Superboy rules!
Without him there would be no Legion of Superheroes, no Lana Lang, no Krypto, that should be enough to justify him.
No argument here! I'm not saying Superboy's stories were bad. Actually, they were pretty fantastic and made incredible contributions to the Super-mythology.
What I AM saying, though, is this: 1) Superboy is really not essential to the story of Superman, at least not as essential as the other things brought up in that webpage of writers submissions; 2) future incarnations of the Superman story ought not to have a Superboy, because really, if you give some thought, the idea (at least presented in the form it took) doesn't make sense.
Seeing Clark learning to use his powers as a youth and developing the training that would make him the world's greatest hero as an adult is interesting to me (vs. seeing an adult Superman fumbling about for the first time...).
I really like the idea of watching Superman in his early years begin to master the disguise and the superheroics. Watching a boy do that just isn't as interesting or inspiring to me. (In addition, after over 10 years of the character's existence, I finally like Conner Kent / Kon-El.)
I'm gonna have to agree with Johnny Nevada and disagree with Jor-L here. Superman is supposed to be an effective superhero. He's the very definition of competence. It is for this reason that Superman's battles against Luthor after the reboot don't really work: because by the very nature of reboot Luthor's concept, in order to keep him an effective villain, Superman can never achieve a total victory. Superman isn't supposed to be like Ralph, the Greatest American Hero, who lost the instruction book to his super-suit. Likewise, for better or for worse, Superman is not Spider-Man either, who loses as often as he wins.
The moment Superman first shows up ought to be the moment that he is all ready to be a superhero and the training wheels come off. The "he sees this for the first time" phenomenon, which is the kind of story people point to in order to defend the concept of Superboy, is inherently dull, because it isn't showing us anything that we haven't seen before. We already know Superman's powers and their full extent, so having him discover a new one that he can do isn't terribly shocking or interesting. We already know his powers, we already know what's going to happen to him. Telling a new version of a "story we already know," like how Kal-El became Superman, is one of the reasons ALL-STAR BATMAN was so dreadful: it showed us the origin of Robin, a story told approximately 14.7 billion times before.
One problem I have with the Silver Age Superboy, is that his characterization was interchangeable with the adult Superman; the fact that he was a kid was not used as it ought to make Superboy a different person. This type of "Superboy learns how to handle his powers and learn to be a hero" story that is pointed to as justification for Superboy's existence was never done.
seeing it set around 15 years or so behind whatever the then-current year was... nostalgia, and whatnot.
The problem with this is, in order to make Superboy stories nostalgic and rural with the amber waves of grain and all that, the whole "Americana" look that was achieved in the SUPERMAN movie, you have to fix the stories in a single specific point in time. This doesn't work for comic books, which operate on a sliding timescale. That is, the Fantastic Four made their famous flight "ten years ago," not "in 1963." Superboy was at first, set in the 1930s, then suddenly, they were in the 1960s. Put the Superboy stories in a specific period, pretty soon Superman will start getting pretty old. This might be an interesting decision to make, but it isn't how they choose to handle these kinds of characters.
It MIGHT be possible to create a vague "rural past" without getting into time-centered details, sort of like how the Batman Animated Series was not set in any specific time point.
Even if nobody did make the connection, the fact that Superman started showing up in Metropolis a few years later, when Clark Kent moved there, should have set some alarm bells ringing. Superboy just blows the whole secret out of the water.
The Superboy stories have many logic holes, but I don't think this is one of them. Pete Ross and Lana Lang move to Metropolis as adults; that doesn't make them Superman. People from rural areas move to big cities.
I always hated stories in which kids brought down spy rings and foiled robberies as a boy (and that goes for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and the Famous Five and all o' yez), and Superboy was no exception. I didn't want to read stories about kids fighting crime and I still don't. When I read about children, I want Swallows and Amazons or Kenneth Grahame. I want Christopher Robin, not Robin the Boy Wonder.
God, I hate those stories. The ones where some random kid jumps on his skateboard and saves the city from Godzilla.
I loved POWER PACK, but the stories there were achieved BECAUSE the characters were kids, not in spite of the fact they were kids. As opposed to something like STAR WARS: EPISODE I, where we are asked to swallow that a ten year old kid can win the space version of the Indianapolis 5000, and nobody at any level, even Jabba the Hutt (or his insurance broker), points out that it's fairly insane to have any sporting event where a ten year old is allowed to participate with adults, let alone one that has a body count.
Although Superboy might be interesting if they choose to make use of the fact Superboy's a teenage boy, and so his thinking is very different than the adult Superman: decent and incorruptible, but more hormonal, more emotional, less savvy.
Not to mention Pete Ross, Lex losing his hair, Bizarro, etc etc. (Or TV's Smallville, for what it's worth). Superboy is as essential to classic Superman as Clark Kent.
As an intellectual exercise, Superman can always be whittled down to one or 2 core concepts. But he's just not SUPERMAN without the accumulated shell of 50+ years of history. Including Superboy.
Telle...telling ME about the value of continuity? My Irony-O-Meter just exploded.
You're right, of course, that Superboy's role in Superman's history is great indeed. Consider, though: are these things contingent on Superman being a BOY? Could these stories, and the elements they introduced, have been told with Superman as an adult? The only one that I can think of that could not be, off the top of my head, is the Legion of Super-Heroes: those hep cats that make the universe safe for malt shops and hand holding wouldn't invite an over-aged square like Superman in. But apart from the Legion, Krypto could be introduced to an adult Superman just fine; Lex and Superman could be foes as adults, Lana could become a rival of Lois as an adult (and she DID, by the way) and so on. The decision to have these other things happen when Superman is a boy is an arbitrary one.
Perhaps because of this, I wonder if Smallville doesn't function along the same lines as Man-Thing's Everglades: a sort of DC-style Nexus of All Realities.
Interesting point. If a rationale could be created as for why Smallville is so "busy," the constant stream of diamond smugglers and scientific laboratories and mafia squealers wouldn't create disbelief. People whine about the Kryptonite stories that were used over and over in the first season of Smallville, but I personally had no problem with them because the presence of Kryptonite provided a rationale for why weird things happen in what is essentially a boring town. When they started getting away from Kryptonite stories, suddenly the Smallville concept was stretched: in this tiny town, there was kryptonite, oh, AND witches, AND Native American ruins...
Dilber MC Theme by HarzeM