Quarter Bin #10 "Superboy: Losin' It"

In the last edition of this particular column, I mentioned the work of Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett on the character of Superboy. Good timing, since this edition will be all about it, with a launching pad of:

SUPERBOY #25-30 (DC)
From March through August 1996.

I don’t know how many fans will recognize this detail, but these issues comprise the “Losin’ It” arc, something I was unlucky enough to miss the first time around. I don’t remember how or why, because I was definitely reading comics regularly at this point, but collecting this arc was an obsession for years. If you’re a Green Lantern fan, think of it almost like “The Sinestro Corps War,” something Geoff Johns had been building toward ever since GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH, a story that resonated backward and forward in the grand design of a maestro.

“Losin’ It” might not sound like a terrifically dramatic title for such an important arc, but trust me, even after fifteen years, I was still thrilled, both to finally read it and while actually reading it, not out of some nostalgia, liking it because I always believed I would (and certainly not because a lot of people had constantly been raving about it, because that was simply not the case). For years I’d hoped DC would make a trade collection of it, to make it easier (and acknowledge its importance, I guess). I knew, though, that it was a foolish wish. Very few people ever held SUPERBOY in quite the same esteem I did. It was a necessary spin-off of an acclaimed and popular arc, a durable one that lasted a hundred issues (then again, so did the original AZRAEL), and even garnered a spin-off of its own (the even better SUPERBOY AND THE RAVERS, which I will at some point in the future obsessively document). It’s hard even these days to achieve something like that, unless you have “Bat,” “X,” or “Avengers” in your name (or you shamelessly hope to flood the market with Deadpool for god knows what reason). Still, there wasn’t a lot of respect, much less trade collections, even in SUPERBOY’s prime. (If you need any further proof of this, and discounting legal matters that had a hand in altering his fate, Superboy in short order lost his trademark costume and, even though his story drove the early issues of Geoff Johns’ TEEN TITANS, never seemed to seriously merit another run, and even when he finally did, all his previous continuity was completely ignored. Harsh.)

What great sin did Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett accomplish? Nothing short of excellence. “Losin’ It” concerns Superboy’s climactic tangling with Knockout, who would eventually stand reveal as a fugitive of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, which alienates him from all his friends, especially Supergirl, who in those days was the source of an unrequited crush, someone he looked up to with almost as much fervor as Superman. His “S” shield was literally ripped from his chest! Aside from the Superman family of books themselves, Mark Waid’s THE FLASH, and Ron Marz’s GREEN LANTERN, no one was doing better character-based material. Okay, so I wasn’t reading James Robinson’s STARMAN. The point is, Kesel and Grummett were doing this with the least likely character imaginable, a punk kid who couldn’t seem to realize there was anyone else in the whole world besides him, who played fast and loose even with people he respected, and treated every girl as if they were just an inevitable conquest. It was Knockout, and “Losin’ It,” that changed everything. If you want to know how Superboy eventually developed the maturity to handle finding out he shared DNA with Lex Luthor, look no further. If Superboy’s editors at the time hadn’t laughed Geoff Johns out of the letters column at the time (seriously!), this would have been a natural for Kesel and Grummett to handle.

Sure, they began to take their Kirby fixation a little more seriously in later years (and darn if I wouldn’t mind DC allowing them to do so again, even if it has nothing to do with the Boy of Steel; Kamandi returned in the pages of COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS, after all), but they also helped launch the concept of Hypertime, which heralded the return of the multiverse. They could look backward and forward. They were always keeping their eye on the future of Superboy. Their run in its scope far exceeded the grasp of the continuity commentary that was Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN.

And again, I have to point at “Losin’ It” as a prime example. (Before you actually track these issues down for yourself, let me just say for the record that I know Grummett didn’t provide the art for every issue. That’s beyond the point here.)

All of this is to say, Superboy demands more respect. Don’t make me explain it in greater detail…