Bottom Of The Pile: Adventure Comics #5

Even Geoff Johns can drop the ball occasionally; he's not bulletproof as Adventure Comics issue five proves. While I may not have had as an extreme problem with this issue as some quarters of the Internet, it was still a pretty lame issue.

Superboy-Prime - the "star" of this issue - lives, effectively on our world where the adventures of his heroes and peers are recorded in the fictional comics published by DC Comics.

A grumpy teenager at the best of times, Superboy-Prime - having been attacked by by an other-worldly Black Lantern Alex Luthor and Black Lantern zombies of all the people he's killes on previous rampages, decides to vent his anger on the staff of DC Comics... while fighting the flying zombies!

Superheroes breaking the fourth wall and meeting their creators can work in certain, rare circumstances (e.g. Animal Man meeting Grant Morrison back during his run on that title, or The Fantastic Four meeting Jack Kirby the other year), but this isn't one of those times. It's an ill-timed joke that falls flat.

I'm not really a fan of Jerry Ordway's art at the best of times, but here the awkward contrast between his "generic" superhero/villain faces and the attempted 'life-like' renditions of his DC colleagues is just very uncomfortable; they look like badly animated cartoons with photo-realistic heads stuck on them (often not even particularly convincingly).

I'm sure the staff at DC all thought this was hilarious - to have a superhero brawl crashing through their offices - but this is a massive in-joke that should have stayed in an internal newsletter, not clogging up the large part of one of the publisher's major Superman titles.

Superboy-Prime makes a great villain - as evidenced in Final Crisis: Legion Of 3 Worlds - but doesn't have the interest-factor to hold up a title on his own; he is a born antagonist who needs a big hero (or group thereof) to work off of.

The Superboy supporting feature in Adventure Comics #5 is better than the lead piece, but suffers from being pulled from its usual headline slot in the title and squashed into the back, making a crucial plot development in the ongoing story of Conner Kent feel rather truncated.

Here's hoping Superboy returns to his proper place for the next issue - that is front and centre, with the lion's share of the page count, rather than playing second-fiddle to a second-string villain.