After Crisis on Infinite Earths eliminated the Multiverse, but before 52 restored it, there was HYPERTIME! Your Major Spoilers Retro Review of Superboy #60 awaits!

SUPERBOY #60

Writer:  Karl Kesel
Penciler: Tom Grummett
Inker: Karl Kesel
Colorist: Buzz Setzer
Letterer: Comicraft
Editor: Mike McAvennie
Publisher: DC Comics
Cover Price: $1.99
Current Near-Mint Pricing: $3.00
Release Date: January 20, 1999

Previously in Superboy: Cloned from the genetic material of Superman, Kon-El was one of the replacement Supermen during the time when the Man of Steel was believed to be dead. After the return of the real steel deal, he began his own adventuring career, operating out of Project Cadmus and punching evil all across the DC Universe. As Superboy #60 begins, the JLA is shocked when Big Barda bursts into the Watchtower carrying Superboy and bellowing for help. But when she tries to remove Kon’s jacket, things start to get REEEALLY odd.

The strange visions that the League sees are, unbeknownst to them, various realities of past DC Comics (including Ben Boxer and Kamandi of the reality dubbed Earth-AD, Earth-One’s powerless kung-fu Wonder Woman and her martial arts guru I-Ching, the Tangent Comics Joker, Gog of Kingdom Come, future Superman from Earth’s End, Elseworld’s Finest Supergirl and Batgirl, and an unidentified Green Lantern), but they barely have time to register it before Superboy croaks out a final warning… and then just plain croaks.

And then, Superboy walks into the room.

Naturally unnerved by the sight of his own dead body, Kon-El barely has the patience to wait for an answer. When Superman’s x-ray vision, Cadmus’ genetic scans, and Dubbilex’s psychic scans confirm that the body is, in every way, that of the actual, living Superboy in the room, he loses his cool and sets out to find The Hairies, a group of advanced minds who travel an underground highway known as The Zoomway. In turn, they take him and the strange, sparking technicolor dream coat to their greatest thinker, a weirdo known as The Gadget Guru!

For decades now, I have had a love/hate relationship with the art of Tom Grummett, and this issue is a perfect distillation of why. Grummett generates Jack-Kirby-inspired madness that’s almost on par with The King himself, including an action shot of The Mountain of Judgement that is truly gorgeous. It’s just something about his character’s faces/necks that makes them all look like they’re either 17 or 125 years old. Stylized art is no big deal, especially in this era, and Tom is a really talented artist, but a part of my mind just fixates on the youthful heads.

Even the Gadget Guru can’t suss out everything, though, only that the coat is some sort of recall device and that it’s DNA-locked to Kon-El himself. That’s when Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman step in to tell Superboy the secret truth of Hypertime! Anything and everything that could ever exist, any time, any place, any reality, even those explicitly erased by previous Crises, are still out there. The trick is finding a way through whatever quasi-dimensional membranic nonsense is separating the tracks, and the jacket may be a way to figure it out. The real problem is generating enough power to use it…

…and that’s how Superboy ends up strapped to a nuclear warhead?

As Project Cadmus and the League watch, Superboy disappears from reality. They have no way of knowing whether he made it to another dimension or was simply blown to atoms, but when Kon-El awakens, he’s on the cold stone floor of the Bat-Cave.

Well, actually, I should probably say “A Bat-Cave.”

And hey, remember what I said about Grummett’s youthful heads? This splash page gives us a character who is an amalgam of Superboy and Robin, another character who looks great under Grummett’s creative style, and maybe a bit too young-looking Batman. The upshot of Robin #60 is to cement Hypertime, which is totally NOT the multiverse while in fact containing everything that was the multiverse, and functioning in precisely the same way, which defines a lot of ’90s comics and shakes out to 3.5 out of 5 stars overall.

If you’ve never read the Kesel/Grummett Superboy run, I recommend large chunks of it, especially anything related to Dubbilex, The Guardian, and Project Cadmus, even with my occasional neck-related griping.

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SUPERBOY #60

67%

67%

Concentrated 1999

The Hypertime reveal from the pages of 'The Kingdom' becomes the central pillar of a time-and-space-shattering epic tale, and it's gonna get weird before we're done. Wrap it all up in Tom Grummet art, and you have yourself something fun.

• Writing

  7
• Art

  7
• Coloring

  6
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