I'm stealing this idea from John Seavey, who wrote an excellent post about Flash #50 and his persistent love for an issue that he first read in 1991. My affection for "Superboy For A Day," an eight page short story from Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #8, isn't nearly as old. I first read the story last August, when I spent a weekend laid up with an unseasonal chest cold. I read over 500 pages of Jimmy Olsen stories to get through that illness, but this story's quiet sadness stuck with me: in a title memorable mainly for its unrestrained wackiness, "Superboy For a Day" and its elegiac tone really stand out.
Written by Otto Binder and penciled by Curt Swan, "Superboy For a Day" isn’t my favorite Superman story – it wouldn’t even make my top ten – nor is it my favorite Jimmy Olsen story – that honor would either go to the loony “Jimmy Olsen, the Bearded Boy,” or the loonier “The Amazing Mirages,” in which Superman builds a pterodactyl out of road-kill and disguises himself as a cactus in order to frighten three young Uranium prospectors. But “Superboy For A Day” is easily my favorite story about Smallville, the town in which Superman and Clark Kent grew up.
As the story begins, Jimmy and Clark have arrived in Smallville to attend “Superboy Day,” at which Superman will be the guest of honor. The story takes a sad turn almost immediately, when Clark learns that one of his childhood friends vanished around the same time that Clark left Smallville to become Superman. The mild-mannered reporter then visits his parents’ grave, where Jimmy leaves him: “Dad and Mom Kent were the finest foster parents any boy – even Superboy – could have had,” Clark thinks to himself, as he stares at their grave. This sense of loss pervades the remainder of the issue: in town, Jimmy discovers that the local museum is missing the giant metal cup that Superboy had once used to catch dangerous hailstones and then learns that Smallville is missing something much more important – the sense of meaning that Superboy brought to the town.
In order to give Smallville a taste of its old relevance, Jimmy and Superman decide to recreate three of Superboy’s most famous feats with Jimmy in the role of Superboy. Naturally, trouble arises, in the form of a mysterious figure who tries to prevent the pair from completing those feats. In the end, the mystery man turns out to be the curator of the local museum, who fears that completing the third feat will reveal Superman’s secret identity. But, despite the curator’s warnings, Jimmy and Superman go ahead and dig a drainage ditch around Smallville, and, in the process, uncover the giant metal cup that Superboy had buried. The curator believes that Superboy buried the cup because his fingerprints were on it, but really the young hero had used it to cap an underground spring. Since Superboy had “hidden” the cup in yard of Clark’s missing childhood friend, the curator had assumed that the friend, not Clark, was Superman. A telegram arrives from the missing friend, revealing that he had suffered amnesia shortly after leaving and thus could not write home, thus corroborating Superman's claims that the curator was mistaken about his secret identity. A happy ending, I guess.
Okay: I’ll admit that the story is kind of stupid. But the Smallville of “Superboy for a Day” really resonates with me. The town used to be the center of everything interesting in the world: Superboy lived there, after all! Now, the adults are mired in nostalgia and the children pine for thrills that they’ve never known. How does a small town go on, after it has lost the very thing that made it special? “Superboy for a Day” doesn’t answer that question, or, if it does, the answer is pessimistic. But take Superboy out of the equation, and you can ask the same question about any town, once the factory closes its doors or the trains no longer stop at the depot. I've lived in several towns like that, places whose heydays came to an end in the early 20th century. Maybe that's why I find the idea behind "Superboy for a Day" so haunting: Smallville's a town where life does goes on, but everyone who lives there is painfully aware that they're just a footnote in somebody else's history.
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