New Adventures of Superboy #50
February 1984
Cover art: Keith Giffen
Story: Dial “V” for Villain
Writer: Paul Kupperberg
Pencils: Keith Giffen & Kurt Schaffenberger
Inks: Keith Giffen & Dave Hunt
There are actually a few things about this cover I do not like. Superboy's face and shield look weird to me. It almost looks like he is wearing a Superboy mask. Also, Star Boy and Wildfire look really blocky. Those three main figures all have problems with them.
I am quite certain I had no idea there was still a Superboy comic being published when this came out.
To clear up the art duties. Giffen draws the first part of the story and the Epilogue. We then have Schaffenberger and Hunt doing the heavy lifting.
Getting on with it, a criminal from the 30th century steals the H-Dial and escapes the museum where it was on display when Chameleon Boy tries to stop him. Unfortunately, for Nylor Truggs he gets stuck in the 20th century with no way of returning. Specifically, Superboy's time. Nylor frees a teenaged Lex Luthor from jail, and Luthor agrees to help Nylor build a time machine to get back to the future. (the amount of gigawatts needed is never mentioned) The Legion makes it to the past and they team-up with Superboy to capture the two criminals.
Nylor has been able to make a few adjustments to the dial though. Dialing H-E-R-O- prevented him from committing crimes which is they only reason he got the thing, so he modified it. The other alteration he made was being able to give others powers, and they must also do his bidding. He used that on Clark's friends Pete Ross, Lana Lang and a couple of others for the big showdown.
The big fight happened after Luthor was defeated, and I guess he went back to prison. He was never mentioned again. The teens transformed by Truggs fought the Legion (before Superboy showed up) and even though they told the Legion they didn't want to do it, they trounced LSH. Superboy did show up and knocked Truggs out easily and had Krypto guard him while he went and saved the Legion. Before the Boy of Steel could really get to work the controlled bad guys turned back into normal. This was because Krypto chomped on the dial, and breaking it. The epilogue was pretty nice as Chamleon Boy returns the pieces back to the museum, and the curator tells him he will just have to dig another one up from the basement and put it on display.
What I liked:
Lex Luthor knows Nylor must be from the future because he can do something Luthor can't.
When Nylor first shows up to transform the teens, Lana comments on how dangerous he looks. I would go more for ridiculous over dangerous. You decide:
The crime Superboy stops in the part introducing him took just long enough from the time he went underwater and come back up that his friends didn't notice.
That the Legionnaires have aged and Superboy hasn't. It actually makes sense
What I didn't like:
The characters that they came up with for the dial. They were all pretty terrible.
I guess Clark wanted to put the Legionnaires in disguise when he took them to his parents by giving them normal clothes. Yet Brainy was still Green, and Chameleon Boy was still in his default look.
As many times as they have been to the 20th century you would think Star Boy would know what a “bar-be-cue” is.
I'd recommend this comic, it does have a certain charm to it. They do try and convince us how dangerous the dial is, but the story is still a pretty lightweight one. The art was fantastic.
Replies
Bar-be-cue? Star Boy's all about the sloppy joes.
How did he modify the dial? Did he spell EVIL like the villain special?
At one point in the Adventure Dial H series -- or maybe in a DC Comics Presents issue -- Chris used the existing letters to dial "HORROR" and became a monster.
No all he did was add a "V" to the center of the dial and somehow that worked.
Border Mutt said:
"Dial "H" for Hero" had been running in The New Adventures of Superboy as its back-up series. The GCD tells me it started in #28 and ended in #49. In the final instalment Chris's and Vicki's H-dials were linked to Robby Reed's.
The Chris and Vicki version of the series had previously run in Adventure Comics (with Marv Wolfman writing, but he didn't write the Superboy instalments). For this version of the series readers were asked to submit ideas for superheroes, and were credited when Chris and Vicki turned into them. Chris tried dialing "horror" in the DC Comics Presents issue.
I got a bunch of those Adventure Comics Dial-H stories for 20 cents a piece when Lone Star Comics used to do their warehouse sales.
Travis Herrick (Modular Mod) said:
Here, again, is another example of the sloppiness exhibited by many of DC's Bronze-Age writers.
There was already a "V" on the H-Dial, as shown 'way back in Robby Reed's third appearance, in the story with the same title as this one---"Dial 'V' for Villain"---from House of Mystery # 158 (Dec., 1966).
On the contrary, the dial in the issue is a wrist one (I found an image of the original art of the page on which Krypto destroys it), and therefore likely either Chris's or Vicki's, which only had the letters h-e-r-o. I did wonder, however, whether Mr Truggs should have been a native Interlac speaker and unable to communicate in English.
Luke Blanchard said:
Ah, gotcha. When I read Mr. Herrick's synopsis, I assumed it was Robby Reed's H-Dial which Truggs purloined from the museum.
Thanks for squaring me away, Luke.
Travis Herrick (Modular Mod) said:
On the cover the other letters have also been replaced. I can make out "i" and "l". I think the one behind the title box is a capital "A" with a baseline towards the right. That would make the final one a capital "n", but I can't read it as such.
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