I don’t admire Geoff Johns for his success.  I don’t admire him for the volume of titles he’s working on.  And I don’t admire him for the way he puts together a giant blockbuster event.  What I admire is the humanity he injects into his stories.  His characters are rarely superifical, and I never feel like his stories go from event to event for the sake of plot.  I believe all of his plots exist to flesh out his character development.

In the last five years (I was away from comics for a while before that) he has drawn me into characters I used to care nothing about.  The most obvious being The Green Lantern and the Corps.  He also made me care about Flash’s Rogues enough that I picked up Flash comics for a while (but, sadly, his Flash is not to my liking).   The most impressive story to me, though, has been his brief run on Adventure Comics.

Yes, I’m one of those Not Into Superman comic readers.  There’s a bunch of us out there who prefer Batman, and only really get into elseworld Supe stories like Red Son.  Or the large stories where Supe’s rule is less than pivotal (New Frontier).  While I accept that Morrison told one of the better Superman stories, it was not so good that I wanted to read any more of it.  So why in God’s green Krypton did I just read six issues of Adventure comics?

Because Geoff Johns didn’t write a Superboy adventure in this comic.  He didn’t tell stories about Krypto the Superdog or Lex Luthor or Braniac or the Kent family.  Sure, all of those elements were in there, but it wasn’t the real focus.  Adventure Comics issues 1-6 (or 503-509, if you don’t believe in reboots) is the story of adolescence.  Not Superboy’s adolescence, but adolescence through the eyes of Superboy.

This has always been the story of a kid who feared he had the worst quality of his parents, and wants desperately to be his own person.  And instead of ham-fistedly having Superboy sit around inner-monologuing to himself, or discussing his thoughts with his friends, Johns shows us Superboy’s checklist.  Every time he exhibits a quality reminiscent of Superman (who everyone expects him to be) he checks a box; every time he exhibits a trait that reminds him of Luthor (his creator) he checks a box.  It’s a really solid narrative device that never feels forced or overused.

DC has recently released many of their more popular titles in hardcover.  Books I’d never in a million years want to take up too much room on my shelf: Batman RIP, Final Crisis, etc.  Adventure Comics is a title I actually would like in the hardcover format so I could lend it out to my many writer friends who keep writing and rewriting their childhood over and over without ever truly expressing what it’s like to be a teenager.  This comic is how it’s done.

Oh, and, uh, Manapul’s art is pretty as always.