Thursday, November 11, 2010

Superboy's Age

An amusing post over at Thoughtballoons poses the question of Superboy's age, which is kind of an interesting nexus of problems that only comic book characters face. To wit:
  1. Superboy is a clone who emerged fully-formed from his test tube, physically sixteen years old when he was 'born.'
  2. Several years in real-time, and an unknown amount of comic book time, passed, during which Superboy learned that he would not age beyond 16.
  3. In the "Sins of Youth" crossover, Superboy was artificially aged, then restored, but this (as I recall) fixed his inability to grow older.
  4. A few years in real time, and an unknown amount of comic book time, passed, and Superboy was taken one thousand years into the future, where he spent several months of real time and an unknown amount of comic book time with the Legion.
  5. Superboy returned to the present, around the same time that he left.
  6. A few years in real time, and an unknown amount of comic book time, passed, and Superboy died.
  7. Superboy's corpse was placed into a sort of suspended animation/regeneration matrix, where it remained for a thousand years of comic book time and a year or two of real time.
  8. After that thousand years or so, Superboy was revived by a different Legion of Super-Heroes, and he returned to the present.
So how old is Superboy? A few years? Nearly eighteen? That, plus a thousand?

In any case, I imagine he and Bart Allen have quite a lot to talk about. Frankly, they've got so much in common that I think we ought to see a lot more of Conner and Bart hanging out than Conner and Tim.

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