Superboy #143 (On Sale:October 5, 1967) sports a really wonderful Neal Adams cover, his first for the "Boy of Steel.""The Big Fall" is written by E. Nelson Bridwell and drawn by Al Plastino. Plastino is another guy who is on his way out at DC. He has about six more months of work before he is let go after drawing Superman and the Superman family for 20 years, a victim of a style that cannot change with the times.
The second Superboy story, "Superboy's Civil War Time Trip" is a reprint from Superboy #91 by Jerry Siegel and George Papp. A Smallville celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Civil War through a re-enactment includes the Kent family, Lana Lang, and Lex Luthor. Superboy travels into space to stop an alien missile, but when he returns to Earth he sees Clark Kent participating in the play. Knowing that it can’t be the real Clark, he watches and thinks that the explosion sent him into the past where he is seeing the real Civil War.
The people involved resemble the future residents of Smallville, except Clark is a spy, and the Luthor duplicate is a hero. Superboy tries to alter history, but in each case he is thwarted by fate.
Edited by Mort Weisinger.
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I have this comic, but mine, alas, is missing the front cover. I acquired it in the early 90s in one of several unopened vintage plastic-bagged three-packs of front-coverless comics which I found in a store selling old magazines. The packs were obviously from the 60s, and had apparently been sitting in some warehouse for nearly thirty years. There were mixtures of different publishers in the same bags; obviously, some distributor had been returning the covers for credit and illegally selling the comics. I got a lot of cool comics out of them (as well as some lame ones), but all of them without front covers.
Since you started posting these and I determined that the release days were on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I've been wondering what came out on October 5, 1967. Too bad it wasn't something cooler than these three — although they all have really nice covers disguising their lame interiors. (At least, I don't recall the Superboy story as being anything great; I haven't read the Robby Reed comic, but if it's consistent with the ones I have read, it's, shall we say, entertainingly dumb. And I can't vouch for the romance comic, but I'm betting the scripts don't come anywhere near the level of quality of the cover artwork.)
So Neal Adams's first Superboy cover appeared the same day that I made my first appearance. That's something, anyway — though not quite as cool as being born five years earlier, when "Love Me Do" was released — but then I'd be 45, instead of just 40, which is bad enough (though, as they say, it beats the alternative). (And if I want to feel young, I can just hang out on the Tonyboard.)
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