Somebody’s First Comic Book: DC Comics Presents #68

Wondering what Somebody’s First Comic Book is all about? The explanation is on this page!

TITLE: Destiny’s Children

CREDITS:
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Curt Swan
Inker: Murphy Anderson
Letterer: Ben Oda
Colorist: Gene D’Angelo
Editor: Julius Schwartz
Cover Artist: Gil Kane
Publisher: DC Comics

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: Come on, it’s Superman. Don’t know who this Vixen dame is, though, or why she’s teaming up with him.

IMPRESSIONS: Superman is zipping around Metropolis when Catwo—Um, Vixen leaps off the Daily Planet building and hitches a ride on his super-back. She’s got a problem, as it turns out, her kinda-nephew has gone missing after playing a video game, along with a bunch of other teenagers. Turns out the whole thing is the plot of some bad guy called Admiral Cerebrus, who is using a video game to find highly skilled kids and, subsequently, kidnapping them.

I actually had to get on IMDB when I read this issue, as the whole plot seems like a mishmash of the movies Tron and The Last Starfighter. Hell, even the game is called Galaxy Starfighter. As it turns out, though, Tron was released the year before this comic, and The Last Starfighter was the year after. So either writer Gerry Conway had some fingers in Hollywood in the early 80s or this was one massive coincidence.

Anyway, it seems clear from the issue that Cerebrus is a brand-new bad guy and Vixen is a relatively new superhero. The writer doesn’t just come right out and explain her powers, but the way she uses them makes it fairly clear that she’s got animal-related abilities, as we see her using the “strength of a lion” and “sea-born skill of a dolphin” during the course of the story. Superman, of course, is Superman, and behaves exactly as one would expect Superman to behave. It’s a tight story, complete in one volume. Not a great one, but no real barriers to understanding that I can see.

GRADE: B+