As you all know I have an over fondness for foreign reprints of US comics; there’s just something about seeing good art in stark black and white that just makes it better, in my eyes anyway. Which is why today I’m offering up Superboy #74 UK, from April, 1955 featuring “The Impossible Creatures”, a reprint from Adventure Comics from November 1954. If nothing else, it gives us a chance to admire the strong, dynamic work of John Sikela, a sadly forgotten DC artist who was also the artist on Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman comic strip (which I’m going to continue to hope that someone will eventually collect and finally put it in print; it was a failure, but it was an interesting one). If his artwork here looks a little strange to you it’s because he preferred to drawn Superboy/Clark Kent as being younger with a more rounded head; it’s definitely not the Superboy I knew from the 1960′s Legion stories.

Written by Otto Binder “The Impossible Creatures” has Superboy temporarily putting his never ending battle against evil on hold so he can travel across the galaxy to help Lana Lang’s archeologist father. He’s been made a public laughing stock for uncovering fossils of unearthly creatures which are deemed fakes. And while this seems a little out of character for Superboy (not to mention beyond his power limits at the time), it’s exactly the sort of thing Otto Binder had Captain Marvel doing only a couple years earlier, And while there are some nice moments once Superboy gets to outer space it’s essentially a story completely lacking anything like drama. Plus there’s the fact the story of his adventure makes the papers and somehow the news that (a) alien life actually exists and (b) a “space ark visited earth a million years ago” doesn’t completely unhinge human civilization.

And here’s some nice one-pagers from the always wonderful Henry Boltinoff…

…and some pretty amateurish one-pagers from an unknown artist.