City Boy #1 Review: DC's Newest Street-Level Hero Gets an Ubiquitous and Unsettling Origin

Borrowing from an age-old cliche, some of the fictional cities within DC Comics have become characters of their own. Gotham, Metropolis, and even smaller hubs like Star City and Central City have developed iconographies and reputations all their own, which have helped and hurt the various super-powered beings who reside within them. This adds a metatextual quality to the arrival of City Boy, the third in DC's trio of AAPI-centric books releasing this month. After its titular character popped in and out of a few of DC's anthology titles, City Boy #1 gives him the spotlight and crafts an understated, but intriguing new adventure within the DC Universe.

City Boy #1 acquaints readers with Cameron Kim a.k.a. City Boy, a lifelong street thief with a supernatural connection to the cities he inhabits. Across the issue, a seemingly-ordinary effort to scavenge around Metropolis sheds light on Cameron's heart-wrenching origin story, before putting him in the crosshairs of some major DC players.

I won't spoil exactly who those major players are, because the nature of that reveal recontextualizes City Boy #1 in a fascinating, and perhaps necessary, manner. While the premise of City Boy could have easily been a standalone take on Cameron's journey, the decision to entrench him in the larger DC mythos in this specific fashion is inspired. It not only makes it seem like City Boy will be more than just a flash-in-the-pan new character, but it creates a genuinely interesting conflict for the issues still to come. In the best way, it feels like a spiritual successor to the introduction of heroes like Kimiyo Hoshi's Doctor Light and Jaime Reyes' Blue Beetle – characters whose early days of superherodom are thrown into a fight that is much, much bigger than they could have conceived.

Those stakes feel even more impactful when coupled with the character work of City Boy #1, which reintroduces (or introduces) Cameron to readers in an unsurprising, but effective manner. Cameron is certainly far from the first or last DC hero to have a pragmatic, borderline-bitter outlook on the good and bad of the world, or to have been given great powers against his will and content. Hell, he even joins a hearty list of characters who have lived on the literal streets of their respective cities. But Greg Pak's script in City Boy #1 immediately works to illuminate the inherent tragedy of Cameron's abilities, and how they do or don't impact his search for personal contentment. Admittedly, the journey to get there is filled with some contrivances, but they're snappy and unique enough to largely work in context, instead of provoking an eye-roll.

Minkyu Jung's artwork lends itself well to City Boy's adventure, illuminating Metropolis in an angle that's familiar, but still distinctively fresh. Action sequences—particularly Cameron's horrific origin story—feel just dynamic enough without being outrageous, and use simpler iconography to let some smaller-scale moments have real impact. While some aesthetic choices take a beat or two to adjust to—if this is your first time reading a City Boy appearance, you might initially mistake the face mask around his chin for a boxy jawline—they create a visual bedrock that will only make future issues feel more extravagant. Sunny Cho's colorwork bathes the issue in an ordinary, but beautiful array of beiges and blues, which particularly stands out when showing the gleaming Metropolis skyscrapers. Wes Abbott's letters are unassuming, but have a sense of forward momentum that matches the events on display.

City Boy #1 may not reinvent the wheel in regards to superhero origin stories, but the plight and power set of its titular protagonist prove to be sufficient. The issue dives into tragedy without tiring out its readers, and sets up a conflict that casts a wild shadow on the stories to come. Based on this clever effort from its creative team, City Boy #1 has the potential to form a compelling new pocket of DC Comics' canon.

Published by DC Comics

On May 23, 2023

Written by Greg Pak

Art by Minkyu Jung

Colors by Sunny Cho

Letters by Wes Abbott

Cover by Minkyu Jung and Sunny Cho