Read the scanned-in story; interesting, though a few nitpicks came to mind:
- Guessing the story was written to explain how Smallville managed to survive without misfortunes without Superboy around. Though would think the lack of crimes would stem more from the comic book cliche of major crimes showing up when superheroes show up (I just assumed the crooks all stuck with Metropolis for whatever reason after Superboy left, and the various visiting aliens/super-types/etc. all honed in on there instead of Smallville)... ;-)
- Wouldn't someone have mentioned this odd mysterious capturing of criminals to Clark/Superman at some point during one of his various visits to Smallville in either identity in various previous stories?
- Pretty sure there's been examples of crimes being committed/disasters occuring in Smallville in stories published before this one (examples, anyone? All I can think of is the mid-50's "Superboy's last day in Smallville" story where we see Smallville's buildling a newer and bigger jail), or of the police moving into action instead of sitting around doing nothing like the Maytag repairman (which I'd think would also prompt some sort of response from Superman...).
Guess I'd have bought into it more if it were just the natural disasters and *some* crimes (vs *all* crimes) being thwarted by the Superboy robot----particularly the natural disasters (if Smallville's experiencing *earthquakes* of all things, would think that stupid robot would be too busy dealing with all the various accidents/natural disasters/etc. we've seen in Superboy stories to have a lot of time to render the police as useless as Chief Wiggum... :-) ).
Re: the idea of Superman robots in general, I wasn't bothered by their existence, but can see why they probably wanted to write them out of the comics in the 70's (a much lower dependence on secret-identity stories in that era, among other reasons)... still, guess they weren't that "Super" if pollution caused 'em to shut down (guess on a journalist's salary, coming up with funds for quality parts is difficult!) ;-)
Wasn't there a 60's story where another Superboy robot survived somehow for years after Superman destroyed his old robots? All I recall is a scene of Superman wrecking various old Superboy robots (by hand) and the story's end (where he upgrades the leftover Superboy robot into a Superman robot). Anyone recall what the plot was?
I remember that, too. So the story idea wasn't exactly new.
True, Superboy had a rather cold attitude towards his robots. Probably because he didn't think of them as artificial intelligence but machines who would follow orders and little else.