Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s new “Superboy” is...

Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s new “Superboy” is perhaps the worst comic book-to-film adaptation to date. Although this particular arrangement of characters appears nowhere in print (in the recent revised continuity of the “Superman” comics, Superboy never existed), DC Comics has boasted that the show will make us believe “all over again that a man can fly.” Hardly. The laughably pathetic special effects--Superboy’s flying especially--are overshadowed only by the horrendous acting, the “evil preppy” version of a young Lex Luthor being the best (worst?) example.

Though the series eschews the camp of the ‘60s “Batman” and the pathos of the ‘70s “Incredible Hulk,” it falls hopelessly into an abyss somewhere in between.

David E. Brady, Upland