Superboy #8 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (writer), Pier Gallo (artist), Jamie Grant & Dom Regan (colorists)

The Story: Superboy and the Chamber of Secrets.

The Review: The moment Lemire launched this title, he injected a supernatural tone to the Smallville mythos that he many times said he would expand in time.  The Phantom Stranger’s multiple appearances heralded significant horrors to come for the Boy of Steel, but till now we’ve gotten radio-controlled frogs, time-traveling psychics, and plants from outer space.  Superboy seemed well on his way to joining his cousins in primarily sci-fi-based heroics.

Then this issue comes, and magic once again rears its unpredictable head, in the form of the Hollow Men, your classic creepy farmers with a twist of zombie.  This isn’t your usual Western European tradition of mysticism: witches and warlocks, nonsense words and fairy creatures.  Lemire takes a much more primal kind of magic and gives it a mad-scientist spin, a union that really suits the earthy, Midwestern backdrop of Smallville and Superboy’s scientific roots.

The arcane elements in this issue are equal parts alchemy, necromancy, and druidism, a perfect match for the eerie frontier of Smallville’s Wild West, the setting for Nathaniel Kent and Albert Valentine’s encounter with the town’s darker side.  It’s got all the stuff that makes great ghost stories: the banished Puritan doctor and his disturbed family; hidden spaces with macabre secrets; shudder-worthy murders; the inevitable building gone down in flames.

Like all great ghost stories, these details inevitably come back to haunt the real world once more, as the entire town falls into a stupor right before Connor’s eyes.  The answer lies of course in the “broken silo,” his only clue to the mysterious events of #2, and the place Nathaniel Kent found has more to it “than life and death,” in the words of crazed surgeon-occultist Eben Took.  Our payoff: the final splash showing what’s “below” Smallville, a stunner of a reveal if there’s any.