At first I thought Xombi was the lone casuality in my pile of books. But I actually forgot about this ‘little Superman title that could’ comic. Which doesn’t make it sound all that good, but it does bum me out that Lemire’s run and essentially ‘THIS’ Superboy is ending in two months. It hasn’t been a perfect run but it’s been a fresh of breath air considering the muck of the other ‘Super’ books DC has to offer.

This particular issue has a lot of twists and turns throughout and there were a couple of points that genuinely surprised me. Maybe I should’ve seen one of them coming but the fact that we see the return of a particular villain and the twist at the very end makes me excited about where the story is going. Just how long has this character been out of the picture and has this series been an entire set up? Plus what else could Lemire bring to the table with the return of this particular villain? The stuff inbetween though isn’t forgettable and for once I am interesting in Psionic Lad and the rest of the supporting cast. It’s nice that Lemire is finally resolving this issue with Psionic Lad so hopefully it goes somewhere next issue.

For my money this is the best issue Pier Gallo has done for the series. Yes faces cans till be a bit iffy but when you get that gorgeous two page splash in the middle of the book, what’s to complain about? Seriously I did not see that splash page coming and the amount of detail and scope of those pages definitely got my attention the rest of the way. But there are other great moments throughout the book like Psionic Lad seeing his teammate in his eye, or how forboding Phantom Stranger looks in every panel, and again the scale/scope of some of these panels are pretty good. There’s even a nice ‘Night of the Living Dead’ homage towards the end and it makes me wonder if a zombie book is the next step for Gallo. Future aside, this book looks pretty damn good and hopefully we get more of the same with the final three issues.

It’s a shame that in two months were gonna go from Jeff Lemire’s take on Superboy to some emo/cyborg thingy in the reboot. But for what it’s worth this is probably the best issue of the series to date. There are a lot of highs in this book from the interesting twists peppered throughout the issue. Then you have Gallo giving you his best issue to date with some really impressive visuals. Maybe I should just stop worrying about the future and notice the damn good issues that lay before me today.