sure enough , he might be the last Logos of Krypton , but the Superman we all know and love life total to Earth as a mostly harmless little baby alien . What if Smallville ’s first alien tangency had been a picayune … deadlier ? That ’s the first-class premiss behind a flighty , intense story in DC Comics ’ newfangled repugnance anthology .
Part of DC House of Horror , “ Bump in the Night , ” from Keith Giffen and Edward Lee , with art by Howard Porter and Hi - Fi and lettering by Rob Leigh , is a moderately short read . Because , have ’s be honest , if a truly alien , hostile Kal - El showed up in a corn field in Kansas , his first encounter with humanity would indeed be swift and brutal . thing kick off gravely — literally one of the first things you see is the ravage corpse of Jonathan Kent , and when we cut to his married woman trying to call him from their farmhouse a distance away from the smoldering ruins of Kal ’s escape pod , you screw she ’s doomed to a similar portion .
But while the story trades in some classic repugnance tropes ( Martha even at one point recognise that checking out a creepy noise she heard instead of immediately play in the opposite direction is a bad play right out of every horror movie ) , what ’s really scary about it is the vehemence of the untested alien variation of Kal we see here — a figure distant enough to be more monster than alien , and one who never learn the moral compass the Man of Tomorrow would learn from the Kents while growing up with the Kents .
The sense of doom that comes form knowing there ’s no fashion out for Martha against a kid with super - strength , topnotch - speed , and heating system visual sense offer a weirdly tangible flush to the gut . These are abilities we ’ve all been keenly aware of when it comes to Superman for decennary — we’ve seen him use them to save countless lives as a hero . Having that inverted as Martha gets confound about the spot and even half - ridicule by the heat imaginativeness speaks both to the dreadful power of what Superman can do and the restraint he employs as a hero .
The Kal - El of “ Bump in the Night ” does n’t have that simpleness , and by the time the tale is over , both the Kents have lost their life in reasonably grisly fashion . The honest “ dark ” alternate drive on the Superman mythos solve when they show just what the absence seizure of Superman ’s ethics — whether it ’s by removing his upbringing with the Kents or through some other means — really means for the major power he wield , and how scarey a figure Superman cwould really be without it .
“ Bump in the Night ” might just be a brief , nervous taradiddle for a repulsion anthology , but its still in force at showing us just how important the Kents were in guide on Kal - El to being a hopeful figure instead of a fearful one .
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