Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason’s Superman #3 opens with Clark, Lois, and Jon arriving at New 52 Superman’s Fortress of Solitude in order to make use of its Kryptonian technology.

“It feels like we’re tresspassing on the previous Superman’s memory,” says Lois, which will ring false to many of the readers for whom Lois’s Superman was the previous Superman. “Jon shares both our genomes, Lois,” says Superman, and they need Kryptonian science to make sense of their son’s unreliable invulnerability, which didn’t prevent him from getting a concussion in issue two. But they didn’t expect Kryptonian science to be waiting on their arrival along with New 52 Krypto, who is sniffing and barking at The Eradicator.

The Eradicator has a lot of tendencies that are reminisicent of other machine villains in fiction. For instance, he has the irritating tendency to speak in the plural (which he shares with the Borg).  He also speaks in a more rigid type font than the organic fictional characters in Superman #3: “WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU, KAL-EL. WE HAVE TRAVELED LONG AND FAR TO SAVE US.” (From here on in, we’re going to relax the caps lock on the Eradicator, and process his shout into its organic equivalent. I imagine, once the modulation is removed, that he sounds exactly like Chris Parnell.) Also, if we look specifically at the “we…us” line, you can see that he’s a plural entity that assumes unity (also like the Borg).

For a second, we could think that the Eradicator isn’t bad, and he’s just programmed with the coldest science fiction idea to ever influence real world conservative politics: eugenics, or government controlled reproduction. Above all else, the Eradicator must preserve the Kryptonian genome, which he considers with his machine A=A thinking as the equivalent of saving Krypton.

Superman’s sudden no-holds-barred decisiveness here causes him to bull-rush the Eradicator, and indicates his belief that the Eradicator is ruthless, and its mechanical pursuit of eugenic idealism will lead to trouble on this world. What surprises Clark, and a reader of either New 52 or Post Crisis continuity, is the passion of this Eradicator, who has apparently been preparing to jump into the K/S fanfic community with a S/E thread of his own: “If you only realized how special this moment is for us. To see you–a living, breating Kryptonian–Strong. Vital. Passionate.” This Eradicator makes us believe in his longing for a hunk of Kryptonian genome in order to jump start the species. “This should be a day of celebration…” he says, while doing his best to bring Superman around to his plans for Superman’s, ahem, genetic potential. “…you leave us no choice but to incapacitate you until we can convince you.”

Then The Eradicator saves Clark and Lois from falling shards of the Fortress of Solitude.

Cut to the title reveal, “Son of Superman,” which comes with a key change as the philosophically subdued Man of Steel considers that the Eradicator risked itself to save Clark’s wife and son. Also, the Eradicator takes it down a notch, and his declarations of genome love are much more chaste. Clark scans Jon with Kryptonian med-tech, then turns his attention to the Eradicator, asking essentially ‘why are you here?’

Well, because, says Eradicator, adding with a touch of the boundary-less fanboy that, “after assimilating personal objects within your fortress, we now wear your house symbol proudly.” Then the Eradicator goes into detail about his previous programming: the General Zod Protocol.

This moment strained credibility for me, because if Clark was willing to pummel The Eradicator on sight, he should have acted more violently upon hearing the words “General,” “Zod,” and “protocol” in any order. What is the General Zod Protocol, anyway? Pure sci-fi horror, it turns out.  The Eradicator’s previous programming was to “arrest Kryptonian Lawbreakers on General Zod’s list by whatever means necessary.” And you do NOT want to get arrested by an Eradicator, as they are literally soul-suckers. The next page reveals that for Kryptonians, at least, the soul definitely exists, and Eradicators can suck it out of the body. Moreover, in the Kryptonian legal system, soul and body are separated until a person stands trial, and while the soul is consigned to a phantom zone projector, the body is placed in a cryo-chamber. “General Zod programs Eradicators to rip soul from body and imprison them separately” sounds like the description of a Twilight Zone episode in a vintage TV Guide, and you will probably store this page in that part of your brain to which you consign science fiction horror concepts like “To Serve Man” and the salt vampire from Star Trek’s “The Man Trap.”

We then hear that as Krypton exploded, planetary slag and crumbs of atomized Kryptonians bonded in a reflective sheen to become the Eradicator’s new skin. What we see during this narration is a little different: disembodied Kryptonian souls mob the Eradicator and possibly get absorbed by him. This non-verbal detail is a nice touch, and shows that the writer and artist are working closely together on this story, especially if the Eradicator is a kind of transport vessel for Kryptonian consciousnesses, as we are left to wonder what his motives are for not telling Clark.  It also makes a kind of a body horror out of The Eradicator in this new incarnation.

After the subatomic Kryptonian residue bonded to his form in one way or another, he spied Kal-El’s blue and red rocket ship, and decided to reinterpret Zod’s programming: “Scour the galaxies, every solar system, every planet. Find the survivor. And let nothing get in our way.” And in another moment in which the imagery belied the text, we see the Eradicator leaving a civilization in flames during his quest for Kal-El. These small, but not subtle, panels show the machine monomania of the Eradicator, that will destroy a whole haystack of genetically impure civilizations in order to find the baby blue needle carrying the last Kryptonian.

What comes next, then, is only logical–the Eradicator considers Jon’s DNA tainted with Lois’s human contribution. “We shall start with your offspring and find a way to bolster his Kryptonian genome to subsume his human one.”

Here’s where the spoilers stop, as I really don’t want to ruin the last four pages of Superman #3 for you, which depict courage and sacrifice, but not from whom you’d expect, and savage retaliation, again not from whom you’d expect.  

Tomasi and Gleason are doing an excellent job in making a memorable villain out of the Eradicator by making him not only a body horror, but a moral nightmare that has a Solomonic justification for the most vile and despicable of actions.  Tomasi also finds the black humor in The Eradicator by showing its moments of excruciating naivete. Many are coming to this new Superman series because of the appeal in seeing Lois and Clark together again, but who expected to see such a captivating character study of one of the more questionable villains in Superman’s rogues’ gallery?  Also, Tomasi and Gleason have a storytelling unity, which you see in the instances in which art and text contradict to underscore the unreliability of the narrator, that is not always common in the mainstream comic book market.  We can only hope that we see a few great story arcs from this team before they get rotated out in the new Superman comic’s twice-monthly schedule.

Superman #3 goes on sale today at comic shops and through digital storefronts.