In this review of Super Creepshow Special #1, we get three twisted tales of superheroes (that delve into superhorror territory).
Super Creepshow Special #1
Writers: Dan Watters, Ryan Stegman, Ed Brisson
Artists: Carmine Di Giandomenico, Riley Rossmo, Andrei Bressan
Main Cover: Rye Parr
Variant Covers: Carmine Di Giandomenico, Riley Rossmo
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: October 8, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Super Creepshow Special #1 begins with “Funeral For A Fiend,” the aftermath of the death of Superman-expy “Mr. Astonishing”. His wife Lisa isn’t convinced that he’ll stay dead, that he’ll be back in a few days tops. He’s buried in a tomb made of Shadownium, meant to keep enemies from tampering with the body.
After he goes a few days without reviving, Lisa goes to open the tomb herself, just in case he’s having trouble getting it open. When she does, the decay has started to set in. And his non-Earthling DNA reacts to decay a bit…differently. He goes off on a superpowered-zombie-murder-spree, and Lisa is eventually forced to bring out a contingency plan: a Huxionite Ray. It does end up stopping him…
But it also ends up releasing the superpowered microbes inside his body, which then go to devour as much of Earth and its inhabitants as possible.
The second tale is “Grave Ghost Reborn”. We’re dealing with a world where corporations want to make superheroes into brands, and Grave Ghost isn’t a fan of that idea. One day, he’s killed…but it’s not permanent. His ability is that he can come back from the dead, just so long as the sparrow that houses his consciousness is still active and can rebuild him. It takes her thirty years to fully restore him post-vaporization.
He finds that things have changed. His former sidekick seems a bit more polished, the fights between superhero and supervillain are more put on for the benefit of audicences as opposed to fighting crime. But worst of all? Said former sidekick is in league with a guy that wanted to make money off of them. This guy mutates, and Grave Ghost tries to fight him off. But then he absorbs his consciousness-sparrow, all for the sake of a “better” world.
Our third tale is “Growing Pains”, in which a scientist (Bob) has been working for years to create a growth serum that would enable him to get back at everyone that ever made him feel like crap, up to and including his ex-wife (who did have some incredibly valid reasons to walk out on him).
The transformation is excrutiatingly painful…but the important thing is that it’s successful. From there, Bob goes on a rampage across town, doling out his revenge until he reaches where Heather’s living now. He’d like to kill her, but she immediately calls him out on what he’s doing and it gives him pause. He tries to make a break for it before the approaching military shows up.
With that fueling rage beginning to fade, the serum starts to wear off. Bob had accounted for a lot of things when he’d forumulated this stuff, but he forgot one major thing: that his expanded skin would need to contract, leading him to die buried by his own flesh.
So, all three stories in Super Creepshow Special #1 were fun experiences. Superheroes have remained popular over the decades for a number of reasons (fighting the good fight, having abilities that the average person could only dream of…sometimes, even being an average person that plucked up the courage to fight). But when you really get to thinking about some superpowers, it’s fertile ground for horror (like, say, the extent of injuries one might deal with if they regenerate).
It’s not a shock that Creepshow did a superhero special, so much as it’s a bit surprising that it took this long. And it did so wonderfully.
Going into the first story of Super Creepshow Special #1, they started with the familiar, classic setup of someone sent to Earth from another planet, him becoming a hero, hooking up with a human…But they definitely played up the alien aspect after his death. Even his tomb was built with that alien uncertainty in mind, as nobody knew if he’d just spring up later on like he’d had a great sleep, or if the decay would mess with all those microorganisms inside of him (which it had). Lisa’s attempt to stop him making things worse also feels quite fitting for this as a Creepshow tale.
The second story may be my favorite of the three (hard as it is to play favorites). Characters that have some form of immortality have always fascinated me, and I liked how it was handled here. There’s also that factor of resisting the urge to sell out to the big corporations that want to monetize superheroes. It’s clear that Grave Ghost, even after thirty years of being dead, still has his integrity fully intact, and if the sparrow had managed to outfly Edenova, Ghost would be okay sooner or later. But any form of immortality is too valuable to people like Edenova, and so he absorbs her.
In that final team shot, the way Ghost is drawn…that’s definitely the face of a man whose very being was hijacked from him. Seriously, those are eyes of sheer desperation, as he knows that there’s nothing he can do to escape this fate he’s been dragged into.
Finally, the third story is a classic yarn of revenge, but with a superpowered twist. And with this being a Creepshow story, that vengeance comes back to bite Bob in a big way. His thirst for payback becomes his own undoing by the end, and for that undoing to come in the form of something as simple as: “Oh, hell, I forgot to factor in contraction…” is a great choice. Some writers may go the route of his new mass weighing him down in the water, but to drown in his own flesh when it was his own ego to bring him to this point works well, I think.
Final Thoughts
Come and experience the eerie side of superpowers with Super Creepshow Special #1. Here we’ve got three twisted tales in the grand Creepshow tradition.
