Volume 40

This volume is the 40th installment of the "03" series. According to the table-of-contents clues, its contents fall on the storyline of Smallville Season 11. Smallville was originally a CW live-action series that premiered in 2001; after its tenth season concluded in 2011, series writer Bryan Q. Miller penned a comics continuation, Smallville Season 11, launched by DC Comics in 2012, picking up right after the TV finale: Clark Kent finally dons the Superman suit in earnest and continues fighting alongside old characters such as Lois Lane, Oliver Queen, and Chloe, while a batch of DC characters previously barred from the show for copyright reasons are brought into this continuity. Issue 40 (corresponding to a digital chapter released around late March 2013) sits at the close of the "Haunted / Effigy" arc: Bart Allen (Impulse) gives his life to stop the Black Knight, and the residual Speed Force accompanying him inadvertently clears the tracking radiation Lex Luthor planted on Clark, allowing Clark and Lois to reunite; Superman, Lois, and Green Arrow then storm LexCorp to recover Tess Luthor's consciousness, while Chloe and Oliver decide to leave Metropolis for a time for the sake of their unborn child. Character relationships, emotional threads, and "Crisis" foreshadowing all advance together in this volume, making it one of the turning points as the series moves from its middle stretch into its second half. One caveat: the above plot belongs to Smallville Season 11 Issue 40; the actual contents of this volume should be checked against the edition in hand.