superspecial abelian varieties are positive characteristic phenomenon. these are abelian varieties enjoying many special, even super special l;-) properties, which i'll attempt to explain. after some background about stratifications of moduli spaces and how, in that context, the superspecial locus is the smallest, i will describe some more recent work on superspecial abelian varieties. in particular, work of m.-h. nicole and a. ghitza that makes use of the superspecial locus to construct modular forms and mention very briefly some beautiful graphs that can be constructed from the superspecial locus.