The Smash Pages crew is back again with a look at what’s arriving in comic shops, bookstores and on digital this week.
If you’re wondering what to get this week, check out a few recommendations below. You can check the Comic List page to see what’s arriving in your local shop, and the comiXology new releases page for what’s available digitally.
Shane Bailey
I’ve talked before about Join The Future and No One’s Rose, two near future stories I’ve been enjoying so I won’t say too much about them at the risk of repeating myself ad naseum, but they come with my highest recommendations.
My daughters will be super excited a new Lumberjanes volume drops though we’re way back on volume 8. I’ll probably pick the new one up. That’s probably their favorite series right now.
I’m always excited about the x-books and this week we get X-Force and the highly entertaining Empyre: X-Men crossover that’s way better than it deserves to be. Terry Moore’s How to Draw Expanded edition looks interesting and it will continue to contribute to my unrealistic dream that I’ll someday draw as well as Terry Moore.
JK Parkin
Speaking of Marvel’s Empyre, the penultimate issue arrives this week, setting up the big finale. I know it wasn’t really planned this way, but I’ve been digging the fact that this event series has been coming out weekly. And despite the issues that Carla and I noted with issue #4, I gotta say overall this has been a really good event, with a fun story and some great tie-ins.
Meanwhile, the insanity continues in DC’s Dark Nights: Death Metal #3, in an issue about Superman, New Apokolips (aka the Sun) and a dark secret held by the Batman Who Laughs.
Writer Tom Taylor calls Seven Secrets one of the “most ambitious stories I’ve ever been a part of,” which is a lot coming from the guy behind the Injustice comics and DCeased. This one, with artist Daniele Di Nicuolo, is about a group that guards seven briefcases that contain various secrets, and the enemy who is willing to do anything to get them. This one is from BOOM! Studios.
From Image Comics comes Big Girls, a new series written and drawn by Jason Howard (Trees). It’s about giant women who fight giant monsters, kind of like Buffy meets Godzilla.
Also from BOOM! is this new graphic novel, Happiness Will Follow, written and drawn by Superior Spider-Man artist Mike Hawthorne. It’s a very personal story about “enduring abuse, discovering a love of art and a passion that helped him to build the home he never had in this graphic novel memoir about family, survival and what it means to be Puerto Rican in America.”
Finally, I think these two new books from Drawn & Quarterly already arrived in bookstores, but they’ll be available in comic shops this week. First up is The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine, a book about “fandom, fame, and other embarrassments from the life of the New York Times bestselling cartoonist.” And in Constitution Illustrated, R. Sikoryak uses some familiar comic characters to deconstruct the American Constitution. It’s the perfect reading material to follow watching Hamilton again on Disney+.