Welcome to Can’t Wait for Wednesday, your guide to what’s coming to your local comic shop this week. There are a lot of big debut issues this week, including the return of Die, Youngblood and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, plus crossovers like Gargoyles/Fantastic Four, the Ninja Turles and Godzilla, and Batman Beyond with Static Shock.
I’ve pulled out some of the highlights for this week below, but for the complete list of everything you might find at your local comic shop and on digital this week, you’ll want to check out one or more of the following:
- Penguin Random House (Marvel + IDW + Dark Horse + more)
- Lunar Distribution (DC + Image + Mad Cave + more)
- ComicList (Pretty much all of the above)
- Amazon/Kindle new releases (digital comics)
As a reminder, things can change and what you find on the above lists may differ from what’s actually arriving in your local shop. So check with your retailer to see what’s arriving at their shop this week.
Die Loaded #1 (Image Comics, $3.99): Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans return for another session of the dark fantasy RPG gone wrong. A year after their return from the hellish game world, the players gather for a wake. They’re finished with the game, but the game isn’t finished with them.
Alongside the new issue comes The Die RPG Quickstart Game Guide, by Gillen and Hans, which includes everything you need to play the game — rules, characters and a multi-session scenario. Just add dice, friends and a desire to get sucked into the game.
“Die was created by us to talk about fantasy and reality, for as long as we have stories to tell. Suffice to say, we do, and Die: Loaded exactly how much else we have to share, to delight, move and horrify you,” said Gillen. “Plus it’s also important for Die that we give other people a chance to tell their stories. It’s why we wrote the RPG, and with the Quickstart, we want to let even more people in on the party.”
Batman/Static Beyond #1 (DC, $4.99): Evan Narcisse and Nikolas Draper-Ivey head to the Batman Beyond Universe for a six-issue team-up between two Saturday morning favorites. In the not-so-distant future, Terry McGinnis patrols Neo-Gotham as Batman Beyond while Virgil Hawkins forges a new technological revolution in Dakota City with the Q-Wave Energy Grid. Together with the Justice League Beyond, they prepare for Earth’s induction into the interplanetary Cooperative—until a new villain arrives and puts everything at risk.
1776 #1 (Marvel, $4.99): J. Michael Straczynski and Ron Lim deliver a time-traveling story featuring Marvel’s present-day heroes returning to the time of the U.S. Revolutionary War to safeguard the founding of the United States of America. To do that, they’ll have to fight Morgan Le Fay.
Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Ghost Ships of Labrador #1 (Dark Horse, $4.99): Mike Mignola and Rob Williams team with artist Laurence Campbell for a two-issue Hellboy story. A town overrun by ghosts would be enough, but Hellboy has an even bigger problem on his hands when a fellow B.P.R.D. agent disappears in the paranormal chaos. Check out some of Campbell’s process artwork here.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles x Godzilla #1 (IDW, $4.99): Tim Seeley and Fero Pe deliver one monster of a crossover as the Heroes in a Half-Shell take on the King of the Monsters. Long before it was corrupted by Shredder, the Foot Clan’s original purpose was to save Japan from kaiju. Now in the present day, Godzilla has reappeared, as Shredder attempts to use the kaiju to create a new mutagen that would give his henchmen a massive upgrade.
Youngblood #1 (Image Comics, $4.99): Creator Rob Liefeld returns to write and draw the book that kicked off the Image Comic revolution back in the 1990s. “The Team is summoned to a crisis in the Pacific as a mysterious vessel appears and a deadly nemesis is revealed!” In true 1990s fashion, the first issue comes polybagged with a trading card.
Poison Ivy 2025 Annual #1 (DC, $5.99): G. Willow Wilson teams with Mark Buckingham for a story that takes Poison Ivy on a journey through time. In her quest to save the natural world from the hands of mankind, Poison Ivy sets out to find the living repository of all secrets: the Tree of Knowledge. But like those who have tasted the tree’s fruit before her, Ivy learns far more than she bargained for.
American Caper #1 (Dark Horse, $4.99): Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser teams with David Lapham and Chris Anderson for this story of “two totally normal, completely damaged families in a world of corrupt business, inept politics, bungling crime, self-righteous justice and problematic leisure wear.”
“American Caper is based on my lifelong fascination with hypocrites, sociopaths, political idiots, dysfunctional families, and violence. Dark, morally ambiguous, very vulgar and, we hope, funny, American Caper is a comic for the confusing world in which we live right now,” Houser said. This is the first issue of 12.
Predator: Badlands #1 (Marvel, $4.99): Ethan Sacks and Elvin Ching create the official prequel to the new film in collaboration with director Dan Trachtenberg. A young Yautja warrior is given a seemingly simple task by his father: retrieve a piece of technology from a derelict spaceship that crashed years ago. Inside, however, an ancient and deadly threat lies in wait.
Liquidator #1 (Mad Cave Studios, $4.99): It’s a big week for time travel stories, as Peter Milligan and Piotr Kowalski launch this new five-issue thriller. Aubrey is a Liquidator, whose job is to fix glitches in time. She just wishes she could fix the glitches in her life. When she arrives in 1891 looking for a feminist masterpiece that won’t be published for almost 100 years, she worries that 1981 might be rejecting her.
Gargoyles x Fantastic Four #1 (Dynamite, $5.99): Marvel brought together the Fantastic Four and Gargoyles about a month ago, and now Greg Weisman and George Kambadais present the Dynamite side of the crossover. When the Manhattan Clan tour the Baxter Building, things quickly get destructive when Coldsteel joins forces with Dragon Man to unleash Annihilus, When Franklin, Valeria and Gnash end up in the Negative Zone, both families must team up to save their children and the world.
Colossal Kaya (Image Comics, $4.99): Wes Craig teams up with Nathan Fox, James Harren, Mike Huddleston, Declan Shalvey and Ryan Stegman for a colossal 48 pages of story and extras. This exclusive single issue won’t be collected in a trade paperback and includes a six-page introduction to the series, perfect for new readers looking to jump into Craig’s fantasy series.
Aquaman #11 (DC, $3.99): This DC K.O. tie-in by Jeremy Adams and Nimit Malavia reveals the connection between the Dark Tide and Darkseid, as Aquaman tries to contend with his new powers.
Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #1 (Dynamite, $4.99): Peter Cannon returns in a new series by Fred Van Lente and Jonathan Lau, which seems to be a reboot vs. a continuation of the Kieron Gillen/Caspar Wijngaard series — which was excellent, by the way, as you’d expect from the creators of The Power Fantasy. Still, Van Lente and Lau are an impressive creative duo themselves, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the character.
Heaven, West Virginia (Oni Press, $19.99): Ravi Teixeira explores the complexity of grief and healing in this new graphic novel. Lamont’s father was not a good man, and now his father is dead. When Lamont arrives in the tiny Appalachian town of Heaven, West Virginia, he learns the art of foraging and tea-making from his Aunt LaToya. But whenLamont starts to see a dark figure with long, glimmering teeth and piercing red eyes that no one else seems to see, he’ll have to confront his grief to defeat it.
Friday Deluxe Edition (Image Comics, $49.99): Image collects Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martín and Muntsa Vicente’s entire post-Young Adult supernatural detective story, originally published digitally by Panel Syndicate. The Nancy Drew-like Friday Fitzhugh spent her childhood solving crimes and digging up occult secrets with best friend Lancelot Jones. Now an adult, she comes home for the holidays and finds something very strange and dangerous happening in their New England town.