Welcome to Can’t Wait for Wednesday, your guide to what’s coming to your local comic shop this week.
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.
Swamp Thing 1989 #1 (DC/Black Label, $4.99): I never thought I’d see the day when the Swamp Thing/Jesus crossover would see print — but here we are! In 1989, Rick Veitch and Michael Zulli worked on an issue of Swamp Thing in which the title character traveled back in time and was present at Jesus’ crucifixion. DC management refused to publish it, and Veitch left the book in protest just a few issues before he was slated to leave anyway. The story went unprinted for nearly four decades, becoming one of comics’ legendary lost works. Now DC is finally publishing it under their Black Label imprint, with the original script for issue #88 and art based on Zulli’s surviving layouts, completed by Vince Locke. It’ll be followed by three new issues by Veitch and artist Tom Mandrake, bringing the story to a close.
I Hate Fairyland #50 (Image, $3.99): Skottie Young and Derek Laufman celebrate a decade of Gert’s mayhem with a milestone 50th issue. This milestone issue sounds like it delivers exactly the kind of chaotic, gleeful tribute the series deserves.
Ultimates #23 (Marvel, $4.99): The end is near for Deniz Camp and Stipan Morian’s ambitious Ultimate title, as Thor and Sif join the war on the Maker just as Thor’s deal with Surtur finally comes due.
Zatanna #1 (DC, $3.99): Writer/artist Jamal Campbell follows his Zatanna miniseries with the Mistress of Magic’s first ongoing series in years. Newly appointed as Prime Magus, the first in millennia, Zatanna is tasked with overseeing the entire world of magic. Get ready to read dialogue backwards again!
Archie Comics 85th Anniversary Presents: Archie Game Galaxy #1 (Archie Comics, $4.99): Writer/artist Holly G sends Archie and the gang on a cosmic video game adventure. When Jughead discovers an old gaming console and powers it up, te gang is sucked inside a universe of quirky planets and wild challenges, with Salem the cat as their unlikely guide.
Hellboy in Love: Black Eyes (Dark Horse, $4.99): Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden and Alex Nieto deliver a cozy-turned-creepy one-shot. Hellboy and Anastasia visit retired B.P.R.D. agents Archie and Margaret in their quiet village, only to find the local ghost’s legendary wails growing more urgent and more frequent by the day.
Batman/Wonder Woman: Truth #1 (DC, $5.99): Jeph Loeb and Jim Cheung reunite for a one-shot set against the Batman: Hush storyline. When the Lasso of Truth is stolen by the Joker and Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman turns to Batman for help tracking them down.
Doom 2099: Rage of Doom #1 (Marvel, $4.99): Frank Tieri and Von Randal drop readers into a desolate future where Doom’s own spell has wiped out all life on Earth, leaving him to reckon with what he’s done. When he discovers Ultron’s buried head and risks everything to repair his time machine, he’s trading one catastrophic threat for another.
Elric: The Sleeping Sorceress #1 (Titan, $4.99): Julien Blondel, Jean-Luc Cano and Valentin Secher send a grief-stricken Elric of Melniboné on a mission to find and aid the Empress of the Dawn, while an army plots to steal both his Ring of Kings and the mighty Stormbringer to forge a new Champion of Chaos.
Final Boss: Masked Vigilante (Image, $3.99): Tyler Kirkham and Leon Govender dig into the origin of the Final Boss universe’s most mysterious breakout character, the shadowed assassin known only as the Masked Vigilante, as she dismantles a ruthless crime syndicate using a carefully crafted arsenal and a past nobody saw coming.
Justice League Intergalactic Special #1 (DC, $5.99): Jadzia Axelrod, Nicole Maines and Travis Moore send a hodge-podge of Justice Leaguers to Naltor, the planet of dreamers now under the spell of a Witch Queen harvesting dream energy for conquest. It’s up to Dreamer, Galaxy, Star Sapphire, Green Arrow and Adam Strange to stop her.
Oddballs’ Odyssey (Bad Dog, $7.99): Tony Millionaire fuses Homer’s Odyssey with the surreal visual grandeur of Moebius’s Arzach in this one-shot from Bad Idea. Bobby Dougherty, a monkey newly sober by divine providence, falls drunk on love at the sight of a radiant swan named Lucia Serena DelMar and sets off across impossible labyrinths and treacherous seas with his faithful skunk companion to win her heart.
Red Roots #1 (Image, $4.99): Lorenzo De Felici writes and draws this new series about a professional killer and a high school teacher bound together by a terrifying, mysterious force.
Planet She-Hulk #6 (Marvel, $3.99): Stephanie Phillips and Aaron Kuder bring the latest She-Hulk series to an earlier-than-expected conclusion — Jennifer Walters has been stranded on Sakaar far longer than planned and far more entangled in its politics than she intended, and the final issue puts her to the ultimate choice: take the throne to save the planet, or get thrown back in the pits. Phillips addresses it, as much as she can, in this podcast interview, and it’s a shame. This series deserved more room to breathe.
Giant-Sized Savage Tales (Dynamite, $7.99): David Avallone teams with artists Mariano Benitez-Chapo, Pasquale Qualano and Sebastián Píriz for 40 four pulpy tales, including a noir Vampirella story, a look at Red Sonja in exile, Captain Gullivar Jones at war and the Last Allan Quatermain story.
G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero — Sssilent Missions: Firefly #1 (Image, $3.99): Jorge Fornés has been providing covers for each of these Sssilent Missions one-shots, and now he takes the reins on a story featuring Cobra’s resident saboteur. Firefly is on a mission he must complete at any cost, even if that means going through the elite Oktober Guard to do it.
Gatchaman: Red Impulse #1 (Mad Cave, $4.99): Steve Orlando and Riccardo Robaldo tell the story of Captain Kentaro Washio, the father of Gatchaman’s Ken the Eagle, as he goes in alone against a Galactor “attack city” designed to lure and kill Gatchaman.
From Parts Unknown #1 (Pesto Comics, $4.99): Adriano Ariganello, Daniel Caval and JP Jordan send pro-wrestling tag team brothers Bruno and Pietro to a remote town where the locals hate wrestlers — but the stadium is packed for a show. Something is very wrong, and the stakes turn out to be considerably higher than a championship belt in this horror series.
Invader Comics Presents: Space Minotaur #1 (Invader Comics, $7.99): Keith Foster and Rory Smith deliver two tales from the life of the Minotaur, reimagined not as a labyrinth monster, but as a space hero. One features his investigation of a planetary disturbance, while the other is from his days as a suit actor on a 1970s tokusatsu show.
Last Harlemite #1 (Red 5 Comics, $4.95): Jeff Carroll and Rustico P. Limosinero launch a post-apocalyptic adventure set in the ruins of Manhattan, as Mansa navigates a dangerous terrain of mutated beasts, driven by memories of his sister and his dog.
Murder Hobo #1 (Midnight Factory, $4.99): Joseph Schmalke and Ryan G. Browne take the RPG archetype of the Murder Hobo, aka the player who skips the roleplaying and just kills everything in sight, and turn it into an ongoing series. Where proper heroes are saving the realm, the Murder Hobos are gleefully foiling all their best-laid plans through pure, selfish anarchy. This was originally published by Scout Comics, so it’s good to see the creators were able to move it somewhere else following all the controversy around the publisher.
Speed Racer Adventures Vol. 1 (Papercutz, $17.99): Franco and Derek Charm reimagine the classic Speed Racer characters as younger versions of themselves in an all-ages adventure, as Speed enters a race rigged by the world’s richest man against Racer X.
Captain Underpants: The First Epic Manga TP Vol. 1 (Scholastic, $14.99): Dav Pilkey adapts the first Captain Underpants book as a manga, illustrated by Japanese artist Motojiro and complete with all-new Flip-O-Ramas.
Clock Hands (HarperCollins, $15.99): Bestselling author Marieke Nijkamp teams with artist Sylvia Bi on this middle-grade fantasy about Vale, a guildless kid in a city built on rigid hierarchies. When Vale lands a once-in-a-lifetime apprenticeship building the city’s first astronomical clock, he discovers that breaking the rules has serious consequences.
Reincarnation Stories (Fantagraphics, $29.99): Kim Deitch embarks on a sprawling, psychedelic odyssey through his own past lives, kicked off by a chance encounter as a four-year-old with a drunk old man who recognizes him as someone who died. From there, the book weaves through time and space, past lives and future selves, as Deitch encounters Frank Sinatra, moon-dwelling Native Americans, a feline YouTube star and the Monkey God.
Soviet Land (Abrams ComicArts, $34.99): Pierre-Henry Gomont delivers a tragicomic thriller set in the rubble of the post-Soviet 1990s about a failed painter and his conman companion as they scavenge through decaying USSR infrastructure for trinkets to sell to wealthy investors.
Everything in Color: A Love Story (23rd St., $29.99): Stephanie Stalvey’s debut graphic memoir shares her deeply personal account of leaving fundamentalist Christianity after being raised in an evangelical community where desire was dangerous and doubt was sin. Stalvey traces her journey through faith, alienation and the relationship with her seminarian husband James that gradually expanded her world.
Martyr Loser King (23rd St., $34.99, digital): Poet, musician and filmmaker Saul Williams teams with illustrator Morgan Sorne to deliver a cyberpunk fable rooted in the real-world exploitation of coltan, the mineral found in every cell phone and computer on earth that’s mined in East Africa under devastating conditions. From the encounter between a miner and an otherworldly stranger emerges a hacker named MartyrLoserKing, and a global cyberattack that could upend centuries of institutional abuse.
Marvel Creator Collection Vol. 1: Back to the Savage Land — Barry Windsor-Smith at Marvel (Fantagraphics, $49.99): The first volume of a career retrospective for Barry Windsor-Smith’s earliest work for Marvel, from The Avengers and Iron Man to Doctor Strange and Nick Fury, culminating in his epic Savage Land collaboration with Gerry Conway.
Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse vs. The Mouseton Society of Evil (Fantagraphics, $24.99): Nicolas Pothier and Johan Pilet set a gleefully retro-futurist Mickey Mouse adventure in the year 2128, as Space Ranger Mickey assembles a team to take down the Phantom Blot’s newly recruited all-star crew of super-villains.