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 + Neon Ichiban (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.
Avengers: Armageddon #1 (Marvel, $5.99): Chip Zdarsky, Delio Diaz and Frank Alpizar launch Marvel’s summer event, which will also serve to tee up a new Avengers title this fall. Red Hulk’s takeover of Latveria requires every hero the Marvel Universe has to offer, from the Avengers to the Fantastic Four to Wolverine, and even that may not be enough. It’ll also come with an exclusive Magic: The Gathering promo card in the first printing polybag, which may be of interest to the Magic players in the audience.
Absolute Catwoman #1 (DC, $4.99): Che Grayson, Scott Snyder and Bengal bring Selina Kyle into her own Absolute Universe title. Someone from the greatest thief in the world’s past sends her life into freefall and kicks off a globe-spanning mystery.
M.A.S.K. #1 (Image/Skybound, $4.99): A new Energon Universe series enters the chat, as Dan Watters and Pye Parr introduce us to Matt Trakker, who is assembling a network of specialists with vehicle-transforming technology to fight Miles Mayhem and V.E.N.O.M.
Skate Ali #1 (Dark Horse, $4.99): Co-writers Kelly Sue DeConnick and Sam Humphries team with artist Natacha Bustos on this near-future skatepunk saga set in a Los Angeles where skateboarding has been outlawed. Ali is a rebel on wheels by night who stumbles into the underground LA Skull Clan and a magical force called the Rush that helps provide both resistance to the powers that be and awesome skateboard moves.
Jay & Silent Bob: Jays of Future Past #1 (Marvel, $5.99): Kevin Smith and Giuseppe Camuncoli bring the View Askewniverse into the Marvel Universe, as Jay and Silent Bob make a quick stop in the 616 and immediately get targeted for death by Doctor Doom, requiring the Fantastic Four, Avengers and X-Men to team up to save them.
M1 Monster Racing League #1 (Image, $3.99): Jae Lee teams with co-writers Robert Windom and Lily Windom on this new ongoing series. Set in anear-future Tokyo, 17-year-old Dev stumbles into an underground world of illegal street racing, where mutation wins championships.
Altered States Warlords #1 (Dynamite, $4.99): Dynamite launches their own Elseworlds/What If?-style alternate reality line with Red Sonja transported to Barsoom, a.k.a. Mars, setting off a chain of events that will eventually pull in Vampirella, John Carter, Dejah Thoris and Tarzan. A premise built entirely on the joy of genre mashup, from David Avallone and Mariano Benitez-Chapo.
Tarzan Beyond #1 (IDW/Alien Books, $5.99): Speaking of Tarzan, Steve Orlando and Renato Guedes bring the Lord of the Jungle back to comics in a new series that features an older, wiser Tarzan and Jane living peacefully until Blackbeard the Pirate lays siege to his homeland in search of the secrets of immortality.
Archie Comics 85th Anniversary Presents: Archie American All Stars #1 (Archie Comics, $4.99): Archie celebrates the World Cup with a boys vs. girls soccer special by Tania del Rio and Dan Parent. Reggie, of course, wants to win at any cost (liek the jerk he is), while the girls’ team gains a mysterious new ringer named Eternity Fields who makes them unstoppable.
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Wings of Fate #1 (Dark Horse, $4.99): Tim Sheridan and Will Sliney helm this four-issue miniseries set in the world of the Masters of the Universe film. It’s about a refugee who finds an injured falcon and must journey through the Mystic Mountains to save it, encountering the legendary inhabitants of Avion along the way.
Bishop #1 (Marvel, $4.99): Saladin Ahmed and Mario Santoro bring Bishop the X-Man into his own miniseries, as his sister Shard arrives in the present right before she died, and Bishop has to choose between his strict code of protecting the timestream and saving the most important person in his life.
Youngblood #100 (Image, $4.99): The first Image title has a convoluted, sometimes turbulent publication history, to the point where titles like Savage Dragon and Spawn are well over 200 and 300 issues, but Youngblood is just now hitting its 100th. Rob Liefeld writes and draws this milestone issue, as the team unites for a final assault on their most formidable enemy, strange alliances are formed and a lineup of legendary artists assembles to create covers — including most of the Image founders and … Robert Kirkman?
Supernatural Special: Castiel #1 (Dynamite, $5.99): Preeti Chhibber and Pasquale Qualano give the fan-favorite angel from Supernatural his comics due. Castiel, always certain in his faith and duty, is suddenly plagued by doubt, and the only variable he can identify is the Winchesters. He tracks them through a chaotic Gainesville weekend, always one step behind, until they finally converge on the same monster.
Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre: Godzilla’s The Odyssey (IDW, $7.99): Frank Tieri and Ilias Kyriazis send Godzilla through Homer’s The Odyssey, replacing storms and sirens with kaiju, and deploying the King of Monsters himself as Zeus’s ultimate weapon to assist Odysseus.
Bad Thoughts #1 (Ignition Press, $4.99): Ande Parks and Dave Wachter introduce Jack Coates, a man who can look inside your mind and see every awful thing you’ve ever thought or done, which makes him very useful in private security. Then he discovers what happens when you trust the wrong people.
Order #1 (AMP, $4.99): The Alban Brothers, twin comic creators living in Colombia, tell the story of Radock, a man torn from his mother when a tyrant emperor rises to power and who is sent to a distant coal mill as punishment. Years later, he’s willing to get his hands dirty to find her and reclaim his life. This story pulls from their own life experiences, as they fled Venezuela in 2014 but their mother couldn’t leave the country due to passport issues.
APE #1 (Floating World, $6): Rich Tommaso spent six years refining this love letter to the 1952–1956 Mad magazine era, studying Will Elder, Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman before spending five months producing this one-shot packed with mad scientists, aliens, cowboys, junkies, businessmen and angsty teenagers.
Tankers vs. Ancient Aliens #1 (Bad Idea, $5.99): Robert Venditti, Tomas Giorello and Trevor Hairsine pick up where the collection (shown below) leaves off, with the Tankers stuck 65 million years in the past. They discover that something far more dangerous than dinosaurs has arrived: a species of battle-hardened ancient aliens armed with weapons humanity has never seen.
Tankers (Bad Idea, $19.99): If the previous listing left you curious, let me back up a bit … this trade paperback collects the original Tankers miniseries by Robert Venditti and Juan Jose Ryp. It’s about a Texas oil company that sends time-traveling mercenaries in mech suits back 65 million years to slightly deflect the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and buy a few more centuries of fossil fuels. This, naturally, goes catastrophically wrong.
Love and Desire in the Promised Land (Fantagraphics, $24.99): Journalist Salomé Parent-Rachdi and illustrator Deloupy deliver one of the most important works of comics journalism this year in a graphic novel filled with interviews with a dozen real citizens of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank about their intimate lives, conducted before the attacks on Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023 and largely preserved intact for this English edition. The authors added a preface in comic form reflecting on the attack and debating whether to revise the book, ultimately choosing to preserve it as a record of life before the war.
100 Cupboards (HarperCollins, $15.99): N.D. Wilson’s bestselling fantasy series gets a graphic novel adaptation, as young Henry, staying with his Kansas relatives, scrapes the wallpaper off his bedroom wall and discovers 100 mysterious miniature doors, each leading to a different world. When his cousin Henrietta boldly ventures through one and disappears, Henry has to follow.
Monsters in Love: A Pride Anthology (Dark Horse, $9.99): James Tynion IV, Tate Brombal, and a lineup of LGBTQIA+ deliver 80 pages of monster romance comics just in time for Pride Month, with a framing story by the Christopher Chaos creative team.
The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad (Beacon Press, $18.95): Marcus Rediker and David Lester tell the story of the 1839 Amistad rebellion, where 53 enslaved Africans slipped their restraints, overpowered their captors and forced the ship toward home, centering the story on the Africans themselves rather than the famous trial that followed.
Mister Magic: The Graphic Novel (Ten Speed Graphic, $24.99): Kiersten White’s psychological thriller gets a graphic adaptation by Scott Peterson with art from Veronica and Andy Fish. It’s about five former child stars of a mysterious children’s show reuniting at the remote desert compound where it was filmed, trying to recover memories of what happened on the day production ended in tragedy.