It’s the summer of 1970 in Southern California and four friends need money to get tickets for the upcoming Janis Joplin concert. Luckily, there happens to be a haunted stretch of highway on Proctor Valley Road that they decide to make money off of by offering paid tours of the area to rubes. But, oh no, the ghosties is real - and lotsa people gonna die!
Auctioneer Rilke gets a tip from his old friend Jojo of a wealthy old lady wanting to clear her ancestral home, Ballantyne House, and sell up. But then Jojo mysteriously dies and when Rilke goes to visit the old lady he finds her missing and two men, one of them claiming to be her son, in the home instead. And then an acquaintance of Jojo’s dies in similar circumstances and known gangsters are seen in Ballantyne House’s grounds. As much as Rilke’s auction house needs this sale to go ahead after all the covid lockdowns caused economic hardship, he can’t help but look into what’s really going on behind the scenes…
Someone in Europe is offing everyone Batman’s ever saved. Time for Bats to hop over the pond to find out whasgoinonnnnn!Before James Tynion IV was announced as Tom King’s successor on Batman, I thought Tom Taylor would’ve made a better replacement. Having read his first standalone Batman story now though… eh… not that he wouldn’t have been worse than Tynion, but his hypothetical Batman run also probably wouldn’t have been good either going by how poor Batman: The Detective turned out.
In Fatherland, Canadian cartoonist Nina Bunjevac relates the short, sad biography of her father, Peter (the Paul Bettany-looking chap on the cover), a Serbian terrorist who made and sent bombs to enemies of his nationalist group, before perishing in 1977 when a bomb he was working on went off and killed him and two collaborators.
Kristen Radtke takes a broad look at the subject of loneliness and also specifically how it relates to America in Seek You, in an effort to understand why there’s an epidemic of loneliness today, how we got here, and what can be done about it. Or are humans just naturally lonely creatures…?
Editor Susan Ryeland receives the latest manuscript from her publishing house’s biggest author: Magpie Murders by Alan Conway, featuring his popular Poirot-esque detective Atticus Pund. Set in a small Westcountry village in 1955, aristocrat Magnus Pye is murdered in his house, mere days after his cleaner died and the place was burgled - are these events connected in some way, pointing to whodunit? But Susan is about to discover the manuscript is just the beginning for an even stranger story that bleeds over from the printed page and into her life…
Someone - or something - is systematically mutilating Gotham’s supervillains. But who - and why?Garth Ennis usually only tangentially writes about superheroes in his comics, and often subversively, like in The Boys, The Punisher, Kev, etc. - they’re never the main feature. And, aside from a short run on Ghost Rider, I don’t think he’s ever written a mainstream superhero comic and has only written Batman as a side-character in books like Hitman and Section Eight.
Clyde Fans is the story of two brothers, Abe and Simon Matchcard, and their fraught relationship over the years, as well as their father’s fan manufacturing company, Clyde Fans, and its rise and fall from the post-war years to its eventual bankruptcy a few decades later.
Haruki Murakami wrote a series of short essays about his t-shirt collection for the Japanese men’s fashion magazine, Popeye, over the course of a year and a half and these are all collected here in Blatant Stocking Stuffer For The Murakami Fan In Your Family Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love.
A cursed record that dooms its listeners. A mysterious jade carving that bestows a horrific disease on those who possess it. A monstrous fashion model. Ghostly blimps of the dead. A crazed puppeteer who turns his family into marionettes. A muse that drives painters mad. A man whose dreams distort time and, eventually, his body. A man determined to carry on his family’s lineage, no matter what. And a nightmarishly greasy house and the poor family the grease envelopes.
Gangsters is using Poison Ivy to make drugs somehow - Catwoman to the rescue! Meanwhile, her rule of Alleytown has made her a target and two new assassins are after her: Wight Witch, who has a honeycomb mask for no reason, and Valley, a steampunk dude whose name is in the title.
Hoke Moseley’s latest case is the suspicious death of a junkie who’s overdosed after swiping a large chunk of change from drug dealers. But then he’s put on a special assignment to solve a stack of cold cases in two months to make his boss look good enough to be promoted and also bring new hope of justice for the (possibly) dead. Then, suddenly, his ex-wife dumps their two teenage daughters in his lap and takes off for the west coast! Now, Hoke’s not only gotta find a new place to live soon but he’s gotta find a place big enough for his kids too. It never rains but it pours, eh…
