Wanted on Earth for supposedly murdering a bar full of patrons in El Paso, Bruce Banner’s turned Hulk into a starship and piloted it into deep space, never to return - though the Avengers are still after him. So when the grieving, newly-crowned King of Asgard, whose dead dad now inhabits Mjolnir, hears the Starship Hulk is nearby, Thor realises he can do some Avenger-ing and work out his grief at the same time. Is time for Hulk vs Thor - ding ding!
Peacemaker finally has a friend: a lil pug he names Bruce Wayne. Mais sacre bleu - an evil brain in a jar called The Brain and his French-speaking gorilla henchman have kidnapped him! To get him back, Peacemaker must steal Deathstroke the Terminator’s DNA so Brain can have a badass new clone bod. And who’s coming to Peacemaker’s party on Saturday?!
“These waves do not crash on me. They break on me. Because I am strong.”- Bruce Banner, mad scientist par excellence
Ben and Alicia find themselves in 1947 small town ‘murica. Sue and Reed are stuck in another small town - full of Doombots what don’t know they’re Doombots?! And Johnny plays at being a convenience store woman. All puzzling situations, but how come they ain’t together - wha hoppen to the Fantastic Floor?!
50 years ago, an MI6 00 Agent stole Soviet Russian research for a form of weaponised water: Stalvoda (“Steel Water”). Now, the Brits having perfected its use, the Russians have stolen it back. The man tasked with retrieving it and killing the thieves? Bond. Jamesh Bond. Da da duun da da! Doo doo doo doo… etc.
Feeling silly? Nick Maandag sure is in his latest collection of absurdist comics, Harvey Knight’s Odyssey!
A lonely young American student living in England gets invited to her friend’s posh ancestral mansion in the country for Christmas. What could possibly go wrong - certainly not murder most foul?! Moo ha ha ha haaaa…. zzz…
Swan Songs is a collection of six comics loosely connected by the theme of the end of something, ie. the end of the world/a marriage/a sentence, etc. W. Maxwell Prince specialises in these kind of one-and-done comics collections - his Ice Cream Man series with Martin Morazzo has the same format and subversive, dark tone - but unfortunately Swan Songs isn’t one of his better books.
Woohoo, new Charles Burns book! Oh… it’s just a series of covers. For comics that don’t exist. Hmm.
Edward Nashton is a brilliant but underachieving and meek accountant who discovers his accountancy firm is laundering money for the mob but feels helpless to do anything. Which is why he becomes so fixated on the new masked vigilante that appears in Gotham: The Batman. He represents justice and positive change to all the wrongs Edward sees in his everyday life. But the obsession soon sours, warping Edward into the Riddler we meet in the 2022 movie.
Betwixt looks like another Junji Ito book - same publisher, same format, same genre - and, though he draws the cover and provides a foreword, this is actually a horror manga anthology from other creators. Half of them are Asian, the other half are American, so the book is divided into stories from the two halves and you can read it either way - the traditional manga right to left, or the western-style left to right.
1891 and Marshal Azrael William Holt is sent out to the Utah Territory to investigate a series of bizarre and horrific murders. Signs point to the abandoned mine near the town of Canary whose water might be contaminated and could be driving people in the surrounding area to madness and despicable acts. But what’s really going on under the ground of Canary, and what does an old case of Holt’s, involving a demented child serial killer, have to do with all of this?
