“It’s about creation, illusion, reality and fiction; survival, escape and escapism.
“On so very many levels, it’s about escaping your past.”
– Stephen on Mister Miracle by Tom King & Mitch Gerads.
Mister Miracle s/c (£22-99, DC) by Tom King & Mitch Gerads.
– Scott Free, Mister Miracle
“Comics will break your heart.”
– Jack ‘King’ Kirby, creator of Mister Miracle (and so much more)
Before we begin, I promise you this:
This is no more a superhero comic that Fraction and Aja’s run on HAWKEYE. Indeed separating this eminently approachable book from its publishing past – of which you need know nothing – plays an integral part in its mischief and in its multilayered narrative.
It is instead a Real Mainstream book, accessible to all, with exceptionally nuanced, neo-classical yet expressionistic art owing much to Bill Sienkiewicz, bursting with wit, insight and passion, about discerning one’s true priorities and appreciating your bounties; embracing and so not running from them, but celebrating them instead in all their often irksome but iridescent best.
Sure, it’s also about torture, death-traps, war, paternal betrayal, screwed up ideas about what constitutes a wholesome upbringing, and unleashing a weapon of prevalently held fears and anxieties upon mankind in an eons-old feud between two warring Kingdoms of Gods.
But really it’s about the indispensable upgrade, to any occasion, of a fresh veggie tray and dips.
It’s about creation, illusion, reality and fiction; survival, escape and escapism.
On so very many levels, it’s about escaping your past.
This goes equally, whether you’re a comicbook creator like Jack ‘King’ Kirby, or one of his creations, Scott Free.
Above all it’s a slick comedy, merrily juxtaposing the crazy and the quotidian, the dire and the daft.
Like Scott’s beautiful wife’s less than becoming bed-face, drawn to observational perfection by line and colour artist Mitch Gerads.
And the strange but not unexpected truth that even a stinking dungeon-kingdom of hellish fire-pits called Apokolips must have a restroom somewhere.
It’s… different.
First we’ll talk plot, then we’ll talk craft.
Celebrated escape artist Scott Free (Mister Miracle) has an enviable life in sunny Los Angeles, with an ever so understanding, preternaturally tall wife, an equally adoring public and – he will soon learn, at the least appropriate juncture – a beautiful baby boy on the way. Oh, there are such play times ahead! So why has Scott Free attempted to pull off the ultimate escape trick, from life? For there he lies sprawled on the bathroom floor, wrists slit, blood swimming round the toilet bowl, staining his colourful costume and mask.
Why does his wife Barda catch him, upon convalescing, talking to an old colleague about new manacles, reputedly impossible to escape from, and a kid who once drew the unknowable: the very face of God? Oberon passed away last month, from throat cancer brought on by his cherished cigars.
Has someone – or something – got to Scott?
“Everything’s wrong. Everything.
“I can’t… There’s something wrong with me.
“I see things… I do things… Things that aren’t…
“I don’t know how to escape this.”
And why is our vision constantly fritzing in and out, like a broadcast losing its tuning? (Bottom left.)
I’ll tell you why.
Scott Free was a God of the Fourth World, born of the Highfather, ruler of New Genesis. The Highfather was engaged in a relentless, ruthless bloody war with Darkseid, ruler of Apocolips, hell-bent on unleashing the Anti-Life Equation. After untold eons, they eventually called a ceasefire. To cement this fragile truce they agreed to swap their own baby sons: Darkseid’s spawn Orion would live on New Genesis, while Scott Free was abandoned to Darkseid and tortured by Granny Goodness (mythological sarcasm) in the stygian X-Pit of Apokolips. It was there that he met his future wife, Big Barda, herself a resilient product of those pits. Unsurprisingly, Scott spent his entire youth determined to escape, and eventually he did so. He moved to planet Earth and became a celebrated escape artist with an enviable life in –
I’m sorry, but you’re breaking up again…
Scott Free AKA Mister Miracle never actually existed except in the fictional DC Comics universe. He was and remains a fictional character from the Fourth World created at DC by Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) after he left Marvel Comics. At Marvel Comics he co-created Captain America, then later the Fantastic Four, X-Men, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer and so many more characters with the infamously alliterative Stan Lee who stole as much of the credit for those fictitious children as possible while the company declined to pay Kirby royalties and managed to “lose” almost all of his original art.
See MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY.
“Comics will break your heart.”
Jack meant the US/UK comics industry. He’s not wrong, and all of this is relevant.
As this book opens, ‘The Secret Origin of Mister Miracle’ is being retold as if on a TV screen in a very specific typeface with a certain degree of moralistic simplicity, a huge heap of hyperbole and a thunderous foray of exclamation points!!!! The art by Mike Norton emulates that of Jack Kirby.
Abruptly we’re then thrown on that cold bathroom floor with Mitch Gerads’ comparatively photo-realistic art and Scott Free’s slit wrists.
“I can always escape” is both Scott’s boast and his fall-back plan.
But can he? Should he? Did he?
What is he really running from, and what’s coming next?
Well, I know it doesn’t sound like it at this point, but the answer is an enormous amount of laughter as every aforementioned element comes into play including Stan Lee returning to the fore as Scott and Barda’s baby son’s nanny. Their son is tellingly called Jacob. Scott Free has a penchant for wearing DC superhero comics t-shirts (the icon range), swapping them between chapters (this escalates), so he isn’t averse to buying his son cuddly superhero toys to play with. This leads to the one line that I never thought I’d read in a DC Comic:
“Batman kills babies.”
Former DC censor-in-chief and professional worrywart Paul Levitz would never have allowed a single sentence of this iconoclastic book to exist. He’d have put it all in the microwave, along with creator Kyle Baker.
Tom King wrote my favourite ever Batman story in BATMAN: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT in which Lois Lane, Selina Kyle, Clarke Kent and Bruce Wayne bond during a night off at a theme park. Tom King thinks outside the box and brings things back down to Earth.
Throughout, Scott and Barda – who’d prefer to do lunch, bask on beaches or survey the starry night sky from the hills above LA’s city lights – are called away to Awful Events, Terrible Treaties and Outrageous Ultimatums from far-off quarters of the Mind-Blowing Multiverse linked (via a teleportation-like conduit called a Boom Tube) to their condominium’s front door.
“Have you fed the cat?”
You’ll be treated to an exquisite short story about a painter and his apprentice which echoes beautifully with the comic’s concepts of illusion and verisimilitude, and if you thought hospital child birth was traumatising enough under ordinary circumstances, it’s infinitely worse when there are harridans outside the ward waiting patiently to disembowel your husband.
Artist Mitch Gerads plays it all to perfection, accentuating the contrast between luridly coloured off-world evisceration and a quiet, pale blue palette with sand, cream and flesh for what you and I are more used to, and his crisp, clean, nine-panel grid ensures that no one will feel alienated, however new they be to comics.
It’s also integral to the comedic timing, a final beat so often falling on the finale.
His forms are both sturdy and svelte, and his incorporation of Kirby’s original rendition of craggy-faced Granny Goodness (Denis Healey runaway eyebrows and all!) into his own Bill Sienkiewicz / Sean Murphy style is seamless.
Plus his light, deft, balletic choreography of the life-or-death fight, flight or infiltration scenes emphasises the ease of their execution while Scott and Barda concentrate instead on their far more pressing issues, like how to best rearrange their condo cupboards and living room in order to incorporate the arrival or their soon-to-be newborn child.
Almost lastly, this: I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m visiting my friends, getting to grips with the idiosyncrasies of their showers is of paramount importance and often completely baffling.
So it is that we return at last to escape and escapism, the struggle to survive, and the will to live through it: to move on, create and to thrive!
“And the son asked, “What is the Fourth World?”
“And the father said,
“The First World is the Old World, the world of my parents from which they fled.
“The Second World is the New World which they sought, which they found, where I came to be.
“The Third World is our world as it is now, in the making, the future being born.
“And the Fourth World, my child, that is my world. The world I see when I close my eyes…”
Young Jack Kirby, born of Austrian Jewish immigrants, looks at us directly, out of the page…
“And try to escape.”
SLH
Buy Mister Miracle s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Sharkey The Bounty Hunter #1 of 6 (£3-25, Image) by Mark Millar & Simone Bianchi.
“You’re looking at eighteen months’ intensive deep cover to get all your criminal friends in one place. I wasn’t proud of what I did in this holo-suit, but I’ll do what it takes if the price is right.”
Oh, the look on the lured victim’s fast-paling face!
And oh, the glee in the patient angler’s grin…
“Oh yeah.”
I chuckled like a sixteen-year-old schoolboy.
Mark Millar enjoys throwing it all about these days, hopping swiftly from one speculative sub-genre to another, as if the last one’s caught fire, in a concerted effort to cater for as many science-fiction tastes as possible. It’s quite a broad church. Admittedly it is a prerequisite that any of those tastes include an attraction to action, arched-eyebrow attitude and more often than not a certain degree of sexual mischief.
He’s not lingering long enough in any one territory for some serious dissection. Quiet and contemplative, he’s not. Not any longer, anyway. It’s been a while since JUPITER’S LEGACY VOL ONE, JUPITER’S CIRCLE VOL ONE and TWO then JUPITER’S LEGACY VOL TWO (to be read in that order, and highly recommended), and much longer still since THE ULTIMATES (ditto). But since most of Millar’s recent set-ups could be considered emergency situations leaving his protagonists neither time to consider nor room for manoeuvre, it works.
Like Millar’s own EMPRESS with art by Stuart Immonen, we’re once more flying across the cosmos, albeit in a space-faring ice-cream van, such is Sharkey’s woeful credit status. And with painterly art by Simone Bianchi, Warren Ellis’s artistic partner on the self-contained ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, this may well appeal also to those of a European Humanoids persuasion.
I also sensed trappings of old-school 2000 AD, the bawdy bits of Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov’s first Barracuda story in PUNISHER MAX VOL 5, the first two Keith Giffen, Alan Grant and Simon Bisley LOBO mini-series, and perhaps Warren Ellis and D’Israeli’s LAZARUS CHURCHYARD (there’s even a toilet in the first few pages, though thankfully it keeps its own counsel).
That doesn’t smell overly fresh, does it?
Even the woman determined to transform herself into a security vehicle smacked of something which Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s DESCENDER dealt with in far more depth.
Yet I was entertained, momentarily.
MAGIC ORDER is where brevity has worked best for Millar most recently – indeed it proved pivotal to the proceedings, rendering the last two of six chapters side-blindingly brilliant in their multiple reveals – and I’ll be back to beseech you to buy that book once it’s been collected, with a far more reasoned response.
For now: contrary to his outward disdain for others and against his better judgement, bounty hunter Sharkey saddles himself with a pre-teen side-kick after handing the boy’s bald uncle in for a lot less lolly than was originally offered because he’s so massively in dept that bondsmen have been instructed to deduct it from his earnings at source. Fortunately a much more lucrative contract is offered and that’s where we’re heading, only it’s been openly tendered so expect competition – from the bloke gloating in the pull quote, for one.
Thanks to Simone Bianchi – still employing the trademark white-lined cut-out effect surrounding some faces and forms – Sharkey with his nascent handlebar moustache comes off like Nick Cave circa ‘White Lunar’ with the other Warren Ellis. The big difference is that above his long-worn, slick black hair, Saint Nick’s not bald on top. Sharkey most emphatically is.
On confronting his shaven-haired quarry, this led Sharkey to a proud bald-bloke joke which our Jonathan enjoyed enormously. As did I, for I too am an angler, patiently waiting with a small smile on my face for J’s inevitable Day of Decision.
SLH
Buy Sharkey The Bounty Hunter #1 and read the Page 45 review here
Transmetropolitan Book 1 s/c (£16-99, Vertigo) by Warren Ellis & Darick Robertson, Rodney Ramos.
“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world…”
DC has recently been repackaging its slimmer Vertigo volumes into heftier editions, and this combines the first two precisely – BACK ON THE STREET and LUST FOR LIFE – for little more money than those single editions.
Back On The Street
Campaigning journalist Spider Jerusalem is a very cranky man. Five years ago he sold his ass to a publisher for a two-book deal whose advance he squandered on escaping his fans by barricading himself up in a shack on a mountainside and surrounding it with mines, guns and ammunition.
Spider is not a people person.
So here is he is with not a word written, hairy and naked and covered in tattoos, the guns now bartered for drugs which have long since run out and the devil is wanting his due:
“That ignorant, thick-lipped, evil, whore-hopping editor phones me up and says, “Does the word contract mean anything to you, Jerusalem?” I was having a mildly paranoid day, mostly due to the fact that the mad priest lady from over the river had taken to nailing weasels to my front door again.”
And so it is that to avoid being sued Spider Jerusalem has to return to a noisy, stinking city he loathes but which feeds him exactly what he needs to write. There he hunts down old friend Mitchell Royce, city editor of The Word, for a regular, paying column in which to scream truth to apathy and all the blind eyes being turned. After that it’s one long refrain of “Where’s my fucking column?!”
Set in a future not so distant as to be unrecognisable from the present which it’s passing judgement upon, this was Warren’s first perfect vehicle in which to address his chief obsessions – technology, politics, drugs, sex and bowel movements – and do so in a foul-mouthed frenzy of highly cathartic rage. Apart from political and social apathy, his first targets included organised religion (Spider dressed up as Jesus at a temple of mad new religions, overthrowing the stalls of the money swindlers) and multi-channel TV saturation, all the hideous advertising that comes with it, and the state of what passes for journalism there:
“…You people don’t know what the truth is! It’s there, just under their bullshit, but you never look! That’s what I hate most about the fucking city — lies are news and truth is obsolete!”
It’s also round two between him and the US President about to seek re-election, in a hotel toilet with a bowel disruptor gun. That one’s going to run. But first it’s live feed from a rooftop overlooking the massacre by the state police of a group of Transcients (“Transcience is all about the right to change your species”) mislead by their dickhead and dick-led leader into attempting secession from The State.
It’s a riot throughout, with the second half lightening up both comedically and visually with fewer panels bleeding off the page and the return of some white behind the panel borders. Darick undergoes a massive leap from the very first page of the fifth issue, his faces and figures more fully formed, but he’s the perfect artist for this from the start, as are the two cover artists Geoff Darrow and Frank Quitely. It’s packed full of background details from a Direct Action Baptist roaming the streets with a water cannon (I laughed a lot at that), hoardings advertising newly invented foods or fetishes, and the insignia of the Transcients, a smiley button with three eyes and a devil’s tail smile.
Lust For Life
Although most readers become instantly addicted to the profane ragings of the easily antagonised political columnist Spider Jerusalem, there are some who come away bewildered by the bombast. Here, however, the first three issues are an emphatic change of style and pace as Jerusalem – against all expected odds – shows that he has a heart. Each self-contained chapter is bursting with speculative science about where humanity and the societies it inhabits might potentially go from here.
In the first Spider’s assistant finds herself nursing a broken heart as the boyfriend whom Spider never liked ditches her in order to die. At least, that’s how she sees it, but Jerusalem has prior experience of the transfiguration: a friend who’s already successfully “downloaded” himself into a billion tiny machines, self-sustaining and strung together by lightning, so leaving his mortality behind. In an attempt to give her closure he explains the process as they travel by a horse-drawn cab through the open parks of the future city, introduces his friend and then arranges for her to witness the event itself. Unfortunately the final moments are so traumatic that she ends up quitting to join a nunnery.
That’s followed by two of Spider’s columns. The second sees the journalist experiencing firsthand some of the reservations built to preserve ancient societies, whilst the first follows the story of one woman’s attempt to preserve herself by electing to be cryogenically frozen, then revived when technology had advanced far enough to create for her a new artificial body. And it has. But society hasn’t advanced far enough to care. She’s dutifully revived as per contract — then left to fend for herself in a traumatically alien world. It’s touchingly done, Jerusalem/Ellis juxtaposing each remarkable feat of science involved in recreating her brain for a new body not only with the less than clinical conditions it’s performed in, but also the less than impressed performances of those executing it in-between petty office politics, casual drinking and sex in the toilets. Oh yes, and when her husband died three years after Mary he was too far from America to be frozen himself, so Mary wakes up alone.
After that… it’s back to the bombast as Spider finds himself the target of a death threat conspiracy involving the theft of his ex-wife’s cryogenically frozen head, a longstanding French vendetta, a disgruntled target of Jerusalem’s journalism and an apoplectic British Bulldog whom Spider once relieved of his prodigious wanger.
Tip of the hat to artist Robertson, not just for making the burlesque great fun, but also for the most gorgeous landscape portrait of a contemporary San Francisco Bay swathed in fog under the crystalline light of an early morning sun.
Reminder: Spider Jerusalem is not a people-person:
“If you loved me, you’d all kill yourselves today.”
SLH
Buy Transmetropolitan Book 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Nightlights s/c (£8-99, Nobrow) by Lorena Alvarez.
Now out in softcover, just in time for its sequel, HICOTEA!
And that cover is such a pretty thing in orange, blues and purples, with tactile spot varnish picking out the title, some flowers and Sandy’s sketches. Oh how she loves to draw! But I promise you that this is nothing compared to the wonders within…
Sandy is lying flat on her back on the lounge carpet, as far from her bedroom as possible, positively gluing herself to the ground.
“I’m a heavy, heavy rock…”
Haha! So many kids do love to prolong the day, don’t they? They go to great guileful lengths, first to avoid climbing those stairs to Bedfordshire, then to keep Mummy or Daddy reading to them for as long as possible. For example, when all else fails and her bedside light looks like going out, our Jonathan’s young Nutjob has been known to clasp her hands studiously, look him in the eyes with a serious, concerned expression and say:
“So, Daddy, tell me about your day…”
I don’t quite know why Sandy’s so keen to delay, for her day is far from done.
Once the bedroom is dark, tiny pink baubles of light appear above her head, which – with a whoosh of wide-spread arms – she transforms into the most magical and diverse parade of magnificent space-swimming creatures! Some come from the ocean, like a gigantic red octopus with big bulbous yellow eyes; some seem to float in their own bubbles of water complete with seaweed. One’s like a giant white wolf with huge orange orbs, there’s an owl, a regal lute-strumming monkey and a cat at the back that could be its queen. She might be reading her own bedtime story.
There’s so much for wide eyes to explore and linger over – those two double-page spreads are actually one long scroll which I’ll show you at the bottom – and Alvarez does aqueous and gelatinous so very well, with pools of light reflected on the membranes. As your eyes drift slowly from left to right, you will see Sandy drifting too – off to a contented sleep.
In the morning it’s time for school. It’s run by nuns, and the Sister supervising the front gate to take attendance is ever so stern.
“Where’s the rest of that skirt, Miss Garcia? This is a sanctuary for learning, not a disco.
“Miss Lopez, are you trying to blind me with that pink hairband?
“You there! Pull those socks up!
“And I don’t want to see you wandering off at break again, Sandy.”
Break seems like fun, and they’ve grass to play on rather than a hard asphalt school yard. It’s just as well, because one of the young ladies is rugby-tackling another to the ground!
Sandy is diligently sketching some of the wonders from the night before when she’s interrupted by a moon-faced girl with lavender-tinted white hair who asks to look at her drawings. She studies them while Sandy waits, worried that she might disappoint and that this newcomer won’t like what she sees, but…
“Your drawings are really good!
“You’ll be famous one day!”
Her name is Morfie, she says, and it’s her first day. But suddenly a storm sets in and Sandy quickly gathers up her school books and hurries inside.
“Bye, Sandy.”
But how did she know Sandy’s name? And why – when Sandy looks out of the window during lessons – is Morfie sitting perched up a tree, with the rain pouring down all around her, her hair blowing like the loose leaves in the squall?
Rain is another element which Alvarez excels at. I can hear all the little droplets’ individual, pitter-patter impacts and splashes on the grass and the trees, and then on the fresh, green heathers and ferns as Sandy cycles back home.
Alvarez incorporates so many of these feathery fronds into the fantastical pages too. But soon the eyes from the nocturnal sequences start to appear in the woods during daylight. Fungi sprout from the tree trunks and the leaf sprays take on a purple, luminous glow.
Morfie’s expressions, already ambiguous, begin to look greedy, her flattering attentions more overtly manipulative, and her demands on Sandy’s creativity become… vampiric.
More than once Sandy uses her drawing skills to create escape routes, and her clever delaying tactics prove that she does at least occasionally pay attention in class.
You will be unsurprised to learn that this gorgeous graphic novel comes from Nobrow. They and their Flying Eye imprint are responsible for a significant sum of our most luxurious Young Readers picture books including Luke Pearson’s HILDA.
Alvarez has lavished NIGHTLIGHTS with so many double-page spreads festooned with such a variety of cute wide-eyed wonders that perhaps your young ones’ imaginative minds will make up adventures of their own. When Philippa Rice once filled Page 45’s window with a vast diorama of colourful paper figures, I saw a five-year-old boy singling some of them out, and I overhead him tell his grandfather the most elaborate stories about them, conjured up on the spot.
There’s certainly plenty to play with here.
SLH
Buy Nightlights s/c and read the Page 45 review here
The Electric State h/c (£18-99, Simon & Schuster) by Simon Stalenhag…
Given that this isn’t comics, I will let the publisher have the first plug to power things up before I switch on my current punnery. Ah, too late…
“Stranger Things meets On the Road in this hypnotic, lavishly illustrated novel. Set in a post-apocalyptic 1997, The Electric State is the story of Michelle who, accompanied by her toy robot Skip, sets out across the western United States in a stolen car to find her missing brother. Told in achingly melancholy, spare prose and featuring almost a hundred gorgeous, full-colour illustrations, The Electric State is a novel like no other.”
That is a fairly accurate description, I have to say. The artwork is exquisite. Simon Stalenhag has clearly started off with photographs, primarily of urban settings and rural landscapes then managed to manipulate them so they don’t look like manipulated pics at all, but more like painted artwork.
Before adding in the madness of huge robots and various other future tech…
The result is a gloriously bleak dystopian road trip with the prose elements recounted in the first person by Michelle.
You will be hanging on before turning over each page to fully take in the art, but also hanging in there to see if there is to be a happy ending.
At 144 pages, it’s far more substantial than you might expect.
JR
Buy The Electric State h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Hiroshima – The Autobiography Of Barefoot Gen (£18-99, Rowman & Littlefield) by Nakazawa Keiji, Richard H. Minear.
Prose autobiography from the creator of BAREFOOT GEN, invaluable for students in prising apart the fiction from the heavily autobiographical elements in the classic, harrowing manga series.
“This compelling autobiography tells the life story of famed manga artist Nakazawa Keiji. Born in Hiroshima in 1939, Nakazawa was six years old when on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the atomic bomb. His gritty and stunning account of the horrific aftermath is powerfully told through the eyes of a child who lost most of his family and neighbours.
The narrative continues through the brutally difficult years immediately after the war, his art apprenticeship in Tokyo, his pioneering “atomic-bomb” manga, and the creation of Barefoot Gen, the classic graphic novel based on his own experiences before, during, and after the bomb. Despite the grimness of his early life, Nakazawa never succumbs to pessimism or defeatism. His trademark optimism and activism shine through in this inspirational work.”
SLH
Buy Hiroshima – The Autobiography Of Barefoot Gen and read the Page 45 review here
Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!
New reviews to follow, but if they’re new formats of previous books, reviews may already be up; others will retain their Diamond previews information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’
BPRD Vampire s/c (£17-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba
Glint vol 1: The Cloud Raiders (£11-99, Caracal) by Samuel Sattin & Ian McGinty
Cold Spots s/c (£14-99, Image) by Cullen Bunn & Mark Torres
Guantanamo Kid – The True Story Of Mohammed El-Gharani (£14-99, SelfMadeHero) by Jerome Tubiana & Alexandre Franc
Hobo Mom h/c (£12-99, Fantagraphics) by Charles Forsman & Max de Radigues
I Am A Hero Omnibus vol 9 (£17-99, Dark Horse) by Kengo Hanazawa
Jonesy – Nine Lives On The Nostromo h/c (£9-99, Titan Books) by Rory Lucey
Little Bear’s Spring (£6-99, Macmillan) by Elli Woolard & Briony May Smith
Nightlights s/c (£8-99, Nobrow) by Lorena Alvarez
Space Boy vol 3 s/c (£9-99, Dark Horse) by Stephen McCranie
The Weatherman vol 1 s/c (£15-99, Image) by Jody LeHeup & Nathan Fox
Green Lantern By Geoff Johns Book 1 s/c (£22-99, DC) by Geoff Johns, Dave Gibbons & Ethan Van Sciver, Patrick Gleason, Carlos Pacheo, Darwyn Cooke
Shazam s/c (Movie Cover Edition) (£11-99, DC) by Geoff Johns & Gary Frank
Superman: The Unity Saga vol 1: Phantom Earth h/c (£22-99, DC) by Brian Michael Bendis & Ivan Reis, various
Amazing Spider-Man vol 2: Friends And Foes s/c (UK Edition) (£11-99, Marvel) by Nick Spencer & Humberto Ramos, Michele Bandini
Spider-Geddon: Covert Ops s/c (£15-99, Marvel) by Priest, Jody Houser & Paulo Siqueira, Andres Genolet, others
Aposimz vol 2 (£10-99, Vertical) by Tsutomu Nihei
Barefoot Gen vol 7 (£14-99, Last Gasp) by Keiji Nakazawa
Black Torch vol 3 (£6-99, Viz) by Tsuyoshi Takaki
Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction vol 4 (£9-99, Viz) by Inio Asano
My Hero Academia vol 17 (£6-99, Viz) by Kohei Horikoshi
One Piece vol 89 (£6-99, Viz) by Eiichiro Oda
That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime vol 2 (£10-99, Kodansha) by Fuse, Taiki Kawakami
Tokyo Ghoul re: vol 9 (£8-99, Viz) by Sui Ishida