After the devastating climax of the last volume, we get a series of chapters each focusing on a different member of the pantheon in the aftermath. Not that most of them even notice what happened to Laura, but there's plenty for them to concern themselves with as Baal goes on the rampage after Baphomet for murdering Inanna. Each chapter has a different artist and a different style and they are all gorgeous and various degrees of devastating to read, meaning you'd very nearly miss what a stunning piece of storytelling is occurring in the Woden chapter, created almost entirely using art from previous McKelvie issues and one little, er, insert from Sex Criminals.

WicDiv continues to be the most zeitgeisty of comics, tpping into a pure pop stream of celebrity, love, death, violence, power fantasies, the ecstasies of youth, the longing for something more and the various dysfunction of all sorts of families.

The dead are coming back! But are they flesh eating zombies or ghosts or good souls given eternal life? When the dearly departed suddenly arise in and around a small town in rural Wisconsis they mostly they seem ordinary and confused, with a few notable exception such as they guy who was in the process of being cremated when the miracle occurred. In deepest winter, quarantined, the subject of global scrutiny and the walking dead in their midst, it all seems too much for anyone to handle. Officer Dana Cypress is put in charge of crimes related to the Revived, but her first callout leads to a horrifying and violent incident that, amongst other things, leads to a devastating discovery about her own sister.

With glowing figures haunting the woods, a would-be exorcist hunting the devil, a deranged old granny on the loose and the CDC contemplating internment for the Revived, fear is on the increase and secrets are bubbling under and over.

A brilliant mix of supernatural horror and rural crime drama packed with mystery and chills and sudden scenes of gruesome carnage, this is a strong start to en exciting series. The dead coming back is nothing new in fiction, but Seeley and Norton manage to make this both startling and original.

Stranger Things made a bigger cultural splash, though this began to come out at roughly the same time. Set in 1988 with a young cast and bizarre goings-on, the comparison seems natural enough. Erin starts her first morning delivering papers in her quiet suburban community, and hooks up with three other paper-girls. Before long things start to get seriously weird, with strange figures stealing their walkie-talkies, lights in the sky, something really strange in a basement, and then, and then... things get wilder and weirder until things are completely bat-lizard boo-yaa gosh wow what the hell was that? No slow build-up King pastiche, this is zero to holy moses in two issues flat.

Writing by Vaughan is clever and sharp, the usual strong characterisations and cliffhangers and plot-twists and reversals. The art by Cliff Chiang is drop-dead gorgeous, lovely colouring too. A great cast of characters helps, as does never knowing what the heck is going to happen next.

Alien fire writing in the sky, murderous recipes, space stations exploding, millennial doomsday anti-chicken cults and magic bullets made from meteorites - events are in train in the world of Chew as some sort of possibly chicken-associated apocalypse appears to be approaching. Tony Chu, FDA cibopath, and his cyborg partner and homicidal boss and adorable sister and assorted allies and enemies move through a strange, surreal world of food crime and food powers trying to put all the pieces together before it's too late. Also, there is POYO.

I'll read anything if I think it's a good and avoid anything is bad like the plague, and since I like to like what I'm reading I'll usually try to find something positive about whatever I read, which is part of the reason why I give every damn thing five stars and say nice things about most things. I got over my snobbishness about superhero comics a while ago, but no way in hell will I follow a character or team just because, it's always about who's writing and drawing. Maybe it's projection but I sometimes think that this is an attitude some part of the superhero world is beginning to share, hence this, the famous Fraction/Aja run on Hawkeye - or Hawkguy as they started calling it.

With an exquisitely composed iconic opening action shot of Hawkeye falling backwards towards a distant street, firing an arrow towards the reader, framed in splinters of broken glass, Fraction and Aja seem to be setting out their stall with a typical, if beautiful, superhero action spectacular. Then he lands and spends six months in hospital and when he gets out pettishly kicks a wheelchair into traffic. There we go.

There are superhero shenanigans, but the heart of this story is the apartment block where he lves and the other inhabitants and the tracksuited Russian heavies who own the building and make life hard for everyone. There's also the dog, and Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye. Clint Barton here is a good-hearted-slob and slacker, bit of a screw-up, but an Avenger with no superpowers so also kind of amazing, in a low-key embarrassed-to-be-amazing way. Hawkeye doesn't so much explore this dichotomy as gleefully mess around with it.

The Aja issues are a kind of giddy perfection comic readers dream about, a post-millennial update of the noir stylings of Mazzuchelli on Born Again and Year One. Javier Pulido is no slouch either, and the Bagley issue ends up being kind of sweet and somehow gets past a whole load of superhero shenanigans to make it work. A classic.

After wounding Darkseid with a bullet fired through time Bruce Wayne is struck down by a bolt of omega energy and thrown into the deep past where he must fight his way though amnesia and follow clues he left for himself, jumping from era to era, chased by something big and nasty with teeth and tentacle, first as a cave-man, then as a witchfinder, then as a pirate, then as a cowboy and so on until he gets to a station hanging over the heat death of the universe, while his superhero friends search for him to stop him because he's so soaked in omega energy when he returns to his his own time he'll destroy the whole world AND I MEAN COME ON.

Return Of Bruve Wayne is the culmination of a few years' worth of build-up and it's got the usual Morrisonian high mind-mending-concept-to-page rate and also Bruce Wayne as a cave-man, a prate, a cowboy, etcetera. Really, it's got everything, and it still feels fresh and mad and fun.

A young journalist on the poverty line, struggling to write her second book after a previous bestseller, researches he events surrounding a flight whose passengers were struck down with amnesia. She follows the trail to a small village in Mexico and then on to China, accompanied by a CIA agent and chased by a pair of killers who cannot be killed, hunting for a man called Henry Lyme, who has a terrible story to tell.

A distillation of military-industrial psychic paranoia, where The men Who Stare At Goats were actually able to manipulate the goats psychically and drafted into a secret agency and trained and sent on missions and used for propaganda and psy-ops, Mind Mgmt is a brilliant, chilling, labyrinthine thriller of a secret world of psychic warfare and catastrophe. With an introduction by Damon Lindelof, it's east to see the attraction for someone with an eye to adapting it for the small screen, packed as it is with mind-bending ideas, sinister characters, weird mysteries and puzzles, and a twisting plot that jumps around in time and space. Gorgeous hardback edition from Dark Horse, too.

This is good, clean, light entertaining fun, extremely well done with lot of big space-ships and blasters and lighstabers and aliens and droids and room for all the characters to have their moments. Leia and Han are stranded on a moon with the Empire on one side and Han's wife on the other. Luke heads off to a smuggler's den to find a way to a lost Jedi temple and gets captured by a Jedi-obsessed Hutt - Chewbacca and C3P0 set off in rescue. Great art, bright colours, bold storytelling: unashamed pulp silliness.

Star Wars and Vader cross over, the band of happy-go-lucky freewheeling adventuring pals clash with the unstoppable monstrosity and his cunning sidekick and her murder machines. Vader blunders into a few squadrons of rebel fighters, including Luke, resulting with Vader and Luke crash landed on a planet with Vader hunting Luke and the entire rebel army hunting Vader. Narratively, the story is obliged to avoid a proper full-on confrontation, since none of the main characters can die and it's way too early in the trilogy for a proper showdown, so a lot of the story is devoted to an entertaining series of tussles between Han and Co versus Dr Aphra and Co while Vader slaughters the rebel army, then a supporting villain from the Vader title shows up to keep the chaos gong. It is acknowledged that the Leia's the one with real grudge against Vader, between the destruction of Alderaan and her tactical role as a Rebel leader, while Vader's just shrugging it all off to get at Luke.

Wow. The Star Wars universe is embedded in my consciousness more deeply than I supposed to find myself so pleased at a well-executed comic. More fun than the films, to be honest.

All street-level all the time this time, right down on the street in the case of an extraordinary issue from the POV of Lucky the dog. Clint has bought the building and now has to cope with being a landlord but the Russian bros are not happy. Incredible David Aja art and sophisticated hipster-noir writing from Fraction. Only thing, everyone lives Kate, heck I love Kate, but isn't she kinda needlessly dickish to the hotel guy in the first story?