Tony Stark and Captain America decide they need to reorganise the Avengers to face threats and dangers that seem to be geeing bigger and badder. Sure enough along come a big bad threat, three aliens on Mars who want to either remake the earth or destroy it based on some ancient fascist eugenics alien programming, the sort of sci fi Big Idea Hickman is bringing to bear in his run but which seems divorced from anything, I dunno, relatable? Can you get away with an alien race sending out automated drones to wipe out life on every planet until they finds one that can be perfected? I mean, as a project it sounds inhuman, which is presumably the point, but I dunno, aliens are people too, surely?

Anyway untold billions of deaths across the Galaxy and then they reach Earth and because Earth is a setting in a Marvel comic they get stopped, but not before killing millions of people in a few panels. I'm saying the casual incessantly huge body count bothers me in an otherwise crisply executed comic that manages a large cast and lots of ideas and epic sweep really well. Dunno why, I grew up reading 2000AD, they'd cheerfully off millions every few pages. maybe if I reread them now they'd bother me, too. Anyway, I expect there'll be a lot more of this in volumes to come, let's see how long I can stick it.

A grueling, heartbreaking, horrifying read, though not without hope or moments of relief. The story of the lives of three women in 20th century China. The first is daughter to a warlord and made into a concubine. In an astonishing act, this woman who has been oppressed, repressed, isolated, miseducated and who had her feet bound in a brutal and ugly tradition, flees with her daughter and this pretty much sets the tone of the human spirit surviving through appalling adversity. Through the fall of Kuomintang and the rise of Communism, the family survives and even thrives. The daughter becomes a Communist official and marries another, but the insane reign of Mao Tse Tung that will cost millions their lives through arrant, horrifying stupidity and evil is just beginning. as a portrait of a family in the time of Mao Wild Swans is riveting, if at times difficult reading. A whole nation dragged back to ignorance and fear by one man's monstrous ego - all too common in the history of the 20th century, but rarely in such an effective fashion, where there was no secret police -the people were made to police themselves. Utterly chilling, but brilliantly written. It's the sheer epic scale of the waste that makes the blood boil, though.

Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye, gets tired of the emotional brick wall and ongoing meltdown that is Clint Barton, the other other Hawkeye, and heads out to LA to be a superhero PI. Madame Masque is out for revenge, her credit line is cut off, forcing her to resort to cat-sitting, and her fist case is to find some missing orchids. It's Philip Marlowe in purple, a conceit confirmed by her receiving mentoring advice from a tired guy in a raincoat in the cat-food aisle of the local supermarket. There's a lot of sun-soaked dirging and depression and nothing quite working out, in keeping with the general tone, Kate Bishop, millenarian rich-girl with a heart of gold kicks against the constraints and conventions of being a tarnished gumshoe knight of the mean streets, which includes getting beat up a lot and getting framed for murder and having it all taken out of your hands by remote authorities in a most unsatisfactory manner which seems to preclude real justice, and it's adorable.

The military decide to test an experiment to destruction, not incidentally murdering the person running the experiment, and in the resulting explosion debris rains down on Julie Martin out by herself in the middle of nowhere. The debris turn into a weird metal breastplate, causing understandable upset and trauma for Julie, but she can't get anyone to believe that it's not some kind of trick, and the military are hunting her.

So, it's an irresponsible military experiment gone awry and bonded with an innocent bystander so we 'd better hunt her down before she finds out what it's capable of story, but Terry Moore is a fantastic artist and storyteller, so it goes down easy, and his proven skill with interpersonal relationships and great characters is what you come to a Terry Moore comic for as much as for the on-the-run-from-the-military-industrial-complex. Good stuff.

Prophet was one of those muscley-characters-with-big-guns from the Image founders back in the day that I never had much time for, but here he's resurrected and reimagined in a far-distant future that is utterly unrecognisable. A John Prophet awakens from a cryopod and traverses the planet altered by time and conflict and aliens on a mission to restart the Earth Empire. Across the galaxy more John Prophets awaken in strange and exotic locations and embark on esoteric missions of their own as the Earth Empire lumbers back to life. This is dense with detail and incident, rich and lush with worldbuilding, completely alien settings full of wonders and horrors, and seems to be ramping up to be a massive, epic space opera in the tradition of Jodorowsky or Moebius. Who would've thought? A brave, bold move and a fantastic piece of work.

An imaginary comic about an imaginary computer, with a pair of heroes granted imaginary lives by the simple application of a pocket alternative universe thing. This plays giddy games with history and technology, science and biography, philosophy and literature and it has footnotes, so so many footnotes, a veritable footnote bubble ready to collapse into a terrifying footnote crisis that will lead to scholars who invested too heavily on footnote futures leaping off asterisks and bruising their ibids. Fortunately, the footnotes are witty, wise and full of amusing and fascinating historical trivia while the comics themselves are a warmhearted delight of unabashed silly cleverness. Long live Lovelace and Babbage!

So Tony's sister Toni is dead, murdered by a cibopath styling himself as a vampire, but Toni left a toe for Tony to gnaw so she could chat with him from the past. This they now do.. Also: prison escapes, a recipe for blended chogs and a psychedelic assault on a pillow factory. Chew rocks so hard.

After a brutal attack leaves their father murdered, the wounded and traumatised Locke family move to an old family house in Lovecraft, New England. Situated on an island, it's a weird old house where their father and his brother played elaborate game with keys and doors. Except it turns out they weren't actually games, as Bode discovers when a key and a door turn him into a ghost. Bode also discovers someone living in the wellhouse, but can't persuade his brother or sister ton listen to him. Then their father's surviving killer escapes and heads out on a long journey to Lovecraft, and he's looking for keys.

Rodriguez's art is stunning, but Hill's scripting is precise, well-observed and merciless. A brilliantly tense and suspenseful horror comic.

Akira opens with Tokyo E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G. Years later, and it's now Neo-Tokyo, and it's about to E*X*P*L*O*D*E. A biker gang full of lively young assholes racing on the motorway yelling each other's names through the heart of destruction run into a strange, tiny, shrunken old man who makes a motorbike esplode. Sorry, E*S*P*L*O*D*E. That's pretty much the start of things E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G all over the place, including the friendship between young biker assholes Kaneda and Tetsuo, with the latter suddenly finding amazing psychic powers triggered inside himself that lets him E*X*P*L*O*D*E things like windows and doors and people. Friendship turns to murderous rivalry and all-out warfare with stuff E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G all over the place, but it's still pretty small-scale, relatively. There's also a secret military project and an underground resistance and the mysterious A-KI-RA who seems to make everyone's pants E*X*P*L*O*D*E with terror.

It's utterly astonishing. The scale, they style, the energy, the scope, the E*X*P*L*O*D*I*N*G, are like absolutely nothing else. E*X*P*L*E*X*E*L*L*E*N*T.

Timothy Hunter is going to be a great magician. We're not. To prepare him for a life of magic, four guides show him the worlds of magic, or at least those pertaining to the DC universe. We get to go along. Four enigmatic strangers, four strange journeys, four fantastic artists, Neil Gaiman, and us.