Every week, Comics! The Blog goes through the list of new releases and we tell you which comics to plug into your mindhole. Your mileage may vary.

JUDGE DREDD: TRIFECTA (Rebellion)

The comic I’m most excited to get my hands on this week is quite a bit different than what we normally showcase here on the blog. This week, the Judge Dredd: Trifecta collection comes out, bringing last year’s surprise hit storyline into shops across the world. What makes this book unique amoung most comics and Dredd stories in general, is the format. In the post Chaos Bug era of Mega City one, 2000AD and some of their finest writers and artists put together a bit of a surprise crossover. The story began in the weekly anthology’s Judge Dredd strip, where Al Ewing and Henry Flint (the amazing creative team behind Zombo) began a tale that bled through to a couple of other serials running during the same period of time, without prior announcement from the publisher. The result was (reportedly) something to behold, and behold I will when I get my hands on a copy of this tomorrow. Coming quite late to Dredd, and 2000AD in general, I missed out on this story as it was coming out (I jumped on around December of last year), so I can’t wait to finally experience this book. I’ll be interested to see just how they collect this book, if they’ll run the serials in their order of appearance, or run through the stories one after another in larger chunks before hitting the big finalé piece right at the end. Regardless, this will be an experience.

SEX CRIMINALS #1 (Image Comics)

Finally, finally, finally, Sex Criminals will be on the stands this week, ready for your supple fingers, your gentle touch, and hopefully, your $3.50. It’s a simple story about a girl whose orgasms can stop time, who meets a boy whose orgasms can do the same. Naturally, when they find each other, they decide to start committing crimes, because… why not? It’s a book that I’ve been pitching successfully at the store for quite a few months, and the elevator pitch always gets people interested… but of course, my shop and my methods are singular, so there’s no telling how many copies will be out in the wild. If the pitch makes you interested in the book, call your shop and let them know. For your efforts, you’ll be rewarded with a fine comic rocket fuelled by the combine perversions and peccadilloes of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky. This in and of itself is a noble endeavour, probably. And hey, wouldn’t it be nice to have more books out there that place sex above violence in terms of sensation? One that treats the content like adults, so to speak? I think so. Go forth and purchase.

RAT QUEENS #1 (Image Comics)

Kurtis Wiebe of Peter Panzerfaust fame has a new series on the stands this week from Image’s Shadowline! Rat Queens is a decidedly “Buffy” take on a D&D type fantasy world, where the titular characters take on atypical male fantasy roles and turn the genre on its head a little. I’m not one for most fantasy, partly because I hate reading books where character Make Everything Sound Dire And Important and use words flowery words that I don’t quite understand (not to mention the general pretension of a certain set of fans who will loudly roll their eyes if you get mixed up between characteristics of an elf and something else that isn’t an elf…), but this seems like it will be a fun read that will end up taking the air out of a lot of the tropes I don’t quite enjoy. Wiebe’s work is always quite strong, so this book should be one you look out for this week.

SIN TITULO (Dark Horse)

Cameron Stewart’s weird mystery web comic finally comes to print from Dark Horse. This series won the Eisner for best web comic when it was still coming out, and I’m pretty glad there’s a collection coming out - while I love reading web comics, I like the sensation of holding the ones that I adore more than reading them on a screen - especially when the strip in question features a finite storyline like this. A great book that will probably be a little under the radar at first - and knowing Dark Horse and their track record for keeping hardcovers in print, if you want this, you might want to grab it quick before the long wait for a second print run.

WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN #36

And finally this week: the fifth part of the big Battle of the Atom storyline is here! The halfway point looks to be like it will feature something big, as Marvel quite deliberately skipped placing this on their retailer previews page for pre-reading. In practice, this means they don’t want certain plot points to get out. I suspect if it’s something crazy, you’ll be hearing about it when the clock strikes midnight in New York (which is when big comic book stories usually first hit media sites), so be careful if you’re trying to avoid spoilers.