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.

BLACK SCIENCE #3 (Image)

Rick Remender, Matteo Scalera and Dean White have done something special with Black Science: they’ve created a series where a dickbag anarchist scientist goes through dimensions just being a stone cold prick and I am eagerly awaiting the next issue instead of swearing it off forever. Seriously: Grant McKay probably wears a Christopher Hitchens t-shirt under his spacesuit. I dislike him so much… but I want him to survive. He’s one up on Archie Andrews in my mind in that way.

Black Science succeeds with such a difficult-to-like protagonist in a few ways. In the most immediate way, it’s because Remender, Scalera and White make it clear that there are far worse things than Grant out there, and far more imperative stakes. Scalera and White‘s art is dark, vivid and lush, with a brooding sense of menace that runs through every issue. White‘s background colours are these mesmerizing painted holes of danger, and in front of them are these really impactful, aggressive characters and monsters by him and Scalera. We’re on McKay’s side almost by default; no matter his brusqueness or his sneers, he’s not the worst motherfucker on the page. Instead, he’s this small creature constantly one turn of the page away from doom, and the way the second issue kept dragging that out underscores his abrasiveness with a palpable vulnerability. When a dude gets stabbed a third of the way through an issue and spends the rest of it bleeding out, it’s easy to let softer feelings creep in.

Another big way Black Science succeeds in making its “hero” relatable is by grounding the whole series in guilt and grief. In his narrations, Grant is much more contrite than in his verbal actions, and the dissonance between the two furthers the sense of dread that the art creates. It teaches the reader to expect the worse, something that will probably be a very good lesson in the coming issues. Black Science is, at least in part, about the folly of hubris, and that makes it mesmerizing.

LI’L SONJA #1 (Dynamite)

This marks the third Red Sonja book that I am now buying and nobody is more surprised by that than I am. Gail Simone, through the main series and the Legends of… companion she initiated, has almost single-handedly created an uprising of support and appreciation of a character who too often is thought of as just cheesecake for men. The apotheosis of that transformation might be Li’l Sonja #1, from Jim Zib and Joel Carroll.

After all, “all-ages series starring a kid version of a hero” is probably the polar opposite of what the character often is, and this is a great opportunity to strike while the iron’s hot and bring a fascinating character to a wider audience. Carroll‘s art is friendly and expressive, with a great economy of line. Zub is great with character beats and humour, which he’s showcasing on Samurai Jack these days, too. Together, it seems like a perfect combination to bring Sonja to an upper stratus of character in which she belongs.

SERENITY: LEAVES ON THE WIND #1 (Dark Horse)

Cards on the table: one of the reasons this column took so long is because I wasn’t sure how badly I should antagonize Browncoats/Firefly fans still begging for the series to come back, because that’s been a minor hobby of mine for the better part of a decade now. But then I remembered, “Hey, I like Firefly/Serenity. These people like Firefly/Serenity. Let’s all like stuff together,” and I recaptured that feeling of how jazzed I am to pick up where the end of the movie Serenity left off the heroes.

Series creator Joss Whedon‘s brother, Zack, steps in as writer in the series’ comic world for, I believe the fourth time, and over the years he’s developed an increasingly satisfying voice in the sandbox. Similarly, penciller Georges Jeanty has spent years drawing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, and over that period he’s shown a deft hand at capturing beloved characters’ likenesses without getting swamped in photorealism and while maintaining and evolving his own aesthetic. Together, the two should be a satisfying team for the book.

Let’s enjoy this together.

THEREMIN #4 (Monkeybrain; digital - buy it here)

Theremin was an interesting book right out of the gate. Curt Pires and Dalton Rose presented an interesting premise: Leon Theremin creates his namesake instrument, but it’s so much more than that: it’s a time/dimension-traveling machine. By presenting familiar concepts (the instrument and its creator) and then blowing it up into crazy science fiction espionage, the book’s creative team was subverting every kind of constraint and establishing this as a book that could be about almost anything. Over the next three issues, they took it to weird places, with a narrative structure that defies a simple “and then Leon went and killed ____” format. Structurally, the book has always played with time and perception, taking an ambitious, challenging tactic.

Theremin #4 changes all of that again by taking those cosmically-defined rules and changing their definitions. As the issue starts, you gradually realize it’s not an issue about Leon; it’s an issue about Curt Pires, about the creative process and the struggle to make something worthwhile or connect. It’s nakedly personal. It’s sometimes uncomfortable. It’s also quite brilliant. The reader gets to experience the book from a creator’s point of view, but a lot of the struggles are the same as Leon’s: the search for love and for satisfaction; trying to escape the numbing frustration of not knowing how to get to what’s next; salvaging meaning from work that may have gone from new-frontier-excitement to something far more menial and disappointing. And all along the way is Rose, bringing that same otherworldiness to the “real-world” story as he does to the cosmic cliffhanger or the other three issues. It binds fiction, metafiction and reality together in a necessary way, complete with bright, neon colours that feel straight out of Kirby.

The issue reminds me a lot of Casanova: Avaritia, where Matt Fraction put so much of himself onto the page in characters like Cass and Luther that sometimes it hurt to keep reading. It hurts to read Theremin #4, but in a good way. I feel like I know Curt Pires better and, through him, the stories he’s been carving from his mind. This is a special kind of issue: one that makes everything about the entire series slightly more special and more vivid.

UNCANNY X-FORCE #17 (Marvel)

You know, I had actually completely forgotten that there are two X-Force series currently being published by Marvel until the “Vendetta” storyline. This isn’t to say that I didn’t forget either one of them; there was just this odd mental block where I didn’t remember that there were two teams with the same name and that they had prominent members from the 1990s who flat-out hate each other, and that eventually this was probably going to come to a head. Spoiler alert: things come to a head in this, the final issue of “Vendetta!”

Dennis Hopeless and Sam Humphries have done a great job building this crossover as this big, inevitable thing that had to happen, but that also has some good team-based character beats in it. And it just keeps getting bigger, as this issue actually brings two big, climactic fights to bear: Cable vs. Stryfe, his evil clone (YES!) and Cable’s adopted daughter, Hope, trying to get revenge on Bishop, the former X-Man who spent decades hunting her through thousands of years and more than one apocalypse (the capital-A Apocalypse is more about Stryfe). And then you bring artists like Dexter Soy and Harvey Tolibau into the mix for these weird, emotional fights, and the story comes together in a nice way. It’s going to be sad to see Humphries go from X-Force, but if he’s going to go out riding the wave of this insanity to help define these characters for years to come… I’m alright with that.

These are some of the many great books being released this week! You can find the full list of comics being released here. If you have any other recommendations, let us know in the comments below.