This Week's Picks: Absolute Batman Closes a War, Todd McFarlane Goes Back to 1977, Plus Bad Seeds Hits the Precinct

This is a week built on paid-off trust. Two of DC's steadiest partnerships are working at full speed because nobody's asking them to prove anything anymore — Snyder and Dragotta closing an arc of their stripped-down Batman, Waid and Samnee two issues into a twelve-parter that already reads like a hit. Tom King and Gabriel Hernández Walta reunite with the exact team that made Vision devastating, aimed now at a sitcom set instead of a robot family. And Todd McFarlane goes all the way back to a sixteen-year-old's sketchbook, fifty years later, to see what's actually in it. Even the week's event tie-in finds its best angle by going smaller, dropping down to the precinct floor while the capes fight upstairs.

Absolute Batman Vol. 3: Devil's Workshop

Writer: Scott Snyder   Artist: Nick Dragotta (with Daniel Warren Johnson, James Harren, Meredith McClaren, Eric Canete, Jock & Josh Hixson)   Letterer: Clayton Cowles   Publisher: DC Comics

Snyder and Dragotta's stripped-down, class-conscious Batman has spent two volumes rebuilding the Dark Knight from the ground up — a Bruce Wayne who never inherited a fortune, working a case with his hands instead of a satellite uplink — and Devil's Workshop is where that redesign gets tested against real pressure. Fresh off toppling Bane, Batman turns to patching up the fallout: an Arkham special that finally explains how the asylum got its shape, a Court of Owls incursion, and a Joker who reads differently when he isn't just a rich man's shadow. The rotating guest artists aren't a scheduling patch so much as a formal experiment Dragotta invited in, each chapter's line work shifting to match its register — grotesque, painterly, precise — without losing the book's central premise that a Batman without money has to actually solve problems instead of buying his way past them. This is the version of the character DC has let get the strangest in years, and volume three is where that strangeness starts paying off.

Batman & Robin Year One: Dynamic Duos #2

Writer: Mark Waid   Artist: Chris Samnee   Colorist: Mat Lopes   Publisher: DC Comics

Waid and Samnee built their reputations wringing maximum clarity out of minimum line work — Daredevil, Black Widow, the original Batman & Robin: Year One — and Dynamic Duos keeps proving a comic can move fast and still let a page breathe. Issue #2 pushes past its street-gang setup into something colder: a cult offering human sacrifices to Barbatos, and Robin working his way into a network of orphaned kids that Gotham's system has already given up on. Samnee draws the city's underclass with the same unfussy precision he gives Batman's rooftop choreography, which is the point — nobody in this book gets treated as scenery. Lopes keeps the color work warm even through the cult scenes, refusing the easy gothic-purple palette and letting the horror land as something closer to grief than spectacle. Twelve issues is a long runway for a done-in-one team like this, but two issues in, the pacing already reads like a story that knows exactly where it's going.

Batman: Bad Seeds – Gotham Central #1

Writer: Christopher Cantwell   Artist: Jacob Phillips   Publisher: DC Comics

Cantwell has made a career out of writing institutions under strain — Iron Man's corporate rot, the imperial bureaucracy of his Star Wars work — and Gotham Central hands him the best version of that premise DC has: cops who don't get capes, working a city where Vandal Savage has just redirected every department's attention toward fighting the Bat-Family. Gordon and Espinoza are left holding a caseload that would break a functional precinct on a good day — a stalker circling Arkham's Dr. Zeller, subways in chaos, Anarky pulling a heist — while the actual superhero apparatus looks the other way. Phillips, whose watercolor-adjacent line work on Where the Body Was and That Texas Blood already proved he can make crime feel lived-in rather than staged, draws Gotham's precinct floor like a place people clock into, not a movie set. Bad Seeds has mostly been a Batman-family showcase so far; this is the issue arguing the real story was always happening one level down.

Challenges of Doom: Spider-Man #1

Writer: Al Ewing   Artist: David Messina   Cover: Fabrizio De Tommaso   Publisher: Marvel Comics

Ewing has spent a decade making Doctor Doom feel less like a punchline villain and more like a coherent worldview, and this one-shot's job is smaller and sharper than his usual canvas: put that Doom in a room with Peter Parker before either of them became who they are. The pitch is almost embarrassingly simple, a teenage Spider-Man in Queens getting a recruitment offer from the world's smartest tyrant, but Ewing's Doom has never needed elaborate schemes to be frightening — just an inability to process rejection as anything other than an engineering problem. Messina draws the age gap between them as a genuine power imbalance rather than an underdog gag, framing Doom as an adult intruding on a kid's afternoon. Untold-tales one-shots live or die on whether they earn their own existence instead of coasting on nostalgia; this one earns it by being about something instead of just happening.

Spawn '77 #1

Writers: Todd McFarlane & Mark Spears   Artist: Mark Spears   Publisher: Image Comics

McFarlane has told the story of Spawn's creation so many times it's practically canon in itself, but Spawn '77 goes further back than the pitch meetings — all the way to a sixteen-year-old kid's original character concept from half a century ago, never published until now. Spears, who's spent recent years proving on his own Mark Spears Monsters that he can carry a fully painted horror-adjacent book solo, takes on that job here too, and the fully painted interiors give the miniseries a texture closer to an illustrated pulp paperback than a modern superhero comic. There's a real risk in a project like this leaning entirely on nostalgia for its own sake, but the collaboration reframes it as something closer to archaeology: McFarlane handing over a fifty-year-old idea and letting a different artist's hand decide what it actually looks like. For a franchise that's mostly told one story for three decades, going back to the very first draft is the strangest and most honest thing McFarlane has done with it in years.

Six of Us #1

Writer: Tom King   Artist: Gabriel Hernández Walta   Colorist: Jordie Bellaire   Letterer: Clayton Cowles   Publisher: Dark Horse

King and Walta's Vision remains one of the sharpest domestic tragedies superhero comics has produced, and Six of Us reunites that team — Walta, Bellaire, and Cowles all returning — for a story that swaps robots for actors, which turns out to be a smaller leap than it sounds. A beloved sitcom ensemble loses one of its own to a death nobody can quite explain, and the show's ratings spike as the surviving cast start turning on each other in ways that blur which grief is real and which is being performed for cameras. King's interest has always been in people who can't stop narrating their own lives, and a hit-show cast is the most literal version of that premise he's found yet. Walta's faces do the heaviest lifting, holding a professional smile and a private collapse in the same panel without tipping into cartoon. Seven issues is enough room for King to let the mystery breathe instead of rushing the reveal, and issue one is patient enough to suggest he will.

The Forever Home #1

Writer: Christian Ward   Artist: Sami Kivelä   Publisher: Oni Press

Ward's solo work (ODY-C, Invisible Kingdom) tends toward the cosmic and psychedelic, so pairing him with Kivelä — an artist whose Big Girls and Coffin Bound work runs cold, controlled, and grounded — is the kind of mismatch that shouldn't work and does. The premise is pure high-concept dread: a billionaire's bunker where twenty minutes pass for every year outside, built to let one family wait out an apocalypse in comfort while the rest of the world ages and dies without them. A child's accident cracks that seal, and something outside starts paying attention. Kivelä's line work keeps the bunker's interior sterile and over-designed, the kind of wealth that mistakes control for safety, which makes the first sign of intrusion land as a genuine violation instead of a jump scare. Ward and Kivelä are asking a blunt question underneath the sci-fi chassis — what a family owes the world it insulated itself from — and issue one is confident enough to let that question sit unanswered.

This Week's Full Release List

Everything else shipping to shelves this Wednesday, condensed:

Other Comics Worth a Look

• Action Comics #1102
• Barbara Gordon: Breakout #5
• Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #3
• Emperor Aquaman #21
• The Fury of Firestorm #6
• Green Lantern Corps #20
• Supergirl #17
• Black Cat #14
• Doctor Strange #10
• Doomquest #4
• Inglorious X-Force #9
• Iron Man #9
• Punisher #8
• Wolverine #27
• Odin #4
• Transformers #36
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #332
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Wings of Fate #3
• Young Hellboy: Thrilling Sky Adventures #3
• Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures – Pathfinders #5
• Fire and Ice: Darkwolf #3
• Sonic the Hedgehog #89
• Sonic the Hedgehog x Godzilla #2
• TMNT: Journeys #13
• Tarzan Beyond #3
• Zorro #3
• 2000 AD #2499

New #1s and One-Shots

• Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett #1
• Marvel Mangaverse: Iron Knight #1
• The Karman Blade #1
• ThunderCats: Cheetara #1
• Fixation #1
• Star Trek: 60th Anniversary Special #1
• Star Trek: Deviations – Evermore #1
• Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coastal Chaos #1
• Vampire Survivors #1
• Keres: Blood & Shadow #1
• Run From The Sun #1
• Tank Girl: Blue Helmet Summer Special #1

Graphic Novels & Trade Collections

• Marvel: Black, White & Blood and Guts
• The End 2099
• Ultimates Epic Collection Vol. 8: Gods and Monsters (Gatefold)
• Spy x Family Vol. 16
• Kaiju No. 8 Vol. 16
• Sakamoto Days Vol. 23
• RuriDragon Vol. 4
• One-Punch Man Vol. 34
• The Amazing Digital Circus Vol. 1

Whether you start with a fifty-year-old Spawn sketch finally seeing print, a Batman built without a fortune, or a bunker where twenty minutes outside costs a year in, this is a week that rewards showing up. Come find us.

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