This Week's Picks: Absolute Cassandra Cain's Killer Origin, Plus DNX Goes to War

This week's best books keep circling the same uncomfortable question: what does it cost to become someone who kills, whether that's a calling, a job, or a war you didn't start? Che Grayson answers it twice, from opposite directions, in two different DC and Image books out today. Pornsak Pichetshote and Tom Taylor answer it with body counts big enough to reshape Gotham. And over at Marvel, Jed MacKay asks what happens when an entire mutant lineage can't agree on whether the future is even worth killing for. It's a grim, exacting stretch of comics — and one of the most thematically coherent weeks we've stocked in a while.

Absolute Cassandra Cain: The Shadow's Hand #1

Che Grayson is already elbow-deep in DC's Absolute Universe as co-writer of Absolute Catwoman, and she doubles down here with the line's bleakest origin story yet. Years before the story starts, the Joker apprenticed himself to the League of Assassins, learned everything they had to teach, and then murdered every one of his teachers. Lady Shiva and her infant daughter are what's left standing in the wreckage — and Cassandra Cain grows up in a world where killing was never a skill her mother chose to pass on, it was just the ground floor. Grayson treats the premise less like an action pitch and more like a study of what a childhood spent around that kind of violence actually does to a person, which tracks with the psychological unease she's already brought to Absolute Catwoman. Matías Bergara, whose linework carried the eerie small-town dread of Coda, gives Cassandra's world a cold, controlled precision, and colorist Mike Spicer keeps the palette bruised rather than glossy. The book's other hook — a collision course with Selina Kyle — means Grayson is quietly building two ends of the same Absolute-Universe bridge at once.

Detective Comics #1113

Tom Taylor picks up the main thread of "Bad Seeds" directly from Batman #13, and the premise alone makes this one of the event's nastiest chapters: Vandal Savage has weaponized a herbicide that's turning Gotham's overgrowth into lumbering, floronic monsters, while his TUCO squads sweep in behind the chaos. Taylor's Batman has always worked best when the threat is systemic rather than personal, and a city-wide ecological attack plays right into that. Jeff Spokes handles both art and color on the main story, giving the toxic-green invasion a sickly, saturated look that does a lot of the horror's heavy lifting, while Wes Abbott's lettering keeps the chaos legible. The issue also carries a backup from Dan Watters and Scott Hepburn (colors by Ian Herring) spotlighting the winning entry from DC's "Building Bad" villain-design sweepstakes — a nice bit of fan-facing world-building tucked into an otherwise grim main feature. Mikel Janín's cover undersells how unhinged the interiors actually get.

Absolute Green Arrow #5

Pornsak Pichetshote made his name turning horror into a tool for examining trauma and power in Infidel, and Absolute Green Arrow has quietly become the best showcase yet for that instinct inside a corporate superhero book. This issue forces Black Canary to reckon with the full scope of Hector Hammond's crimes, and the fallout from a major sacrifice leaves her staring down a trade she can't unmake — one threat for a worse one. Rafael Albuquerque, who co-created American Vampire with Scott Snyder, draws violence with a scratchy, kinetic urgency that never tips into spectacle for its own sake; colorist Marcelo Maiolo leans into sickly, artificial light sources that make Hammond's crimes feel clinical rather than pulpy. Letterer Jeff Powell keeps Dinah's internal spiral legible without over-explaining it. This is the rare Absolute Universe title that earns its bleakness scene by scene instead of leaning on shock value, and five issues in, it's arguably the strongest character study the line has produced.

DNX #1

Jed MacKay is currently the only writer since Roy Thomas to have both Avengers and X-Men on his plate at once, and DNX #1 is where that dual fluency pays off — this is a mutant-line event that understands exactly how an X-Men fight differs from an Avengers fight. Two heirs to Charles Xavier's legacy have each glimpsed the same catastrophic future and drawn opposite conclusions: the X-Men want to prevent it, the shadowy organization 3K wants to accelerate it, and the X-Men's answer is to pull in the Fantastic Four as a wildcard against 3K's biological weapon. Federico Vicentini draws the opening skirmishes with a clean, high-contrast energy that keeps a sprawling ensemble legible, and colorist David Curiel splits the book's palette cleanly between the X-Men's world and 3K's, which does a lot of silent work distinguishing sides before the dialogue catches up. Clayton Cowles' lettering keeps a talky, ideology-heavy opening chapter moving. It's a big, confident swing of a first issue, and it earns the "evolution is contagious" tagline.

Exquisite Corpses: Fox Mask Killer #1

Che Grayson's second book of the week sits on the opposite end of the killer spectrum from her Cassandra Cain origin story — instead of someone built into violence from birth, Fox Mask Killer is about someone trying to opt out of it. In James Tynion IV and Michael Walsh's Exquisite Corpses universe, where Grayson has already contributed art on several issues, the Fox Mask Killer is the assassins' assassin: the one other killers-for-hire are afraid of. This spinoff opens with her doing the one thing that world doesn't allow — wanting out. Adam Gorham's art has always thrived on tension between stillness and violence, and that instinct suits a book about a person trying to disappear from a life that won't let her. Jordie Bellaire's colors do serious atmosphere-building work here, and Becca Carey's lettering stays sparse, which fits a lead character who's spent her whole career not being seen. Two Grayson books, two different theories of what killing does to the person doing it — that's the kind of coincidence a good comics week is built on.

Spawn 77 #1

Spawn has been running continuously since 1992, but Spawn 77 #1 goes back further than that — all the way to McFarlane's original 1977 concept for the character, years before Al Simmons ever got his name. Todd McFarlane co-writes with painter Mark Spears, whose fully rendered, painted interiors give this version of Spawn a texture the flagship book has never really used: less inked-and-colored superhero horror, more oil-on-canvas dread. It's a genuinely strange thing for Image to put out in 2026 — a nearly fifty-year-old idea getting its first-ever comic-book treatment, in an art style closer to a gallery painting than a monthly pamphlet. Whether it reads as a serious reinvention or a nostalgia exercise probably depends on how attached you are to the character McFarlane actually built, but as a standalone artifact of comics history, it's hard not to be curious about the version of Spawn that never happened the first time around.

This Week's Full Release List

Also Out This Week

• Arcadia #8
• Avengers: Armageddon #4
• Babs – The Black Road South #5
• Batwoman #7
• Daredevil #7
• G.I. Joe #26
• Monstress #64
• The Patron #2
• Superman Unlimited #17
• Wonder Woman #37

New #1s and One-Shots

• Big Shakedown #1
• Creepshow Vol. 5 #1
• Dungeons & Dragons – Ravenloft #1
• Hellraiser – Resurrections – The Deep Gospel #1 (one-shot)
• Joe Kubert – 100 Years – A Life in Covers #1 (one-shot)
• Marvel Mangaverse: Arcane Avengers #1 (one-shot)
• Ofiusa #1
• Space Ghost vs The Herculoids #1

Graphic Novels & Trade Collections

• Absolute Power Omnibus HC
• Ace of Hearts – Lessons in Love From an Asexual Girl GN
• Age of Video Games – A Graphic History of Gaming GN
• All-New Spider-Gwen: Ghost-Spider TP
• Amazing Spider-Man Modern Era Epic Collection Vol. 15: Spider-Island TP
• Batgirl of Burnside TP (DC Compact Comics Edition)
• Batman – Gargoyle of Gotham: The Deluxe Edition HC
• Batman H2SH HC
• Batman – Killing Time TP
• Briar Vol. 3: Night's Terror TP
• DC/Marvel – The Cosmic Kiss Caper & Other Stories HC/TP
• The Dissidents – Autocrats, Vigilantes, Communists, and Cartoonists HC
• The Flood That Did Come TP
• Hot Blood Vol. 2: The Valley of Kings TP
• Identical HC
• Into the Unbeing – Library Edition HC
• Invincible Universe: Battle Beast Vol. 2 – The Emissary TP
• Jane American HC/TP
• John of the Night TP
• Kill All Immortals II TP
• Marvel/DC – The Dead of Knight & Other Stories HC/TP
• Murder School HC
• Peaceful Remission HC
• Penguin Classics Marvel Collection: Mighty Thor TP
• The Plot: Complete Series TP (Compact Edition)
• Power Rangers Prime Vol. 4 TP
• Return to Sleepy Hollow TP
• Scarlet Traces Vol. 4 TP
• Scorched Vol. 7 TP
• Sgt. Rock by Joe Kubert Deluxe Edition HC
• Skull Cat Vol. 2: Skull Cat and the Vampire's Amulet TP
• Spider-Man By Chip Zdarsky Omnibus HC
• Stranger Things Library Edition Vol. 5 HC
• Street Sharks: Jawsome Justice TP
• Supergirl Vol. 2: Hometown Horrors TP
• Tomb Raider: Sacred Artifacts TP
• Unwritten Compendium 2 TP

None of this week's picks let their characters off easy — not the assassin's daughter, not the vigilante staring down a trade she can't undo, not the killer trying to walk away, not the mutants choosing sides in a war neither side is sure it wants. Stock up accordingly, and don't be surprised if you need a lighter book on deck for after.

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