This Week's Picks: Doom Gets an All-On-One Issue, DNX Escalates, Plus Hulk vs. the Fantastic Four

Egos run this week's shelf. Doctor Doom gets an issue built entirely around his certainty. Two heirs to Xavier's dream keep fighting over whose future is real. The Infernal Hulk takes on Marvel's First Family. And in Gotham, the cops carry the weight while the capes fight above them. Every one of these books asks the same thing: what happens when someone is sure they are the hero of the story?

Doom All-On-One #1

Al Ewing has spent years making Doctor Doom read as a coherent worldview instead of a cackling punchline, and this one-shot with artist Alessandro Cappuccio puts that work at the center of the stage. Ewing's Doom never needs an elaborate scheme to be frightening. He needs only his own certainty, and the sense that the universe owes him agreement. Cappuccio is a good match for that pitch. His figures carry weight and menace without tipping into melodrama, so Doom's arrogance reads as gravity instead of costume. One-shots like this live or die on whether they say something new about a character everyone thinks they know. With Ewing writing, the bet is a safe one. This is the week's best argument that Marvel's most famous villain is still its most interesting.

DNX #3

Jed MacKay is the rare writer holding both Avengers and X-Men at once, and DNX is where that dual fluency pays off. The setup is clean: two heirs to Charles Xavier's legacy have seen the same catastrophic future and drawn opposite conclusions. The X-Men want to prevent it. The shadowy group 3K wants to speed it along. By issue three, the early skirmishes have given way to the harder question of whether anyone in this fight can be trusted with the outcome. Federico Vicentini keeps a large ensemble legible, and colorist David Curiel splits the palette between the two camps so you always know whose side a scene belongs to. Letterer Clayton Cowles keeps an ideas-heavy script moving. It is a confident event book that trusts its readers to follow the argument.

Batman: Bad Seeds – Gotham Central #2

Christopher Cantwell writes institutions under strain better than almost anyone at DC right now, and Gotham Central gives him the best version of that premise the company owns. These are cops without capes, working a city where Vandal Savage has pulled every department's attention toward the Bat-Family. Jacob Phillips, whose work on Where the Body Was and That Texas Blood already proved he can make crime feel lived-in, draws the precinct floor like a place people actually clock into. The Bad Seeds event has mostly been a showcase for the heroes. This two-part story argues that the real story was always happening one floor down, where the paperwork piles up and nobody gets a cape. Issue two is where the pressure on Gordon and his detectives starts to show.

Infernal Hulk vs. Fantastic Four #1

Phillip Kennedy Johnson has made a career out of writing rage as a moral position instead of a personality quirk, and the Infernal Hulk gives him the ideal vessel for it. Artist Cian Tormey draws the collision with the scale this matchup demands, setting Marvel's First Family against a Hulk who is no longer just a force of nature but something older and meaner wearing the shape. The Hulk War build-up has been patient. This issue is where it stops being patient. Johnson understands that the Fantastic Four work best when they have to act as a family under fire, not a squad of powers, and a threat this brutal tests every one of those bonds. It reads as event fuel with real teeth.

Batman & Robin Year One: Dynamic Duos #3

Mark Waid and Chris Samnee built their reputations by squeezing maximum clarity out of minimum line work on Daredevil and Black Widow, and Dynamic Duos keeps proving a comic can move fast and still let a page breathe. The twelve-issue run has been building from a street-gang setup toward something colder, with Robin working his way into a network of orphaned kids that Gotham has already given up on. Samnee draws the city's underclass with the same unfussy precision he gives Batman's rooftop choreography, and Mat Lopes keeps the color warm even through the darkest scenes. Three issues in, the pacing already feels like a story that knows exactly where it is going. This is the best-behaved Bat-book on the shelf.

Spawn '77 #2

Todd McFarlane and Mark Spears go back to the original 1977 concept for Spawn, a sixteen-year-old's idea that sat in a drawer for half a century. Spears paints the interiors, which gives the miniseries a texture closer to an illustrated pulp paperback than a monthly superhero comic. Issue one set the tone. Issue two is where we find out whether this reads as archaeology or nostalgia. Handing a fifty-year-old idea to a different artist and letting his hand decide what it looks like is the most honest thing McFarlane has done with the franchise in years. Pick it up for the paintings alone.

This Week's Full Release List

Everything else shipping to shelves this Wednesday, condensed:

Marvel

• Amazing Spider-Man #1001
• Black Cat #15
• Wade Wilson: Deadpool #9
• Iron Man #10
• Generation X-23 #9
• X-Men #39
• Uncanny X-Men #159 Facsimile Edition
• X-Men '97: Season Two #5
• Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett #3
• Midnight Spider-Man #2

DC

• Barbara Gordon: Breakout #6
• Batman #227 Facsimile Edition
• Detective Comics #880 Facsimile Edition
• Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #4
• Doom Patrol #2
• Green Lantern Corps #21
• Legion of Super-Heroes #2
• Supergirl #18
• Teen Titans #2
• The Nice House by the Sea #12
• 100 Bullets: The US of Anger #4

Image, IDW and More

• Transformers #37
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #333
• The Karman Blade #2
• Blood & Thunder #18
• Chachu #3
• Radiant Black #44
• Regicide #3
• The Seasons #12
• Spawn: The Curse of Sherlee Johnson #8
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #23
• Sonic the Hedgehog x Godzilla #3
• Star Trek: Red Shirts – Ghost of the 21st Century #3
• Star Trek: Holo-Ween II #2
• Dungeons & Dragons: Total Party Killers #3
• Bludwire #4
• Sicko #3
• Prima Apparata #2
• Power Rangers Unlimited #4
• No Gods No Masters #2
• Watson v. Holmes #2
• Club Nephilim #2
• Adventure Time Quadruple Feature #4
• Fire and Ice: Darkwolf #4
• Magnus Jakuta #6

New #1s and One-Shots

• Venom #1 (Charles Soule and Tommaso Bianchi)
• Wolverine: Paradise #1
• Nova: Return of the Rings #1 (Josh Trujillo and Humberto Ramos)
• Captain Britain 50th Anniversary Special #1
• Amazing Spider-Man: Amazing Visions #1
• Star Wars: Rogue One – Chirrut & Baze #1
• Meals to Astonish: Avengers #1
• Batman: Bad Seeds – Streets of Gotham #1 (one-shot)
• Ice Cream Man #1 Chocolate Vanilla Twist Edition
• Universal Monsters: Frankenstein Black & White Special #1
• You'll Never Leave This Place Alive #1
• Starship Godzilla: Invasion X #1
• Star Trek: Zero Point #1
• Archie vs. the Terminator #1
• Cassie #1
• Hammer Head #1
• 12-Foot Skeleton #1
• Mark Spears Graveyard Shift #1
• Lilith: Blood & Burlesque #1
• Haunted Mansion: Stray Spirits #1
• Jynx and Stitches: The Great Revenge #1
• Magic: The Gathering Untold Stories – Liliana #1

Graphic Novels and Trade Collections

• Animal Man by Grant Morrison Book 1
• DC Finest Horror: Where Dead Men Walk
• Robin Year One
• Black Panther: Intergalactic
• Star Wars: Boba Fett Black, White & Red Treasury Edition
• Sabrina: New Riverdale (Compact Edition)
• The Black Beetle Omnibus
• Barbaric Vol. 1
• Revolutionaries Vol. 4
• Sunstone Vol. 5
• Chainsaw Man Vol. 22
• Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Vol. 6
• Toy Story Classic Comics Collection Vol. 1
• Winnie-the-Pooh: The Graphic Novel

Start with Doom if you want the sharpest character piece, DNX if you want the biggest swing, and Gotham Central if you want to see what the city looks like when nobody is wearing a cape. Whichever you grab, bring a friend. These are books built for arguing about afterward.

The Multiverse Comics Podcast — with Stephen, Jason, and Scott — is available wherever you get your podcasts.