This Week's Picks: Doom Patrol and Legion of Super-Heroes Launch, Plus Weird Al Crashes the World's Finest

Nearly everything on this list is a door, not a hallway. Two of DC's most beloved oddball properties relaunch on the same Wednesday, a one-shot pairs Batman and Superman with an actual song parodist, and two ongoing Marvel titles use new-arc openers as if they were new #1s in disguise. Even Image's big debut of the week hides its mythology behind a premise you can explain in one sentence: a mother, a missing daughter, and a bargain that costs a soul. If you have ever wanted to start a pull list from scratch, this is the week to do it.

Wade Wilson: Deadpool #8

Writer: Benjamin Percy   Artist: Geoff Shaw   Colorist: Alex Sinclair   Publisher: Marvel Comics

Percy's twenty-year run of wounded-animal antiheroes — Wolverine, Ghost Rider, X-Force — has always worked best when he strips a character down to one appetite, and "Big Guns" does exactly that by pointing Wade Wilson at Frank Castle. Two characters built on the same premise, violence as the only fluent language, but opposite relationships to consequence: that's the real hook, not the new vehicle or the mission-of-the-week cover copy. Shaw, coming off the propulsive body-horror machinery of Extremity and a run of kinetic Guardians of the Galaxy pages, draws impact with real follow-through, which matters when the whole issue is staged as an arms race. Alex Sinclair's coloring keeps the palette hot and desaturated at once, the visual register of a fight that's already decided its own ending. This is Deadpool played as tragedy wearing a joke's clothing, which is the only way the character has ever really worked.

X-Men: Omega Red Dawn #1

Writer: Steve Orlando   Artists: Minkyu Jung, Alan Robinson   Colorist: Yen Nitro   Letterer: Clayton Cowles   Publisher: Marvel Comics

Orlando has spent the last several years proving he can run a large ensemble without losing anyone's voice — his Marauders and Way of X both did the quiet work of making a crowded cast feel like a team, not a roster — and that skill gets tested hard here. Omega Red, the Cold War creation built entirely around carbonadium and stolen life force, abducts Professor X and unleashes a chemical weapon that turns rage into a contagion, which reframes an old Soviet-supersoldier plot as something closer to a pandemic story. Jung and Robinson split art chores without breaking tone, giving the globe-trotting rescue mission scale without losing the claustrophobia of watching allies turn on each other. Nitro's coloring pushes hard into sickly greens and hot reds as the infection spreads, doing a lot of the tension's heavy lifting. A rescue mission is only as good as its ticking clock, and weaponized hatred is a genuinely unsettling one.

Daredevil #6

Writer: Stephanie Phillips   Artist: Flaviano   Colorist: Rico Renzi   Cover: Lee Garbett   Publisher: Marvel Comics

Phillips closed out her Omen arc by making Matt Murdock's radar sense feel like a liability, pushing him to isolate the people closest to him rather than risk them as targets. "Of Moles and Owls" opens by testing whether that isolation actually held, dropping him into a citywide criminal collision the moment he could use a break. Guest artist Flaviano trades Lee Garbett's noir shadow-craft for a looser, more expressive line that suits a story about factions coming apart at the seams rather than one killer closing in, and Rico Renzi's coloring keeps Hell's Kitchen lit like a powder keg instead of a crime scene. The Owl has always worked best as a symbol of organized crime's brittle order, and putting him back in play right as the underworld fractures is a sharp structural choice. This is street-level Daredevil doing what it does best: making a city feel like a character with its own temper.

Batman/Superman/Weird Al: World's Weirdest #1

Writers: Mark Waid, Tyrone Finch   Vibes: "Weird Al" Yankovic   Artists: Dan Schoening, Fico Ossio   Colorist: Luis Antonio Delgado   Letterer: Steve Wands   Publisher: DC Comics

The premise sounds like a stunt until you notice how precisely it's built: the fifth dimension is being drained of everything strange and specific, an affliction that turns creativity itself into the villain, and the only person DC's two biggest icons can find to fight it is a man whose entire fifty-year career has been built on transformation and specificity. Waid, who has written more World's Finest team-ups than almost anyone alive, understands the joke only lands if the stakes are sincere, and pairing with Finch keeps the plotting tight enough that the concept never curdles into a one-note bit. Schoening's cartooning, honed on Ghostbusters and a decade of all-ages work, is exactly the right register for a story that needs to be gorgeous and silly in the same panel, and Luis Antonio Delgado's coloring keeps the fifth-dimensional sequences genuinely uncanny rather than just goofy. It's a rare comic where casting a real person as the cure for sameness is also the whole thesis statement.

Crowbound #1

Writer: Jeff Lemire   Artist: Dustin Nguyen   Letterer: Steve Wands   Publisher: Image Comics (Mature)

Lemire and Nguyen have built a body of work together — Descender, Ascender, Little Robot — defined by melancholy filtered through genre machinery, and Crowbound trades their science-fiction instincts for fairy tale without losing the pattern. Rose is a factory worker whose daughter is taken a year before she's due to join the workforce herself, which grounds the book's dark fantasy in something closer to labor anxiety than mysticism, before the Scarecrow Queen arrives to offer the oldest bargain in folklore: get her back, at the cost of your own soul. Nguyen's watercolors carry the atmosphere here, turning the Factory and the gothic wasteland around it into something that feels post-industrial and pre-modern at once, a neo-Western with the rust still wet. It's the rare "series premiere" that reads like the first chapter of a novel rather than a pilot episode, patient enough to trust its own dread.

Legion of Super-Heroes #1

Writer: Joshua Williamson   Artist: Hayden Sherman   Colorist: Tamra Bonvillain   Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou   Publisher: DC Comics

Williamson has made a career out of turning legacy properties into structured mysteries rather than nostalgia exercises — his Flash and Dark Crisis work both used a body or a death as the engine for exploring an entire mythology — and Legion gets the same treatment here. A thousand years after Krypton's rocket landed on the Kent farm, superheroes are outlawed, the Persuaders enforce that ban with real teeth, and the murder of philanthropist R.J. Brande is the wound Brainiac 1 of 5 has to investigate while assembling a team of rebels scattered across a hostile universe. That's a smarter hook than "Legion, but new," because it turns world-building into forward motion instead of homework. Sherman's angular, high-energy linework and Bonvillain's candy-bright coloring give this future a genuine sense of a totalitarian regime dressed up as utopia, exactly the tension the concept needs. A murder mystery is a good enough reason to meet fifty new characters at once.

Doom Patrol #1

Writer: Darcy Van Poelgeest   Artist/Colorist: Niko Henrichon   Letterer: Lucas Gattoni   Publisher: DC Comics

The Morrison/Case run set a bar for weird-as-emotional-truth that has intimidated most attempts to revisit the team since, and Van Poelgeest's opening move is disarmingly small: broke, adrift, and trying to keep the lights on, Negative Man, Elasti-Girl, and Robotman take a heroes-for-hire gig finding a missing cat. It escalates the way these things do — a UFO, a wave of vanishing neighborhood pets, and a ghost from the team's past preparing to cross back into their world — but the small-business absurdity of the setup is the point, not a stall before the real plot starts. Henrichon, the Eisner-winning painter behind Pride of Baghdad, draws and colors the whole thing himself, giving the book a soft, overcast, autumn-afternoon light that makes the mundane stretches feel just as considered as the cosmic ones. It's a rare superhero team book that earns its strangeness by starting from financial desperation instead of a crisis event, and that's exactly the register this team has always needed.

This Week's Full Release List

Everything else shipping to shelves this Wednesday, condensed:

Other Comics Worth a Look

• 100 Bullets: The US of Anger #3
• Absolute Superman #23
• Batman #13 (Bad Seeds)
• Batgirl #23 (Bad Seeds)
• Escape #9
• Giant Robot Hellboy Returns #2
• Minor Arcana #18
• Superman: The Stranger #1
• Tales of Wonder #1

New #1s and One-Shots

• Archie #1
• Black Panther/Namor: Doomed #1
• Cruel Kingdom 2 #1
• Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment #1 (one-shot)
• Hellraiser: Resurrections – New Wounds #1
• Marvel Mangaverse: Web of Blood #1 (one-shot)
• Marvel Zombies: War Zone #1
• No Gods, No Masters #1
• The Perfectly Monstrous Life of Adam Frankenstein #1 (one-shot)
• Prima Apparata #1
• Project Perseus #1
• Spider-Women 50th Anniversary Special #1 (one-shot)
• Supernatural: Wayward Special #1 (one-shot)
• Teen Titans #1

Graphic Novels & Trade Collections

• A Ghost Arm Made of Angry Ghosts HC
• All The People I Have Been HC
• Artillery: Weapons of Art HC
• Batman: City of Madness TP
• Batman: White Knight Presents Generation Joker TP
• Bruce Wayne, Not Super: The Bat-Catastrophe TP
• Complete Crepax Vol. 10: Surreal Stories HC
• The Cutting Garden HC
• DC Finest: Harley Quinn – The Ballad of Harley Quinn TP
• Fables: No More Happily Ever After TP (DC Compact Comics Edition)
• Fantastic Four Vol. 2: The Invincible Woman TP
• Fence Book 1 TP
• Ghost Boys: The Graphic Novel HC/TP
• G.I. Joe Vol. 4: The Hunt for Energon TP
• Hunger and the Dusk Deluxe Edition HC
• Invincible Vol. 17 TP
• Iron Man Epic Collection Vol. 8: Demon in a Bottle TP
• Kodi: A Place to Call Home TP
• Mexikid Dreams: A Graphic Memoir HC/TP
• Superman: The Triangle Era Omnibus Vol. 3 HC
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Casey Jones TP
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles x Godzilla TP
• Twilight Zone: Stories From the Fifth Dimension TP
• Two Suns HC
• Ultimate Wolverine Vol. 3: The Maker's Mark TP
• Vampire the Masquerade: Complete Series TP (Compact Edition)
• Wonder Woman Rebirth by Greg Rucka Omnibus HC
• w0rldtr33 Deluxe Book 1 HC

Whether you start with a broke superhero team taking a cat case, a thousand-years-later Legion untangling a murder, or a mother striking a bargain with a Scarecrow Queen, this is a week built for beginnings. Come find us.

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