This Week's Picks: Gotham's Bad Seeds and Vertigo's Black Tower, Plus Remender and Epting's Hammerfist

Almost every book worth talking about this week is about an agency — a police force, an intelligence service, a shadow bureau, a hit squad — doing something its charter never authorized. Gotham's commissioner has a private army. British intelligence keeps a paranormal division nobody is allowed to name. A federal outfit shows up in a small Colorado town to investigate something it doesn't understand and can't be allowed to leave alone. Even the week's crime books are really about organizations: a crew that won't let a thief walk away, a conspiracy a marksman can't shoot his way out of. The one book that breaks the pattern does it by going as personal as possible, which is exactly why it lands.

Batman: Bad Seeds — Sunset #1

Writers: Matt Fraction and G. Willow Wilson  Layouts: Giuseppe Camuncoli  Finishes: Cliff Rathburn  Colorist: Tomeu Morey  Letterer: Clayton Cowles  Publisher: DC Comics

Two of DC's best-running books collide here, and the collision is earned rather than editorially imposed. Fraction has spent his Batman run quietly expanding a mythology everyone assumed was fully mapped, while Wilson's Poison Ivy has been building toward Pamela Isley's political ascent for dozens of issues. Bad Seeds lets those two long games meet: Mayor Isley, abandoned by her allies both electoral and arcane, makes a last-ditch play that threatens to bury Gotham under prehistoric plant life, and Police Commissioner Vandal Savage — who already has the Bat-Family hunted and a paramilitary force in the streets — sees a chance to eliminate two problems in one night. What makes the premise work is that Savage is the more frightening figure. Ivy's apocalypse is desperate; his is procedural. Camuncoli's layouts give the super-sized page count real architecture, and Rathburn's finishes keep the whole thing dense without turning muddy. This is event storytelling that grew out of the books instead of being handed down to them.

Black Tower: The Raven Conspiracy #1

Writer: Ram V  Artist: Mike Perkins  Colorist: Mike Spicer  Letterer: Andworld Design  Publisher: DC Comics — Vertigo

Of everything the revived Vertigo has put out this year, this is the book that most convincingly sounds like the imprint's first era. Ram V — whose The Many Deaths of Laila Starr and Detective Comics work both showed a knack for treating the supernatural as bureaucratic fact rather than spectacle — drops a 23-year-old rookie into Division Nine, an obscure and deliberately underestimated arm of British intelligence that handles paranormal incidents. In the right circles they're called Black Tower. The plot involves a scheme to steal a giant-king's head and break a ward that has kept invaders off British soil for centuries, which is a magnificently strange thing to run through a modern spy-thriller structure of dead drops, handlers, and deniability. Perkins draws it filthy and cold, all rain-slick concrete and bad fluorescent light, and Spicer colors it like a place where nobody has slept well in years. Magic and espionage are both professions built on lying for the state. Putting them in the same room is a better idea than it has any right to be.

Hammerfist #1

Writer: Rick Remender  Artist: Steve Epting  Colorist: Matt Hollingsworth  Letterer: Rus Wooton  Publisher: Image Comics — Giant Generator

Remender has been writing variations on the same wounded man for twenty years — Deadly Class, Black Science, Low — and Hammerfist is the most stripped-down version yet. Mike Denton is a hitman, an addict, and an absentee father, and the only person who still thinks he can be better is the daughter he keeps failing. Then Black Noon arrives, an ancient darkness that erases light from all things, and the weapon that can fight it runs on love. That is a genuinely risky premise, one bad line away from collapsing into sentiment, and the reason it holds is Steve Epting. Epting draws grounded, weight-bearing figures — his Winter Soldier and Velvet work made espionage feel like physical labor — so when the supernatural finally shows up, it registers as an intrusion into a real world rather than a genre the book was always going to become. Hollingsworth's palette does the rest, keeping the light sources scarce enough that you feel the title's stakes before anyone explains them.

Terminal #2

Writers: Robert Kirkman and Joe Casey  Artists: Andy Kubert, David Finch, Arthur Adams  Inker: Sandra Hope  Colorist: Dave McCaig  Letterer: Rus Wooton  Publisher: Image Comics — Skybound

A creative team this stacked usually signals a book coasting on names, and the interesting thing about Terminal is how much structure Kirkman and Casey have built underneath the star power. The hook — a covert superpowered war fought around, and increasingly over, the world's most important technological visionary — sits in the same territory Casey has mined since Wildcats 3.0: superheroics as an extension of capital rather than an alternative to it. Issue two turns on Marilyn Howe's decision, and the book is smart enough to treat a choice as a bigger escalation than a punch. Splitting art across Kubert, Finch, and Adams could easily fragment a comic, but Sandra Hope's inks and McCaig's coloring hold a consistent surface across all three, so the shifts read as deliberate register changes instead of scheduling accidents. If the first issue was the pitch, this is where it starts proving it has somewhere to go.

Absolute Catwoman #3

Writers: Scott Snyder and Che Grayson  Artist: Bengal  Colorist: Giovanna Niro  Publisher: DC Comics

The Absolute line works best when the reinvention costs its lead something specific, and Selina Kyle's cost is other people. This issue brings the Calicos — the crew she came up with and left behind — crashing back through the middle of her plans, which is a sharper conflict than another rooftop score. Grayson, whose Rise and short-form horror work has consistently been about who gets left holding the consequences, writes the crew as a claim rather than a nostalgia trip. Bengal is the reason to buy it, though. His animation-trained figure work gives this Catwoman a lightness that the rest of the Absolute books have deliberately drained out of their leads, and Niro's coloring keeps the palette warmer and more saturated than the line's house style. In a shared universe built on making everything heavier, a book about a thief who still moves like she is enjoying herself reads as a real argument.

Next Level: One Shot #1

Writer: Gerry Duggan  Artist: Fernando Blanco  Publisher: DC Comics

DC is using Deadshot to open the door on its Next Level wave, and putting Duggan on that job is the most telling decision here. His long Marvel run — Deadpool, X-Men, Uncanny Avengers — was built on making line-wide architecture feel like character work, and Floyd Lawton is a useful lens for exactly that: a man who solves problems at a distance, now handed a conspiracy that reaches further than his range. Blanco draws crime comics better than almost anyone currently working in mainstream superhero books, with a hard, high-contrast approach honed on Catwoman and Detective Comics that suits a story spending more time in bad rooms than on rooftops. At 48 pages it has room to be a real story rather than a teaser, which is the difference between a setup one-shot worth reading and one worth skipping.

Absolute Martian Manhunter Vol. 2: The Agency

Writer: Deniz Camp  Artist: Javier Rodríguez  Publisher: DC Comics

Collecting issues #7 through #12, this is the back half and the conclusion of the strangest, most formally adventurous book DC has published in years. Camp and Rodríguez spent volume one turning John Jones's mind into the actual page architecture — panels as thought, layout as psychological state — and volume two puts pressure on that by introducing the Agency, a shadow outfit with unlimited governmental authority, into Middleton. John has to hold down a job, hide a Martian, manage abilities that keep expanding past his control, and watch his relationships come apart, all from a motel room. Rodríguez is one of the few artists alive who can design a page this experimentally and still have it read cleanly on the first pass, and the collected format is genuinely the better way to experience what he is doing here; the storytelling tricks compound across issues in a way monthly gaps blunt. If you have been curious about the Absolute line's outer edge, start here and work backward.

This Week's Full Release List

Everything else shipping this Wednesday, condensed:

Other Comics Worth a Look

• Absolute Wonder Woman #23
• The Beauty #8
• Bloodland #6
• Concrete: Stars Over Sand #3 — Paul Chadwick's masterwork, and a strong candidate for comic of the year
• The Flash #36
• Hello Darkness #24
• Hidden Springs #4
• Mind Management: New & Improved #3
• Operation: Iron Coffin #2 — Dracula versus a Nazi vampire train, from Kenny Porter and Tyrell Cannon
• Poison Ivy #47 (Bad Seeds)
• Superman #41 (Kingdom of Zod)
• Universal Monsters: Blood of the Wolf Man #3

New #1s and One-Shots

• Denver #1
• M.A.S.K.: Origins #1 (one-shot)
• ROM Special #1 (one-shot)
• Stuff of Nightmares: The Cat in the Coffin #1 (one-shot)
• This Land Is Old and Dark #1
• Tomb of Apocalypse #1
• What If Cassandra Nova Killed Professor X #1 (one-shot)
• Witchblade / Vampirella #1 (one-shot)

Graphic Novels & Trade Collections

• Alien vs. Captain America TP
• Amazing Spider-Man: The Classic Newspaper Comics 1980 TP
• Avatar Legends: Masters of the Elements Vol. 1 TP
• Batman: The Long Halloween — The Last Halloween TP
• Battlepug: Cosmic Doggyssey TP
• Battler Britton: Bloody Good Show HC
• Conquest of the Cosmos TP
• Daredevil & Punisher: The Devil's Trigger TP
• Deluge TP
• Department of Truth Vol. 7 TP
• EC Archives: The Complete Valor TP
• Faithless Complete Collection TP
• The Flash Vol. 4 DC K.O. TP
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Compendium Vol. 4 TP
• Gigantic: The Complete Series TP
• Green Lantern Vol. 6: With This Ring TP
• Impact Winter: Origins TP
• Last Comic Book on the Left Vol. 1 HC
• Like Swimmers HC
• Marvel Fanfare Omnibus Vol. 3 HC
• Miles Morales — Spider-Man Modern Era Epic Collection Vol. 4: Sitting in a Tree TP
• Planet She-Hulk TP
• The Primal Hunter Vol. 1 GN
• Prince Valiant Vol. 31: 1997–1998 HC
• Red Robin: Tim Drake Compendium TP
• Something Is Killing the Children Omnibus Vol. 2 TP
• Spider-Verse: Spider-Geddon Omnibus HC
• Strange Tales GN
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin — The Lost Years TP
• Titans Vol. 5 DC K.O. TP
• X-Men: Blue & Gold — Bloodties Omnibus HC
• Youngblood Vol. 1 TP

Gotham, London, Middleton, and whatever unnamed city Mike Denton is drinking his way through — different maps, same question about who gets to hold power without anyone checking the work. Pick the genre that suits your mood; the argument underneath is the same one either way. Come find us.

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