This Week's Picks: Queen in Black and The Patron, Plus a Post-SDCC Wave of Marvel One-Shots

Coming off SDCC, the racks this week aren't chasing announcements — they're doing the quieter work of character studies, franchise mashups, and one very good anniversary victory lap. There's no single event dominating the wall; instead, Marvel spreads its energy across a symbiote war, a time-displaced Doctor Doom, an X-Man finally getting a sister act, and a licensed crossover that actually earns its premise. The best book of the week, though, comes from neither Marvel nor DC. It's a small, hand-painted horror-crime debut about the art world's ugliest transaction, and it's the clearest reminder that a "small" week can still hit hard.

Queen in Black #1

Al Ewing writes, Iban Coello draws (with Zé Carlos), and Guru-eFX colors this cosmic collision from Marvel — the team behind Venom War returning to symbiote territory with higher stakes and a bigger cast. Knull has spent the void building a new army to finish what he started; Hela may have beaten him to Earth, arriving with a legion of the galaxy's deadliest symbiotes in tow. Ewing has made a career out of finding the human wreckage inside cosmic-scale conflict — Immortal Hulk and Mortal Thor both worked because the god-tier stakes never drowned out the people underneath them — and here that person is the Son of Venom, caught directly between two of the ugliest forces in the Marvel Universe. Coello's linework, sharpened across Imperial and Fantastic Four, gives both Knull's void-born horror and Hela's Asgardian menace distinct silhouettes, which matters enormously in a book built on symbiote-on-symbiote carnage staying legible. Symbiote events risk diminishing returns at this point, but pitting evil against evil with the good caught in the middle is a genuinely smart structural reset.

Bishop #2

Saladin Ahmed writes, with art by Mario Santoro (and Reese Hannigan) and colors by Federico Blee, continuing Marvel's new solo showcase for one of the X-Men's most underused legacy characters. Bishop has spent three decades as a supporting player and time-travel plot device; this series is finally interested in who he is when nobody needs him to explain the future. Issue two brings his sister Shard back into frame — not for a reunion, but with a mission dangerous enough to test what family even means to a man who's already lost his entire timeline once. Ahmed's best work, from Black Bolt to Miles Morales, treats interiority as the genre hook rather than an afterthought bolted onto action, and a story about a man confronting his own sister as a variable in someone else's plan is exactly the kind of quiet gut-punch he writes well. Santoro's storytelling stays grounded even when the stakes threaten to go cosmic, which is the right choice for a book that's ultimately about a family, not a franchise.

Doomquest #3

Ryan North writes, Francesco Mobili draws, Frank D'Armata colors, and Travis Lanham letters this ten-issue Doctor Doom series, and issue three might be the sharpest premise North has landed yet. Doom, still displaced from the Titanic and flung across history, wakes up at the dawn of the American Revolution — and immediately starts wondering whether one man with a laser Gatling gun centuries ahead of schedule could simply improve the outcome. North's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Fantastic Four work has always paired real comedic instinct with a rigor about consequences, and that combination is perfect for Doom: a character who genuinely believes he could run history better than history ran itself, and who now has the means to test that theory on the actual birth of a nation. Mobili's redesigned Doom reads as both regal and unstable, which is the exact tone this premise needs to stay funny without losing the character's terrifying self-certainty.

Predator vs. The Planet of the Apes #1

Greg Pak writes and Alan Robinson draws this five-issue crossover, and the premise alone should tell you whether you're in: a Yautja hunter crash-lands on the Planet of the Apes, and what follows is a genuine three-way war between humans, apes, and the deadliest hunter in the galaxy. Pak has already proven at Marvel that he can make licensed mashups feel like more than a marketing exercise — his instinct is always to find one grounded human perspective and let the spectacle organize around it, and that's exactly what astronaut Arch provides here, embedded in a hostile ape society where her own species is subservient. Robinson's art has the scale this concept demands without losing the practical, tactile quality that makes Predator stories work — you need to feel the jungle canopy and the ape society's brutal social order as real places, not just a backdrop for a Yautja to stalk through. It's a big swing that lands because nobody involved is winking at the premise.

The Patron #1

Christian Ward writes, John J. Pearson draws and hand-paints every page, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou letters this Ignition Press debut — and it's the most purely exciting book on the wall this week. Ward is best known as an artist in his own right (ORIGIN II, Invisible Kingdom), which makes his decision to hand the visuals entirely to Pearson and write from the outside a real vote of confidence, not a compromise. The premise is vicious and elegant: Mr. Cherish has built an empire scouting emerging artists, launching them toward stardom, and then orchestrating their deaths without a trace — because nothing inflates a young painter's value like a tragic, untimely end. When his newest target, Matty Barnes, survives the script Cherish wrote for him, the twist doesn't just complicate one murder, it threatens to unravel Cherish's entire posthumous economy. Pearson's hand-painted pages give the book a genuine art-object quality that a story about the commodification of dead artists earns honestly. Horror-crime hybrids set in the art world are rare enough on their own; one this confidently executed is rarer still.

Rocket Raccoon: Rocket Rewind #1

Christos Gage and MacKenzie Cadenhead write, with art from Todd Nauck and Enid Balám (among others) and a cover by Ryan Stegman, marking fifty years since Subject 89P13 first showed up in Marvel Preview. Anniversary specials live or die on whether they treat the milestone as an obligation or an occasion, and this one leans hard into the latter — three new stories bracketing a re-presentation of Rocket's actual 1976 debut from co-creators Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen. The Gage/Nauck entry pairs Rocket with Hank Pym for a Sub-Atomica invasion that's exactly as chaotic as "two size-obsessed characters team up" implies, while Cadenhead and Balám's "BoomShakaLaka" rounds out the anthology with a different flavor of cosmic slapstick. It's low-stakes by design, and that's the point: fifty years in, Rocket doesn't need to save the universe to be worth celebrating. He just needs to be funny, which this book is.

This Week's Full Release List

Everything else shipping to shelves this Wednesday, condensed:

Single Issues of Note

• 2000AD #2491
• Concrete: Stars Over Sand #2
• Is Ted OK? #6 (series finale)
• Feral #25
• Ghost Pepper #13
• In Your Skin #4
• Hellboy in Love: Obsidian #2
• Only the Savage Are Left #2
• Toxic Avenger Comics #10

New #1s and One-Shots

• Nano #1
• Batman/Superman World's Finest Annual #1
• DC's Hawk-Girl Summer #1
• Detective Comics Annual #1
• Dirt Beneath the Devil #1
• Horror of Godzilla #1
• Justice League: Knight Vision Special #1
• Queen in Black: Defenders of Light and Dark #1
• Queen in Black: Hela #1
• Superman Annual: Year One Thousand #1
• What If... Kraven Survived His Last Hunt #1

Graphic Novels & Trade Collections

• 1776 TP
• Aquaman by Geoff Johns Book 1 TP
• Avatar: The Last Airbender Chibis Vol. 2 – Sokka's Boomerang Class HC
• Big Burn HC
• Daredevil by Ann Nocenti & John Romita Jr. Omnibus Vol. 2
• Darkness Vol. 1 TP
• DC Finest: Green Lantern – Hard-Traveling Heroes TP
• Event Horizon: Dark Descent TP
• The Field GN
• Hyde Street Vol. 2 TP
• Johnny Boo on the Go: Friends and Enemies TP
• Judge Dredd Complete Case Files Vol. 23 TP
• Legend of Korra: Kya and the Secret of the Sand TP
• Mad Dog Morgan HC
• Marian: Heretic Vol. 1 TP
• Masters of the Universe Vol. 1: The Sword of Flaws TP
• Murder Next Door: A Graphic Memoir TP
• Our Soot Stained Heart TP
• Plants vs. Zombies: Zomnibus Vol. 5 HC
• Predator Black, White & Blood Treasury Edition TP
• Skin Police Vol. 2: Paid in Flesh TP
• Star Wars Legends: The Newspaper Strips Omnibus HC
• Tom the Dancing Bug Vol. 1: Secret Origins TP
• Trailer Park Warlock Vol. 2 TP
• Ultimate X-Men by Peach Momoko Vol. 4: Children's Whereabouts TP
• Ultraman Omnibus HC
• Venom Modern Era Epic Collection Vol. 2 TP
• X-Men: Age of Apocalypse Omnibus HC
• X-Men by Jed MacKay Vol. 4: Age of Revelation Aftermath TP

It's a week that rewards a wander around the whole store rather than a beeline to one shelf — a symbiote war, a wayward Doctor Doom, a hunter loose on the Planet of the Apes, and a horror-crime debut that might be the best single issue of the month. Post-SDCC weeks are usually a breather. This one just happens to be a good one.