What’s that? Mephisto Vs. Premiere Hardcover doesn’t deal with Marvel’s most diabolical character fighting their Premiere Hardcover format? Instead it collects a four-issue miniseries from the 1980s by Al Milgrom and John Buscema called Mephisto Vs., in which the marriage-eating villain fights the Avengers, the FF, and two X-Men teams?

Oh.

Well, that will probably be a better fight then. It’s a $20, 144-page collection.

What else is due out in shops this week? You won’t have to sell your soul and/or marriage and twenty years worth of continuity to find out. Just join me after the jump.

Absolute Death: If you think Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo and Mark Buckingham’s two ’90s Death of the Endless spin-off minis aren’t anywhere nearly long enough to fill up a $99 absolute edition don’t worry, you’re right. Included within these 360 gigantic pages are pretty much every Death story I can think of, including stories from various anthologies, a couple of Death-focused issues from Sandman, that “here’s how you put on a condom” AIDS thing, and the 1994 Death Gallery, which was/is fantastic. DC/Vertigo should really get back in the habit of publishing those gallery books again…teenage Caleb loved ‘em.

Anchor #1: Writer Phil Hester and artist Brian Churilla introduce a new character in this new $4 series from Boom Studios. Who is it?. A devil calls him an anchor and a young woman named Hofi calls him Clem, but he himself doesn’t really know. I only know he’s big, strong, bald, bearded, weird and engaged in a fist fight on two different planes of reality in this first issue (one against the hordes of hell, another against a giant ice monster). Churilla’s art makes it one of the best-looking Boom books so far, and Hester offers enough clues in this first, set-up issue to prove intriguing. Give it a look tomorrow.

Blood and Water: The Judd Winick-written, Tomm Cooker-drawn, Brian Bolland-covered 2003 Vertigo miniseries returns to print as a 130-page, $15 trade paperback. I haven’t re-read it since its original serialization, but I recall the first issue being pretty great, while the story sort of petered out into a more standard vampire story. On the Winick spectrum of quality though, it’s probably one of the better things he’s written for DC.

Booster Gold #25: Didn’t think a new volume of a Booster Gold ongoing series could last a whole 25 issues? Then you apparently thought wrong. With this issue, the current volume has reached the point at which the original volume ended. In this issue, the time-jumping hero teams up with the new Batman and Robin.

Deadpool #900: No, Deadpool hasn’t reached #900 for real yet, the previous issue was #16, and this is just Marvel engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor regarding their habit of occasionally using voodoo mathematics to suddenly pump a relaunched title up into some astronomical figure ending with two zeroes. I thought it was pretty clever, so long as Marvel doesn’t beat this joke into the ground like they—Oh, never mind, they already are. Anyway, this totally made-up anniversary book looks like it should boast one of the better values in super-comics this week, as your $5 will get you 104-pages by the likes of Jason Aaron, Joe Kelly, Fred Van Lente, Kyle Baker, Damion Scott and those are just the creators I really, really like.

Hammer of The Gods Vol. 1: Mortal Enemy: Michael Avon Oeming and Mark Wheatley’s Image Comics miniseries about a pissed off Viking calling out his gods is now a $20, 185-page trade paperback from IDW. It’s not to be confused with Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga.

Heavy Liquid: This is a new printing of Paul Pope’s 1999 Vertigo sci-fi series about a Mick Jagger-esque hero named “S” in a futuristic New York City. If you’re wondering if it’s any good, I tell you now that it is. This version has apparently been re-colored, and will include some sketch material. It’s a 240-page, $25 softcover, and you can see the first few pages here.

Hector Plasm: Totentaz: Benito Cereno and Nate Bellegarde return to their supernatural superhero creation in this 48-page, $6 one-shot. Oh! Ha! I just got it! H-ecto-r Plasm! Hey, that’s pretty clever.

House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1: Tis the season. This special $5, 48-page issue features a framing sequence by the Vertigo ongoing’s regular creative team, wrapped around short stories featuring Madame Xandu, John Constantine, I, Zombie and Sandman’s Merv Pumpkinhead by familiar Vertigo talents like Matt Wagner, Peter Milligan, Giuseppe Cauncoli, Amy Reeder Hadley, Michael Allred, Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Kevin Nowlan and others.

Incredible Hercules #136: Just a reminder, this is the issue in which this happens.

Odysseus The Rebel: Steven Grant and Scott Bieser’s webcomic re-telling of the Greek myth is now available as a 185-page, $13 trade paperback. You can read the whole shebang online for free here of course, but who wants to stare at a computer screen when they could stare at a comic book instead?

The Perhapanauts Halloween Spooktacular #1: Another of the several holiday-themed anthologies due out this week, this one has the regular Perhapanauts creative team of writer Todd Dezago and artist Craig Rosseau welcoming Rich Woodall and Fred Hembeck to join them for a jumping-on-point style one-shot.

Super Friends #20: Have I mentioned lately how much I love J. Bone?  Check out his cover for this year’s Halloween issue of the kid-friendly Justice League comic:

Bone draws the best self-satisfied Batman.

Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk: Did you wait for the trade on this one? Or were you buying it in singles up until the point where the writer decided to take a few years off and thought “Screw that guy, I’m not buying any of his stupid comics anymore” when they resumed publishing?  Well, now you can read all six issues of Damon Lindelof and Leinil Francis Yu’s miniseries about, um, Wolverine and the Hulk getting in a fight in one sitting if you like. It’s a $25, 144-page hardcover, and while I haven’t read the second half of it, I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s one of the greatest comic books ever made, given how many years Lindelof spent researching and polishing the script.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 1:52 pm and is filed under 'Twas The Night Before Wednesday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.