Hey guys, this is the last New Comics Day of the year! And it doesn’t seem like too gigantic a week, so it’s a perfect time to visit your local comic shop and drop some of your Christmas money on some collections and graphic novels you’ve been considering buying f0r a while. And if you don’t see anything you like on the shipping list for this week, and can’t find any trades you wanna buy for yourself, you can always visit your local comic shop and by me comics. I don’t mind.

Anyway, here are a few noteworthy releases for the week. As always, these aren’t necessarily the books I deem the best (or worst) or personally plan on buying or reading; they’re just the ones that jumped out at me while reviewing the shipping list as books that have some interesting component to them.

Batman: The Dark Knight #1: For anyone who thought that what the world of comics needs now is one more Batman ongoing monthly series, good news! Here comes a sixth Batman ongoing that’s set in current continuity (I think it’s number eight or number nine if you want to count Batman Confidential, The All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold and/or Superman/Batman). As if to prove the point that there might be a few too many Batman comics at the moment, despite this being an overall slow week for new releases, this is just one of the three Batman books available this week (Detective Comics #872 and The All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold #2 are the others).

What separates this book from the Bat-pack is that it’s going to be the province of a single writer/artist, ala Tony Daniels’ on-and-off-and-now-back-on-again run on Batman, with David Finch getting the honor of an all-new Batman vanity series (complete with use of the most momentous Batman moniker!)

Whether it’s for you or not likely depends on your feelings about Finch’s work; the first two issues are $4 a piece, and it will drop down to the $3-for-20-page format in March.

Bigfoot: Pascal Girard follows his short, Drawn and Quarterly-published book Nicolas with this $20,  50-page hardcover about a teenager in a crummy town who becomes a local celebrity when a YouTube video of him goes viral. You can check out a preview here.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Tales: This $30, 300-page hardcover collects a whole mess of short stories from hither and yon, mostly written by Joss Whendon and the TV show’s writers. Gene Colan, Becky Cloonan, Paul Lee, Tim Sale, Steve Lieber and Andy Owens provide the art. You can see the complete list of contents, and a short preview, here.
Hellboy: The Sleeping and The Dead: Wow, talk about a match made in heaven—writer/cover artist Mike Mignola and artist/variant cover artist Scott Hampton teaming up for a two-part miniseries about Hellboy and vampires. What’s it going to look like? Like this. How is it possible that these two have never worked together before…?

Jungle Girls: This isn’t comics per se, but it’s full of illustrations, including some that feature comics heroines. It’s an 84-page, $25 book softcover featuring 52 all-new portraits of various jungle girls all drawn by Jim Silke. You can take a look at a few examples here.

John Carter of Mars: Weird Worlds: Over 110-pages worth of the comic book adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian adventure-having hero can be found in this $15 collection featuring work by Murphy Anderson, Joe Orlando, Gray Morrow, Howard Chaykin, Marv Wolfman and others. You can see a preview here; check out the hilt of the sword of cover….doesn’t get much more phallic than that, does it?

Ka-Zar by Mark Waid and Andy Kubert: This $20, 200-page trade paperback collects a big chunk of the 1997 series in which the creative team named in the title took Marvel’s Tarzan of the Savage Land and sent him to New York City.

What If #200: Ooh, ooh, I’ve got one—What If…Marvel’s Numbering Of Comics Made a Lick of Sense To The Curious Observer? This is a one-shot comic, but instead of being labeled with a #1, or going number-free, it gets issue #200 assigned. Why? Beats me. Comics.org says the 1977 series lasted 47 issues and the ’89 series lasted over 115, so maybe if you add in all of the one-shots and specials over the years you get 200, maybe? And why would you do this…? That I can’t even guess. At any rate, this overs-ized, $5 book will feature two different stories. Marc Guggenheim and Dave Wilkins re-do the ending of Siege, so that Norman Osborn beats Asgard but must then face Doctor Doom, while original Fantastic Four writer Stan Lee teams with recent Fantastic Four artist Dale Eaglesham for a story in which The Watcher takes down Galactus.
You can see a preview here.

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