Dark Horse

Thanks to their respective billion dollar movie franchises, people everywhere are familiar with the superhero universes of Marvel and DC. But the Golden and Silver Ages of comics were boom periods for the superhero genre, with dozens of publishers trying their hands at the hot new genre, including Gold Key Comics. The heroes of Gold Key never quite gained a permanent foothold in pop culture consciousness, but they've proved surprisingly resilient, and they're about to be reintroduced once again via Dynamite Entertainment's new series The Sovereigns as well as the recently announced new Magnus series. Here's everything you need to know about the history of the Gold Key heroes.

The question most often asked of the ComicsAlliance staff is a variation of, “Which comic books should I be reading?” or, “I’m new to comics, what’s a good place to start?” The Wednesday deluge of new comic books, graphic novels and collected editions can be daunting even for the longtime reader, much less for those totally unfamiliar with creators, characters and publishers, and the dark mysteries of comic book shopping like variants, pre-ordering, and formats. It’s with these challenges in mind that we’ve created Best Comic Books Ever (This Week), an ongoing guide curated by the ComicsAlliance staff. This is where new comics readers and seasoned Wednesday shoppers alike can find our picks of the best books the medium has to offer.

I've never been a huge Masters of the Universe fan. I mean, not since I was seven or eight years old. I've never bought a figure as an adult; I don't even read the current comics, although I've considered it. But the toys, and the comics they came with, were really important to me as a child, and I'm certainly not above nostalgia. So I was happy to receive the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Minicomic Collection from Dark Horse for my recent birthday.

Lobster Johnson stories are always fun, whether it's in the present day where he continues his adventures as a ghost, the past as a pulp hero, or in-between as a fictional character within the Mignolaverse. He's someone you can pretty much do anything with. In that vein, ComicsAlliance has an exclusive preview of Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and Tonci Zonjic's Lobster Johnson: The Pirate's Curse #1, on sale next week from Dark Horse.

Some monsters are surprisingly small, no bigger than a person or smaller still. They intimidate psychologically or with supernatural powers, not with size and strength. But then there are monsters that are big. Giant monsters are easy to understand. They are to humans what we are to ants, and we all know all too well how many ants we've stepped on. With Monsters Unleashed going on at Marvel, and Kong: Skull Island currently in theaters, this feels like a great time to pay tribute to the various giant beasts and kaiju that have graced the covers of comic books for about as long as comics have existed.

While Mike Mignola may have officially put an end to the adventures of Hellboy, the prolific creator has established a living, breathing universe over the past twenty-plus years and its one that shows no signs of slowing down. ComicsAlliance has the exclusive reveal of June's crop of Mignolaverse titles, including The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed and a huge prose collection featuring stories by Chelsea Cain, Delilah Dawson and Chris Roberson.

For as long as there have been comic books full of men and women dressed in bright colors performing heroic deeds, there have been comic books involving giant mutant gorillas standing in their way. It was established in the Silver Age that if you put a gorilla on the cover, you would sell more copies of that comic, so there's a wealth of amazing covers with noble apes front-and-center. This gallery collects some of the best.

Dark Horse's American Gods adaptation is one of the biggest comics of the year, and it's no surprise that some of the best comics in the industry are turning up to provide variant covers for the series by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell and Scott Hampton. With the first issue out next week and the television show premiering soon, ComicsAlliance has the exclusive reveal of Bill Sienkiewicz's cover to American Gods: Shadows #2.

Zodiac Starforce is a team of cosmically-powered teenage girls who starred in their own Dark Horse miniseries by writer Kevin Panetta and artist Paulina Ganucheau back in 2015. And their returning for another series this summer, Zodiac Starforce: Cries of the Fire Prince. Panetta and Ganucheau have been promising that the Magical Girl-inspired team would return ever since the first series ended, but it's exciting to finally hear the date and title from Dark Horse.

The question most often asked of the ComicsAlliance staff is a variation of, “Which comic books should I be reading?” or, “I’m new to comics, what’s a good place to start?” The Wednesday deluge of new comic books, graphic novels and collected editions can be daunting even for the longtime reader, much less for those totally unfamiliar with creators, characters and publishers, and the dark mysteries of comic book shopping like variants, pre-ordering, and formats. It’s with these challenges in mind that we’ve created Best Comic Books Ever (This Week), an ongoing guide curated by the ComicsAlliance staff. This is where new comics readers and seasoned Wednesday shoppers alike can find our picks of the best books the medium has to offer.