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Womenswear in superhero costumes hasn’t always been about skintight, sexy unitards. In the early Silver Age of comics, readers saw the inception of the mystically-inspired heroine; one imbued with passive or non-contact abilities such as invisibility, telepathy, or magic. Especially common at Marvel, these mystic or faux-mystic heroines offered a contrast to the superhero brute force of their male colleagues, but they also had something else in common; the headdress.

There’s an anecdote told in a trade for DC’s weekly series 52. In an issue halfway through the run, Phil Jimenez was given a page breakdown from Keith Giffen that asked him to draw seven statues of fallen members of the JLA as part of the background, as a visual reminder of all that the team had lost over the years. Jimenez, taking a look at this breakdown, presumably nodded to himself that this was a good idea, and included every single deceased member of the JLA who had ever existed in the scene instead.

Tomb of Dracula came out of Marvel between 1972 and 1979: start date, one year after the CCA let up on vampires. This was a year after Hammer’s increasingly psychological Karnstein Trilogy wrapped up with Twins of Evil, and the same year (obviously) that the studio released Dracula AD 1972. While Christopher Lee grew ever more dissatisfied with what he saw as his Dracula’s creep towards absurdity, Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman (along with Gerry Conway, Archie Goodwin and Gardner Fox) created a Gothic masterpiece in the comics; a soap opera that doubled as a perfect and precise character study. Dracula’s got problems, and he’s at the root of every one.

Emma Frost is stylish. Allegedly. I mean, that’s what I’ve been told, over and over again, by the dudes who write and draw her. She’s a scion of the Boston brahmins! She attends the swankest parties, given by the crustiest of the upper crust! She loves to feel sexy — in ways that just happen to coincide with the most thuddingly obvious fanboy desires! So classy! So urbane! Truly, what modern woman doesn’t consider what appears to be a $29.99 plastic corset from a strip mall sex shop the height of empowered glamour? Emma Frost has a wardrobe problem.

Daredevil as the world's greatest cook. It's hard to resist that one-line pitch, so when 'Hell's Kitchen', written by Si Spurrier and drawn by Jonathan Marks, cropped up in solicitations of Secret Wars Journal #2, I started salivating onto my keyboard. Cookery! Puns! Matt Murdock in chef's whites! It's exactly the kind of high-concept silliness I want from my alternate-universe superhero crossovers, and an all-too-rare chance to delve into the fourth and fifth senses of comics' most famous blind person.

A few days ago DC casually outed two characters that everybody had always thought were a couple, even if it had never been actually stated on-panel anywhere. Responding to the question, "Are Harley and Ivy girlfriends?" the official DC Twitter account confirmed: "Yes, they are Girlfriends without the jealousy of monogamy." That's a breakthrough of sorts, but it’s not as though DC could do anything but confirm the relationship, at this point! The best creative team in comics could tell a decade-long story in which Harley falls in love and marries a man, has kids, and settles down into monogamy, and fans would still stoke the fires driving the Harley/Ivy ship onwards.

The things about The Sandman that I recall the most fondly aren't what most others think of. In my experience, an overwhelming percentage of readers are quick to talk about the characters, or the strength of writer Neil Gaiman's voice. I definitely can't argue against either of those, but what I really appreciated about The Sandman was Gaiman and his artists' ingeniously subtle tricks with symbolism and structure. The big points were always echoed in some very clever ways that never disrupted the natural flow of the story to point out how ornate the plot actually was. Gaiman and J.H. Williams III have managed to condense pretty much all the major themes of the seventy-five issue run of The Sandman into The Sandman: Overture.

The recent free eight-page preview for DC's upcoming Cyborg series by David F. Walker and Ivan Reis revealed a significant change for title character Victor Stone; after having his cybernetic arms severed and his life ended by rampaging monsters, the three-quarters mechanical hero came back to life with new, more human-looking limbs. To some readers it might seem a mere cosmetic makeover, but the change may have deeper implications. To understand why, it's helpful to understand how Cyborg is regarded by black critics.

Comics carry a sense of physical prestige. When you pick one up from the shelf, it usually isn’t just lying there, blowing in the wind – it’s often wrapped up in a too-tight plastic bag, boarded with a thin piece of cardboard to ensure you don’t crease a single hair on Superman’s immaculate head. The experience is designed to make you consider each comic as a precious item, something best kept mint so you can sell it and get your grandkids through college in a few decades from now. The thing is, sometimes we need to be reminded that comics are not immaculate, and actually there’s no reason not to mess them up a little in the course of reading. Some of the most enjoyable moments in comics over the last few years have been those moment where the storytellers step back, wave an arm towards the story they’re telling, and say, “Hey, let’s take a pair of scissors to this, eh?”

John Allison and Lissa Treiman's Giant Days is a lot of things: fun, entertaining, silly, cute... but it also offers some interesting commentary on the world of the internet in issue 3. The gang at the center of Giant Days (Esther, Daisy, and Susan) encounter some crappy times with the internet that are all too reminiscent of real women's dealings with internet creeps. The story is handled with just enough humor and sincerity to make it thoughtful without being preachy. Spoilers ahead!