Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:

* Diving from above

^ Rising from below

% Sidling from sideways

^ % BATWOMAN VOL. 1: HYDROLOGY

J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman's version of this series has turned out to be really different in tone from the Greg Rucka/Williams version collected in Elegy--this is effectively a supernatural suspense story--but I'm enjoying it too. Speaking of Williams, this week also sees Seven Soldiers of Victory vol. 2--the $30 paperback reprint of the second half of the Grant Morrison-written project from a few years back, in which he provides the tour de force art for the closing chapter. And speaking of Seven Soldiers artists, Frazer Irving draws this week's Shade #9, written by James Robinson.

* ^ % THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN DISINTERRED #5

I'm guessing from the description that this issue of David Hine and Shaky Kane's increasingly unmoored-from-the-rigors-of-plot, increasingly wonderful salute to garage-sale back issue piles is some kind of riff on war comics and "Mars Attacks!"

* DC COMICS PRESENTS: SUPERMAN ADVENTURES #1

I'm generally a Mark Millar skeptic these days, but if you'd like to see what his writing's kind of whizz-bang enthusiasm looks like without nastiness or cynicism riding on its back, I direct your attention to his entirely charming late-'90s run on Superman Adventures, the first four issues of which are reprinted here for eight bucks. (And while you're rooting around in that particular back issue bin, may I point out that Scott McCloud also wrote a year's worth of that series?)

^ THE MASSIVE #1

Brian Wood has been describing his and Kristian Donaldson's new, ongoing series about a ship full of postapocalyptic environmentalists as part of the beginning of "the second major phase of his career." It's not quite clear what that means, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

* % SPIDER-MEN #1

The heavily hyped 616/Ultimate crossover by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli; I suppose after this long there's no longer a point in pretending that Ultimate is its own new-reader-friendly standalone continuity. Also this week in the Bendis department: Avengers #27 (drawn by Walter Simonson) and Avengers Assemble #4 (drawn by his old Ultimate Spider-Man collaborator Mark Bagley).

^ % 2000 AD #1782/1783

Those are the issues that Midtown Comics' site claims we're getting this week; per Diamond, it's #1779-1781. Anyway, these two issues continue John Wagner and Colin MacNeil's Judge Dredd serial "Eve of Destruction" (part of the 40-plus-week buildup to "Day of Chaos," which begins in #1786), as well as Alan Grant and Steve Yeowell's retro-ish "Cadet Anderson: Algol," Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing's bizarre "The Zaucer of Zilk," and more.

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