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

KEY:

% Run the mission

^ Don't get seen

* See

¢ Swim away from the Mission

^ DAREDEVIL #10

Paolo Rivera draws the fantastic quasi-Dore cover, as well as the Mark Waid-written story inside, which wraps up the Mole Man sequence. I love the way this series keeps finding new ways to embrace the past thirty years of Daredevil while being completely unlike it.* THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN DISINTERRED #3

David Hine and Shaky Kane's miniseries about the kinds of feverish fantasies that are bred by cheap old comics bubbles onward. People with eyeballs for heads are always cool.

% THE FLASH #7

If all the New 52 titles were as elegantly executed as Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato's Flash, they'd be a lot easier to admire as a line. Manapul and Buccellato's take on the series isn't flashy or particularly interested in pushing it into new territory, but it's got real thought behind its tone and its aesthetics, and it's always a pleasure to look at. This issue involves Captain Cold, because that's who shows up in Flash comics.

* % ¢ 2000 AD #1769

The one issue of 2000 AD on which both the Diamond Comics Distribution and Midtown Comics shipping lists agree this week sees all five of the current serials (Judge Dredd, Absalom, Strontium Dog, Grey Area and Nikolai Dante) in mid-story. Diamond's list also includes #1771 (the 35th anniversary issue, which sports a pretty wonderful Chris Weston cover--"a love letter to the second Golden Age of 2000 AD"--and has the same five right-in-the-middle-of-things serials augmented by a couple of peculiar "what if"-type one-offs concerning former 2KAD characters Rogue Trooper and the Visible Man), but not #1770. How hard can it be to ship issues of a weekly series in order?

^ ¢ NEW AVENGERS #23

Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato wrap up the Dark Avengers storyline, at least for this iteration of the Dark Avengers. Also this week: Avengers #24.1, by Bendis and Brandon Peterson, and the inevitable Avengers Vs. X-Men #0, by Bendis, Jason Aaron and Frank Cho, as previewed in pretty much everything with a Marvel logo in the past month.

¢ ROGER LANGRIDGE'S SNARKED! #6

I keep pressing Langridge's all-ages post-Lewis Carroll adventure on people, and they keep reading a few pages and giggling out loud and then asking me where they can find copies. This episode of the current nautical storyline--in the manner of most Boom! books, I suspect the series will continue to break down in four-issue chunks--is called "Yo Ho Ho and a Nice Cup of Tea."

^ % SECRET AVENGERS VOL. 3: RUN THE MISSION, DON'T GET SEEN, SAVE THE WORLD

Warren Ellis's most recent venture into superhero-mainstream comics, a variation on the formula he tried out in Global Frequency, collected as a $25 hardcover: issues #16-21, respectively drawn by Jamie McKelvie, Kev Walker, David Aja, Michael Lark, Alex Maleev and Stuart Immonen. That Aja issue is nice.

¢ UNDERTOW

Ellen Lindner's thoughtful, scrappy graphic novel from a few years ago, concerning a young woman's weekend experiencing the darker side of both youth and Coney Island in the '50s, reappears in hardcover, from the new U.K. press Soaring Penguin. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

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