Previews

It's not all fun in the sun for Jem and the Holograms at the moment, because even though they're enjoying the sandy beaches of Hawaii, there's a dark storm clouds of emotion hovering over everyone, threatening to ruin their fun. It all comes to a head with Kelly Thompson, Gisele Lagace, W. Victoria Robado and Shawn Lee's Jem and the Hologram's #25 as secrets are revealed, but do they offer transparency or treachery?

Who is Shade, and where does she come from? We already knew she was originally a birdlike alien from the planet Meta, but it's always seemed like there might be more to the story. Especially since most Metans, like the original male Shade, look like humans, instead of having feathers and beaks. Now, in Shade the Changing Girl #7, by Cecil Castellucci and Marguerite Sauvage, we finally learn a lot more of the story. Check out an exclusive preview!

Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt's The Wild Storm has so far lived up to its promise of reinventing the familiar through the most modern and forward thinking of lenses, creating a global spy conspiracy that brings together fan-favorite characters like Grifter, Voodoo and The Engineer. Next week sees the release of The Wild Storm #3, which features the return of one of Ellis' most popular creations, Jenny Sparks, radically re-imagined for a millennial age, and we have a preview of Jenny's new powers in action.

After a video of "The Jugheads" playing a song about how much they love to eat hamburgers becomes a worldwide smash, Riverdale's favorite teenagers are transformed into unwilling Internet superstars, and it's up to one Forsythe Pendleton Jones III to fix everything before it ruins everyone's life forever. Check out an exclusive preview!

Lenore, the "cute little dead girl" who starred in a bunch of hilariously gory and humorously horrific indie comics by Roman Dirge back in the '90s and early 2000s, has clawed her way out of the ground and back into print in The Bloody Best of Lenore, a new hardcover collection from Titan Comics to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the character.

As much as it might be the story of an unstoppable crime-fighter in a colorful costume who's occasionally called on to deal with world-shattering cosmic threats, I think it's fair to say that Judge Dredd isn't really a superhero comic. I'm not sure what the line is, but there's just something about him that separates Mega City One's most famous lawman from his more traditionally justice-minded cousins --- and never has that distinction been more evident than in the pages of Judge Dredd: The Cape & Cowl Crimes. Set for release on April 11, the new paperback collects 160 pages of classic stories of Dredd dealing with costumed vigilantes, and you can read the entire first chapter --- in which Dredd has an encounter with the moderately super, mildly bulletproof Fairlyhyperman --- below right now!

The current Venom series has been a bit of an enigma. It doesn't quite explain what happened to Flash Thompson, and has flipped the roles a bit to the point that the new host, Lee Price, is a bad egg who wants to do crimes, and the symbiote is the angel on his shoulder, trying to convince him not to. However everything changes next month as the original Venom, Eddie Brock, returns to the comic, and potentially returns to the role. Check out a first look at Mike Costa and Gerardo Sandoval's Venom #6.

Last year, Britannia --- the prestige murder mystery miniseries set in Ancient Rome, from Peter Milligan and Juan Jose Ryp --- took a lot of people by surprise, but showed that Valiant remains a publisher that'll keep you guessing with the genres and conventions it'll pull out of its hat. Next month, Rome's first and only detective, Antonius Axia, returns for a new mystery and Valiant have provided us a preview of the first issue.

The full-color history of comic books continues in IDW's The Comics Book History of Comics #5, by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. This issue covers American comics from 1955 to 1965, which is an incredibly eventful decade. That takes us from the dawning of the Silver Age at DC Comics, through the birth of the Marvel Universe, and also the beginning of Underground Comix, as the issue incorporates the biography of a young man named Robert Crumb.

There's nothing wrong with being a property that was designed to sell toys in the 1980s. Plenty of today's beloved properties started out that way, especially the ones being published by IDW. But MASK: Mobile Armored Strike Kommand has always felt almost comically toyetic to me: Good and evil teams who wear special helmets that give them powers and ride in vehicles that transform into other vehicles. However, as we see in this preview from MASK #4, writer Brandon Easton and artist Tony Vargas have found the key to rising above that problem and making their characters feel like people: family melodrama.