Previews

The retro-TV adventures in DC's digital-first line just keep getting cooler, particularly in Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77. If you haven't been reading the crossover series by Marc Andreyko, Jeff Parker, and David Hahn, you've been missing out on a decades-spanning-epic. The story began in the 1940s, with WWII-era Wonder Woman meeting a young Bruce Wayne. Then it continued in 1966, with Batman and Robin following Ra's al Ghul's trail to Paradise Island. Here in Chapter Nine, available digitally March 22, the story jumps forward again, to 1977, as Wonder Woman rides her motorcycle to Gotham City in search of Batman. But this is a decade after Batman's heyday, and things have changed in the years since. Check out an exclusive preview of chapter nine.

Courtesy of DC Comics, ComicsAlliance brings you an advance look at new periodical comic books, collected editions, graphic novels and collectibles going on sale in June 2017 (and in some cases beyond) from the publisher’s superhero line, Gerard Way's Young Animal, and the mature readers Vertigo imprint.

Spinning out of Ta-Nehisi Coates' groundbreaking Black Panther comes The Crew, a new series co-written by Coates and his World of Wakanda collaborator, Yona Harvey, with art by the legendary Butch Guice. The team consists of Black Panther, Luke Cage, Storm, Misty Knight, and Manifold, who are investigating the death of a Harlem activist.

I don't want to be an armchair editor here or anything, but you'd think that if you're doing a story where Batman crosses the dimensional barrier from Gotham City to hang out in New York --- specifically the NYC that's home to the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles --- you'd have to take a page or two for him to ask questions, right? "Where are all the abandoned warehouses," he asks, scowling, "And why isn't there a single Playing Card And Chemical Factory on the entire island of Manhattan? And why are your sewers so... livable?!"

Justin Jordan and Ibrahim Moustafa's Savage Things continues a trend of recent Vertigo titles by breathing new life into the once ailing imprint, and the blacker-than-black-ops chaos is already riveting to behold, even one issue in. In the second issue --- out next month --- Abel is questioned over his role in the Black Forest program, and we have a preview of the interrogation.

Something that's been overlooked pretty often since the big Archie Reboot is that the company is still publishing stories featuring the classic, gag-centric versions of the characters. It's publishing a lot of them, actually --- every single Archie Digest features a new lead story about the gang, and in 2016, that amounted to over 300 pages of new material in that classic Archie style. Now, it's all being collected in the Archie: Best of 2016 Digest Annual, a 348-page digital collection out next week. Check out a preview.

The ResurrXion is less than a month away, and we've got a look inside the first issue of X-Men Blue, the new book about the time-displaced founding X-Men, written by Cullen Bunn with art by Jorge Molina. All the press around ResurrXion has been about taking the X-Men back to their roots as supheroes, and that's definitely going on here, with the team leaping out of a Blackbird jet to stop a robbery on board a luxury yacht. And the thief turns out to be a classic X-Men villain, to boot.

For fifty issues, X-O Manowar was arguably the crown jewel of the Valiant Universe. It was the longest-running title, the book that introduced concepts like the Vine and even Ninjak to the larger universe, and it set the tone of smart superheroics that has defined the line ever since its relaunch. After it ended, I think we all knew that there would absolutely be another take coming along soon, but Robert Venditti, Cary Nord, and company definitely left a hard act to follow. But when X-O Manowar returns next week, that's exactly what Matt Kindt, Tomas Giorello, and Diego Rodriguez are setting out to do with the launch of a massive epic spanning four story arcs that take Aric of Dacia out of retirement and into an alien world of war and conquest -- and you can read a preview!

If you've been following the current "Superman Reborn" crossover, you know that The Man of Tomorrow's entire world has been turned upside-down and inside-out by the revelations regarding his place in the DC Universe, but there's still more to come! Everything comes to a head with some major shocks and surprises in week's Action Comics #975 by Dan Jurgens, Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza, Christian Alamy, Trevor Scott, Wil Quintana and Rob Leigh, and we have an exclusive preview of the "Superman Reborn" finale.

Back when they first announced it, Valiant referred to Matt Kindt and Cafu's upcoming Rapture as "Lord of the Rings for the Valiant universe." It's designed as a fantasy epic sprawling across four issues, building on the mythology of the Deadside and exploring a shadowy world of demonic fantasy and a war against Heaven itself. But if we're going to be real here, I think there's a chance that it might actually end up being better than Lord of the Rings. I mean, Lord of the Rings doesn't have Ninjak jump-kicking skeletons, now does it?