jonathan hickman

Secret Wars by Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribic and Ive Svorcina is about as fantastical and traditionally superheroic a story as we're likely to cover in this column. However, when you break it apart and look at the pieces, there's a certain parallel to the state of the world as it stands today that's interesting to note, and it reminds us that men with the most power are usually the sorest losers, even when they think they've won.

Jonathan Hickman described his upcoming Image series as "like Star Trek, but super depressing." Star Trek, of course, has historically been about a utopian future where humanity has solved Earth's problems and expanded outward into the cosmos, uniting with other advanced planets to spread civilization across the galaxy. In the future Hickman portrays in Frontier, that plan has apparently not gone so well.

AMC’s adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Vertigo series Preacher is proving to be very popular with audiences, despite the many tweaks and changes that the television series has made to the original comic’s story. The tale of Jesse Custer, Tulip O’Hare, and Cassidy has proven to be more adaptable and malleable than many fans may have thought, and the new approach to the show’s core concept opens up different avenues to update the classic Western tale. If you love Preacher and you already know the comic from cover to cover, we’ve got five of the best independent comics for you to try next that tackle similar themes of cowboys, vampires, and how humanity relates when faced with a god.

The Flash has been one of the most consistently enjoyable and downright fun comic book adaptations since it debuted, and more than most of its peers it is blisteringly unafraid to embrace its comic book origins. In the space of two seasons we've got multiverses, time travel, and an honest-to-gosh Gorilla City, and it paved the way for shows like Arrow and Gotham to lighten up and have more fun. With no new episodes of The Flash until later this year, you might be looking for something to fill that science-based superhero hole in your life, and we've got five great independent comics for you that, while they might not all feature a super-speedster punching a gorilla in the face, do live up to The Flash's absurdity and unrelenting inventiveness in one way or another!

Doctor Doom first appeared in Fantastic Four #5 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Sinnott and Stan Goldberg, published on April 10 1961. One of the most iconic villains in comic book history, Victor Von Doom has always remained steadfast in his goals: Take over the world for its own benefit, and kill Reed Richards along the way, if there's time.

Jonathan Hickman’s creator owned work is known for tackling big, often metaphysical concepts such as the nature of media as propaganda, the transcendence of humanity beyond the limitations of the human form and the death and destruction of the entire world at the hands of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. His new series The Black Monday Murders with Tomm Coker, Michael Garland and Rus Wooton, announced today at Image Expo, takes things a bit simpler and is all about rival schools of magic, but instead of magic they are financial institutions battling for supremacy following the global stock market crash of the late eighties.

The United States has split into separate sovereign territories who uneasily co-exist side-by-side as population grows, food supplies decrease and the world slowly creaks towards death. Oh, and three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse have returned to usher in the end a whole lot sooner, and the one person that stands against them is their brother, Death. That’s the premise of Jonathan Hickman, Nick Dragotta and Frank Martin’s East of West, published by Image, which has been running since 2013. It presents a very American apocalypse, as politicians plot and scheme their way through another day while the literal end of the world is right around the corner.

Back in March of 2015, a full-page advert appeared in the back of various DC comics, which asked; “Would you sacrifice another world so yours can live?” If you were following Jonathan Hickman's Avengers titles around the same time, you might have asked yourself, just for a moment: since when does Batgirl run ads for Marvel's next big event That question presents essentially the same set-up as Marvel's Secret Wars, which saw Reed Richards, Black Panther, and their Illuminati friends facing the threat of alternate Earths on a collision course with their own. Eventually, it all went wrong, and Dr Doom had to take the remnants of the multiverse and combine them into a single multi-dimensional world. Turning the page, the ad was revealed to be promoting Convergence, DC's own big event for 2015, and an entirely different story. In Convergence, an omnipotent villain pitches characters from disparate realities against one another in a multiversal battle royale. Each reality co-exists on a planet apparently of the villain's creation, a kind of 'battle-world'. Oh, hang on...

Starbrand & Nightmask. It sounds like a two-stage rejuvenating skincare treatment, but it's actually the title of Marvel's newly announced ongoing series from writer Greg Weisman and artist Dominike 'Domo' Stanton, starring former Avengers writer Jonathan Hickman's young Marvel Universe versions of two New Universe concepts. These are characters who used to spend their time wiping out alien armadas with a blink of an eye, now they'll be enrolling on university courses and going on adventures. It's all a little unexpected. Settle in, and I'll try to explain.

The Marvel Comics line is about mid-way through its giant line-wide crossover event Secret Wars, in which reality has been rewritten by god-emperor Doom, and the heroes have been re-imagined more than a dozen times over in different domains paying tribute to stories from throughout Marvel's publishing history. One of those domains is a version of House of M, another reality-rewriting crossover event that cast the Marvel heroes in different roles, which ran ten years ago. House of M launched the current era of Marvel events, kicking off a steady steam of universe-shaking storylines that continues into Secret Wars. To mark the tenth anniversary of House of M, and ten years of event-driven storytelling, we're asking you to determine which of these events was the very best.