Ryan Ferrier

Over the past few weeks, HBO's new hit series Westworld has captivated a viewership with its complex tale morality play of gods, men and machines. As great as Westworld is, it's only on for one hour a week, and soon it'll reach the season finale. If you need more of that good machines-achieving-sentience action, we've selected five of the best robotic comics for you to sample next. Love that? Try this.

Yesterday, Fabian Rangel Jr and Javier Caba launched a Kickstarter for their upcoming original graphic novel Blood Brothers (Los Hermanos Sangre); today we learn that the comic is just the first part of a much larger plan, as a number of popular independent creators have come together to launch self-publishing imprint Two-Headed Press, or 2HP.

On June 12th, 2016, a gunman entered the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and killed forty-nine people, as well as wounding fifty-three more. It was the biggest terror attack on American soil since September 11th, and a purposeful attack on predominantly Latinx gay and bisexual men in what was supposed to be a safe space. This December, DC Comics and IDW are coming together to publish an anthology titled Love Is Love, which sees over one hundred comics creators coming together to contribute stories, with all proceeds going to Equality Florida and the fund to benefit the survivors of the attack.

Every now and then, a comic comes along with a title so great that you just have to sit there for a moment wondering why no one has used it before. This week, we got the latest entry in that canon with the announcement of Hot Damn, a new four-issue miniseries from Ryan Ferrier and Valentin Ramon, the creators of IDW's D4VE. Set for release in April, Hot Damn is a look at the afterlife, and as you might expect from the title (and the goat with the pentagram on its head in the image above), it's not the one with the harps and fluffy clouds. Instead, a young man finds himself condemned to eternal damnation, but not the kind he's ever heard of before. Check out the exclusive reveal of the cover and more information below!

In Ryan Ferrier and Devaki Neogi's Curb Stomp, a gang of five women called the Fever protect their home turf from outside crews, stemming the flow of guns and drugs into Old Beach. When two rival gangs make a deal to push them out of their home, leader Machete Betty makes a decision that she regrets, pushing the Fever into a war they wanted nothing to do with. Comparisons with The Warriors are inevitable, but Curb Stomp stands on its own as a story that transcends the exploitation genre.

This week, Boom! Studios announced Curb Stomp, a new four-issue miniseries from the team of Ryan Ferrier, Devaki Neogi and Neil Lalonde. Taking place in a city divided up by four gangs, Curb Stomp shows what happens when the five women who make up one of those gangs, the Fever, are pushed into a war by an act of violence meant to defend their turf. On sale in February, issue one comes with cover art by Tula Lotay, Trevor Hairsine and Marie Bergeron. Curb Stomp arrives in the midst of comics readers' increasingly vocal desire for more diverse stories featuring women protagonists. Boom! has been attempting to service this audience with books like Lumberjanes, Bee and Puppycat and Butterfly, and Curb Stomp would seem to speak to the call for more strong, action-based heroines in particular. With that in mind we spoke to Ferrier and Neogi about the feeling that they're trying to get from the series, the challenge of designing characters for a life of brutal violence, and just why it is that the gang is called "The Fever."

Grant Morrison has been talking about his film passion project, a psychedelic Western called Sinatoro, since at least 2010. It was even promoted with a poster. But the writer's screenplay has ended up taking the route so many projects take on the way to becoming movies: It will be a comic first. Morrison will work with artist Vanesa Del Rey on the series, which will come out some time next year from Black Mask Studios, the comics and transmedia company launched last year by comics artist Ben Templesmith, writer Steve Niles, Bad Religion guitarist/songwriter Brett Gurewitz and Matt Pizzolo of Occupy Comics. It's one piece of a big and not too shabby slate of new comics coming from the publisher in the next year, the highlights of which you can check out below.

Book titles are a tricky business. Trying to sum up the essence of your work in a few simple words that intrigue and encapsulate can often be the hardest part of creating something original. Writer Ryan Ferrier (Terminals, The Brothers James) overcame this hurdle pretty easily with his latest comic about a tiger who is a lawyer -- he just went ahead and called it Tiger Lawyer...