Tom Derenick

Things are looking dire for Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman '77 Chapter 22, the digital-first series from writer Marc Andreyko and artist Tom Derenick that recently came back from hiatus. Steve's body has been taken over by the brain of a supervillain, and Wonder Woman is trapped between his psionic attacks and the guns of her supposed allies, who aren't as concerned with Steve's safety as she is.

DC's latest promotional comic for KFC is a sequel to last year's "The Colonel of Two Worlds," in which Colonel Sanders teamed up with the Flash to fight Colonel Sunder, his evil counterpart from Earth-3. It involves an attack from Sunder that causes eleven of the Colonels Sanders of the Multiverse to each forget all but one of the Eleven Secret Herbs and Spices, meaning that they have to all team up to remember how to make fried chicken, including the Colonel Sanders of the Kingdom Come universe or the far-off future of the Legion of Superheroes. It posits that Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken are multiversal constants within the construct posited by Multiversity and Convergence, on par with Superman and Batman. And it is the single best DC comic of the year.

The comic adaptation of Injustice: Gods Among Us has proved to be one of the biggest, most reliable hits for DC Comics over the past few years and remains the cornerstone of the company's digital publishing arm. The series tells the story of the five years between the death of Lois Lane at the hands of The Joker, and the events of the video game, revealing the details of Superman’s rise to power and Batman’s attempt to resist his regime. As Injustice heads towards its conclusion, DC has provided us with an exclusive preview of the upcoming Chapter Eighteen.

A line-wide relaunch provides a great opportunity for a publisher to take a look at the visuals of their books, specifically costumes and decide what needs tweaking, changing and updating. We’ve already seen new looks for Batman, Deathstroke and Birds of Prey but today artist Tom Derenick posted on his Facebook page a detailed design sheet for the new look Superman post-Rebirth and in true ComicsAlliance tradition, we’re going to pick apart and analyze it see what works and what doesn’t.

Gail Simone’s return to Secret Six in The New 52 has gone by without much notice. As good as it is, there hasn’t been as much of an outpouring of love and support as the previous volumes received. Yet with classic Secret Six characters like Catman and Black Alice mixing it up with New 52 creations such as Strix or Porcelain, it’s still just as good as you remember. And hiding in plain sight the whole time was one character that readers know only too well from an earlier DC era. In the book's most recent issue, by Simone, Dale Eaglesham, Tom Derenick and Jason Wright, we fnally saw him spring back into the form we know and love.

A more appropriate name for DC Comics' Convergence event, at least the miniseries that will accompany the main series for two months next spring, may be "Nostalgia Trip." DC has been rolling out titles and creative teams for the 40 planned series week by week. The first batch focused on the publisher's pre-New 52 continuity. The second focused on the 1990s (including WildStorm), and the third seemed to center on the 1980s. The fourth and final group of miniseries, which DC announced Tuesday, covers a much wider time period: All of DC's pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths continuity. And there's another twist: They all take place on defined and listed alternate Earths which existed before the company's last line-wide reboot in the 1980s.

When DC Comics launched its "New 52" Universe a few years back, Suicide Squad was pretty much the bottom of a barrel that wasn't really in good shape to begin with. Despite being an attempt to revive one of the best, most elegantly crafted and thought-provoking superhero books of the 1980s, the New 52 version was a noisy, soulless mess that ended up doing almost irreparable damage to characters like Harley Quinn in the name of making something more extreme, in a true late '90s Juggalo sense of the word. When the series was finally canceled and relaunched, I honestly wasn't expecting it to get any better, especially since the new lineup included the addition of one of the worst new DC characters of the past several years. But we're two issues into what writer Sean Ryan (and about 27 artists so far) is doing with the re-relaunched title, New Suicide Squad, and while I'm not sure, I think it might actually be the smartest team book DC's putting out.