Bergara’s skill with color, texture and character creation have made a great story into something truly excellent, breathing life into Hum and his companions with expressive faces, clothes and body language that convey a long history. The story has followed protagonist Hum through wild and weird lands full of astonishing, imaginative and deely detailed creatures. This week brings the final issue of Simon Spurrier and Matias Bergara’s fantasy epic Coda, which has defied expectations at nearly every turn.

Snyder and Capullo love upping the ante with every outing, and considering this may be there last with the Bat, count on it being big in every way.

The three-issue, bi-monthly DC Black Label release finds Bruce Wayne waking up young and rejuvenated in Arkham Asylum, with Joker’s severed head as a companion on his post-apocalyptic quest to figure out a reality where he was never Batman-and the world went to hell as a consequence. The duo went on to create the worlds-shattering Dark Nights: Metal event, and this week they’re reuniting for Batman: Last Knight on Earth, which is being billed as Snyder and Capullo’s final Batman story. Across five years and over 50 issues of Batman, Snyder and Capullo enshrined themselves among the most beloved Caped Crusader creative teams of all time, introducing frightening new foes like the Court of Owls, crafting unforgettable storylines like “Death of the Family” and even putting Jim Gordon in a mechanized Batman suit for an arc.

Batman helped lead the salvo, with then- Detective Comics writer Scott Snyder taking over the title alongside former Spawn artist Greg Capullo, who had been largely absent from mainstream superhero comics for years. In 2011, DC Comics launched an ambitious line-wide relaunch of 52 first issues, many of which reset character timelines or introduced new status quos for familiar favorites. What we do have, though, are major new launches for Batman, Superman and…DC’s Super Pets? We’ve also got original debuts like She Said Destory and Killer Groove, an unexpected Star Wars entry, a new Archaia joint, a Hellboy deep dive and more in this week’s Required Reading. DC Comics alone had some much going on this week that we didn’t have room for notables like the Heroes in Crisis conclusion, or the latest (long-delayed) chapter of Doomsday Clock. Now that summer is finally cooking (quite literally, depending on your zip code), publishers are starting to roll out their big guns.

Battlepug (2019) #1 by Mike Norton