Paring down characters and concepts to what's "cool," or "relatable," is a storytelling strategy that can only truly promise diminishing returns. Eventually, tastes change, forcing the reset button to be pressed, eventually, time after time. This series swerved in the other direction; Bendis and Immonen are playing the Greatest Hits, but remastered and remixed. Even planets and galaxies away, the X-Men are outcasts in worlds that hate and fear them, relying on the compassion and wherewithal of friends, family and sympathizers for survival. It's the same old story, but it's never been newer.

Dan Slott balances the cast of Wall-Crawlers very well, keeping the focus on our lead but giving space and respect to every Spider-Man, -Woman and -Child in case that version is a reader's favorite. Oliver Coipel, Wade von Grawbadger and Justin Ponsor bring tremendous energy to the visuals, bringing a grandiosity befitting the event.

Plots come and go. They are only engaging for as long as you are engaged in the tale's telling. The ideas that sustain them, however, endure. We take them with us, outside of our stories. Like the biggest of ideas, the best fiction can annihilate our very real expectations.

AXIS #3 marks the end of The Red Supremacy, Book One of the crossover. We've seen the wheel turns on its, y'know, axis, and now the bad guys seem good and the good guys seem maybe not as much. This series doesn't seem like a deep exploration of heroism in the Marvel Universe, or a particularly well-reasoned conflict between two teams of heroes. It's just an excuse to dump all of Marvel's toys out of the toybox, and play with them. Thematic justification of the fun is this story's last priority. It's just a lot of stuff going on, a lot of players on the board. I'm okay with it - you don't go to White Castle trying to order the ribeye.

n icon is forced to only play the greatest hits, and to relive past glories. A pop star, though, couples their catalog full of smashes with the vital promise of many years more to come. Batman tops the charts.

I don't have a preference between caped crusader and dark detective. My favorite Batman stories are just the ones where he's got the steepest challenge. And the thing about Joker stories is they just seem to get steeper all the time.

Stories like Black Dynamite are eventually cast aside, relics of the world that births them. They may be disposable, but they're indispensable.

Starring archetypal characters that avoid the wrong side of clich, on a world where nothing is yet obvious but promises to reveal its most compelling traits in time, and moving in a direction that feels like we may know the route but couldn't possibly gauge the destination, Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein are off to a roaring start on their latest Image offering. Drifter is a book you inhale, though it will likely burn your lungs. It's a hard drink, but one that goes down oh so easy.

If Brubaker and Phillips have a shortcoming, it's that they can only put out one series at a time. As they shed light on the blood-inked writing on the wall, Fatale starts to look more and more like their greatest feat yet. They've married the crime noir that they made their bones on with Sleeper and Criminal with Lovecraftian horror without sacrificing any focus on character. These guys do work that elevates all genre fiction. The exacting precision with which they've orchestrated this entire story proves that these are creators whose conclusion will be a realization, not a mere finish.

Gotham Academy earns honors. Kerschl, Cloonan and Fletcher's storytelling is a breeze, and stands out not only from other comic books, but of commercial storytelling throughout popular media. It is a testament to the power of diversity, not only of representation, but of perspective and priority. That its flavor is so unique among its peers makes it a savory reward to enjoy. Maybe Gotham Academy's greatest lesson is that the extraordinarily normal kids of Batman's world have stories to tell that are as gripping as those of the Caped Crusader himself.

Not every movie has designs to be a box-office shattering blockbuster. Blockbusters are forced to make concessions in order to play to the cheap seats. This is why, sometimes, the most satisfying stories are the ones that accept their cult status at the outset, and go on to celebrate it. Celebrating the weirdness of their own specificity allows audiences to participate in it while also embracing their own. Sometimes, not being for everyone is the point.

There is a school of thought that says some comics are for kids and some are for "grown-ups." But strip away adult's desire to ascribe "meaning" to everything and kids' dismissive certainty about a world with which they are largely unfamiliar, and we see that the two parties commonality. A comic like Rocket Girl reminds us that the space in between the two is little more than a communication gap, waiting to be imaginatively bridged.

That's why Saga is so great. At the end of the day, it's about the all-together.

Your life is what you made it. Accepting the architect is the best way to accept the architecture. Probably.

Zdarsky and Fraction are redeeming the very idea of the sex comedy. It's important. And best of all, it relieves the tension.

Manhattan is a place to work, but Brooklyn is a place to live. Or, better yet, a place to work out of a home-office. Pulido, Soule, and Vicente's She-Hulk is funny, smart and professional. It's a book with the best kind of broad appeal.

That will come in time, of course, and as Shutter flashes on we are sure to learn more about Kate, her universe (multiverse?), her adventures, and why she gave them up. Distinct, lively and awash with fun details, Keatinge, Del Duca, Gieni and Image's new offering inspires the trait best paired with skepticism: curiosity.

Southern Bastards isn't a history lesson. There's no hot air hemming and hawing about its lofty sense of self. It's a book about action- actions taken and not- and the power of letting that action speak for itself. Inner turmoil, it turns out, is something that a place can experience just as well as a man. And legacy is turmoil's record book.

Maybe Starlight could have said something new if it had been less predictable. Perhaps there's something to be said about knowing that the space between you and your best days is only going to grow that has not yet been said. There could be a deep allegory made concerning the Tantalusians' need for inspiration from an interloper. Starlight doesn't really do much of that. Instead, it gives you exactly what it is; meat and potatoes sci-fi pulp. Predictability isn't so bad.

There's a lot of promise to this first issue. Everything from Rex to the take on L.A. to the frontal-lobe-attacking imagery is so wildly unpredictable that setting an expectation for the story feels pointless. It's ultra-engaging on a visual level. I wasn't sure if I was imagining a Nicktoons-y, Klasky Csupo quality to Callahan and Anderson's work until I saw what I'm sure was Reptar in a crowd shot, when the association cemented itself. The colors are vibrant, the character work is as funny as the situations, and the storytelling is clear. There's a lot of conversation around hackery in the story, but this one is utterly cohesive.

Thor is a woman, but Thor is still Thor. She is saving Asgardians, battling foul creatures from across the Nine Realms, standing against Dario Agger and the nefarious forces of his Roxxon corporation, and summoning the thunder. That's all I really want out of my Thor comics. The rest of it? Well, I'll just have to figure that out along with her.

Thor meets a drinking buddy. Thor makes a mess. And Thor learns about accountability. While Odin never shows his one-eyed face in this issue, its a story of fathers and sons and expectations. It manages to be genuinely poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Thor himself may not be worthy in this story, but it is certainly a tale worthy of Thor.

Someday, we won't have to have any more conversations about what to do about Wonder Woman. Why she's not better respected, or a bigger seller, or a bigger “star.” Her blockbuster movie will come, eventually. Female creators will get their turn to tell their stories through her, eventually. The world will catch up eventually, so until then we can just be inspired by the way Wonder Woman unites us, even through conflict.