Another win for DeConnick and Rocha. While I would've liked for Aqualad's confrontation with his father to be a bit more significant, the fact that it was Manta's own father, via the AI Manta himseld built, who ended up confronting Manta was also a stroke of genius. "I am a machine" he says over and over again, yet DeConnick makes us feel his pain even through his robotic repetition. Also, Rocha's redesign of Mera's outfit is gorgeous and I hope it doesn't go away once she's given birth. It's a bit less practical looking than Stjepan Sejic's design that skewed closer to Amber Heard's Mera, but the swaddling green fabric and the golden thigh highs Rocha came up with have a glorious simplicity all of its own.

Beautiful art, well rounded and charismatic characters, and whole lot of potential for horror - of which this issue doesn't have much, but it more than makes up for it with everything else.

Joe Hill is such an absolute bastard, he can make you feel sorry for the severed head of a rapist-murderer. Yes, that is the level. On other news, June is such a fully realised character, this series should never be read without a rain app in the background to make it scarier, and Vertigo, like Jesus, has risen from the dead and renamed itself Hill House Comics. Leomacs was an incredible find for DC, and I'm both excited for what he'll do with the rest of this series, as well as looking forward to whenever he gets his hands on a proper DCU book. I'm positively LOSING my head over this series. Get it? Because decapitation? Oh, whatever. Just do yourself a favour and buy this fucking book.

Somehow, James Tynion's done it: he's made me very interested in Punchline and how her journey will differ from Harley's. He also succesfully shows how different and mature Harley has become (well, mature in her own way.) Also, the Alfred hallucination sequences are a knife to the heart this time around, while still imbuing Bruce and the plot with hope. Lastly, as usual, Jimenez's art is gorgeous especially when paired with Tomeu Morey's beautiful colours.

It's a gorgeous-looking, extremely well written book but what most disturbs me about it is the scene between Joker and Red Hood. Somehow, Johns has given Jason Todd his most emotional moment in the span of a few pages than Jason's had in his entire Red Hood run for the past nine years in his own title.

Like the first Death Metal one shot, Guidebook is surprisingly additive to the main event while also throwing in some fun side stories that may not he crucial to the reader's understanding of Death Metal but do expand the world Snyder and co. are creating. The main story by Snyder, Tynion, Williamson and Mahnke is simultaneously the most important story while also the least interesting. It does what it needs to do by contextualizing how the Death Metal world came to be, and ends in an interesting cliffhanger. The pacing, however, was a bit too fast for me and ended up losing whatever emotional aspect it could've had. The Harley Quinn story by Zdarsky and Randolph is one of the silliest and most entertaining ones, and makes me hope that these two are the creative team for Harley's inevitable post-Death Metal relaunch. Becky Cloonan's Aquaman story looks gorgeous, as her art always does, and I really enjoyed the poetic writing as well as the context of what Arthur has been forced to endure since the Batman Who Laughs took over Earth Prime. Vita Ayala and Dan Panosian's Diana and Poison Ivy story is my favourite, as it turns an odd couple of characters into perhaps the most emotional moment Death Metal has provided yet. Panosian's art has also never looked better. Finally, Priest and Eduardo Risso's Batman and Jonah Hex story was a bit confusing what with all the talk about dangerous potential of milk, yet the constant dark reminder that "All Light Dies" paired with Risso's dreary and stylish art gave me chills from start to finish. The Black Lantern oath has sadly never been more relatable than in 2020.

"Nobody likes ya! Ya smell bad and ya got NO FRIENDS!" - Lobo This was AWESOME and should be a mini series

Well, here we are. A Death Metal tie in has made me cry so 2020 really can't be stopped at this point. Listen, if you love the DC Universe with all its pros and cons, the hope, the darkness, the perpetually broken continuity and the great stories that come from trying to fix it, and most of all the amazing characters that have endured for decades, you owe it to yourself to read this.

"Still guarding?" "Still guarding." "Good dog." Tom Taylor you BASTARD, I did not expect you to make me cry over talking dogs in a zombie story.

Tomasi/Walker: 5/10 Great art, pointless story - if one can even call it a story when really it's more of a Batman's rogues gallery recap. Bendis/Marquez: 10/10 Probably the best thing Bendis has done at DC so far outside of Naomi. Someone give him and Marquez a Batgirl ongoing STAT. Fraction/Zdarsky 10/10 Obviously. What did we expect? I'm a sucker for anytime Bruce and Joker get downright Freudian with each other, and this may be the best example of that yet. Also, honourable mention for Joker grafitting an alley with the following quote: "Every alley is a Crime Alley if you believe in yourself!" Indeed. Rucka/Risso 9/10 Again unsurprisingly great with a team like this, and a really topical and inspirational entry in this anthology. Tynion/Rossmo 9/10 A surprisingly sweet story that also happens to be spooky and action-y. Rossmo draws the cutest Robin I've seen. DeConnick/Romita Jr. 8/10 A nice short thriller that actually puts more focus on Bruce than it does Batman. Not groundbreaking, but very entertaining. Wolfman/Lupacchino 6/10 I didn't feel strongly about this one either way. It's not necessarily bad, but it's too compressed to be interesting. Feels like Wolfman tried to fit an annual's worth of plot into 15 pages, and the plot wasn't all that to begin with. Morrison/Burnham 8/10 A darkly hilarious tale of a poor concerned Gothamite who intends to be the saviour of his crime besieged city. Until he remembers, oh right, there's Batman. King/Simonson 8/10 It's a simple enough story, but as usual King manages to deconstruct Batman even in a few pages, and he uses a neat time-looping plot device to do it. You mileage will vary with whether or not you enjoy King's Batman. I mostly do. Snyder/Reis 10/10 Snyder makes the most out of a few pages to show just how deep the (super weird but also adorable) friendship between Batman and Gordon is. Jurgens/Nowlan 7/10 It's an interesting prelude to whatever shape the Generations event will finally take on next year, but I'm guessing it wasn't meant to be read as a one off because it doesn't really work well that way. Still it got me interested in Generations, which I guess is what it was meant to do. Tamaki/Mora 7/10 Saddled with tying into not only the ongoing Joker War, but also the next Tomasi Detective arc, Tamaki crafts a good story that probably isn't half as great as it could've been if she had been allowed to just do her own thing. Oh well. Overall, it's a great anthology with mostly amazing stories, a couple of mediocre ones, and a whole lot of creative teams I now wish had a little corner of the Batverse to call their own.

This is just a nice, done-in-one story that checks all the usual boxes. The trick here is to have master artist Nicola Scott on pencils, which instantly makes every single thing about it better.

Beautiful art, masterful worldbuilding, and a main character that you just can't help but root for immediately. Definite buy!

Del Duca and Filardi's art is gorgeous, and Watters' writing makes both Jon and Yara even more interesting than I already found them. Solaris, Jon's sassy cybernetic sun nemesis, is also an awesome villain. If there's one thing to be nitpicky about, it's just that as a Brazilian there are some language issues in Yara's storyline. One character is named Soasa - a last name that does not exist, but was probably meant to be Sousa - and São Paulo is mistakenly referred to as São Paolo once or twice. Yara also exclaims a sentence in Portuguese at one point that isn't something I've ever heard someone say, but I'll blame Google translate for that. Anyway, other than that this is another Future State winner.

The art is gorgeous, the banter is witty, and I'm very interested in the new Titans but the plot itself buckles under its own weight, as though trying to fit 6 issues into just 2. I'm hopeful Titans Academy will be a great book with this same team, but sadly there just didn't seem to be nearly enough space for this Future State story to breathe.

In which Constantine summons a porn demon stuck in his phone, finds out bouncers can have literature degrees, confronts a racist hobo, and has his dick complimented by someone who thirty seconds earlier held a knife to his balls. Spurrier and Campbell are absolutely killing it, but I must beg for one thing: PLEASE GET RID OF CONSTANTINE'S BUZZCUT. This nigh bald situation is bothering me something fierce, and I didn't spend $3.99 on this just so that I couldn't properly sexualize a fictional piece of shit British warlock like the horny idiot that I am. That said, you should all be reading this, even if I'm pretty sure Constantine having a near buzzcut may actually classify as terrorism.

While issue #1 hinted at darker goings on in Dr. Ben Arnell's life, issue #2 builds on it by telegraphing that something is definitely not right with the good doctor. At the very begining, while in a feverish nightmare of sorts, Joker asks Dr. Ben: "When you go mad, will you even realise it?" Indeed, will he? Will WE? Jeff Lemire is a wonderful writer as always, and while I wish we could've seen more of Ben's regular life before the twists of the issue happened, everything was executed very deftly. As for the art, while I'm not a huge Sorrentino fan, his is a perfect fit for a grounded horror book such as this one, especially with Jordie Bellaire's gorgeous colours. Killer Smile is a hauntingly glorious hoot, and while I have many theories as to where this is going in February's final issue, something tells me I'll just end up baffled and utterly creeped out.

Sorrentino's art was twisted, evocative, and spooky as always, and Lemire did a good job tying everything together, but I can't shake the feeling that this ending was a bit too predictable for the tale this incredible team was telling. Perhaps that will be rectified in the upcoming one shot in May, but for now, while I greatly enjoyed this series, it feels like a bit of a disappointment.

Not having read any past stories about the Black Mercy, I found Loveness' script quite chilling. From the very first page it's clear something is about to go very wrong, but Loveness cleverly intersperses the rising tension with interesting questions both about the Justice League's personal lives as well as their impact, good and bad, in the world. Rocha, Henriques and Fajardo Jr. clinch a great script with incredible art that is very DC house style but with a twist all its own. I'm glad this art team is staying on even after this filler arc is done.

Lucifer and Constantine together are such a fascinating match, but Watters' addition of a great cast of international hedonistic ghosts who engage in headless bisexual threeways and nazi tirades make it all the better. Blanco and Cunniffe's art is gorgeous, although I'd love to see what Blanco's pencils would look like if they weren't quite so thick. All in all, another win for Lucifer.

Another win for Hill House Comics! There's truly nobody out there like Joe Hill who can introduce a whole cast of characters, make you like all of them, set up the basic premise, and then start the ball rolling in the most interesting way possible. Immonen, obviously, is a master, and I hope he sticks around to do more Hill House books. As I only read DC I've never read any of Immonen's Marvel books, but his reputation preceeds him and it could not be more right. Read Plunge if you dare (and you SHOULD dare.)

King has said Rorshach is him pouring his anger at the current political landscape of America into a story. As someone who shares his rage, even the small snippets of that aspect of the story that we get in issue one were enough to get my blood boiling. The casual dismissal of fascism, an enormous poster that says "Come To The Conservative Revolution", the vaguely familiar campaign slogan of "America for Americans." King spends this introductory issue more concerned with the setup of this noir thriller, and he does it very well, but at its edges he is seething, and that's incredibly cathartic because so am I. Jorge Fornes provides his usually gorgeous, appropriately noir-style art that simultaneously fits with Gibbons' art in the original series while also being its own thing, and Dave Stewart's beautiful colours are the cherry on top. This is an auspicious beginning to a series that will have a lot of detractors simply by existing, but I for one can't wait to get deeper into this mystery and further into the rage.

Alanna is a fucking savage and I'd read an entire maxiseries purely consisting of this woman smirking at people while she chainsmokes and openly plots against them. On a more serious note, the mixture of political and war thriller King is weaving here is his best work since Omega Men and The Vision, and Gerads and Shaner give us outstanding art as always.

Tom Taylor gives us a great new squad full of personality, plus his usual apt handle on already well established characters such as Waller and Harley. A few emotional moments involving the new characters felt a bit unearned since we'd barely gotten to know them, but given Taylor's proclivity for fictitious bloodbaths there was no way everyone was coming out of this unscathed. Redondo and Lucas are an amazing art team as they've been since Injustice. The Squad is back, and I haven't been this excited for Task Force X in a long, long time!

In which plots are solved, then retroactively unsolved, a serial killer goes on a short-lived spiritual journey, Lex Luthor hates mysteries, Batman loves puns, and Superman does NOT want to hear any spoilers, thank you very much. There isn't much to say in the face of perfection, except for maybe, like, "woooah!". But then "woooah!" makes you sound either like a simpleton, a toddler, or both (a simpletoddler?) so let's just say Jimmy Olsen #6 is perfect. Fraction and Lieber are KILLING it, and if this book doesn't get at least nominated for an Eisner, SDCC can eat my Superman-themed shorts.

This rating is just for the main Joker story. The Punchline one is frankly just mediocre, but I haven't written it off completely yet.

Who knew that out of all the high fantasy offers out in the comic market right now - Image's amazing Die and Reaver, Marvel's 17 different Conan monthlies - DC would be the one coming out with the best offering? Phillip Kennedy Johnson has clearly crafted an extremely intricate world, yet he doesn't bog down the pacing with unecessary exposition. He gives you enough so that you're not lost, and then lets the tight plotting do the rest of the work. Riccardo Federicci's art is otherworldly in its beauty, complemented by Sunny Gho's gorgeous colours. This is truly the pinnacle of what a fantasy comic can achieve, and I just hope its sales reflect that.

I was so excited to fall in love with The Low, Low Woods, so it frankly quite sucks that it just ended up being very "meh". The other Hill House comics already out have blown me away every issue, but this one just wasn't it. It's a highly expository issue with little meat to its bones - art and writing wise. The two main characters, Vee and El, are endearing but we don't get much insight into them and the little we get isn't enough. Their predicament is potentially interesting, but the pacing is tediously slow and the art was too lacking in detail to do the heavy lifting while the plot meandered. The cliffhanger at the end is so bizarrely vague I thought I was missing pages for a second. Again, I'm not happy I feel this way about it, and judging by critics reviews I'm in the minority. I'll give it one more issue because I REALLY want to like this and I'd love to support all the Hill House series. Fingers crossed next issue is better!

Wilson's barely started but already she's doing substantially better than the mediocre atrocity James Robinson commited during his snoozefest of a run. She's not really reinventing the wheel here, but she does pick up on the current WW continuity and steers it towards something potentially very exciting. Diana sounds very much like herself, her interactions with Steve Trevor are both naughty and romantic yet still very much Diana. The only downside is Cary Nord's art. It's serviceable, and it's not distasteful to look at, but I could almost tell which specific panels lost half of their gravitas because of his lackluster arc. If they wanted Wilson's run to have a more classic, simplistic approach to it, why not get Chris Samnee or Doc Shaner? Oh well. Either way, this is worlds better than what we've had since Rucka's departure, and G. Willow Wilson seems on track for an awesome run.

Plot wise Tamaki continues with her apparent modus operandi of taking things slow, but the buddy dynamics of Diana and Max Lord are so fun, I barely care. Steve Pugh and Romulo Fajardo absolutely kill it in the art department. They elevate the humour and even have some beautiful, surprisingly moving shots of Diana watching the sunset. So far this is not a complex Wonder Woman story, but it is an incredibly fun one and I had really missed that before Tamaki took over.

Incredible art by Jack Herbert and colourist Gabe Eltaeb, and Orlando's script is at once perfect for a one and done annual, yet screaming for a follow up arc to the secret uncovered by Diana and the amazons. Hopefully Mariko Tamaki will do just that once her already thrilling Maxwell Lord arc is over.

In which Diana wakes up to a ruined earth, is betrayed, then beaten, yet her undying resolve to love mankind, flawed though it may be, still causes her to emerge victorious. I loved some aspects of this but was very bothered by others. First of all, either this was crammed with way too many plot developments, or I've become so used to the plot decompression in modern comics that I FEEL as though too many plot developments were crammed into this. Daniel Warren Johnson takes on a very busy tour on Wonder Woman: Dead Earth #1 yet I felt I wasn't allowed to ever stop and smell the roses, so to speak. Because of the hastened pace, it feels as though many things that could've been explained better (or at all) had no time to breathe, and it was only halfway through the book that I stopped feeling as though I was playing catch up with the plot. It does seem to be leading to some pretty interesting places, however, so I can't wait for the next issue out in February. As for the art, I'd never read a book pencilled by Daniel Warren Johnson before, and while I love his different style, a couple of things bothered me a bit. First, his portrayal of Wayne Manor isn't nearly Manor-like enough. It's silly, I know, but I was really stuck on this god knows why. Also, I'm very curious as to why a post apocalyptic world's aesthetic would be half medieval, half low-budget sci-fi. All in all, Dead Earth is a fascinating addition to Diana's story, but it went by way too fast for my taste and didn't expand on a number of interesting things I wish I knew more about.