6 Awesome Comics You Must Read This Week (20 November)
This week in comics news, Geoff Johns talked about the New 52 Phase 2 that DC will be pursuing in Spring next year. The company has already announced a couple of weekly titles, like Batman Eternal and Five Years Later, thought what Phase 2 will mean is uncertain. Is it a reboot? A relaunch? Or just marketing chuff? A re-launch wouldn't be surprising given the faltering sales of the New 52 with readers unwilling to commit to series given DC's propensity to cancel titles and/or change creative teams at the drop of a hat, though it would be shocking to see a reboot two and a half years after the initial New 52 began. Speaking of Batman, artist Jason Fabok released a seasonal Bat drawing which parodied Jean Leon Gerome Ferris' The First Thanksgiving, 1621. It's a cool image of the Bat family and associated characters/villains with one particularly interesting detail Nightwing is missing! Unless Dick Grayson goes blonde, perhaps he's not in the picture because something will happen to him in the current Forever Evil storyline where he's been de-masked and is a prisoner of the Crime Syndicate? A sketch from the forthcoming bumper issue of Detective Comics #27 out in January showed Batman with a new Robin who is also black. Writer Scott Snyder went on to explain that this new Robin would not be a permanent replacement and would only appear in that one-off story, but it's quite surprising that it'll be 2014 when we first see a black Robin, something you'd think would've happened years earlier. DC also revealed that their Free Comic Book Day offering next May will be a Five Years later comic, teasing their forthcoming weekly series, while Marvel stated their FCBD comic would be Guardians of the Galaxy with a Spider-Man backup (both titles have movie coming out next summer). Jason Aaron's delightful Wolverine and the X-Men series will sadly be coming to an end early next year with issue #42. However, Aaron will continue writing X-Men comics with his excellent new series, Amazing X-Men. Alright, those are the big comics news stories - on to the awesome comics releases for this week!