The gun-wielding thug at the center of Near Death is a bit more complex than your average degenerate who has found his way to “the light”. The new, creator-owned Image series from writer Jay Faerber explores the path of a hitman named Markham, who takes a bullet and experiences the afterlife—or something like it—when his heart stops on the operating table. From there, we’re asked to sympathize with a guy who suddenly changes tack after trading the lives of countless people for a steady paycheck.

Italian artist Simone Guglielmini’s hazy two-page spread from the first issue of Near Death is bathed in blood and warm sun rays. These characterize Markham’s enlightening “dream”, where a score of men, women, and children stand before him in a meadow, prominent bullet holes in plain view. This reinforces the story’s chief plot point: that Markham has been in the enforcer game for years, and the time has finally come for him to “balance the scales”, as he puts it.

Post-apocalyptic literature never wavers from exposing the harsh consequences of actions. Environmental disasters, biological pandemics, economic collapse, nuclear armageddon – there’s a massive list of phrases to describe what can be the horrors of cause and effect.

After six years of DMZ, writer Brian Wood is no stranger to stories about strife and its aftermath. Now the Vertigo superstar creator is set to launch another such tale, The Massive, for Dark Horse Comics, but this time the scope is different.

While there are obvious similarities to DMZ, according to Wood “It’s more tonal. I wanted this book to be different, but a book a DMZ reader could easily access.”

Remember those old Gold Key books? If you weren’t around when they launched, go out and find some. They really feel like the last bastion of a different era, a kind of comics from long, long before even when they were first published. They feel like remnants, a dying breed, artifacts from a lost civilization.

The received narrative goes, that the Comics Code Authority really stymied the creative prospects of the industry. After just a handful of Senate hearings, genre comics all but vanished, and superhero books became little more than pablum. Those old Gold Key books really do read like an attempt to resurrect the spirit of the EC books while remaining within the confines of the Code.

How strange is it, that it would be Sam Peckinpah to articulate this moment?

Right at the end of The Wild Bunch there’s a moment that has absolutely no place in that movie. The Bunch have met up again, they’ve holed up in some anonymous house, but they encounter each other changed men. One look in their eyes and you know, individually, they’ve each committed themselves to rescuing Angel, held prisoner by the Mexican General, the movie’s chief villain.

It’s a flawless, near silent cinematic moment. The camera sweeps across the room. Each of The Bunch know with a certainty that the tensions between them will never be resolved. There’ll never be restitution. And yet, with an equal certainty, each one of them is now, uncharacteristically, committed to this greater thing of rescuing Angel.

While the Cartoon Network ThunderCats reboot fared well, many people fail to remember that the beloved ThunderCats originally returned in a daring wave of comicbooks in 2003 under the Wildstorm imprint. The most noteworthy of these miniseries was surely the not-so-cleverly titled ThunderCats: The Return. 

Picking up where the debut miniseries Reclaiming Thundera left off, The Return sees Lion-O emerge from the mystical world of the Book of Omens after years of training to claim his rightful place as Lord of the ThunderCats. Thwarted by circumstance, he finds his planet of Thundera enslaved by the evil Mumm-Ra. Most of the iconic ThunderCats are scattered, held prisoner, enchained, or otherwise in need of rescuing.