Happy Comic Book Day, True Believers. You all know about Daredevil right? He’s the superhero with a disability who uses his special skills and handheld weapon to fly above the city and punish criminals. He’s the one who started out in a largely yellow costume in his first appearance, but soon shifted the mostly red look that he’s most recognized for.

Yeah, you know Daredevil. And if you’re a true comicbook fan you know that his secret identity is… Bart Hill.

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

“How do your pistol and your bible, and your sleeping pills go?” Tom Waits croons out heartrendingly on “Who Are You”, the fifth track on 1992’s Bone Machine, “Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?” There’s a strange link between the Waits song and China Miéville’s unique reboot of Dial H. But it’s a link you can’t really see until you read Dial H #12.

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

After just a few years on the Hellblazer title, Jamie Delano’s body of work already began to seem somehow insurmountable as a creative statement. Could other writers achieve the same character affects Delano had? Could they map out the same neo-Victorian London-driven storytelling (which married so elegantly those hardboiled noir elements of Chandler with the utter mind-screaming horror of Lovecraft) in the same way that Delano had? Could they protract that quintessential magic? When Garth Ennis took the reins as series regular writer for Hellblazer, he reminded us not only of the power of the John Constantine character (the titular Hellblazer), but also that as significant as it was, Delano’s creative vision wasn’t a limitation, but an invitation.

Linked entirely upon the basis of a sharp but quite limited color palette, urgent present-day scenarios and anxiety-inducing memories come through with cinematic vibrancy for Babble, a graphic novel that UK comics publisher Com.X issued stateside in January of 2013. Artist Bryan Coyle’s pinpoint line work frames an array of fiery mustard yellows that are countered by slight variations of powder blue for the book’s strategically divided aesthetic. Even as Babble‘s tale of dead languages and stories that date back thousands of years is weird and somewhat complicated, it’s a hook that warrants a slow read, if only for the comic’s striking appearance.

The monthly DC Comics solicitations. What were once a source of anticipation and excitement showcasing forthcoming stories in the DC universe have since degraded into a veritable obituary page for canceled titles. Though their respective plot summaries aren’t exactly generous when it comes to exact details or status quo-shattering reveals, there have, as of late, been two words appearing within these curtailed synopses that leave many of us shaking our heads in collective disappointment with their clear meaning: “final issue.”

The sudden cancelation of floundering comic titles isn’t by any means a new phenomenon. Since the early heyday of the comicbook publishing industry countless series have come and gone from the shelves of newsstands and drugstore magazine racks, making way for superior reading experiences that catered to the changing discernment of readers or simply compensated for a previous book’s lackluster sales. In essence, this is a widely accepted business practice, switching out an inferior product for one that will hopefully reconcile previous profit loss. Yet there’s something to be said about the alarming frequency of titles being canceled under DC’s New 52 initiative, with quite a few reaching an expedited, abrupt terminus almost as soon as they’re announced.

It’s disheartening to bear witness to the fact that we’re nearly two years in and the New 52 hasn’t quite lived up to its intended purpose when first spearheaded by DC Comics’ top editorial brass. What was meant as an audacious, albeit necessary, reboot of its entire legacy to broaden the appeal of their intellectual properties and comicbooks as a whole—a medium that, when compared to the consumer landscape of decades past, has been facing sturdy competition more so than ever from electronic media and other digital entertainment outlets—the publisher appears to be more preoccupied with maintaining the distinction of releasing fifty-two books a month. This is regrettably opposed to delivering the quality necessary to spark an interest in not only new readers but fans that have shown staunch support for DC time and again. You can call it a hackneyed expression, but the old economic chestnut “quantity over quality” is apparently the company mantra as evidenced by their playing spin doctor, labeling every group of new comic series designed to fill in the swaths left behind by egregious cancelations as “waves.”