There is a veritable flood of new comics every week: new issues, variant covers, new #1s, and fresh-faced miniseries. Fewer – but still bountiful – are the dozens of bookshelf editions landing in your local comic shops (and attainable by your local indie bookshops, as well!). From fresh original graphic novels, long-awaited archive editions, and collections of recent comics for all you trade-waiters, there are plenty of trade paperbacks and hardcovers to fill your shelves.
After reviewing hundreds of these sorts of books for AIPT over the years, I’ve come to appreciate what makes a collection truly special. Here at Tradewatch, I pick five books releasing in the coming week that seem the most exciting to me. Here are my picks for the week of September 8th, 2025.
DC Finest: Horror – The Devil’s Doorway
DC Comics, TPB – $39.99 (Buy Now)
From the masterful storytelling of Len Wein, Neal Adams, Alex Toth, and Bernie Wrightson, these tales showcase DC’s talent for weaving horror and suspense into unforgettable narratives.
This book has stories from a wide array of DC’s old horror mags: House of Secrets, House of Mystery, The Witching Hour, The Phantom Stranger, and The Unexpected, all from the years 1969 and 1970. Those of us who spend a lot of time thinking too much about comics history, horror, and publishing trends some fifty years old know this era to be right around the time that the Comics Code Authority loosened its vise-like grip on horror content in comic books. A whole realm of new possibilities opened up for comics creators interested in the macabre and grotesque, and that’s fertile ground for the very specific group of creators this book collects.
The EC Archives: The Complete Moon Girl
Dark Horse Comics, HC – $59.99 (Buy Now)
THE COMPLETE MOON GIRL COLLECTS THE AMAZING ADVENTURES of Claire Lune and Lionel Manning — Moon Girl and the Prince — who together fend off invaders from other planets as well as fight crime, and who “dedicate themselves to the task of creating a better world.”
EC Comics are, of course, most famous for their mid-century horror fare like Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear; real heads know all about the brilliance of MAD! Magazine, long before the entrance of Alfred E Neuman. But EC Comics existed in the true Golden Age, starting in the mid-1940s and lasting until the above-mentioned Comics Code Authority effectively banished their content; like all comic book publishers at the time, EC was eager to throw everything at the wall and hope that something would stick (and sell). Moon Girl and the Prince (later just Moon Girl) debuted in 1947 and appears to have not one, not two, but three genres of comics in its sights: sci-fi, superheroes, and (maybe, just maybe) some romance for the girls. She’s like Wonder Woman but with moon rocks!
Micronauts Epic Collection – Home Sweet Homeworld
Marvel Comics, TPB – $49.99 (Buy Now)
In this Epic Collection, our freedom fighters will join forces with S.H.I.E.L.D. in a war with Hydra, but first they’ll have to survive life on Earth, a place designed for heroes a bit larger than their micro-scale. Meanwhile, back in the Microverse, an evil returns, but it won’t take a form the Micronauts expect.
Marvel appears to be cranking out licensed content Epic Collections as fast as they can, presumably to collect the full runs of ROM Spaceknight and Micronauts before some arbitrary contract runs out; they did a similar push on Conan the Barbarian Epics a few years ago, dropping fifteen volumes over a short three years; the Conan rights were then immediately picked up by Titan for new stories. Micronauts is one of those secret joys of old-school comics fans, a book intrinsically woven into the fabric of the Marvel Universe before being carefully excised as soon as the license ran up. These stories are huge in scope, and this is the time to get your hands on them.
Paying the Land
Metropolitan Books, TPB – $22.99 (Buy Now)
Against a vast and gorgeous landscape that dwarfs all human scale, Paying the Land lends an ear to trappers and chiefs, activists and priests, to tell a sweeping story about money, dependency, loss, and culture―recounted in stunning visual detail by one of the greatest cartoonists alive.
Joe Sacco’s crack reporting about an indigenous people under siege by industrialization gets its paperback debut next week. Sacco traveled to the Northwest Territories to research the impact of the gas, oil, and diamond industries on the Dene people, who have lived in the Mackenzie River Valley long before white settlers arrived on the continent. Sacco is a true journalist filtering his reporting through impeccable cartooning, and the result — here and in his larger body of work — is groundbreaking.
The Lexicon of Comicana
New York Review Books, TPB – $29.95 (Buy Now)
A new edition of Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker’s riotous and immensely influential handbook for drawing and reading cartoons—a book that’s both a parody of humorless how-to guides and a genuine (and genuinely instructive) ode to the art of making comics.
Presenting itself as a sort of textbook of cartooning, The Lexicon of Comicana is a tongue-in-cheek guidebook by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker. Prescribing a vocabulary to aspects of cartooning — “morfs” to describe basic body shapes, “emenata” to describe symbols (like sweat drops, drunk spirals, and love hearts) spiraling from characters’ heads, for example — Walker both mocks the idea of carefully defining a lexicon while going ahead and defining the lexicon. It’s a fun, goofy, but informative deep dive into the art of cartooning, and this new printing comes nearly fifty years after its original 1980 publication.
You must be logged in to post a comment.