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 June 24th, 2026.
Batman and Robin by Grant Morrison: Absolute Edition
DC Comics, HC – $125.00 (Buy Now)
From Grant Morrison’s legendary Batman saga comes his renowned run on the dynamic duo. In the wake of Batman’s death, Dick Grayson must take on the mantle of Batman and tutelage the unpredictable Damian Wayne as the new Robin. As Gotham adjusts to its new dynamic duo, Bruce battles through time–from caveman to pirate to gunslinger–racing back to the present. Past and future collide in this mind-bending epic of legacy, identity, and destiny.
Ongoing readers of Tradewatch might notice that Grant Morrison often makes the column, whatever the project. That’s because their ideas are often so over-the-top and incredible that they redefine how a character is seen or experienced, and that’s certainly true about their run on Batman and the associated titles. Bats himself gets set adrift in time (due to some crazy Darkseid nonsense), and his assorted sidekicks and allies get up to all sorts of depraved, strange shenanigans. The whole run is worth reading, and what better place to start your collection than this nice Absolute Edition?
Casanova Compendium
Image Comics, TPB – $39.99 (Buy Now)
Casanova Quinn gets ripped out of spacetime, betrays everyone he ever loved, and destroys whole worlds in his wake. But it’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. The first four CASANOVA stories are now collected in one massive, brain-melting, idiom-incinerating volume. CASANOVA: We were destroying multiverses before destroying multiverses was cool.
I fell in love with artist brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon after delving into 2009 masterpiece Daytripper; their work is bold, multifaceted, and dynamic, and it’s always a joy to behold. That Casanova is also written by Matt Fraction — whose landmark books like Hawkeye and Sex Criminals are constant sources of discussion among my peers and I — only makes this book all the more appealing. I hadn’t gotten around to picking any of it up, but thankfully this new volume collects all twenty issues of the series.
DC Finest: Fourth World – When the Old Gods Die
DC Comics, TPB – $39.99 (Buy Now)
Before the Justice League, before the Multiverse—there was the Fourth World. Born from the mind of Jack Kirby, this cosmic saga pits the New Gods of New Genesis against the dark forces of Apokolips in a battle that spans galaxies and destinies. Witness the rise of Mister Miracle, Orion, and Darkseid in the mythic war that reshaped the DC Universe.
Jack Kirby’s strange, storied time at DC Comics began with Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen and culminated in the Fourth World saga. It might be a hard, bizarre tale to track — it runs throughout several series, all bits and pieces leading to Apokolips — so it’s nice to see a new DC Finest collection that sums up the most concentrated stretch of the story. Kirby was in full ‘alien epic’ mode, starting here and progressing through the end of his career: he was all big ideas and massive mythologies. He was never fully let loose and given absolute free reign, but this might be as close as you get to what that would look like.
X-Men: Elsewhen Vol. 1
Abrams Books, HC – $39.99 (Buy Now)
Legendary comic book creator John Byrne returns to the title he first drew 50 years ago, Uncanny X-Men, with this one-of-a-kind new graphic novel series, X-Men: Elsewhen. This three-volume graphic novel series picks up the story from Byrne’s original run, taking the characters in new and unexpected directions.
It seems insane that a creator could take some of the biggest characters in all of comics and just sort of make what amounts to isolated fanfic of them, then turn around and print a prestige hardcover of that work. That’s exactly what Elsewhen is, though: one-time X-Men luminary John Byrne started drawing an alternate trajectory of the X-Men narrative around the point where he left Uncanny X-Men; he did this for his own gratification, releasing the pages on his forum. It snowballed into an alternate timeline, presented here. New X-Men stories from a classic era, completely reimagining where the story could have gone, done without pay for the sheer hell of it. And now it’s in hardcover.
Zdarsky Comic News: Eighteen Months I Can’t Get Back
Zdarsco, TPB – $17.99
Finally! All eighteen issues of the award-losing free magazine collected in a non-free format! Featuring funny stuff and interviews with comic creators like SCOTT SNYDER, GAIL SIMONE, DENIZ CAMP, JAMES TYNION IV, BRIAN K. VAUGHAN, TINI HOWARD, EVE EWING and more! I swear, this will be the only time I print this thing and it will be “to-order,” so if you want any, now’s the time! Also, it’s a COMIC SHOP EXCLUSIVE! I love you, comic shops. -Chip (Zdarsky)
Speaking of bizarre projects taken on by creatives seemingly for the sheer hell of it: Chip Zdarsky’s Comic News was a delightful but utterly ridiculous effort that was glorious while it lasted. It felt doomed from the start: it must have been an awful lot of extra work for one of the hottest writers in the industry to take on. It certainly made me miss print magazines about comics.
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