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 1st, 2025.
Adventure Time Oni Compact Comics Edition Vol. 1: Down Memory Lane
Oni Press, TPB – $9.99 (Buy Now)
Take a trip down memory lane with this specially curated collection of ADVENTURE TIME—er, adventures!
Diving into the new ‘compact comics’ craze — cheap, low-profile books packed with content — Oni Press brings us a collection of the 2014 volume of Adventure Time, written by Christopher Hastings and Dinosaur Comics and Fantastic Four scribe Ryan North. It’s a selective collection, taking stories from a wide range of issues rather than presenting a complete chronology, but a cherry-picked collection of zany action might better refine the experience.
Creepy Archives Vol 10 / Eerie Archives Vol. 10
Dark Horse Comics, TPB – $24.99 each (Buy Now)
In this cranium-cracking collection, the Eisner Award-winning Creepy Archives run continues to bring classic Warren horror anthology stories to modern readers in an affordable paperback edition!
Collecting issues of the legendary black and white horror mags, these Archive Editions are doing the lord’s work of preservation. There are few experiences like cracking open one of those oversized magazines, feeling the newsprint and taking in the ghoulish interiors. Truly strange stuff. Take this summary of a story from Eerie #49:
‘Marvin, The Dead-Thing! One is the Loneliest Number’
Marvin had been lonely for weeks…ever since he killed himself by jumping off the bridge into the slime that passed itself off as a river, but Marvin found a friend. And she too, was dead.
How can you pass that up?
Daredevil Epic Collection: To Dare the Devil
Marvel Comics, TBP – $54.99 (Buy Now)
One of the most influential runs in not just Marvel history, but all comics history begins with Frank Miller’s arrival as the driving creative force of Daredevil.
Daredevil wasn’t doing well, sales-wise, and the book was in danger of cancellation around the time Frank Miller swung in and took over. It became a massive hit and changed the industry not long after. These are the comics that helped inspire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (if you can believe it), and while Miller’s run would culminate in the Born Again run a little while later, these issues show the beginning of that resurrection.
DC Finest: Batman – Red Skies
DC Comics, TPB – $39.99 (Buy Now)
From the dark alleys of Gotham to the red skies of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC Finest: Batman: Red Skies presents some of the most compelling stories in the Dark Knight’s history.
Just before Crisis reset the DC Universe and pointed it in a more self-serious and self-celebratory direction, Batman was straddling the line between that serious tendency and the lingering memory of the Batman television series’ camp and goofiness. Writer Doug Moench was striving for the dark and gloomy, even when a rogue like Penguin or Two-Face leaned into their utmost cartoonish; like his later work on Moon Knight, Moench (and his collaborators Gene Colan and Tom Mandrake) helped define the characters’ more noir and macabre direction. These comics point the way toward the Batman we know today.
The Weight
Drawn and Quarterly, TPB – $29.95 (Buy N0w)
Melissa Mendes’ pastoral cartooning captures the openness of rural America—soft breezes, tall grass, whirring grasshoppers, rainstorms, skinned knees. But all the while, the cruelty, the disappointment of man lurks behind the barn and in the trailer.
Based on the (very few) preview pages of The Weight I’ve seen, Mendes‘ looks to be crafting a quietly powerful coming-of-age period piece. I’m a sucker for coming-of-age tales of all shapes and sizes — it’s remarkable how pivotal and poignant that period of life is for literally everyone — and so of course I’m interested in this. If you’re interested in the bleakly uplifing (or the upliftingly bleak), this might be up your alley.
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