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 15th, 2025.
Cry Out Loud
Penguin Random House, HC/TPB – $24.99/$17.99 (Buy Now)
In this spine-chilling YA horror graphic novel, a rebellious Irish teen visits distant relatives, only to discover that she’s to be sacrificed as part of a generational blood ritual. Now, she must confront her ancestors and break the violent cycle to save herself.
Cartoonist Tara O’Connor creates incredible, lovely, and emotive work — all her characters feel real and lived in. This book, which promises to be a sort of YA folk-horror story set in Ireland, seems poised to drag those emotionally rich characters through some tense and gruesome territory; it will be exciting to see exactly how horrific O’Connor goes with the YA banner. However intense the book gets, it will almost assuredly feel earnest and earned.
DC Finest: The Spectre – The Wrath of the Spectre
DC Comics, TPB – $39.99 (Buy Now)
When police officer Jim Corrigan was murdered, he was denied entry into the afterlife and given the opportunity to return to Earth with a mission to destroy all evil. As the Spectre , Corrigan had near-omnipotent powers, which he used to mete out justice as a spirit of vengeance! This volume covers stories published between 1966-1988 which have never been collected in prior Spectre volumes!
Who doesn’t love a grim and dour spirit of vengeance? The Spectre is an interesting, tortured character with a very long and varied career; I fell in love with him reading Kingdom Come and my curiosity has run deep ever since. This volume covers a good chunk of the 1960s stories featuring the character, both in his own title and in books like Adventure Comics, Showcase, and Ghosts. It’s a little insane that the Silver Age provided us with a character who just confirms that, yes, there is a God and, yes, he is pissed.
Death in Trieste
Fantagraphics, HC – $24.99 (Buy Now)
The cartoonist known as Jason returns with a collection of three short graphic stories, connected by an absurdist thread, showcasing his idiosyncratic cultural obsessions, clear line style, and deadpan humor.
Jason is one of the most distinctive cartoonists of his generation, not just because of his squared-off anthropomorphic animals (which are uniquely his), but because there’s a literary and artistic influence seeping into his storytelling. Death in Trieste kicks off with a story of surrealist criminals/pranksters who take after the painter René Magritte, and that is hilarious. This book will pair well with Jason’s The Left Bank Gang, in which a group of Lost Generation writers, including Fitzgerald and Hemingway, decide to rob banks to supplement their meager literary paychecks.
Generation X Epic Collection – Family Business
Marvel Comics, TPB – $54.99 (Buy Now)
Banshee and Emma Frost continue to shape the next generation of mutantkind, but what happens when Emma’s sister Adrienne becomes their new headmistress? Feelings run high when Jubilee challenges M to a showdown in the Danger Room, and the team joins new X-Man Maggott to face deadly foe the Slaughter! As the Frosts try to reach one Age of Apocalypse refugee — Nate Grey, A.K.A. X-Man — another sets his sinister sights on Generation X: none other than the Dark Beast!
It always surprises me how few of my peers were obsessed with Generation X in their youth — I certainly was. Replacing The New Mutants as the premiere teen mutant book, Gen X was wonderfully weird and filled with delightful melodrama, and it really spoke to me as a kid. This book collects both highs and lows; none of these stories are definitive, and some labor begrudgingly forward. But this is also part of a brief period when Terry and Rachel Dodson were on art (they do every cover in the collection, if I’m not mistaken, even if they don’t do the interiors). It looks great, even if it doesn’t read great.
Howard the Duck by Zdarsky & Quinones
Marvel Comics, TPB – $44.99 (Buy Now)
The furious fowl is taking on weird cases as the Marvel Universe’s newest and most feathery private investigator, and his new job will take him everywhere from the Savage Land to across the cosmos! Howie shares offbeat adventures with Rocket Raccoon, Squirrel Girl, Gwenpool, She-Hulk, and more — but his strangest case of all may just be the disappearance of Hollywood’s Lea Thompson! Plus: what’s a duck to do when the Ten Realms go to waugh… sorry, war?
A sad truth people are going to have to accept regarding this column: if there is a Howard the Duck release in any given week it will almost certainly make it into my top five. That’s because Howard is a subversive, singular delight in the Marvel Universe, and should be celebrated every chance given. Though no run on Howard will ever be as eye-opening and game-changing as Steve Gerber’s original run in the 1970s, this run (by the ever-affable Chip Zdarsky and ultra-talented Joe Quinones) is easily the second-best take the character has received in his fifty-plus years. This book is hilarious; it plays with the weirdness of comics and the specific weirdness surrounding Howard, and it’s surprisingly touching. A lot of emotion went into this book about a talking duck, and that makes it a high-water mark of its era.
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