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Thoughts on the Forgotten Realms Subclasses UA
You may wonder what this is if you read the previous blog post. This is actually the kind of content I want to be able to post. I want to have an opinion, be moved to write about it, and post it. The formalized process and the schedule are the things that work against me, but I’m not going to stop having opinions. The difference is, I’m not going to open up various other subclasses and do a deep analysis to make sure I’m shoring up my points. I may be wrong or off the cuff, and if I am, I hope you let me know.
This discussion first came up on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord, so please, if you haven’t already, consider joining our Patreon, joining our Discord, and listening to the podcast. I’d appreciate it. This is a slightly edited version of my thoughts after being asked about the most recent Unearthed Arcana, looking at the subclasses that might be included in this Fall’s Forgotten Realms releases.
The Subclasses
Bard: College of the Moon. I actually like the College of the Moon. It has a nice mechanical call back to 1e Bards and the Moonshaes, which was very tied to the druidic-themed bards of that era. It kind of steps on the College of Spirits with tying abilities to “stories,” but that’s not that weird for a bard, just not something we’ve seen framed that way outside of the College of Spirits.
Cleric: The Knowledge Domain. This revision doesn’t bother me except for one thing (mechanically), and that’s Unfettered Mind, which means Intelligence checks will be largely pointless for this character after 6th level unless they’re extremely difficult. That feels too early for that kind of ability, and it leans back into that problem of showing that a class or subclass is good by just not having the class need to roll for anything.
Fighter: Purple Dragon Knight. Even if you want to have a fighter subclass that’s a dragon rider, I think you still have some awkwardness with the 7th-level ability because being allowed to use a medium dragon as a mount, even though it’s too small, feels like you’re awkwardly riding something, and to me that feels less cool than feeling like you’re a competent dragon rider riding something that can be ridden. I’m still trying to work out the hesitance to make it large at 7th-level, since the statistics are still keyed to the character, not to an existing stat block. Its not even like it interacts with emanations much, which would be wider with a large creature than a medium one. 15th level before you can picture your character riding a properly sized dragon doesn’t feel good to me.
Paladin: Oath of Noble Genies. Oath of the Noble Genies is a conceptual issue for me, regardless of lore. I think a paladin’s oath is about DOING something for a reason or stopping something for a reason. There are a number of oaths, a lot of them 3rd party, that do what this subclass does, where it doesn’t play with the core fantasy of a paladin. “I have sworn an oath to do genie stuff and oppose non-genie stuff.” I don’t get a strong roleplaying vibe from that.
In fact, one of the big selling points of the 5e paladin is that they are so devoted to doing a thing, championing a CAUSE, that they don’t necessarily have a specific deity, and the gods just kind of say, “yup, that’s a champion of THING, they need these powers.” But this is “I think these genies need to be followed, so I serve them,” which doesn’t feel like a paladin oath to me.
Ranger: Winter Walker. The problem I have with the Winter Walker is that you are a ranger from the scary cold, hunting scary things that live in the cold. And you do extra cold damage. That’ll show those yetis, cold light walkers, and white dragons who’s boss. By that, I mean someone who doesn’t do extra cold damage that those creatures can ignore. Yes, if you take this ranger and adventure in non-cold environments, but it’s a weird disconnect that they’re less effective in their native terrain because of this.
Sorcerer: Spellfire Sorcery. The Spellfire Sorcerer actually does what I would expect from the setting material it’s drawn from. It’s not as powerful as most spellfire wielders have been portrayed, but it does what they do, in a toned-down manner, and when they get higher level, they can start looking more like the raw, elemental channelers of the Weave that they’re supposed to be. I’m kind of cool with that.
Rogue: Scion of the Three. My issue with the Scion of the Three will sound like a setting issue, but it’s almost more of a marketing issue. The italicized text might as well say this subclass exists because Baldur’s Gate III made over a billion dollars. One of the things I saw lauded in various places about the 2024 Player’s Handbook’s character creation process was “ask to see if an evil character is okay.” It feels weird to actively encourage not just nuanced evil characters but someone kind of revels in murder as a player character option.
The Lore Behind the Subclasses
Fighter: Purple Dragon Knight. The Purple Dragon Knights have nothing to do with amythest dragons. It’s very weird that in the designer videos, it seems to bother them that there wasn’t a more direct thematic tie between calling an order of knights “The Knights of the X Dragon” and literally giving them powers based on that dragon type. That makes it feel like the expectation of everything in the setting is that there will be a very obvious game-related reason for every name, without any symbolism or nuance. Is it going to be a problem if the Red Wizards of Thay aren’t all literally red?
I don’t think works as a dragonrider knight as well as it could, but it has nothing to do with Cormyr as a Purple Dragon Knight. It’s taking something intrinsically Cormyrean and trying to say, “Yeah, maybe these were kind of related to Cormyr, but now they’re not associated with a single country and are all about working with amethyst dragons.” That’s even weirder because why are amethyst dragons more likely to bond with a knightly order than other dragon types, other than coopting an existing name?
Gold, Silver, Bronze, Red, and Blue have all been associated with dragon riders and militaries in other settings, but Amethyst dragons are obsessed with multiple realities and collecting obscure knowledge. Other than trying to make the name of the subclass painfully obvious, there is no reason to make this a class associated with the knighthood of Cormyr. If anything, if you REALLY wanted to connect this to the Realms or Baldur’s Gate III, make this a class tied to, but not limited to, Githyanki, and make sure you can use red dragons and maybe a few other types as well, with this subclass. I know they won’t go this route because it’s more obscure, but if you really wanted an order of dragon-riding knights to serve as a basis, Impiltur has traditionally had dragon riders in its history. But Impiltur is even further away from the Sword Coast and less commonly mentioned than Cormyr.
Cleric: Knowledge Domain. It’s minor, but the marketing-driven lore bothers me. In the description of the Knowledge domain, the primary gods associated with Knowledge are mentioned as Asmodeus, Mystra, Savras, and Jergal, and then “less-common divinities” like Deneir, Oghma, and Azuth are mentioned. The introduction is contradicted because Oghma and Gond were mentioned up front, but then the rest of the description walks all of that back.
Jergal is an obscure deity that many people in the Realms don’t even remember. He has a role in Baldur’s Gate III, but the narrative doesn’t imply that Jergal is a major deity, even in Baldur’s Gate III. It’s very careful to frame him as an obscure god who gave his power to Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul in the distant past. Oghma, Deneir, and Azuth are all much more well-known deities. Yes, people may know who Jergal is from Baldur’s Gate III, but if they were paying attention, they’re probably going to wonder why he’s so well known now all of a sudden.
Paladin: Oath of Noble Genies. There are genies in the history of Calminshan. The genies Calim and Memnon both formed nations in the region and went to war with one another. The region and its cities still bear their names, but they were bound into a gem before Calimnshan was formally founded. Neither genie was particularly well regarded. In the 4e era, Memnon and Calmin were freed, went back to war with one another, installed genasi as leaders in the region, and generally treated the humans of the region pretty badly.
We haven’t seen much of Calimnshan in the 5e era, but we know Calim and Memnon were overthrown and banished back to the elemental chaos/elemental planes. Basically, it was the same broad reboot that the rest of the Realms received, so we just generally know that Calimnshan is being pieced back together, probably in a manner that looks similar to what it looked like in the late 3e era . . . maybe.
That gives us a few issues with having well-known and established paladins with an Oath to serve genies:
- Its unlikely they would be drawing power from all four genie types when there was only a Djinn and an Efreet involved in the region
- Servants of these genies aren’t likely to be working with one another since Calmin and Memnon have constantly been at war with one another
- Servants of both genies would probably be seen as oppressors in this era, given that the genies put genasi in charge and specifically enslaved or oppressed the humans of the region
I know they may not want to play up Djinn and Efreet being in an eternal war—I don’t know—but that doesn’t mean Calmin and Memnon wouldn’t have been at war, establishing separate, competing empires in the region in ancient times. They may not want to play up genasi enslaving humans in the name of the genie lords, but it would be strange to try to change Calim and Memnon from generational villains to revered rulers.
Rogue: Scion of the Three. There is no reason that a rogue that is supernaturally invested in murder would be a “Scion of the Three” and not just a “Scion of Bhaal.” Even if you want to lean into the Baldur’s Gate III storyline, three distinct, contentiously allied faiths were working together. You had a Chosen of Myrkul, a Chosen of Bane, and a Chosen of Bhaal, not a champion of all three. It’s not just design dictated by marketing; it’s design that’s only engaging with the surface level of the game rather than its actual content.
Ranger: Winter Walker. The Winter Walker ranger leans heavily into being a ranger from a cold land beset by vague cosmic horrors and undead, which is the theme of Rime of the Frost Maiden, but it’s never been a theme of Icewind Dale before that. It’s fine as a theme for that adventure, but it becomes this strange thing where a type of ranger has emerged that caters to a state that has only existed in Icewind Dale for a decade? If this is the new “theme” of Icewind Dale, what does the place look like when you resolve Rime of the Frost Maiden? If you aren’t playing that adventure, is it the default that Auril always imposes eternal winter unless you play through those events? It feels like we’re only going to get this new theme, which was the consequence of Auril being trapped there and causing the eternal winter in recent years.
I understand they want very distinct, easily communicated themes, but those themes feel very thin and very obviously tied to very specific, singular storylines. Icewind Dale does have a theme of having lost places that are difficult to find because of the weather and being the corner of the world where people go to lose themselves. That theme ties into Honor Among Thieves, and Honor Among Thieves even flies in the face of Icewind Dale, which is a horror setting.
Without Auril and the eternal winter, it’s still pretty damn cold most of the time, and we’ve established the following about the region:
- Outcasts and people wanting to start over live in Ten Towns
- The Lord’s Alliance established a prison in the region because it sequesters undesirables far away from most of the Sword Coast, and only daring, charming, movie-worthy heroes would manage to escape
- Because of the remote location, ancient civilizations have ruins there that have gone unexplored, which has been a theme both in Rime of the Frost Maiden and the Icewind Dale video games
It’s also just a wee bit strange that the description of the Winter Walker implies that there may be multiple fallen cities from Netheril in the city, which kind of seems like overkill, given that there weren’t that many Netherese flying cities to begin with.
Broader Lore Thoughts
I understand wanting to have clear themes, but there are clear themes and thin, single-note regions. It seems strange that not only is Icewind Dale being limited to cold/horror themes but also that Cold Walker rangers are so focused on being “Icewind Dale” rangers that an order of rangers with those competencies isn’t framed as having additional origins like Vaasa or the Great Glacier. This is even stranger when you have the opposite problem with the Purple Dragon Knights being taken from specific to Cormyr to being a broader organization across Faerun.
I’m not sure what’s driving these kinds of decisions except to ruthlessly design so that something can only be a single thing. Even then, it’s strange that the single thing for one subclass is “you’re from this one region,” and the single thing for this other subclass is “you can’t be from just one region.”
I’ve said this several times, but I will revisit something I’ve said before, across multiple editions. As much as I love the aspects of the Realms that appeal to me, if you are remaking large parts of the Realms to fit broader D&D concerns, then don’t use the Realms; make a new setting that can hold your new assumptions. If you want to use Baldur’s Gate III to sell books, then you should realize that Baldur’s Gate III had substance because it used the texture that already existed in the setting, not because it redefined large sections of the setting and ignored other aspects.
There is a big difference between “See, Jergal is a thing you recognize from Baldur’s Gate III” and “Jergal has the position he has in the story because of the backstory of Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul, that’s been circulating since at least AD&D 2e products.” I’m not calling for a devotion to extreme minutia. Canon for the sake of canon is bad, and it keeps people from engaging with the setting. However, continuity has to be more than identifying proper nouns for it to have any meaning. It’s not easy to find that middle ground, but that’s why the people in the industry who can do it manage to make their work shine.
#BaldurSGateIII #dnd #DungeonsDragons #DungeonsDragons2024 #ForgottenRealms #gaming #RoleplayingGames #rpg #rpgs #TabletopRoleplayingGames #ttrpgs #UnearthedArcana
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Squirrel just flying high and proud, looking down on those poor land-based critters below! They are not ready for the embodiment of ADHD!
Art by https://www.furaffinity.net/user/hydez
Drackal is https://linktr.ee/Ra_Zim
#squirrellostinchaos #riolu #pokemon #drackal #kobold #hybrid #male #anthro #tail #shorts #shortsonly #pauldron #shouldercape #LostinChaosSCAR #SquirrelRaZim #flying #handsonhips #openmouth #eyesclosed #hydez #2023 #furry #furryart
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The importance of flight data can't be overstated.
"Lost in the chaos is just how successful Musk has been at suppressing that real-time flight data on the internet. In so doing, he’s taking aim at an incredibly valuable source of information—which has helped researchers, journalists, and experts with everything from tracking Russian oligarchs to investigating the fate of missing aircraft to tracking down international hitmen"
Story by Justin Ling on WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-elonjet-flight-tracker-transparency/
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The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite
It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.
Childe Hassam – The Island GardenYet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.
We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.
Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.
II. The Portable Climate
Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.
Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.
This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.
The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.
There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.
And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.
III. The Geometry of the Plantation
If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.
The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.
Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.
But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.
The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.
Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.
IV. The World Interior of Capital
The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.
Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.
This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.
Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.
The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.
V. The Monoculture of the Sky
We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.
This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.
The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.
This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.
VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch
If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.
The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.
In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.
The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”
This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.
We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.
Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.
VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed
The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.
Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.
The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.
In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.
#Agrologistics #AI #AlgorithmicResistance #Anthropocene #ArchitectureTheory #Art #artificialIntelligence #Biosphere2 #BuckminsterFuller #Business #ClimatePhilosophy #ComplexityTheory #DeepEcology #DesignFiction #DigitalResistance #EcologicalGrief #Enclosure #EnvironmentalHistory #Fordlandia #futureOfWork #Garden #Geoengineering #GillesClément #Leadership #Liveness #MetabolicRift #Metabolism #Modernity #Permaculture #PeterSloterdijk #philosophy #PhilosophyOfNature #PostIndustrialism #Rewilding #SpaceshipEarth #systemsThinking #Technocracy #Terroir #TheAnthropocene #TheGarden #TheKernel #TheThicket #TheWorldInterior #ThirdLandscape #VictorianBotany #WardianCase #WorldInterior #writing
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Marvelous Market: Best New Comics April 29
Free Comic Book Day has some competition
This Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, the day every year where publishers release special free comics in an attempt to get new people to go to a comic book shop and maybe buy some other comics. This year, due to the shenanigans of the Diamond distribution bankruptcy, this Saturday is also Comics Giveaway Day. Yes, some publishers decided to do their own event that is identical in every way but name for reasons of their own. Because this Wednesday is the 5th in the month (always a low-comic week) and the FCBD / CGD, I’m going to swap out my usual 4 ongoing series recommendations with 4 free giveaway comics I think look interesting.
Hello and welcome to the Marvelous Market, my weekly guide for anyone interested in going to a comic book store today. In addition to a full list of new # 1s and new volume 1s, I’ll be giving you my top 4 recommendations in 4 categories. Like Houston legend Mike Jones rapped, “We’re still tippin’ on four-fours.” I’m going to give you the top four new comics, top four ongoing comics, the top four graphic novels, and the top 4 preorders.
The work going into this curation is made possible by readers like you. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can help make this work possible.
New Issue # 1s
ARCHIE COMICS 85TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTS: ARCHIE GAME GALAXY # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Archie and his friends get their game on in this BRAND NEW video game story, just in time for the The Super Mario Galaxy Movie! While Betty is tasked with feeding Sabrina’s mischievous cat, Salem, the gang decides to join her. Things get wild when Jughead discovers an old gaming console and powers it up—suddenly, they’re all sucked into the game! Now trapped in a dazzling universe filled with quirky planets and unique challenges, Salem becomes their unexpected guide through this vibrant realm. Together, they must navigate wacky worlds and tackle hilarious obstacles as they work to find their way back home. With teamwork and friendship at the forefront, will they conquer the cosmos and return before it’s time for Salem’s next meal? Join them on this uproarious journey full of laughter, adventure, and interstellar surprises!
ELRIC: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
After love was taken from him, Elric of Melniboné is tasked with finding and aiding the Empress of the Dawn. Though others also seek her out. An army plots to steal Elric’s Ring of Kings as well as the mighty Stormbringer all in order to create a new Champion of Chaos. But with grief chipping away at his resolve can Elric really subdue the deadly Stormbringer that claws at his mind or will he succumb to his impulses and become Chaos incarnate?
HELLBOY IN LOVE: BLACK EYES # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A cozy visit with retired B.P.R.D agents Archie and Margaret takes a chilly turn when Hellboy and Anastasia investigate the local ghost, whose once only legendary wails have been disturbing their quaint village with more and more urgency.
SWAMP THING 1989 # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Over three decades since the controversy and cancellation, Rick Veitch’s legendary lost issues are completed! After a renowned two year run on the series, Veitch’s grand finale to Swamp Thing was cut short, and never to see print! Whispers and leaks hinted at the epic untold saga for years. Now, for the first time, that final story is told! As Swamp Thing is cast back through time, he will come to meet a carpenter who will change the trajectory of his life, and the DC Universe forever. The origin of Etrigan , and Swamp Thing’s journey to the beginning of time starts here!
FREE COMIC BOOK DAY / COMICS GIVEAWAY DAY
DEICIDIUM: OMENS # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A first look at the epic new sci-fi series from award-winning creators Ram V, Evan Cagle, and Anand Radhakrishnan!
Featuring gorgeous black and white interiors, Deicidium is set in a future world governed by the marriage between theocracies and corporations. Worship is currency, faith is power. In this newfound stability, old powers once more return to the world. Gods of fire, wind, volcanoes, jaguars — gods of mischief, stories, love, and war — manifesting through everyday people. But with the established hierarchy threatened, the powers-that-be decide that these newly-made gods must be found — and killed…
ENERGON UNIVERSE: 2026 SPECIAL # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
The biggest year in Energon Universe history is here, with four all-new stories from the worlds of Transformers, G.I. Joe, Void Rivals, and more in this Free Comic Book Day issue.
Join the biggest names in comics for both a perfect Energon Universe jumping-on point and a can’t-miss experience for long-time fans.THE FUTURE IS ****** ANNUAL # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
The ultimate STAND ALONE INTRODUCTORY ONE-SHOT to the GREATEST HACKER COMIC BOOK OF ALL TIME is here! Witness guest artist JUAN GEDEON (Marvel’s Venom and DC’s Jurassic League) draw an absolutely killer story by series regular writer Fred Van Lente (Deadpool vs. The Punisher), which can introduce anyone to the SIXTY-ISSUE ONGOING SERIES! Look, this comic book rules, and it’s FREE! Get on the bandwagon, buddy! This issue even has giant guns and monsters! What more do you want!? TWENTY-FOUR PAGES OF STORY FOR, THAT’S RIGHT, FREE!
WORLD OF ARCHIE # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Celebrate Archie Comics’ milestone 85th anniversary with this collection of fun, all-ages stories! You probably already know Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and even that mischief-maker Reggie, as well as everyone’s favorite teen witch, Sabrina, and those musical, mystical Josie and the Pussycats. Still, there’s a whole WORLD of Archie characters to explore. This collection spotlights some of the expanded Archie universe and showcases why Archie and his friends have been the coolest for nearly nine decades! Featuring the work of Archie fan-favorite creators including Dan Parent, Holly G!, Timmy Heague, Jamie L. Rotante, Craig Boldman, Steven and Lily Butler, and more!
Trade Paperbacks, Hardcovers, and OGNs
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: THE CLASSIC NEWSPAPER COMICS 1977 TP
SOLICIT COPY:
Introducing Clover Press and The Library of American Comics’ new deluxe softcover slipcase series, collecting all of Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man classic newspaper comics. Each volume collects a full year of newspaper strips, from January 1 through December 31. Every edition is printed in an 11” x 8.5” landscape format softcover book that slides into a vertically oriented die-cut slipcase!
The wall-crawler swings into his first year of the long-running Spider-Man newspaper strips, brought to life by the legendary team of Stan Lee and John Romita! Every exciting adventure is presented just as readers experienced them nationwide, with the full-color Sunday pages integrated with the dailies!
1977 kicks off as J.Jonah Jameson invites none other than Doctor Doom, the iron-fisted ruler of Latveria, to address the U.N.—and it’s up to Spider-Man to stop him from blackmailing the world’s leaders! From there, the wall-crawler faces off against a rogues’ gallery of iconic foes, including Doctor Octopus, the Kingpin, and Kraven the Hunter. Plus, the debut of an all-new villain: The Rattler
MARVEL CREATOR COLLECTION NO. 1: BACK TO THE SAVAGE LAND — BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH AT MARVEL vol. 1 HC
SOLICIT COPY:
This first of a three-volume series collecting the legendary Barry Windsor-Smith’s work at Marvel features his early work on X-Men, The Avengers, Doctor Strange, and Iron Man, as well as his amazing run on Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales, and much more.
From the moment Marvel brought him to the U.S. in 1969, Windsor-Smith was a creative force to be reckoned with. A passionate devotee of Jack Kirby, Windsor-Smith’s earliest drawing at Marvel reflected that influence, but he quickly developed his own unique, eye-opening style, combining intricately detailed realism with the dreamlike lushness of art nouveau and late-1960s psychedelia.
This volume focuses on the earliest of his work, including memorable storylines on The Avengers, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and individual stories for Chamber of Darkness, Tower of Shadows, and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. All new benchmarks of comics art, culminating in what may be the highlight of this period: Windsor-Smith’s collaboration with writer Gerry Conway on an epic tale of civil war in Ka-Zar’s Savage Land. Future volumes will trace Windsor-Smith’s career through such milestones as Machine Man and Weapon X.
NERD INFERNO: THE ESSENTIAL EVAN DORKIN TP
SOLICIT COPY:
Collecting the Milk and Cheese, Eltingville Club, and Dork comics by Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning comics creator Evan Dorkin. Collected for the first time in an affordable omnibus edition.
The entire Eltingville Club saga. Every Milk and Cheese comic. All the fun strips, gag panels and stories from Dork.
The entire shebang is now available in one big-ass Omnibus edition, a staggering display of satire, silliness, and stupidity featuring all the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning humor comics by semi-esteemed and somewhat-beloved cartoonist Evan Dorkin. It’s going to sell out and you will cry if you don’t get a copy, so get to it, kids (This message was approved by Evan’s therapist).
For mature audiences.
SPEED RACER ADVENTURES vol. 1 HC
SOLICIT COPY:
In the tradition of Flash Gordon Adventures and Tiny Titans, Speed Racer Adventures is a brand-new story aimed at young readers, introducing them to young versions of the famous classic characters.
The best race car driver in the world has been invited to drive the most advanced artificial intelligent car in the world. Speed Racer is not that driver, and the Mach Five is not that car, but that’s not going to stop him from entering that race and winning! When the world’s richest man uses unlimited funds to build the most technologically advanced car in the world and hires Racer X to run a race he created, the deck is stacked against Speed Racer! Its not going to be an easy race, but with his secret weapons, his friends and family, Speed has a pretty good chance of getting in the race and winning, but he’s going to hedge his bet by using a whole lot of candy! Come for the laughs, the hijinx and the amazing speeds the cars reach. Go Speed racer, GO!
Preorders on Final Order Cutoff
ESCAPE # 7
SOLICIT COPY:
The smash-hit series returns! Milton’s daring plan comes to a head as he sabotages the Titan cannon from within, but escape means facing an army, a vengeful Colonel, and impossible odds. The explosive new arc begins here, and not everyone makes it out alive.
GODZILLA’S MONSTERPIECE THEATRE PRESENTS: GODZILLA’S THE ODYSSEY # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Godzilla’s tour of the literary canon continues as it smashes its way across The Odyssey in this oversize standalone one-shot!
Homer’s The Odyssey is widely considered to be the greatest epic of all time. So, how could you possibly make it more epic? Fill it with kaiju, that’s how. Odysseus’ journey home was already challenging enough, but what if instead of storms, sirens, and cyclopes, the gods sent monsters even more powerful than the titans? And what if Zeus sent the most powerful one of all to assist the king on his odyssey? It’s like Homer said: “Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is stronger than Godzilla.”
Written by Frank Tieri, illustrated by Ilias Kyriazis, and featuring part two of Tom Scioli’s Godzilla vs. Robin Hood.
THE LUCKY DEVILS HC
SOLICIT COPY:
A dark, hilarious satire about the struggle to do good in a world that makes it so easy to be bad, The Lucky Devils is an examination of everything that makes humanity both grand and terrible from two of comics’ most unique storytellers.
The Lucky Devils is a tale of two ordinary, good-hearted, 20-something Chicagoans who begin working with the devils on their shoulders in an attempt to fix their broken lives. It works beyond their wildest dreams, and in time they become two of the most powerful people on earth. While they fully intend to use that influence to make the world a better place, we all know what they say about the road to Hell…
For fans of their previous bestselling collaborations like Curse Words and Eight Billion Genies, stories like Lucifer or The Good Place, or tales where ordinary people’s lives intersect with the supernatural — this new series is sure to delight readers looking for a fantastical new read.
Collects issues #1-9.
ULTIMATE ENDGAME # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
THE END OF THE LINE! The universe hangs by a thread as our weary heroes face their final, crushing challenge: the ultimate, cataclysmic showdown with The Maker! Everything they have fought for, everything they believe in, will be tested in this pulse-pounding, oversized final issue. There are no more retreats, no more second chances.
What did I miss?
If there are some great comics, collected or in single issues, that you think I should be reading, tell me about them! And if you do try out any of these series, let me know how you liked them, or didn’t. This is a safe space for haters. If you enjoy this service, please share this article on social media or tell someone that you know reads comics about it.
Divining Comics is brought to you by generous support from the “Best Friends of Divining Comics,” Alex Seubert.
Divining Comics is also brought to you by the support of the “Friends of Divining Comics,” Comic Book Herald.
If you would like to add your name to the list of friends, best friends, or best friends forever, support this work for less than the cost of one cup of coffee a month at patreon.com/diviningcomics. You can also leave a one-time tip/buy my zines at ko-fi.com/spikestonehand. Or, if you can’t afford to support me financially at this time, simply follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky and share my posts there.
#art #books #ComicBooks #comics #DC #dcComics #marvel #marvelComics #MarvelousMarket #NewComicDay -
Marvelous Market: Best New Comics April 29
Free Comic Book Day has some competition
This Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, the day every year where publishers release special free comics in an attempt to get new people to go to a comic book shop and maybe buy some other comics. This year, due to the shenanigans of the Diamond distribution bankruptcy, this Saturday is also Comics Giveaway Day. Yes, some publishers decided to do their own event that is identical in every way but name for reasons of their own. Because this Wednesday is the 5th in the month (always a low-comic week) and the FCBD / CGD, I’m going to swap out my usual 4 ongoing series recommendations with 4 free giveaway comics I think look interesting.
Hello and welcome to the Marvelous Market, my weekly guide for anyone interested in going to a comic book store today. In addition to a full list of new # 1s and new volume 1s, I’ll be giving you my top 4 recommendations in 4 categories. Like Houston legend Mike Jones rapped, “We’re still tippin’ on four-fours.” I’m going to give you the top four new comics, top four ongoing comics, the top four graphic novels, and the top 4 preorders.
The work going into this curation is made possible by readers like you. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can help make this work possible.
New Issue # 1s
ARCHIE COMICS 85TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTS: ARCHIE GAME GALAXY # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Archie and his friends get their game on in this BRAND NEW video game story, just in time for the The Super Mario Galaxy Movie! While Betty is tasked with feeding Sabrina’s mischievous cat, Salem, the gang decides to join her. Things get wild when Jughead discovers an old gaming console and powers it up—suddenly, they’re all sucked into the game! Now trapped in a dazzling universe filled with quirky planets and unique challenges, Salem becomes their unexpected guide through this vibrant realm. Together, they must navigate wacky worlds and tackle hilarious obstacles as they work to find their way back home. With teamwork and friendship at the forefront, will they conquer the cosmos and return before it’s time for Salem’s next meal? Join them on this uproarious journey full of laughter, adventure, and interstellar surprises!
ELRIC: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
After love was taken from him, Elric of Melniboné is tasked with finding and aiding the Empress of the Dawn. Though others also seek her out. An army plots to steal Elric’s Ring of Kings as well as the mighty Stormbringer all in order to create a new Champion of Chaos. But with grief chipping away at his resolve can Elric really subdue the deadly Stormbringer that claws at his mind or will he succumb to his impulses and become Chaos incarnate?
HELLBOY IN LOVE: BLACK EYES # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A cozy visit with retired B.P.R.D agents Archie and Margaret takes a chilly turn when Hellboy and Anastasia investigate the local ghost, whose once only legendary wails have been disturbing their quaint village with more and more urgency.
SWAMP THING 1989 # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Over three decades since the controversy and cancellation, Rick Veitch’s legendary lost issues are completed! After a renowned two year run on the series, Veitch’s grand finale to Swamp Thing was cut short, and never to see print! Whispers and leaks hinted at the epic untold saga for years. Now, for the first time, that final story is told! As Swamp Thing is cast back through time, he will come to meet a carpenter who will change the trajectory of his life, and the DC Universe forever. The origin of Etrigan , and Swamp Thing’s journey to the beginning of time starts here!
FREE COMIC BOOK DAY / COMICS GIVEAWAY DAY
DEICIDIUM: OMENS # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A first look at the epic new sci-fi series from award-winning creators Ram V, Evan Cagle, and Anand Radhakrishnan!
Featuring gorgeous black and white interiors, Deicidium is set in a future world governed by the marriage between theocracies and corporations. Worship is currency, faith is power. In this newfound stability, old powers once more return to the world. Gods of fire, wind, volcanoes, jaguars — gods of mischief, stories, love, and war — manifesting through everyday people. But with the established hierarchy threatened, the powers-that-be decide that these newly-made gods must be found — and killed…
ENERGON UNIVERSE: 2026 SPECIAL # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
The biggest year in Energon Universe history is here, with four all-new stories from the worlds of Transformers, G.I. Joe, Void Rivals, and more in this Free Comic Book Day issue.
Join the biggest names in comics for both a perfect Energon Universe jumping-on point and a can’t-miss experience for long-time fans.THE FUTURE IS ****** ANNUAL # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
The ultimate STAND ALONE INTRODUCTORY ONE-SHOT to the GREATEST HACKER COMIC BOOK OF ALL TIME is here! Witness guest artist JUAN GEDEON (Marvel’s Venom and DC’s Jurassic League) draw an absolutely killer story by series regular writer Fred Van Lente (Deadpool vs. The Punisher), which can introduce anyone to the SIXTY-ISSUE ONGOING SERIES! Look, this comic book rules, and it’s FREE! Get on the bandwagon, buddy! This issue even has giant guns and monsters! What more do you want!? TWENTY-FOUR PAGES OF STORY FOR, THAT’S RIGHT, FREE!
WORLD OF ARCHIE # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Celebrate Archie Comics’ milestone 85th anniversary with this collection of fun, all-ages stories! You probably already know Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and even that mischief-maker Reggie, as well as everyone’s favorite teen witch, Sabrina, and those musical, mystical Josie and the Pussycats. Still, there’s a whole WORLD of Archie characters to explore. This collection spotlights some of the expanded Archie universe and showcases why Archie and his friends have been the coolest for nearly nine decades! Featuring the work of Archie fan-favorite creators including Dan Parent, Holly G!, Timmy Heague, Jamie L. Rotante, Craig Boldman, Steven and Lily Butler, and more!
Trade Paperbacks, Hardcovers, and OGNs
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: THE CLASSIC NEWSPAPER COMICS 1977 TP
SOLICIT COPY:
Introducing Clover Press and The Library of American Comics’ new deluxe softcover slipcase series, collecting all of Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man classic newspaper comics. Each volume collects a full year of newspaper strips, from January 1 through December 31. Every edition is printed in an 11” x 8.5” landscape format softcover book that slides into a vertically oriented die-cut slipcase!
The wall-crawler swings into his first year of the long-running Spider-Man newspaper strips, brought to life by the legendary team of Stan Lee and John Romita! Every exciting adventure is presented just as readers experienced them nationwide, with the full-color Sunday pages integrated with the dailies!
1977 kicks off as J.Jonah Jameson invites none other than Doctor Doom, the iron-fisted ruler of Latveria, to address the U.N.—and it’s up to Spider-Man to stop him from blackmailing the world’s leaders! From there, the wall-crawler faces off against a rogues’ gallery of iconic foes, including Doctor Octopus, the Kingpin, and Kraven the Hunter. Plus, the debut of an all-new villain: The Rattler
MARVEL CREATOR COLLECTION NO. 1: BACK TO THE SAVAGE LAND — BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH AT MARVEL vol. 1 HC
SOLICIT COPY:
This first of a three-volume series collecting the legendary Barry Windsor-Smith’s work at Marvel features his early work on X-Men, The Avengers, Doctor Strange, and Iron Man, as well as his amazing run on Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales, and much more.
From the moment Marvel brought him to the U.S. in 1969, Windsor-Smith was a creative force to be reckoned with. A passionate devotee of Jack Kirby, Windsor-Smith’s earliest drawing at Marvel reflected that influence, but he quickly developed his own unique, eye-opening style, combining intricately detailed realism with the dreamlike lushness of art nouveau and late-1960s psychedelia.
This volume focuses on the earliest of his work, including memorable storylines on The Avengers, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and individual stories for Chamber of Darkness, Tower of Shadows, and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. All new benchmarks of comics art, culminating in what may be the highlight of this period: Windsor-Smith’s collaboration with writer Gerry Conway on an epic tale of civil war in Ka-Zar’s Savage Land. Future volumes will trace Windsor-Smith’s career through such milestones as Machine Man and Weapon X.
NERD INFERNO: THE ESSENTIAL EVAN DORKIN TP
SOLICIT COPY:
Collecting the Milk and Cheese, Eltingville Club, and Dork comics by Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning comics creator Evan Dorkin. Collected for the first time in an affordable omnibus edition.
The entire Eltingville Club saga. Every Milk and Cheese comic. All the fun strips, gag panels and stories from Dork.
The entire shebang is now available in one big-ass Omnibus edition, a staggering display of satire, silliness, and stupidity featuring all the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning humor comics by semi-esteemed and somewhat-beloved cartoonist Evan Dorkin. It’s going to sell out and you will cry if you don’t get a copy, so get to it, kids (This message was approved by Evan’s therapist).
For mature audiences.
SPEED RACER ADVENTURES vol. 1 HC
SOLICIT COPY:
In the tradition of Flash Gordon Adventures and Tiny Titans, Speed Racer Adventures is a brand-new story aimed at young readers, introducing them to young versions of the famous classic characters.
The best race car driver in the world has been invited to drive the most advanced artificial intelligent car in the world. Speed Racer is not that driver, and the Mach Five is not that car, but that’s not going to stop him from entering that race and winning! When the world’s richest man uses unlimited funds to build the most technologically advanced car in the world and hires Racer X to run a race he created, the deck is stacked against Speed Racer! Its not going to be an easy race, but with his secret weapons, his friends and family, Speed has a pretty good chance of getting in the race and winning, but he’s going to hedge his bet by using a whole lot of candy! Come for the laughs, the hijinx and the amazing speeds the cars reach. Go Speed racer, GO!
Preorders on Final Order Cutoff
ESCAPE # 7
SOLICIT COPY:
The smash-hit series returns! Milton’s daring plan comes to a head as he sabotages the Titan cannon from within, but escape means facing an army, a vengeful Colonel, and impossible odds. The explosive new arc begins here, and not everyone makes it out alive.
GODZILLA’S MONSTERPIECE THEATRE PRESENTS: GODZILLA’S THE ODYSSEY # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Godzilla’s tour of the literary canon continues as it smashes its way across The Odyssey in this oversize standalone one-shot!
Homer’s The Odyssey is widely considered to be the greatest epic of all time. So, how could you possibly make it more epic? Fill it with kaiju, that’s how. Odysseus’ journey home was already challenging enough, but what if instead of storms, sirens, and cyclopes, the gods sent monsters even more powerful than the titans? And what if Zeus sent the most powerful one of all to assist the king on his odyssey? It’s like Homer said: “Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is stronger than Godzilla.”
Written by Frank Tieri, illustrated by Ilias Kyriazis, and featuring part two of Tom Scioli’s Godzilla vs. Robin Hood.
THE LUCKY DEVILS HC
SOLICIT COPY:
A dark, hilarious satire about the struggle to do good in a world that makes it so easy to be bad, The Lucky Devils is an examination of everything that makes humanity both grand and terrible from two of comics’ most unique storytellers.
The Lucky Devils is a tale of two ordinary, good-hearted, 20-something Chicagoans who begin working with the devils on their shoulders in an attempt to fix their broken lives. It works beyond their wildest dreams, and in time they become two of the most powerful people on earth. While they fully intend to use that influence to make the world a better place, we all know what they say about the road to Hell…
For fans of their previous bestselling collaborations like Curse Words and Eight Billion Genies, stories like Lucifer or The Good Place, or tales where ordinary people’s lives intersect with the supernatural — this new series is sure to delight readers looking for a fantastical new read.
Collects issues #1-9.
ULTIMATE ENDGAME # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
THE END OF THE LINE! The universe hangs by a thread as our weary heroes face their final, crushing challenge: the ultimate, cataclysmic showdown with The Maker! Everything they have fought for, everything they believe in, will be tested in this pulse-pounding, oversized final issue. There are no more retreats, no more second chances.
What did I miss?
If there are some great comics, collected or in single issues, that you think I should be reading, tell me about them! And if you do try out any of these series, let me know how you liked them, or didn’t. This is a safe space for haters. If you enjoy this service, please share this article on social media or tell someone that you know reads comics about it.
Divining Comics is brought to you by generous support from the “Best Friends of Divining Comics,” Alex Seubert.
Divining Comics is also brought to you by the support of the “Friends of Divining Comics,” Comic Book Herald.
If you would like to add your name to the list of friends, best friends, or best friends forever, support this work for less than the cost of one cup of coffee a month at patreon.com/diviningcomics. You can also leave a one-time tip/buy my zines at ko-fi.com/spikestonehand. Or, if you can’t afford to support me financially at this time, simply follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky and share my posts there.
#art #books #ComicBooks #comics #DC #dcComics #marvel #marvelComics #MarvelousMarket #NewComicDay -
Marvelous Market: Best New Comics April 29
Free Comic Book Day has some competition
This Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, the day every year where publishers release special free comics in an attempt to get new people to go to a comic book shop and maybe buy some other comics. This year, due to the shenanigans of the Diamond distribution bankruptcy, this Saturday is also Comics Giveaway Day. Yes, some publishers decided to do their own event that is identical in every way but name for reasons of their own. Because this Wednesday is the 5th in the month (always a low-comic week) and the FCBD / CGD, I’m going to swap out my usual 4 ongoing series recommendations with 4 free giveaway comics I think look interesting.
Hello and welcome to the Marvelous Market, my weekly guide for anyone interested in going to a comic book store today. In addition to a full list of new # 1s and new volume 1s, I’ll be giving you my top 4 recommendations in 4 categories. Like Houston legend Mike Jones rapped, “We’re still tippin’ on four-fours.” I’m going to give you the top four new comics, top four ongoing comics, the top four graphic novels, and the top 4 preorders.
The work going into this curation is made possible by readers like you. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can help make this work possible.
New Issue # 1s
ARCHIE COMICS 85TH ANNIVERSARY PRESENTS: ARCHIE GAME GALAXY # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Archie and his friends get their game on in this BRAND NEW video game story, just in time for the The Super Mario Galaxy Movie! While Betty is tasked with feeding Sabrina’s mischievous cat, Salem, the gang decides to join her. Things get wild when Jughead discovers an old gaming console and powers it up—suddenly, they’re all sucked into the game! Now trapped in a dazzling universe filled with quirky planets and unique challenges, Salem becomes their unexpected guide through this vibrant realm. Together, they must navigate wacky worlds and tackle hilarious obstacles as they work to find their way back home. With teamwork and friendship at the forefront, will they conquer the cosmos and return before it’s time for Salem’s next meal? Join them on this uproarious journey full of laughter, adventure, and interstellar surprises!
ELRIC: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
After love was taken from him, Elric of Melniboné is tasked with finding and aiding the Empress of the Dawn. Though others also seek her out. An army plots to steal Elric’s Ring of Kings as well as the mighty Stormbringer all in order to create a new Champion of Chaos. But with grief chipping away at his resolve can Elric really subdue the deadly Stormbringer that claws at his mind or will he succumb to his impulses and become Chaos incarnate?
HELLBOY IN LOVE: BLACK EYES # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A cozy visit with retired B.P.R.D agents Archie and Margaret takes a chilly turn when Hellboy and Anastasia investigate the local ghost, whose once only legendary wails have been disturbing their quaint village with more and more urgency.
SWAMP THING 1989 # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Over three decades since the controversy and cancellation, Rick Veitch’s legendary lost issues are completed! After a renowned two year run on the series, Veitch’s grand finale to Swamp Thing was cut short, and never to see print! Whispers and leaks hinted at the epic untold saga for years. Now, for the first time, that final story is told! As Swamp Thing is cast back through time, he will come to meet a carpenter who will change the trajectory of his life, and the DC Universe forever. The origin of Etrigan , and Swamp Thing’s journey to the beginning of time starts here!
FREE COMIC BOOK DAY / COMICS GIVEAWAY DAY
DEICIDIUM: OMENS # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A first look at the epic new sci-fi series from award-winning creators Ram V, Evan Cagle, and Anand Radhakrishnan!
Featuring gorgeous black and white interiors, Deicidium is set in a future world governed by the marriage between theocracies and corporations. Worship is currency, faith is power. In this newfound stability, old powers once more return to the world. Gods of fire, wind, volcanoes, jaguars — gods of mischief, stories, love, and war — manifesting through everyday people. But with the established hierarchy threatened, the powers-that-be decide that these newly-made gods must be found — and killed…
ENERGON UNIVERSE: 2026 SPECIAL # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
The biggest year in Energon Universe history is here, with four all-new stories from the worlds of Transformers, G.I. Joe, Void Rivals, and more in this Free Comic Book Day issue.
Join the biggest names in comics for both a perfect Energon Universe jumping-on point and a can’t-miss experience for long-time fans.THE FUTURE IS ****** ANNUAL # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
The ultimate STAND ALONE INTRODUCTORY ONE-SHOT to the GREATEST HACKER COMIC BOOK OF ALL TIME is here! Witness guest artist JUAN GEDEON (Marvel’s Venom and DC’s Jurassic League) draw an absolutely killer story by series regular writer Fred Van Lente (Deadpool vs. The Punisher), which can introduce anyone to the SIXTY-ISSUE ONGOING SERIES! Look, this comic book rules, and it’s FREE! Get on the bandwagon, buddy! This issue even has giant guns and monsters! What more do you want!? TWENTY-FOUR PAGES OF STORY FOR, THAT’S RIGHT, FREE!
WORLD OF ARCHIE # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Celebrate Archie Comics’ milestone 85th anniversary with this collection of fun, all-ages stories! You probably already know Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and even that mischief-maker Reggie, as well as everyone’s favorite teen witch, Sabrina, and those musical, mystical Josie and the Pussycats. Still, there’s a whole WORLD of Archie characters to explore. This collection spotlights some of the expanded Archie universe and showcases why Archie and his friends have been the coolest for nearly nine decades! Featuring the work of Archie fan-favorite creators including Dan Parent, Holly G!, Timmy Heague, Jamie L. Rotante, Craig Boldman, Steven and Lily Butler, and more!
Trade Paperbacks, Hardcovers, and OGNs
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: THE CLASSIC NEWSPAPER COMICS 1977 TP
SOLICIT COPY:
Introducing Clover Press and The Library of American Comics’ new deluxe softcover slipcase series, collecting all of Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man classic newspaper comics. Each volume collects a full year of newspaper strips, from January 1 through December 31. Every edition is printed in an 11” x 8.5” landscape format softcover book that slides into a vertically oriented die-cut slipcase!
The wall-crawler swings into his first year of the long-running Spider-Man newspaper strips, brought to life by the legendary team of Stan Lee and John Romita! Every exciting adventure is presented just as readers experienced them nationwide, with the full-color Sunday pages integrated with the dailies!
1977 kicks off as J.Jonah Jameson invites none other than Doctor Doom, the iron-fisted ruler of Latveria, to address the U.N.—and it’s up to Spider-Man to stop him from blackmailing the world’s leaders! From there, the wall-crawler faces off against a rogues’ gallery of iconic foes, including Doctor Octopus, the Kingpin, and Kraven the Hunter. Plus, the debut of an all-new villain: The Rattler
MARVEL CREATOR COLLECTION NO. 1: BACK TO THE SAVAGE LAND — BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH AT MARVEL vol. 1 HC
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This first of a three-volume series collecting the legendary Barry Windsor-Smith’s work at Marvel features his early work on X-Men, The Avengers, Doctor Strange, and Iron Man, as well as his amazing run on Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales, and much more.
From the moment Marvel brought him to the U.S. in 1969, Windsor-Smith was a creative force to be reckoned with. A passionate devotee of Jack Kirby, Windsor-Smith’s earliest drawing at Marvel reflected that influence, but he quickly developed his own unique, eye-opening style, combining intricately detailed realism with the dreamlike lushness of art nouveau and late-1960s psychedelia.
This volume focuses on the earliest of his work, including memorable storylines on The Avengers, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and individual stories for Chamber of Darkness, Tower of Shadows, and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. All new benchmarks of comics art, culminating in what may be the highlight of this period: Windsor-Smith’s collaboration with writer Gerry Conway on an epic tale of civil war in Ka-Zar’s Savage Land. Future volumes will trace Windsor-Smith’s career through such milestones as Machine Man and Weapon X.
NERD INFERNO: THE ESSENTIAL EVAN DORKIN TP
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Collecting the Milk and Cheese, Eltingville Club, and Dork comics by Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning comics creator Evan Dorkin. Collected for the first time in an affordable omnibus edition.
The entire Eltingville Club saga. Every Milk and Cheese comic. All the fun strips, gag panels and stories from Dork.
The entire shebang is now available in one big-ass Omnibus edition, a staggering display of satire, silliness, and stupidity featuring all the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning humor comics by semi-esteemed and somewhat-beloved cartoonist Evan Dorkin. It’s going to sell out and you will cry if you don’t get a copy, so get to it, kids (This message was approved by Evan’s therapist).
For mature audiences.
SPEED RACER ADVENTURES vol. 1 HC
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In the tradition of Flash Gordon Adventures and Tiny Titans, Speed Racer Adventures is a brand-new story aimed at young readers, introducing them to young versions of the famous classic characters.
The best race car driver in the world has been invited to drive the most advanced artificial intelligent car in the world. Speed Racer is not that driver, and the Mach Five is not that car, but that’s not going to stop him from entering that race and winning! When the world’s richest man uses unlimited funds to build the most technologically advanced car in the world and hires Racer X to run a race he created, the deck is stacked against Speed Racer! Its not going to be an easy race, but with his secret weapons, his friends and family, Speed has a pretty good chance of getting in the race and winning, but he’s going to hedge his bet by using a whole lot of candy! Come for the laughs, the hijinx and the amazing speeds the cars reach. Go Speed racer, GO!
Preorders on Final Order Cutoff
ESCAPE # 7
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The smash-hit series returns! Milton’s daring plan comes to a head as he sabotages the Titan cannon from within, but escape means facing an army, a vengeful Colonel, and impossible odds. The explosive new arc begins here, and not everyone makes it out alive.
GODZILLA’S MONSTERPIECE THEATRE PRESENTS: GODZILLA’S THE ODYSSEY # 1
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Godzilla’s tour of the literary canon continues as it smashes its way across The Odyssey in this oversize standalone one-shot!
Homer’s The Odyssey is widely considered to be the greatest epic of all time. So, how could you possibly make it more epic? Fill it with kaiju, that’s how. Odysseus’ journey home was already challenging enough, but what if instead of storms, sirens, and cyclopes, the gods sent monsters even more powerful than the titans? And what if Zeus sent the most powerful one of all to assist the king on his odyssey? It’s like Homer said: “Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is stronger than Godzilla.”
Written by Frank Tieri, illustrated by Ilias Kyriazis, and featuring part two of Tom Scioli’s Godzilla vs. Robin Hood.
THE LUCKY DEVILS HC
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A dark, hilarious satire about the struggle to do good in a world that makes it so easy to be bad, The Lucky Devils is an examination of everything that makes humanity both grand and terrible from two of comics’ most unique storytellers.
The Lucky Devils is a tale of two ordinary, good-hearted, 20-something Chicagoans who begin working with the devils on their shoulders in an attempt to fix their broken lives. It works beyond their wildest dreams, and in time they become two of the most powerful people on earth. While they fully intend to use that influence to make the world a better place, we all know what they say about the road to Hell…
For fans of their previous bestselling collaborations like Curse Words and Eight Billion Genies, stories like Lucifer or The Good Place, or tales where ordinary people’s lives intersect with the supernatural — this new series is sure to delight readers looking for a fantastical new read.
Collects issues #1-9.
ULTIMATE ENDGAME # 1
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THE END OF THE LINE! The universe hangs by a thread as our weary heroes face their final, crushing challenge: the ultimate, cataclysmic showdown with The Maker! Everything they have fought for, everything they believe in, will be tested in this pulse-pounding, oversized final issue. There are no more retreats, no more second chances.
What did I miss?
If there are some great comics, collected or in single issues, that you think I should be reading, tell me about them! And if you do try out any of these series, let me know how you liked them, or didn’t. This is a safe space for haters. If you enjoy this service, please share this article on social media or tell someone that you know reads comics about it.
Divining Comics is brought to you by generous support from the “Best Friends of Divining Comics,” Alex Seubert.
Divining Comics is also brought to you by the support of the “Friends of Divining Comics,” Comic Book Herald.
If you would like to add your name to the list of friends, best friends, or best friends forever, support this work for less than the cost of one cup of coffee a month at patreon.com/diviningcomics. You can also leave a one-time tip/buy my zines at ko-fi.com/spikestonehand. Or, if you can’t afford to support me financially at this time, simply follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky and share my posts there.
#art #books #ComicBooks #comics #DC #dcComics #marvel #marvelComics #MarvelousMarket #NewComicDay -
Marvelous Market: Best New Comics April 15
Supergirl Saturday is this week
If you normally buy your comics on Wednesday, you might want to plan on also dropping my on Saturday. Check if your comic book shop is doing something fun, having sales, or giving away anything for Supergirl Day this Saturday.
Hello and welcome to the Marvelous Market, my weekly guide for anyone interested in going to a comic book store today. In addition to a full list of new # 1s and new volume 1s, I’ll be giving you my top 4 recommendations in 4 categories. Like Houston legend Mike Jones rapped, “We’re still tippin’ on four-fours.” I’m going to give you the top four new comics, top four ongoing comics, the top four graphic novels, and the top 4 preorders.
The work going into this curation is made possible by readers like you. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can help make this work possible.
New Issue # 1s
FIREBORN # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A new series set in the world of LOST FANTASY!
Aaron Hillburg was just another rich-kid failson — ghosting his responsibilities, hopping rooftops, and hating his billionaire father in peace… until a mysterious floating dragon egg bonds to him and ignites a hidden lineage of ancient magic inside his body.
Now every violent outlaw wizard, biker cultist, and supernatural warlord between New York City and The World Beneath is hunting him — and they’ll burn the world down to pry the egg from his corpse.
A high octane fusion of fantasy and superheroes perfect for fans of Invincible, How To Train Your Dragon and Absolute Batman.
THE HAB # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Eisner-nominated writer Joshua Dysart (UNKNOWN SOLDIER) combines his powers with world-renowned comic artist David Lapham (STRAY BULLETS), comic book legend Bill Sienkiewicz (NEW MUTANTS), and award-winning colorists Bill Crabtree (INVINCIBLE) and Matt Hollingsworth (BATMAN) to present a groundbreaking horror tour-de-force.Mercurial billionaire Tuttle Barrows prepared for everything—even the end of the world. Years ago he wielded his immense power and fortune to build a massive sealed habitat atop a once protected ancient freshwater glacial cave. Now, as the world outside unravels, Barrows, his family, and a handpicked inner circle retreat to their final sanctuary—a place built to outlast civilization itself.But something was already there. Beneath layers of ice, in the ancient freshwater vault, a long-dormant danger lurks. While hallucinations twist their reality and violence spreads like a fever they must descend deeper or risk their last refuge becoming a tomb.
STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY – LOST CONTACT # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Caleb, Genesis, Jay-Den, Kyle, and Tarima are all students of Starfleet Academy, the illustrious school responsible for the Federation’s best. One day, they dream to serve as great leaders on board ships of their own, to study the cultural intricacies of sentient life amongst the Galaxy, or to go where no person has explored before. But today, their mission is simply to execute a survey simulation on a lifeless, low-oxygen planet. Or at least, it seems simple… until a huge storm cuts off their contact with their teachers aboard the Athena… and something impossible appears: an alien. Now, they’ll have to work together and use everything they’ve learned in class about first contact to make it off the planet alive!
SUPERGIRL: THE WORLD – SUPERGIRL DAY SPECIAL EDITION # 1
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Celebrate Superman Day with a globe-spanning spotlight on the Last Daughter of Krypton!
Supergirl has always fought to live up to the legacy of her cousin — but finding her place on her adopted world hasn’t always been easy. Now, Kara Zor-El sets out on a journey across Earth itself, embracing its wonders, cultures, challenges, and people… all while saving lives the only way Supergirl can.
This Superman Day Special Edition offers an inspiring first look at the upcoming original graphic novel Supergirl: The World — a sweeping, heartfelt celebration of the Maiden of Might. Across 15 countries, creators from around the globe come together to tell stories that reveal why Supergirl remains one of the most uplifting and powerful heroes in the DC Universe.
Featuring two short stories from the graphic novel, this special edition invites readers to witness Kara’s compassion, courage, and hope as she discovers the extraordinary world she now calls home.
A perfect entry point for new readers and a must-have for Supergirl fans — only available for Superman Day!
Ongoing Series
ABSOLUTE BATMAN # 19
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Poison Ivy proved to be just one of the many horrors within the bowels of the ARK M facility, and as Joker sets his sights on Absolute Batman, he decides to enlist the help of one of the center’s most terrifying doctors, Dr. Jonathan Crane. While Bruce Wayne tries to align himself with Barbara Gordon, there’s more than one alliance formed in this issue. New debuts, new villains, new arc starts here.
G. I. JOE # 21
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STORM SHADOW AND SCARLETT RETURN! The Arashikage and Cobra have met once before… prepare for ROUND TWO! Will G.I. Joe be forced to put a stop to it?
GHOST PEPPER # 10
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It’s all been leading to this — Ash vs Bataar! As Loloi and her team risk it all to save their world, nothing has prepared them for the devastating consequences!
ULTIMATE WOLVERINE # 16
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YEAR TWO OF THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE NEARS ITS END IN THE FINAL ISSUE OF ULTIMATE WOLVERINE!
Wolverine and Phoenix track Magik right into the demonic dimension of Limbo for an epic, devastating showdown! To escape Illyana’s realm of dark magic, a final sacrifice must be made, one that will lead directly into ULTIMATE ENDGAME #5!
Trade Paperbacks, Hardcovers, and OGNs
ADVENTURE TIME Oni Compact Comics Edition: Princess Power!!! TP
SOLICIT COPY:
Back off, Ice King! These princesses are out to chew bubblegum and kick butt—and they’re all out of bubblegum…
Whether it’s defeating Magic Man at Princess High Tea (back off with your dumb irony and words and junk, Magic Man!), celebrating birthdays in the FIRST PERSON (ooooo), discovering the whereabouts of Lumpy Space Princess’s missing star (y’all better have flippin’ good alibis, OK?), crowning the Best Princess Ever (who will take home the coveted Betamax 3000 Tiara Buffer?!), or overseeing a phantasmagoric* (*phantasmagoric: dreamy, weird, changing, shifting) hot air balloon race, these princess-focused adventures pack a most mathematical punch!
Princess Bubblegum, LSP, Turtle Princess, Muscle Princess, Hot Dog Princess—the list goes on! All these princesses and more grace the pages of this specially curated Adventure Time collection, featuring issues #15, 20, 35, and 62–69 of the original comics run with stories written by Ryan North (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl), Mariko Tamaki (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me), and Delilah S. Dawson (Star Wars: Phasma), and drawn by Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb (Midas) and Ian McGinty (Bee and PuppyCat)!
BATMAN: GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT – THE KRYPTONIAN AGE
SOLICIT COPY:
The year is 1893, and Gotham City has flourished under the eye of the Batman. But despite the gaudy new light bulbs and the gaudier nouveau riche, the shadows are also growing deadlier new threats. The Batman will find himself challenged by the mysterious Catwoman and the even more enigmatic Talia al Ghul. And what cosmic treasure from beyond the stars waits for all of them outside the confines of Gotham City? The new era of Elseworlds kicks off with the return of the crown jewel, the gothic world originated by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola. Superstar duo Andy Diggle ( Action Comics , Poison Ivy ) and Leandro Fernández ( Batman , Birds of Prey ) breathe new life into the legend of Gotham City and its dark guardian. This isn’t the Gilded Age; this is the Kryptonian Age! Collects issues #1-6.
THE COMPLETE 2000 AD BY ALAN MOORE vol. 1: Future Shocks & Other Stories HC
SOLICIT COPY:
Alan Moore is a legendary comics writer credited with transforming the medium and how it was seen through his seminal works such as V For Vendetta, From Hell and, of course, Watchmen.
But, before any of that, he cut his teeth at 2000 AD, the “galaxy’s greatest comic”. It was there that Moore honed his craft in preparation for the accolades that would follow.
This first volume in a new series collecting all of Alan Moore’s work for 2000 AD, brings together all of his Future Shocks as well as a host of other one-off stories.
Moore is a master of the short-format story and this collection doubles as the perfect guide for how to write comics to a page limit.
Includes the story “A Holiday In Hell” which has never been reprinted in English since its first publication in 1980.
Moore’s stories are complemented by the works of a string of legendary artists including Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), Ian Gibson (The Ballad of Halo Jones), Eric Bradbury (Rogue Trooper), Bryan Talbot (Grandville), Steve Dillon (Preacher), Brett Ewins (Bad Company) and more.
RUN TP
SOLICIT COPY:
First you march, then you run.
This follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series March is the continuation of the life story of John Lewis and the struggles seen across the United States after the Selma voting rights campaign.
To many, the civil rights movement was capped with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. All too often, the depiction of history ends with a great victory. But John Lewis knew that victories are just the beginning.
John Lewis was one of the preeminent figures of the movement, leading sit-in protests and fighting segregation on interstate busways as an original Freedom Rider. He became chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. He helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the ensuing delegate challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And he co-led the march from Selma to Montgomery on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
In Run, John Lewis and longtime collaborator Andrew Aydin reteam with Nate Powell—the award-winning illustrator of the March trilogy—and are joined by L. Fury, making an astonishing graphic novel debut, to tell this often-overlooked chapter of civil rights history.
Preorders on Final Order Cutoff
BEN TEN # 1
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Summertime is here and blockbuster movies are already starting to heat up movie theater screens all over the globe! Of course, Archie and his extended group of friends are going to get in on the action! First, the Superteens and the Power Pets take on some souped up zoo animals in an all-out brawl! But who’s the evil mastermind behind all the chaos? Then, Veronica Lodge and Ginger Lopez battle it out to be the next best fashion critic! Inspired by upcoming movies like : Masters of the Universe, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and The Devil Wears Prada 2, plus plenty more homages to notable movies throughout Archie’s history, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got extra popcorn before diving into this fun-filled issue!
ESCAPE vol. 1 TP
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SHOT DOWN. HUNTED. OUT OF TIME.
Set in a brutal, fully painted world of anthropomorphic animals — equal parts Inglourious Basterds and Watership Down — ESCAPE is a gritty, bullet-riddled journey through war’s scorched aftermath. It’s about the violence we inflict, the souls we try to save, and the courage it takes to crawl out of fire.
From the creative team of New York Times bestselling author RICK REMENDER (DEADLY CLASS, Uncanny X-Force) and powerhouse DANIEL ACUÑA (Captain America, Black Panther) — the duo behind Marvel’s Uncanny Avengers — comes a savage, full-throttle wartime thriller where survival isn’t given… it’s taken.
Milton Shaw is a battle-hardened bomber pilot, flying missions over a war-torn world ruled by a ruthless empire. But when his plane is shot out of the sky, Milton wakes up behind enemy lines — in the smoldering ruins of a city he helped burn. And in less than 24 hours, his own side is dropping the big one to finish the job.
Now, injured, unarmed, and being hunted through enemy streets, Milton’s only shot at escape comes from the unlikeliest place: a grieving father and his son — civilians shattered by the same fascist regime that rules this land with an iron claw. Enemies by blood. Allies by circumstance. Together, they’ll have to fight their way out before the bomb drops and erases everything… and everyone.
Collects ESCAPE #1-6.
STAR TREK: CELEBRATIONS 2026 # 1
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You are cordially invited to the party that is this year’s Star Trek: Celebrations anthology! This one-shot features the universe’s queer characters in tales of love and triumph, exemplifying Gene Roddenberry’s mission for us all to one day celebrate infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Our cast of all LGBTQIA+ creators — including Meghan Fitzmartin, Ben Kahn, Jamila Rowser, and more (!) — are serving up the fun with stories like a botanical adventure with Sulu and Ben, a bar brawl bash with Mariner and Jennifer, and a nostalgic holodeck date gone wrong with Seven and Raffi, so don’t miss out on this talent-packed extravaganza.
THE ULTIMATES # 24
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YEAR TWO OF THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE NEARS ITS END IN THE FINAL ISSUE OF ULTIMATES!
She-Hulk and her remaining teammates confront the villainous Hulk in a brutal, all-or-nothing battle on Gamma Island!
What did I miss?
If there are some great comics, collected or in single issues, that you think I should be reading, tell me about them! And if you do try out any of these series, let me know how you liked them, or didn’t. This is a safe space for haters. If you enjoy this service, please share this article on social media or tell someone that you know reads comics about it.
Divining Comics is brought to you by generous support from the “Best Friends of Divining Comics,” Alex Seubert.
Divining Comics is also brought to you by the support of the “Friends of Divining Comics,” Comic Book Herald.
If you would like to add your name to the list of friends, best friends, or best friends forever, support this work for less than the cost of one cup of coffee a month at patreon.com/diviningcomics. You can also leave a one-time tip/buy my zines at ko-fi.com/spikestonehand. Or, if you can’t afford to support me financially at this time, simply follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky and share my posts there.
#art #books #ComicBooks #comics #DC #dcComics #marvel #marvelComics #MarvelousMarket #NewComicDay -
Marvelous Market: Best New Comics April 15
Supergirl Saturday is this week
If you normally buy your comics on Wednesday, you might want to plan on also dropping my on Saturday. Check if your comic book shop is doing something fun, having sales, or giving away anything for Supergirl Day this Saturday.
Hello and welcome to the Marvelous Market, my weekly guide for anyone interested in going to a comic book store today. In addition to a full list of new # 1s and new volume 1s, I’ll be giving you my top 4 recommendations in 4 categories. Like Houston legend Mike Jones rapped, “We’re still tippin’ on four-fours.” I’m going to give you the top four new comics, top four ongoing comics, the top four graphic novels, and the top 4 preorders.
The work going into this curation is made possible by readers like you. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can help make this work possible.
New Issue # 1s
FIREBORN # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A new series set in the world of LOST FANTASY!
Aaron Hillburg was just another rich-kid failson — ghosting his responsibilities, hopping rooftops, and hating his billionaire father in peace… until a mysterious floating dragon egg bonds to him and ignites a hidden lineage of ancient magic inside his body.
Now every violent outlaw wizard, biker cultist, and supernatural warlord between New York City and The World Beneath is hunting him — and they’ll burn the world down to pry the egg from his corpse.
A high octane fusion of fantasy and superheroes perfect for fans of Invincible, How To Train Your Dragon and Absolute Batman.
THE HAB # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Eisner-nominated writer Joshua Dysart (UNKNOWN SOLDIER) combines his powers with world-renowned comic artist David Lapham (STRAY BULLETS), comic book legend Bill Sienkiewicz (NEW MUTANTS), and award-winning colorists Bill Crabtree (INVINCIBLE) and Matt Hollingsworth (BATMAN) to present a groundbreaking horror tour-de-force.Mercurial billionaire Tuttle Barrows prepared for everything—even the end of the world. Years ago he wielded his immense power and fortune to build a massive sealed habitat atop a once protected ancient freshwater glacial cave. Now, as the world outside unravels, Barrows, his family, and a handpicked inner circle retreat to their final sanctuary—a place built to outlast civilization itself.But something was already there. Beneath layers of ice, in the ancient freshwater vault, a long-dormant danger lurks. While hallucinations twist their reality and violence spreads like a fever they must descend deeper or risk their last refuge becoming a tomb.
STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY – LOST CONTACT # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Caleb, Genesis, Jay-Den, Kyle, and Tarima are all students of Starfleet Academy, the illustrious school responsible for the Federation’s best. One day, they dream to serve as great leaders on board ships of their own, to study the cultural intricacies of sentient life amongst the Galaxy, or to go where no person has explored before. But today, their mission is simply to execute a survey simulation on a lifeless, low-oxygen planet. Or at least, it seems simple… until a huge storm cuts off their contact with their teachers aboard the Athena… and something impossible appears: an alien. Now, they’ll have to work together and use everything they’ve learned in class about first contact to make it off the planet alive!
SUPERGIRL: THE WORLD – SUPERGIRL DAY SPECIAL EDITION # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Celebrate Superman Day with a globe-spanning spotlight on the Last Daughter of Krypton!
Supergirl has always fought to live up to the legacy of her cousin — but finding her place on her adopted world hasn’t always been easy. Now, Kara Zor-El sets out on a journey across Earth itself, embracing its wonders, cultures, challenges, and people… all while saving lives the only way Supergirl can.
This Superman Day Special Edition offers an inspiring first look at the upcoming original graphic novel Supergirl: The World — a sweeping, heartfelt celebration of the Maiden of Might. Across 15 countries, creators from around the globe come together to tell stories that reveal why Supergirl remains one of the most uplifting and powerful heroes in the DC Universe.
Featuring two short stories from the graphic novel, this special edition invites readers to witness Kara’s compassion, courage, and hope as she discovers the extraordinary world she now calls home.
A perfect entry point for new readers and a must-have for Supergirl fans — only available for Superman Day!
Ongoing Series
ABSOLUTE BATMAN # 19
SOLICIT COPY:
Poison Ivy proved to be just one of the many horrors within the bowels of the ARK M facility, and as Joker sets his sights on Absolute Batman, he decides to enlist the help of one of the center’s most terrifying doctors, Dr. Jonathan Crane. While Bruce Wayne tries to align himself with Barbara Gordon, there’s more than one alliance formed in this issue. New debuts, new villains, new arc starts here.
G. I. JOE # 21
SOLICIT COPY:
STORM SHADOW AND SCARLETT RETURN! The Arashikage and Cobra have met once before… prepare for ROUND TWO! Will G.I. Joe be forced to put a stop to it?
GHOST PEPPER # 10
SOLICIT COPY:
It’s all been leading to this — Ash vs Bataar! As Loloi and her team risk it all to save their world, nothing has prepared them for the devastating consequences!
ULTIMATE WOLVERINE # 16
SOLICIT COPY:
YEAR TWO OF THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE NEARS ITS END IN THE FINAL ISSUE OF ULTIMATE WOLVERINE!
Wolverine and Phoenix track Magik right into the demonic dimension of Limbo for an epic, devastating showdown! To escape Illyana’s realm of dark magic, a final sacrifice must be made, one that will lead directly into ULTIMATE ENDGAME #5!
Trade Paperbacks, Hardcovers, and OGNs
ADVENTURE TIME Oni Compact Comics Edition: Princess Power!!! TP
SOLICIT COPY:
Back off, Ice King! These princesses are out to chew bubblegum and kick butt—and they’re all out of bubblegum…
Whether it’s defeating Magic Man at Princess High Tea (back off with your dumb irony and words and junk, Magic Man!), celebrating birthdays in the FIRST PERSON (ooooo), discovering the whereabouts of Lumpy Space Princess’s missing star (y’all better have flippin’ good alibis, OK?), crowning the Best Princess Ever (who will take home the coveted Betamax 3000 Tiara Buffer?!), or overseeing a phantasmagoric* (*phantasmagoric: dreamy, weird, changing, shifting) hot air balloon race, these princess-focused adventures pack a most mathematical punch!
Princess Bubblegum, LSP, Turtle Princess, Muscle Princess, Hot Dog Princess—the list goes on! All these princesses and more grace the pages of this specially curated Adventure Time collection, featuring issues #15, 20, 35, and 62–69 of the original comics run with stories written by Ryan North (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl), Mariko Tamaki (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me), and Delilah S. Dawson (Star Wars: Phasma), and drawn by Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb (Midas) and Ian McGinty (Bee and PuppyCat)!
BATMAN: GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT – THE KRYPTONIAN AGE
SOLICIT COPY:
The year is 1893, and Gotham City has flourished under the eye of the Batman. But despite the gaudy new light bulbs and the gaudier nouveau riche, the shadows are also growing deadlier new threats. The Batman will find himself challenged by the mysterious Catwoman and the even more enigmatic Talia al Ghul. And what cosmic treasure from beyond the stars waits for all of them outside the confines of Gotham City? The new era of Elseworlds kicks off with the return of the crown jewel, the gothic world originated by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola. Superstar duo Andy Diggle ( Action Comics , Poison Ivy ) and Leandro Fernández ( Batman , Birds of Prey ) breathe new life into the legend of Gotham City and its dark guardian. This isn’t the Gilded Age; this is the Kryptonian Age! Collects issues #1-6.
THE COMPLETE 2000 AD BY ALAN MOORE vol. 1: Future Shocks & Other Stories HC
SOLICIT COPY:
Alan Moore is a legendary comics writer credited with transforming the medium and how it was seen through his seminal works such as V For Vendetta, From Hell and, of course, Watchmen.
But, before any of that, he cut his teeth at 2000 AD, the “galaxy’s greatest comic”. It was there that Moore honed his craft in preparation for the accolades that would follow.
This first volume in a new series collecting all of Alan Moore’s work for 2000 AD, brings together all of his Future Shocks as well as a host of other one-off stories.
Moore is a master of the short-format story and this collection doubles as the perfect guide for how to write comics to a page limit.
Includes the story “A Holiday In Hell” which has never been reprinted in English since its first publication in 1980.
Moore’s stories are complemented by the works of a string of legendary artists including Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), Ian Gibson (The Ballad of Halo Jones), Eric Bradbury (Rogue Trooper), Bryan Talbot (Grandville), Steve Dillon (Preacher), Brett Ewins (Bad Company) and more.
RUN TP
SOLICIT COPY:
First you march, then you run.
This follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series March is the continuation of the life story of John Lewis and the struggles seen across the United States after the Selma voting rights campaign.
To many, the civil rights movement was capped with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. All too often, the depiction of history ends with a great victory. But John Lewis knew that victories are just the beginning.
John Lewis was one of the preeminent figures of the movement, leading sit-in protests and fighting segregation on interstate busways as an original Freedom Rider. He became chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. He helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the ensuing delegate challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And he co-led the march from Selma to Montgomery on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
In Run, John Lewis and longtime collaborator Andrew Aydin reteam with Nate Powell—the award-winning illustrator of the March trilogy—and are joined by L. Fury, making an astonishing graphic novel debut, to tell this often-overlooked chapter of civil rights history.
Preorders on Final Order Cutoff
BEN TEN # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Summertime is here and blockbuster movies are already starting to heat up movie theater screens all over the globe! Of course, Archie and his extended group of friends are going to get in on the action! First, the Superteens and the Power Pets take on some souped up zoo animals in an all-out brawl! But who’s the evil mastermind behind all the chaos? Then, Veronica Lodge and Ginger Lopez battle it out to be the next best fashion critic! Inspired by upcoming movies like : Masters of the Universe, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and The Devil Wears Prada 2, plus plenty more homages to notable movies throughout Archie’s history, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got extra popcorn before diving into this fun-filled issue!
ESCAPE vol. 1 TP
SOLICIT COPY:
SHOT DOWN. HUNTED. OUT OF TIME.
Set in a brutal, fully painted world of anthropomorphic animals — equal parts Inglourious Basterds and Watership Down — ESCAPE is a gritty, bullet-riddled journey through war’s scorched aftermath. It’s about the violence we inflict, the souls we try to save, and the courage it takes to crawl out of fire.
From the creative team of New York Times bestselling author RICK REMENDER (DEADLY CLASS, Uncanny X-Force) and powerhouse DANIEL ACUÑA (Captain America, Black Panther) — the duo behind Marvel’s Uncanny Avengers — comes a savage, full-throttle wartime thriller where survival isn’t given… it’s taken.
Milton Shaw is a battle-hardened bomber pilot, flying missions over a war-torn world ruled by a ruthless empire. But when his plane is shot out of the sky, Milton wakes up behind enemy lines — in the smoldering ruins of a city he helped burn. And in less than 24 hours, his own side is dropping the big one to finish the job.
Now, injured, unarmed, and being hunted through enemy streets, Milton’s only shot at escape comes from the unlikeliest place: a grieving father and his son — civilians shattered by the same fascist regime that rules this land with an iron claw. Enemies by blood. Allies by circumstance. Together, they’ll have to fight their way out before the bomb drops and erases everything… and everyone.
Collects ESCAPE #1-6.
STAR TREK: CELEBRATIONS 2026 # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
You are cordially invited to the party that is this year’s Star Trek: Celebrations anthology! This one-shot features the universe’s queer characters in tales of love and triumph, exemplifying Gene Roddenberry’s mission for us all to one day celebrate infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Our cast of all LGBTQIA+ creators — including Meghan Fitzmartin, Ben Kahn, Jamila Rowser, and more (!) — are serving up the fun with stories like a botanical adventure with Sulu and Ben, a bar brawl bash with Mariner and Jennifer, and a nostalgic holodeck date gone wrong with Seven and Raffi, so don’t miss out on this talent-packed extravaganza.
THE ULTIMATES # 24
SOLICIT COPY:
YEAR TWO OF THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE NEARS ITS END IN THE FINAL ISSUE OF ULTIMATES!
She-Hulk and her remaining teammates confront the villainous Hulk in a brutal, all-or-nothing battle on Gamma Island!
What did I miss?
If there are some great comics, collected or in single issues, that you think I should be reading, tell me about them! And if you do try out any of these series, let me know how you liked them, or didn’t. This is a safe space for haters. If you enjoy this service, please share this article on social media or tell someone that you know reads comics about it.
Divining Comics is brought to you by generous support from the “Best Friends of Divining Comics,” Alex Seubert.
Divining Comics is also brought to you by the support of the “Friends of Divining Comics,” Comic Book Herald.
If you would like to add your name to the list of friends, best friends, or best friends forever, support this work for less than the cost of one cup of coffee a month at patreon.com/diviningcomics. You can also leave a one-time tip/buy my zines at ko-fi.com/spikestonehand. Or, if you can’t afford to support me financially at this time, simply follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky and share my posts there.
#art #books #ComicBooks #comics #DC #dcComics #marvel #marvelComics #MarvelousMarket #NewComicDay -
Marvelous Market: Best New Comics April 15
Supergirl Saturday is this week
If you normally buy your comics on Wednesday, you might want to plan on also dropping my on Saturday. Check if your comic book shop is doing something fun, having sales, or giving away anything for Supergirl Day this Saturday.
Hello and welcome to the Marvelous Market, my weekly guide for anyone interested in going to a comic book store today. In addition to a full list of new # 1s and new volume 1s, I’ll be giving you my top 4 recommendations in 4 categories. Like Houston legend Mike Jones rapped, “We’re still tippin’ on four-fours.” I’m going to give you the top four new comics, top four ongoing comics, the top four graphic novels, and the top 4 preorders.
The work going into this curation is made possible by readers like you. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can help make this work possible.
New Issue # 1s
FIREBORN # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
A new series set in the world of LOST FANTASY!
Aaron Hillburg was just another rich-kid failson — ghosting his responsibilities, hopping rooftops, and hating his billionaire father in peace… until a mysterious floating dragon egg bonds to him and ignites a hidden lineage of ancient magic inside his body.
Now every violent outlaw wizard, biker cultist, and supernatural warlord between New York City and The World Beneath is hunting him — and they’ll burn the world down to pry the egg from his corpse.
A high octane fusion of fantasy and superheroes perfect for fans of Invincible, How To Train Your Dragon and Absolute Batman.
THE HAB # 1
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Eisner-nominated writer Joshua Dysart (UNKNOWN SOLDIER) combines his powers with world-renowned comic artist David Lapham (STRAY BULLETS), comic book legend Bill Sienkiewicz (NEW MUTANTS), and award-winning colorists Bill Crabtree (INVINCIBLE) and Matt Hollingsworth (BATMAN) to present a groundbreaking horror tour-de-force.Mercurial billionaire Tuttle Barrows prepared for everything—even the end of the world. Years ago he wielded his immense power and fortune to build a massive sealed habitat atop a once protected ancient freshwater glacial cave. Now, as the world outside unravels, Barrows, his family, and a handpicked inner circle retreat to their final sanctuary—a place built to outlast civilization itself.But something was already there. Beneath layers of ice, in the ancient freshwater vault, a long-dormant danger lurks. While hallucinations twist their reality and violence spreads like a fever they must descend deeper or risk their last refuge becoming a tomb.
STAR TREK: STARFLEET ACADEMY – LOST CONTACT # 1
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Caleb, Genesis, Jay-Den, Kyle, and Tarima are all students of Starfleet Academy, the illustrious school responsible for the Federation’s best. One day, they dream to serve as great leaders on board ships of their own, to study the cultural intricacies of sentient life amongst the Galaxy, or to go where no person has explored before. But today, their mission is simply to execute a survey simulation on a lifeless, low-oxygen planet. Or at least, it seems simple… until a huge storm cuts off their contact with their teachers aboard the Athena… and something impossible appears: an alien. Now, they’ll have to work together and use everything they’ve learned in class about first contact to make it off the planet alive!
SUPERGIRL: THE WORLD – SUPERGIRL DAY SPECIAL EDITION # 1
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Celebrate Superman Day with a globe-spanning spotlight on the Last Daughter of Krypton!
Supergirl has always fought to live up to the legacy of her cousin — but finding her place on her adopted world hasn’t always been easy. Now, Kara Zor-El sets out on a journey across Earth itself, embracing its wonders, cultures, challenges, and people… all while saving lives the only way Supergirl can.
This Superman Day Special Edition offers an inspiring first look at the upcoming original graphic novel Supergirl: The World — a sweeping, heartfelt celebration of the Maiden of Might. Across 15 countries, creators from around the globe come together to tell stories that reveal why Supergirl remains one of the most uplifting and powerful heroes in the DC Universe.
Featuring two short stories from the graphic novel, this special edition invites readers to witness Kara’s compassion, courage, and hope as she discovers the extraordinary world she now calls home.
A perfect entry point for new readers and a must-have for Supergirl fans — only available for Superman Day!
Ongoing Series
ABSOLUTE BATMAN # 19
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Poison Ivy proved to be just one of the many horrors within the bowels of the ARK M facility, and as Joker sets his sights on Absolute Batman, he decides to enlist the help of one of the center’s most terrifying doctors, Dr. Jonathan Crane. While Bruce Wayne tries to align himself with Barbara Gordon, there’s more than one alliance formed in this issue. New debuts, new villains, new arc starts here.
G. I. JOE # 21
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STORM SHADOW AND SCARLETT RETURN! The Arashikage and Cobra have met once before… prepare for ROUND TWO! Will G.I. Joe be forced to put a stop to it?
GHOST PEPPER # 10
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It’s all been leading to this — Ash vs Bataar! As Loloi and her team risk it all to save their world, nothing has prepared them for the devastating consequences!
ULTIMATE WOLVERINE # 16
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YEAR TWO OF THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE NEARS ITS END IN THE FINAL ISSUE OF ULTIMATE WOLVERINE!
Wolverine and Phoenix track Magik right into the demonic dimension of Limbo for an epic, devastating showdown! To escape Illyana’s realm of dark magic, a final sacrifice must be made, one that will lead directly into ULTIMATE ENDGAME #5!
Trade Paperbacks, Hardcovers, and OGNs
ADVENTURE TIME Oni Compact Comics Edition: Princess Power!!! TP
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Back off, Ice King! These princesses are out to chew bubblegum and kick butt—and they’re all out of bubblegum…
Whether it’s defeating Magic Man at Princess High Tea (back off with your dumb irony and words and junk, Magic Man!), celebrating birthdays in the FIRST PERSON (ooooo), discovering the whereabouts of Lumpy Space Princess’s missing star (y’all better have flippin’ good alibis, OK?), crowning the Best Princess Ever (who will take home the coveted Betamax 3000 Tiara Buffer?!), or overseeing a phantasmagoric* (*phantasmagoric: dreamy, weird, changing, shifting) hot air balloon race, these princess-focused adventures pack a most mathematical punch!
Princess Bubblegum, LSP, Turtle Princess, Muscle Princess, Hot Dog Princess—the list goes on! All these princesses and more grace the pages of this specially curated Adventure Time collection, featuring issues #15, 20, 35, and 62–69 of the original comics run with stories written by Ryan North (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl), Mariko Tamaki (Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me), and Delilah S. Dawson (Star Wars: Phasma), and drawn by Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb (Midas) and Ian McGinty (Bee and PuppyCat)!
BATMAN: GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT – THE KRYPTONIAN AGE
SOLICIT COPY:
The year is 1893, and Gotham City has flourished under the eye of the Batman. But despite the gaudy new light bulbs and the gaudier nouveau riche, the shadows are also growing deadlier new threats. The Batman will find himself challenged by the mysterious Catwoman and the even more enigmatic Talia al Ghul. And what cosmic treasure from beyond the stars waits for all of them outside the confines of Gotham City? The new era of Elseworlds kicks off with the return of the crown jewel, the gothic world originated by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola. Superstar duo Andy Diggle ( Action Comics , Poison Ivy ) and Leandro Fernández ( Batman , Birds of Prey ) breathe new life into the legend of Gotham City and its dark guardian. This isn’t the Gilded Age; this is the Kryptonian Age! Collects issues #1-6.
THE COMPLETE 2000 AD BY ALAN MOORE vol. 1: Future Shocks & Other Stories HC
SOLICIT COPY:
Alan Moore is a legendary comics writer credited with transforming the medium and how it was seen through his seminal works such as V For Vendetta, From Hell and, of course, Watchmen.
But, before any of that, he cut his teeth at 2000 AD, the “galaxy’s greatest comic”. It was there that Moore honed his craft in preparation for the accolades that would follow.
This first volume in a new series collecting all of Alan Moore’s work for 2000 AD, brings together all of his Future Shocks as well as a host of other one-off stories.
Moore is a master of the short-format story and this collection doubles as the perfect guide for how to write comics to a page limit.
Includes the story “A Holiday In Hell” which has never been reprinted in English since its first publication in 1980.
Moore’s stories are complemented by the works of a string of legendary artists including Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), Ian Gibson (The Ballad of Halo Jones), Eric Bradbury (Rogue Trooper), Bryan Talbot (Grandville), Steve Dillon (Preacher), Brett Ewins (Bad Company) and more.
RUN TP
SOLICIT COPY:
First you march, then you run.
This follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series March is the continuation of the life story of John Lewis and the struggles seen across the United States after the Selma voting rights campaign.
To many, the civil rights movement was capped with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. All too often, the depiction of history ends with a great victory. But John Lewis knew that victories are just the beginning.
John Lewis was one of the preeminent figures of the movement, leading sit-in protests and fighting segregation on interstate busways as an original Freedom Rider. He became chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. He helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the ensuing delegate challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And he co-led the march from Selma to Montgomery on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
In Run, John Lewis and longtime collaborator Andrew Aydin reteam with Nate Powell—the award-winning illustrator of the March trilogy—and are joined by L. Fury, making an astonishing graphic novel debut, to tell this often-overlooked chapter of civil rights history.
Preorders on Final Order Cutoff
BEN TEN # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
Summertime is here and blockbuster movies are already starting to heat up movie theater screens all over the globe! Of course, Archie and his extended group of friends are going to get in on the action! First, the Superteens and the Power Pets take on some souped up zoo animals in an all-out brawl! But who’s the evil mastermind behind all the chaos? Then, Veronica Lodge and Ginger Lopez battle it out to be the next best fashion critic! Inspired by upcoming movies like : Masters of the Universe, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and The Devil Wears Prada 2, plus plenty more homages to notable movies throughout Archie’s history, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got extra popcorn before diving into this fun-filled issue!
ESCAPE vol. 1 TP
SOLICIT COPY:
SHOT DOWN. HUNTED. OUT OF TIME.
Set in a brutal, fully painted world of anthropomorphic animals — equal parts Inglourious Basterds and Watership Down — ESCAPE is a gritty, bullet-riddled journey through war’s scorched aftermath. It’s about the violence we inflict, the souls we try to save, and the courage it takes to crawl out of fire.
From the creative team of New York Times bestselling author RICK REMENDER (DEADLY CLASS, Uncanny X-Force) and powerhouse DANIEL ACUÑA (Captain America, Black Panther) — the duo behind Marvel’s Uncanny Avengers — comes a savage, full-throttle wartime thriller where survival isn’t given… it’s taken.
Milton Shaw is a battle-hardened bomber pilot, flying missions over a war-torn world ruled by a ruthless empire. But when his plane is shot out of the sky, Milton wakes up behind enemy lines — in the smoldering ruins of a city he helped burn. And in less than 24 hours, his own side is dropping the big one to finish the job.
Now, injured, unarmed, and being hunted through enemy streets, Milton’s only shot at escape comes from the unlikeliest place: a grieving father and his son — civilians shattered by the same fascist regime that rules this land with an iron claw. Enemies by blood. Allies by circumstance. Together, they’ll have to fight their way out before the bomb drops and erases everything… and everyone.
Collects ESCAPE #1-6.
STAR TREK: CELEBRATIONS 2026 # 1
SOLICIT COPY:
You are cordially invited to the party that is this year’s Star Trek: Celebrations anthology! This one-shot features the universe’s queer characters in tales of love and triumph, exemplifying Gene Roddenberry’s mission for us all to one day celebrate infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Our cast of all LGBTQIA+ creators — including Meghan Fitzmartin, Ben Kahn, Jamila Rowser, and more (!) — are serving up the fun with stories like a botanical adventure with Sulu and Ben, a bar brawl bash with Mariner and Jennifer, and a nostalgic holodeck date gone wrong with Seven and Raffi, so don’t miss out on this talent-packed extravaganza.
THE ULTIMATES # 24
SOLICIT COPY:
YEAR TWO OF THE ULTIMATE UNIVERSE NEARS ITS END IN THE FINAL ISSUE OF ULTIMATES!
She-Hulk and her remaining teammates confront the villainous Hulk in a brutal, all-or-nothing battle on Gamma Island!
What did I miss?
If there are some great comics, collected or in single issues, that you think I should be reading, tell me about them! And if you do try out any of these series, let me know how you liked them, or didn’t. This is a safe space for haters. If you enjoy this service, please share this article on social media or tell someone that you know reads comics about it.
Divining Comics is brought to you by generous support from the “Best Friends of Divining Comics,” Alex Seubert.
Divining Comics is also brought to you by the support of the “Friends of Divining Comics,” Comic Book Herald.
If you would like to add your name to the list of friends, best friends, or best friends forever, support this work for less than the cost of one cup of coffee a month at patreon.com/diviningcomics. You can also leave a one-time tip/buy my zines at ko-fi.com/spikestonehand. Or, if you can’t afford to support me financially at this time, simply follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky and share my posts there.
#art #books #ComicBooks #comics #DC #dcComics #marvel #marvelComics #MarvelousMarket #NewComicDay -
Kranke #Totalüberwachung im #NRW #Sicherheitspaket durch CDU und Grüne gewünscht. Komplett lost 🤬🔥
NRW-#Überwachungspaket versetzt Datenschützerin "in Alarmbereitschaft"
""Gerade ein möglicher Zugriff des #Verfassungsschutz'es auf private #Videoüberwachungsanlagen versetzt mich in Alarmbereitschaft"
Ein großes Fragezeichen setzt die Leiterin der Aufsichtsbehörde auch hinter den von Schwarz-Grün ins Spiel gebrachten Einsatz von Künstlicher Intelligenz (#KI)..."
https://www.heise.de/news/NRW-Ueberwachungspaket-versetzt-Datenschuetzerin-in-Alarmbereitschaft-9996993.html -
Ein Beitrag im #Radio #Rabe zur #TourDeLorraine zum #Workshop "Lost in Communication? Von #Fakten, #Beeinflussung und #Macht" von meinem Kollegem Lars und mir
https://rabe.ch/beitrag/22-01-2025/ra-be-info-vom-22-januar-2025#Bern #reitschule #freieRadio #nowef #postfaktisch #SozialeBewegung #GutesLeben
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Ein Beitrag im #Radio #Rabe zur #TourDeLorraine zum #Workshop "Lost in Communication? Von #Fakten, #Beeinflussung und #Macht" von meinem Kollegem Lars und mir
https://rabe.ch/beitrag/22-01-2025/ra-be-info-vom-22-januar-2025#Bern #reitschule #freieRadio #nowef #postfaktisch #SozialeBewegung #GutesLeben
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Ein Beitrag im #Radio #Rabe zur #TourDeLorraine zum #Workshop "Lost in Communication? Von #Fakten, #Beeinflussung und #Macht" von meinem Kollegem Lars und mir
https://rabe.ch/beitrag/22-01-2025/ra-be-info-vom-22-januar-2025#Bern #reitschule #freieRadio #nowef #postfaktisch #SozialeBewegung #GutesLeben
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Ein Beitrag im #Radio #Rabe zur #TourDeLorraine zum #Workshop "Lost in Communication? Von #Fakten, #Beeinflussung und #Macht" von meinem Kollegem Lars und mir
https://rabe.ch/beitrag/22-01-2025/ra-be-info-vom-22-januar-2025#Bern #reitschule #freieRadio #nowef #postfaktisch #SozialeBewegung #GutesLeben
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Ein Beitrag im #Radio #Rabe zur #TourDeLorraine zum #Workshop "Lost in Communication? Von #Fakten, #Beeinflussung und #Macht" von meinem Kollegem Lars und mir
https://rabe.ch/beitrag/22-01-2025/ra-be-info-vom-22-januar-2025#Bern #reitschule #freieRadio #nowef #postfaktisch #SozialeBewegung #GutesLeben
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“The Age of Reason” by John R. Ancka
It was the 25th century in outer space.
The first failure occurred on the spaceship while the trip was proceeding normally. The controls went crazy. Suddenly. Without any reason for it. It was a minor fault, but Captain Donovan never took anything lightly and ordered Aldo, the mechanic, to find out the cause of the problem. Aldo put on his space suit and went outside the ship.
They were on a routine mission through space to explore a moon that promised numerous resources for the future. The crew was made up of trained personnel, who had to face a new and unexplored environment. There might be some dangerous creatures or a complicated scenario. That is why it was necessary to carry weapons. Did I mention the possibility of facing space pirates? It was hard work.
Aldo returned to the ship without news. The incident was unexplained. Hardly convinced, Captain asked for a report to be noted in the logbook. The incident remained in the log book. For a while.
The crew soon realized that all their problems were just beginning. A little mistake here and there. Then came the reviews, but there was nothing to say. Again, there was no explanation for the failures. However, the worst were the nightmares.
Terrifying nightmares.
All the crew members suffered from them, filled with disturbing visions: crashes, impressive deaths, appearances of demons, childhood traumas, and unpronounceable things. A carnival of horror.
There was another failure in the configuration of the cameras that ensured adequate rest with relaxing imagery to help crew members sleep, Instead, cameras became traps that did not allow the crew to wake up from the bad dreams until the established hours were met.
The tired faces of the entire team were evident. In the dining room, everything was silent. A feeling of unease reigned in the spaceship.
“I had a nightmare last night,” Sissy said, breaking the silence. She was responsible for the food. “And it’s been the same the nights before.”
“Look at my face,” Michelle Zhang, the beautiful co-pilot, said. “Do you think any of us have been able to sleep well lately? We’re all in the same boat.”
“I know,” Sissy said, “We have a problem. I think maybe it has to do with the ship’s gravitational system.”
Anne looked up at Sissy. “I am the pilot. Do not forget. I would have noticed if there was any problem with the system, and I assure you that such a problem does not exist.”
“I’m not blaming you,” Sissy said.
“So what are you trying to say?” Michelle asked. “I mean, we’re having strange problems with the ship, and everyone here is having terrible nightmares. The relationship between the problem and the ship’s vibrations is possible.”
Captain limited himself to listening to the talk in silence.
However, Aldo burst into the debate with a heated tone. “It has been impossible not to listen to your speculations about our current problems, Sissy. You wanna tell me something? I tell you this because the correct functioning of the ship’s gravitational system and the sleep chambers are my responsibility. You’re questioning my work, but what if I question yours? What if I said that nightmares occur from eating spoiled food?
“Do you want to bet on it?” Sissy shouted, “Do you have a problem with me?”
Captain Donovan raised a hand and ordered silence. “That’s enough. I understand what you are going through. I reviewed these failures myself. Aldo and I tried to find a solution. We couldn’t find anything. Your approach, Sissy, will be taken into account. We need different perspectives and…”
Suddenly, there was a general breakdown on the ship. There was a horrible noise, and everything failed. Gravity, the air system, and the engines stopped. The spaceship lost its way. Total chaos.
The crew members were suspended in the void, suffocated, unable to scream. Terrified. If they survived this, they had to solve the problem. This time, the whole thing went too far.
A second passed, and everyone was on the floor. What just happened? Fear reflected in each of their faces.
Captain Donovan, sat on the floor, thinking as always. Confused like everyone else. He was primarily responsible for finding a solution to the problem. Every second that this persisted was his failure.
“This is serious,” said Ben Harris, the navigator. “We almost died.”
“Seriously?” Sissy screamed, “It was absolutely deadly. I don’t understand how we are still alive.”
Aldo stood up and spoke.
“But we must do something. Anything. Captain Donovan, what shall we do now?”
Eyes landed on the leader. He stood up and, regaining his composure, said, “I would be lying to you if I said I knew what was going on here. Together, we can discover the origin of our problems. And we will start now.”
Captain Donovan divided the ten crew members into two teams. The first was made up of:
-Captain Donovan
-Aldo
-Michelle
-Sissy
-Ben
The second was made up of:
-Anne
-Neal, the doctor
-Nic, the electrician
-Carlos, the biologist
-Jimmy, the geologist
Both groups were assigned to explore each half of the ship. The scan carried out by the system itself failed, and a thorough examination had to be carried out in person.
This new exploration yielded the same result. Nothing wrong with the ship. No anomaly. Shouldn’t there be a reason for all that madness?
Only one incident occurred, although it was ultimately just a mistake. Anne’s team found something that looked like a large shadow. The group raised their weapons. They slowly approached it, but when they got closer, they only found a perfect pareidolia caused by a part of the ship.
That night, Captain Donovan did not sleep, thinking about the problem they faced. None of them wanted to use the cameras to sleep. It was better to wake up immediately from some nightmare than to be trapped in the damn chambers.
It occurred at approximately 3:00 a.m. A heartbreaking voice came out of nowhere. Captain Donovan ran towards the source of the noise. It was Jimmy’s room.
He found a screaming Jimmy trapped in some horrible nightmare. He tried to wake him up, but couldn’t. The screams continued.
The rest of the crew came, and the doctor prepared a medicine to force Jimmy to wake up.
As the doctor prepared the dose, everyone heard the words Jimmy shouted.
“He is here,” he shouted in terror. “His name is Khebiros, and he is coming for all of us. He says he will take us to hell. No one is here to save us…”
The doctor gave the injection, hoping that Jimmy would snap out of the endless nightmare. Jimmy calmed down for a momento, only to wake up with a scared look, asking for help. Then he fell to the ground.
The doctor confirmed Jimmy’s death. The crew was shocked.
“It’s impossible,” Anne said. “What’s going on here?” She looked at the rest. “Any of us could be next.”
The doctor tried to remain calm. “Jimmy fell into a nightmare too hard. His mind could not withstand such pressure. Do you understand? Everything can be explained.”
“No,” Ben said, “nothing is explained. I think it’s time to stop thinking that we can explain what’s going on here. Something or someone is playing with us, and now it is killing us.”
“We saw something during our inspection,” Nic said, “it was…”
“It was a shadow, folks,” Neal interrupted. “A pareidolia.”
“I thought so,” said Anne, “but now…”
“Now what?” Sissy asked.
“I think there’s someone on board.”
Aldo shook his head.
“It’s impossible, our system would have detected it.”
“At least,” Ben said, “it’s outside of our reality, our own world.”
“What are you saying?” Captain Donovan asked.
“Are you talking about a ghost?” Carlos asked.
“Oh please!” Aldo shouted. “It must be a joke.”
Ben tried to make it clear that he was not talking about ghosts, but rather that perhaps there was an intruder on the spaceship who moved in a different dimensión, and capable of avoiding the ship’s scanners..
“If it were true, what should we do?” Captain Donovan asked, trying to keep his mind open to other possibilities.
Ben approached the controls and explained how to manipulate the multiple realities until they encountered a strange presence.
“Go ahead,” Captain Donovan said.
The rest of the team looked at Ben expectantly. Neal and Aldo were the ones with the most skeptical expressions.
Ben’s face was tense. He had a bad feeling about what was causing the failures. He knew that there was something disturbing in the problems and nightmares they suffered. Something evil that ended with Jimmy’s death. However, he couldn’t let anyone else know his secret thoughts.
Suddenly, a light appeared on the ship’s radar. “There,” said Sissy, expressing what no one was able to say, since everyone remained silent.
Ben redoubled his efforts to catch the elusive intruder. It was now or never.
The signal became stronger, as if something was captured.
In front of the spaceship, a strange figure began to appear. He was human-shaped, but larger and more muscular than a normal human. His skin was a fiery red, and his body was covered with hair from the middle of his waist to his feet, like a bear. He had large claws on his hands and feet. However, the most terrifying thing was his face.
On its head was a pair of large spiral horns like those of a misshapen ram. His face was deformed, a cross between a human face and a nightmare. His face expressed greed, lust, and evil. The being looked at the silent crew watching him through the ship’s glass.
“Now you know me,” the being said. His voice echoed throughout the ship. “You are abandoned, and you are mine. All of you will come with me to my kingdom of darkness.”
He raised a hand, pointing to the crew. Suddenly, Neal let out a cry of pain, writhed for a few moments before his shocked companions, and fell lifeless. The being vanished with a ghastly laugh that lingered in space.
The crew members were petrified. They did not believe what they just saw. All along, they were deceived by blindly believing in science and the material, but the old beliefs were back to show them that they were wrong.
All the fantasies of the ancestors: angels, demons, ghosts, witches, mermaids, good and evil. Could there be anywhere an all-powerful God creator of all things?
Sissy and Anne fainted from the shock. Captain Donovan rushed to pick them up. He tended to the team patiently, gave water to each, and tried to calm them down.
“I can’t believe what I saw,” Sissy said.
“It’s impossible,” said Carlos, “Everything we knew was a lie.”
“In the end, our ancestors were right to believe in magic, spirits, and all those things I won’t call nonsense anymore,” Nic said.
“I know the impact we suffered,” said Captain Donovan, “I have suffered the same myself. But I believe we can still do something against this being.”
“And what could we do to him?” Sissy said, ”We can’t take him on. He’s too powerful.”
“That thing,” Aldo said, ”shouldn’t exist.”
“But it exists,” replied Captain Donovan, ”and it’s real, as real as we are. That’s why I believe we can find a way to defeat it.”
“Maybe,” Carlos said, ”we should stop thinking we know everything. Forget almost everything we’ve learned throughout our lives.”
“We blindly believed in science,” said Michelle, ”as the ancients believed in myths and religions.”
“I always wondered,” Carlos said, “if the ancients saw a lot of things by hallucination, mass hysteria, and other explanations. When we decided to abandon all these past beliefs, we were left without an authentic explanation.”
“It’s very simple,” Anne said, “they didn’t know how to explain it all. They didn’t know what else to say.”
Silence fell over the room for a moment.
“According to Arthur C. Clarke,” Nic finally said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
“Exactly,” Captain Donovan said, “we just don’t know how to deal with him yet.”
“That’s right,” Aldo said. “It must have a structure, a plane in which it can move. If we force it to appear, we might be able to beat it. We just need to know its dimensional plane to attack it. Ok, I’m in.”
“We know the plane in which it moves,” said Ben, ”I can replicate the same experience, and we can find it again.”
Everyone agreed to put that plan into action. They grabbed the weapons, configuring them to their highest power. Michelle and Aldo wore robotic suits loaded with lasers and missiles. Quite an arsenal. However, fear gripped their hearts, because they didn’t know what they were up against.
Ben set the ship’s power to the same frequency as the first time. It was a dangerous maneuver because excessive power use could leave them with no way to get home. But it was the only way to make the enemy appear.
“It’s done,” Ben said. “You can start the search. Kill that idiot.”
Only Ben and Carlos remained in the control room. The rest of the team, led by Captain Donovan, set out in search of the demon.
“Ben, point us in the direction we should go.”
“There’s a vibe in the warehouses. I think it’s him.”
“Right. We’re on our way.”
“How do we know we’re going to hurt him?” Carlos asked Ben in the control room.
“The weapons are set to the ship’s frequency, so we’re using the same energy that we get it to show up with. Hopefully, it can hurt him.”
Carlos and Ben stared at the screen.
The team moved toward the warehouses. Their nerves were on edge. They still could not assimilate the existence of such a being and the obligation to face him.
“There!” Ben shouted, his voice sounding almost desperate.
Captain Donovan pointed his gun in the direction of the vibration and fired at it. A scream arose in the void. The whole team was terrified, but overcoming their own fear, they fired at the same spot.
The scream grew louder, and they could see the horrible figure appear in front of them. He seemed to be wounded, and the group attacked him again. However, in the middle of the shooting, he raised a hand, and some sort of energy threw them back.
The crew members saw the demon rise. It was huge, bigger than any human, and its skin was red, completely red. It was truly terrifying, monstrous.
“Do you not understand that you will die? The thousand years have passed, and my power has been released. I just wanted to have a little fun with you sad ignoramuses. You think you know everything, but you know nothing. Never mind. Soon, I will destroy your world.”
He raised a hand, and the entire ship began to vibrate. The metal creaked loudly. The ship was deforming. The demon was trying to implode everything.
Captain Donovan shot at it to stop it. The demon roared furiously and directed its attack at him. A horrendous pain seized Captain’s body, and he fell to the ground. The demon enjoyed Captain’s suffering with a cruel smile.
Michelle, who was inside the robotic suit, got up and ran towards the creature. The collision was terrible. They both went through a couple of walls of the ship. She fired the suit’s beams at it in an attempt to hurt it.
Captain recovered, and with the others, ran after the demon and Michelle. It was difficult to attack the enemy without the risk of injuring Michelle as well. But, finally, the demon proved to be stronger and hit the co-pilot, sending her many meters back.
Without wasting time, the members of the group shot him at the same time. The attack was effective and the monster fell with a loud scream. It managed to get up, and stretched its arm in the direction of the group.
They ran on different sides to avoid falling victim to the demon’s power. When the demon saw the opportunity, it disappeared.
The team regrouped. No one was injured, but Michelle’s robotic suit was inoperable. The good news was that she was fine, with no scratches. Captain spat blood, but asked the rest not to worry about him.
Ben called them. The signal was too close to the control room. The enemy was coming towards them. The whole team immediately headed for the front of the ship, aware that defending the control room was their only chance of survival.
Ben and Carlos were ready to face the enemy. Perhaps nervous, but they were determined to fight to the end.
“Look,” said Carlos, gripping his gun tightly, “He seemed to be moving more slowly. I think he’s wounded. Maybe our team managed to hurt him.”
“True,” Ben said, lowering the gun and looking at the screen, ”although we don’t know the stuff that being is made of, so we can’t draw any conclusions.”
Suddenly, a powerful smell of sulfur flooded the whole room. It was unbearable. However, Ben and Carlos were still ready to attack.
The demon appeared in front of them. Both men fired at him, but the devil was faster and avoided the lasers. They ran for cover as they fired, and their adversary, with a wave of his hand, threw them against the wall.
The creature looked at them and headed for the controls. At that moment, the doors opened, and the rest of the team started shooting at it.
“We have to cover the controls,” Sissy said.
The demon went through the lasers and attacked Sissy, killing her.
The crew attacked it with all the arsenal they had. The Monster screamed, and fired powerful lightning bolts that damaged the ship’s structure. The crewmen took cover as best they could. The lightning seemed to come from all sides and cause more destruction.
“We should do something,” Michelle said in the midst of the war, ”I don’t think we’re hurting him anymore.”
“Captain,” Ben said, ”if we can stop him for a brief moment, I could teleport him to the engines and harness the energy there to send him to a distant dimensión, so far away that it couldn’t hurt us. At least, in theory.”
“I could stop it,” Aldo shouted. He was the only one with a robotic suit, capable of stopping it.
“That solution would be too dangerous,” Ben said, ”you will die.”
“Aldo,” Captain Donovan said, ”let me do it. Give me the suit.”
“Negative, Captain,” Aldo replied, ”putting on this suit wasted too much of my time. Too late.”
“How much energy are we going to use for that?” Anne asked. “We may run out of a way to get home.”
“It will be worse to die here,” Nic said.
“Okay,” Anne said, ”good point.”
“Damn it, Ben, do I or don’t I?” Aldo asked.
“I can’t find another way,” Ben said.
“Aldo, no!” Captain Donovan shouted.
And Aldo ran straight at the devil, surprising him and embracing him with the suit at its highest energy.
Ben ran to the controls, setting up the system as the violent fight between the demon and Aldo continued. The rest of the team took cover from the lasers the opponent threw at them. However, they were also firing at him, trying to avoid hurting Aldo.
A light covered the fighters, and they both disappeared from the control room. For a moment, all was quiet. Suddenly, commotion erupted. There were explosions everywhere.
“Ben!” Captain shouted. The destruction continued to sweep over more sections of the ship.
“I’m on it!” Ben shouted.
“We have to go to the engines,” Anne shouted, ”we have to help Aldo.”
“Let´s go!” the rest of the team said in unison.
The crew members ran to the engines, when an explosion occurred, destroying almost half of the ship.
The safety mechanism caused the gates to seal the half that had not been destroyed.
The starship (or the part of the ship that survived) floated directionless in the vastness of space.
“He’s gone,” Ben said sadly, ”Aldo couldn’t do it. We barely have enough power to keep the air and lights on.”
“But we must have some way out of all this,” Nic said, looking to others for hope.
“We have nothing,” Anne said, ”we have no way to get home.”
“Without power we’re not going anywhere,” said Michelle, ”and without engines, we’re not going anywhere either.”
“Oh, no!” Nic said. ”We’re lost, we’re going to die.”
Everyone remained silent. No one could say anything to counteract this reality.
Until Captain Donovan stepped forward.
“We still have something to do,” Captain said firmly. He got down on his knees and began a prayer to some merciful god in the infinity of the universe.
Copyright © 2026 John R. Ancka
#death #demon #destruction #fighting #praying #spaceship
All Rights Reserved -
The #Courage #Tour, organized by Trump-promoting #dominionists
-- #Lance #Wallnau and #Mario #Murillo,
-- and co-sponsored by the MAGA movement organization
"America First Policy Institute",
rolls into Pennsylvania this week on its tour of 19 swing counties that could decide the outcome of the presidential election.The event will be held Friday night and all day Saturday in #Monroeville, which is located east of Pittsburgh.
Scholar Matthew Taylor, who attended a Wisconsin stop, called the tour
“the most targeted and tactical voter mobilization effort done by #Christian #nationalists ever,”adding that
“they’re doing it hand in glove in many ways with the #Trump campaign and with the apparatus of the Trump campaign through an organization like #AFPI.”Indeed, the Courage Tour exemplifies
💥the de facto merger between the MAGA movement and dominionist Christian nationalists.AFPI, a “think tank” organized by and filled with former Trump administration officials,
is an active participant in #Project2025, another example of the shared authoritarian goals of Trumpworld and the Christian nationalists who helped put Trump in power in 2016 as part of their long-term plan to take “dominion” over every sphere of influence in society.Turning Point USA’s #Charlie #Kirk has also supported the tour.
In 2023, AFPI President #Brooke #Rollins, a former Trump adviser who had been preparing his second-term agenda before he lost the 2020 election,
held an "America First Summit"
where she discussed AFPI’s Vision 2025,
a preview of Project 2025’s plans for the aggressive use of government power to promote the far-right agenda.Rollins happily admitted that their “ideologically revolutionary” goal is to 🔥“seize control of the administrative state” as part of “an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions.”
That echoed language used by the #Heritage #Foundation when it launched Project 2025 as a plan for the MAGA movement to “take the reins of government.”
The Courage Tour’s combination of tent revival-style religious rallies with political mobilization reflects the beliefs of #New #Apostolic #Reformation figures like Wallnau and Murillo that spiritual revival will lead to political transformation of the country to bring it into alignment with their particular biblical worldview.
Wallnau has said the tour’s purpose is to break “#demonic #strongholds” that have supposedly kept Republicans from winning elections,
and to prepare Christians to rule and reign after Christ’s return by training them to “occupy territory now.”In other words, the Courage Tour is an example of #NAR “#spiritual #warfare” in pursuit of earthly power
—for Trump and for themselves.Right Wing Watch reported that when the tour stopped in Wisconsin in July, the leader of a group called "The Lion of Judah" urged people to sign up to serve as election workers so that they could be in effect a
“Trojan Horse” for the Christian nationalist political movement.At an earlier stop in Michigan, Christian nationalist political operative #David #Barton spread false Christian nationalist history.
Researcher Jenny Cohn has pointed out that #Rob #Pacienza, senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
—a longtime center of Christian-right political organizing
—is a senior fellow in the Center for the American Dream at AFPI.
This Wednesday, Sept. 25, Pacienza will kick off 40 days of prayer leading up to the election
with an online event with Courage Tour speaker Alveda King.Pacienza’s project comes with a daily prayer guide that includes prayers for policies protecting life “from conception until natural death”
and “restoration” of marriage being limited to one man and one woman.It includes a prayer that “Christians would use the power we have as citizens to rein in big government so that the State never becomes our Master.”
It also urges people to pray that God would
“remove those from office who oppose Him”
and “cause chaos and confusion among groups who oppose Him and His people so that their plans are thwarted.” -
And who will work in the fields? Children?Folks who have just lost #FoodAssistance and #Medicare?#Protestors who piss off Trump?
#Trump’s Immigration #Crackdown Hits #CaliforniaFarms
#Farmworkers hid in fields on Tuesday as word spread that ICE agents were conducting raids in California’s breadbasket, an activist said.
By Bernard Mokam and Pooja Salhotra
June 11, 2025, 9:08 p.m. ETExcerpt: " 'The #Trump administration is ramping up its immigration crackdown, with a focus on workplaces with undocumented #laborers, such as #farms, #restaurants and #construction sites. Estimates show more than eight million undocumented #immigrants work in the United States.
"Last Friday, federal immigration agents swept through the garment district of Los Angeles, setting off protests that have rattled sections of downtown L.A. and have spread to a number of cities across the country.
"For #farmworkers — about 42 percent of whom are undocumented, according to the Agriculture Department — the escalation in arrests has created widespread fear." 'Children are terrified,' Ms. Romero said. 'They don’t want to go to school because they don’t know if their parents will be home when they come back.'
"Local leaders have rebuked the escalation, which could bring hardship to one of California’s agricultural corridors. The #CentralValley — which grows #almonds, #grapes, #walnuts and #cherries, among other crops — produces a quarter of the nation’s food, worth an estimated $17 billion a year, according to federal data.
" 'These actions are completely unjustified and harmful,' said Mayor Luis McArthur of Oxnard. 'They create chaos in our city without contributing much to public safety. Furthermore these actions undermine the very principles of #DueProcess.'
"The raids this week represent the first organized immigration enforcement from the new Trump administration to hit California’s agricultural region, which covers about 40 percent of the state, Ms. Romero said. A handful of federal operations have been conducted in other rural communities in recent weeks. Last month, federal agents pulled over a bus in #AlbionN., and detained 14 immigrants who worked at a nearby farm. In April, three children and their mother were detained at an upstate New York dairy.
"Rural migrants are particularly vulnerable to immigration enforcement because they stand out in towns that are often racially homogenous, said Will Lambek of Migrant Justice, an advocacy organization for farmworkers in #Vermont, where eight dairy workers were detained in April.
"In California, Ms. Davalos said the agents could have made more arrests had the community been less prepared. Once a volunteer spotted officers in the area, an alert was sent through a network of support.
"Federal agents were denied entry to at least nine farms in the Central Coast, Ms. Davalos said. Some growers parked their vehicles in front of their gates. Employees also obscured their cars.
'We demonstrated the power of brave, nonviolent #resistance to #ICE’s tactics of #terror,' Ms. Davalos said, lamenting what she described as politically driven attempts to reach a deportation quota. 'At the end of the day, they’re seizing our family, friends, neighbors and co-workers.'"If federal immigration enforcement activities continue, #FoodProduction will become increasingly difficult, and food prices could rise, warned Bryan Little, senior director of policy advocacy at the California Farm Bureau."
Read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/us/trump-ice-raids-california-farms.htmlArchived version:
https://archive.ph/NFWuO#ResistICE #Authoritarianism #ImmigrationCrackdown #ICERaids #TrumpIsANazi #AuthoritarianRule #ImmigrantsFeedUs #NoHumanIsIllegalOnStolenLand #HungerGames #EatTheRich #ThisIsFascism #Project2025
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Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos – The New York Times
President Trump, who is scheduled to speak in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, has been heaping dismissive scorn on many of the leaders he will greet there. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times.Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos
As European leaders try to engage with the American president over Greenland and the future of Ukraine, he is mocking them as weak.
Listen to this article · 4:59 min Learn more
Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times.By Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek
Jan. 20, 2026, Updated 3:32 p.m. ET
President Trump and his entourage will be in Europe this week. And they are showing their contempt.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, already hobnobbing with elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, had a sharp retort when reporters asked him about European leaders’ efforts to block Mr. Trump from seizing Greenland.
“I imagine they will form the dreaded European working group,” Mr. Bessent said, calling it their “most forceful weapon.”
It is no secret that the president and his aides view Europe as a weak, ineffectual collection of nations dominated by liberal leaders and tangled in bureaucracy. His administration’s official national security strategy, released last month, said Europe had lost its “civilizational self-confidence” amid a “failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
But rarely has the mocking been so overt.
European leaders’ “most forceful weapon” is “the dreaded European working group,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Credit…Markus Schreiber / Associated PressEarly on Tuesday morning, as Europe’s leaders continued to wring their hands over the president’s latest threats to Greenland, Mr. Trump posted an apparently A.I.-generated meme that showed him hoisting an American flag while standing on the island.
Editor’s Note: The cartoonish image of standing on Greenland, from Truth Social, my edits, I cleaned it up a bit. 🙂 … –DrWeb
“Greenland. U.S. Territory. Est. 2026,” the meme read.
Mr. Trump had not even arrived in Switzerland yet. But as he prepared to speak there on Wednesday, he continued to heap dismissive scorn on the leaders he was about to greet.
When reporters told Mr. Trump that President Emmanuel Macron of France was not going to join the American-led “Board of Peace” overseeing Gaza, Mr. Trump waved aside Mr. Macron’s opinions as irrelevant, saying he would be “out of office in a few months.”
“I’ll put a 200 percent tariff on his wines and Champagnes, and he’ll join, but he doesn’t have to join,” the president said, flexing the power of the American market and underscoring France’s vulnerability to his whims.
He also posted flattering messages from Mr. Macron and Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, on Truth Social — showing just how much European leaders are heaping praise on Mr. Trump in what appears to be an attempt to keep him engaged.
“I will use my media engagements in Davos to highlight your work,” Mr. Rutte wrote in the message that Mr. Trump shared.
“Let us try to build great things,” Mr. Macron said, though he also noted: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.”
Mr. Trump also targeted Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, giving him his signature all-caps treatment as he complained that the United Kingdom had decided to give up sovereignty of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands, while retaining control of a U.K.- and U.S.-operated military base there.
In 2024, the United Kingdom relinquished control of the islands, a remote archipelago it had held since the colonial era, to Mauritius. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later praised the deal, which came after years of negotiations, and after a court found that Britain had acted unlawfully by detaching the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965.
“Our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia,” the president wrote on his social media site, accusing Britain of doing so “FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.”
He added that international powers “only recognize STRENGTH” and that giving away the island was an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY.”
Mr. Trump’s heckling has troubled European leaders, many of whom are hoping to communicate with him on the sidelines of the Davos meetings. Leaders from across the 27-nation European Union will also gather in Brussels on Thursday evening to discuss how to respond to his latest threats on Greenland.
As the United States looks like a more and more volatile ally — and a hugely unpredictable one — European leaders are saying the continent must move away from its tight ties to America.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos – The New York Times
Tags: Bessent, Criticizes, Davos, Europe, European Nations, Greenland, Jeanna Smialek, Michael D. Shear, Slams, Switzerland, The New York Times, Trump, Trump 1.2, Trump Administration, Ukraine
#Bessent #Criticizes #Davos #Europe #EuropeanNations #Greenland #JeannaSmialek #MichaelDShear #Slams #Switzerland #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #Trump12 #TrumpAdministration #Ukraine -
#Amazoncom And #Industry Competitors In Broadline #Retail -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/business.html#62#Government gives green light to two wind park projects -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/world-capitals.html#Kathmandu#China freezes new robotaxi licenses after Baidu chaos -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/cities.html#109a#NotreDame heads into 2026 with a QB it hasn't had -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/health.html#16#NewNo 1 on high school baseball state rankings lost -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/sports.html#24View all news from Capitals in the US https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2026/03/latest-news-from-capitals-in-united.html
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Blown Away 💨 | 10 Observatories in 10 Weeks – Week 8
Week 8 came in swinging — and the wind did not hold back.
The marquee? Gone.
The tents? Nearly airborne.
John? Almost lost his dirty dishes to the gale.Between hanging onto everything that wasn’t bolted down and trying to keep our sanity, we still managed to get the last two roofs on and tick off nearly all the fiddly bits that had been holding us up.
It was chaos, comedy, and construction all rolled into one windy finale.
Only two weeks left — and the observatory field is finally starting to look ready for the stars.#BlownAway #10Observatories10Weeks #AstroWorx #ObservatoryBuild #DIYObservatory #RollOffRoof #TelescopeLife #AstroBuild #MakerLife #EngineeringChallenge #StarviewFarm #Astronomy #Space #Astrophotography #Cosmos #Science #NASA #Stargazing #NightSky #Galaxy #Stars #Moon #Universe #AstroLife #SpaceExploration #Physics #STEM #Engineering
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Blown Away 💨 | 10 Observatories in 10 Weeks – Week 8
Week 8 came in swinging — and the wind did not hold back.
The marquee? Gone.
The tents? Nearly airborne.
John? Almost lost his dirty dishes to the gale.Between hanging onto everything that wasn’t bolted down and trying to keep our sanity, we still managed to get the last two roofs on and tick off nearly all the fiddly bits that had been holding us up.
It was chaos, comedy, and construction all rolled into one windy finale.
Only two weeks left — and the observatory field is finally starting to look ready for the stars.#BlownAway #10Observatories10Weeks #AstroWorx #ObservatoryBuild #DIYObservatory #RollOffRoof #TelescopeLife #AstroBuild #MakerLife #EngineeringChallenge #StarviewFarm #Astronomy #Space #Astrophotography #Cosmos #Science #NASA #Stargazing #NightSky #Galaxy #Stars #Moon #Universe #AstroLife #SpaceExploration #Physics #STEM #Engineering
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Blown Away 💨 | 10 Observatories in 10 Weeks – Week 8
Week 8 came in swinging — and the wind did not hold back.
The marquee? Gone.
The tents? Nearly airborne.
John? Almost lost his dirty dishes to the gale.Between hanging onto everything that wasn’t bolted down and trying to keep our sanity, we still managed to get the last two roofs on and tick off nearly all the fiddly bits that had been holding us up.
It was chaos, comedy, and construction all rolled into one windy finale.
Only two weeks left — and the observatory field is finally starting to look ready for the stars.#BlownAway #10Observatories10Weeks #AstroWorx #ObservatoryBuild #DIYObservatory #RollOffRoof #TelescopeLife #AstroBuild #MakerLife #EngineeringChallenge #StarviewFarm #Astronomy #Space #Astrophotography #Cosmos #Science #NASA #Stargazing #NightSky #Galaxy #Stars #Moon #Universe #AstroLife #SpaceExploration #Physics #STEM #Engineering
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Blown Away 💨 | 10 Observatories in 10 Weeks – Week 8
Week 8 came in swinging — and the wind did not hold back.
The marquee? Gone.
The tents? Nearly airborne.
John? Almost lost his dirty dishes to the gale.Between hanging onto everything that wasn’t bolted down and trying to keep our sanity, we still managed to get the last two roofs on and tick off nearly all the fiddly bits that had been holding us up.
It was chaos, comedy, and construction all rolled into one windy finale.
Only two weeks left — and the observatory field is finally starting to look ready for the stars.#BlownAway #10Observatories10Weeks #AstroWorx #ObservatoryBuild #DIYObservatory #RollOffRoof #TelescopeLife #AstroBuild #MakerLife #EngineeringChallenge #StarviewFarm #Astronomy #Space #Astrophotography #Cosmos #Science #NASA #Stargazing #NightSky #Galaxy #Stars #Moon #Universe #AstroLife #SpaceExploration #Physics #STEM #Engineering
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Blown Away 💨 | 10 Observatories in 10 Weeks – Week 8
Week 8 came in swinging — and the wind did not hold back.
The marquee? Gone.
The tents? Nearly airborne.
John? Almost lost his dirty dishes to the gale.Between hanging onto everything that wasn’t bolted down and trying to keep our sanity, we still managed to get the last two roofs on and tick off nearly all the fiddly bits that had been holding us up.
It was chaos, comedy, and construction all rolled into one windy finale.
Only two weeks left — and the observatory field is finally starting to look ready for the stars.#BlownAway #10Observatories10Weeks #AstroWorx #ObservatoryBuild #DIYObservatory #RollOffRoof #TelescopeLife #AstroBuild #MakerLife #EngineeringChallenge #StarviewFarm #Astronomy #Space #Astrophotography #Cosmos #Science #NASA #Stargazing #NightSky #Galaxy #Stars #Moon #Universe #AstroLife #SpaceExploration #Physics #STEM #Engineering
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Angry Metal Guy’s Top 10(ish) of 2025 By Angry Metal GuyEvery year has been shitty for a while, and in some ways, 2025 was the shittiest of them all. The widespread sense that the End Is Nigh is what I would charitably call our zeitgeist.1 And I feel comfortable saying, it’s a shitty zeitgeist. But in defiance of the shit burger we’re all eating every day while we wait for the AI drone war to start, 2025 was my best year in a while. It did, in fact, see me more involved on the front and back ends of AngryMetalGuy.com than I’d been in a long time. And like those lists we’ve already published, AMG, both as a persona and community, has been a refuge for me during difficult times. The joy of discovery and the eclecticism inherent in what we do here have been a major part of why I love this blog. So, honestly, that’s been nice.
In terms of the blog’s health, AngryMetalGuy.com is holding steady. We’ve got a growing team of n00bs covering some of the holes we’ve had in the schedule.2 I worked very hard on training them in combination with Druhm, and it’s fair to say we were both happy with the result. We had some of our best candidates to date, and that made me proud and happy. There’s still room for a few more, so we might dig into the pool in the early part of 2026. So if you applied, all hope is not lost. We continue to attract around 1.25 million views a month, and that’s held steady for three years running. Obviously, we would like to continue to grow. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re actually seeing a slight downturn in visitors because of Generative AI. There are, of course, a lot of people who go to Google and write “My Favorite Band – New Album Review,” and they will be greeted by an AngryMetalGuy.com link that tends to place pretty highly on the Google Machine and awaits their complaints with open arms. But I suspect there are other kinds of views we’ve accrued – those which end up in people grabbing album art or looking for release dates – that disappear when people are requesting that ChatGPT do that for them. And while LLMs will link you after plagiarizing you, they’ll only do it if you let them, and we do not. And so any conversions of people checking linked resources are probably lost.3 There have been some weird months here and there with seemingly anomalously low numbers, so who even knows.
The active n00bs have allowed us to revive the three-posts-a-day pace,4 and we only went dark for five days during 2025. As a collective, we posted 699 posts—down from the very peak of 2019’s nearly 1,000 posts!—but in line with where we’ve been since Covid. And, our posts continue to be longer than they were in 2019, averaging 901 words for a total of 629,905 words that we produced for free in 2025. That’s a 2600-page term paper—Times New Roman, 12 point font, double-spaced on A4 paper.5 This dedication to quantity derives from the whip of an analytics-driven Steel Druhm, but wouldn’t be possible without our amazing staff putting their shoulders to the Eternal Boulder ov Metal™ and rolling it uphill every day, saying “One must imagine Sisyphus happy. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
We continue to have international appeal, as well, though the country rankings haven’t changed much from 2024. Like last year, our top five is made up of the English-speaking world (US, UK, CAN, AUS at five) + Germany (at four).6 Weirdly, we are getting a sizable amount of traffic from China, which clocks in at six for the first time. There are almost certainly shenanigans at play with those numbers, as I am not aware of any influx of Chinese fans here recently. Maybe that’s AI traffic. Maybe that’s VPN traffic. Maybe we’ve been infiltrated and are now a communist honey pot. Maybe Druhm is buying traffic. Or, maybe, Winnie the Pooh has finally discovered how excellent the realm of heavy metal really is, and China is going through a different kind of cultural revolution! Regardless, 7-10 is made up of the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, and France, with Spain and Finland dropping out of the top ten. The biggest news, however, when it comes to our international readership, is that signs point strongly to Pope Francis having been our solitary reader in the Holy See. The venerable Franciscan passed away in April of 2025, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that no one appears to have made the pilgrimage from the Vatican to Angry Metal Guy this year.
It’s worth noting that we lost more than a few stalwarts along the way in 2025,7 largely due to the #Cursed-Boomer-Posting chat on Slack, which has torn us apart. There may also have been some other influences, such as marriages, having high-paying jobs, running TV shows, having actual lives, or resenting me.8 Regardless, for all those who have worked hard to make AngryMetalGuy.com go, but who are not here with us anymore, I just want to say thank you. Despite my autistic isolation and standoffishness, I do love you all and miss you. The door is, of course, always open. And I am happy to see some special little guys who’ve been in deep freeze popping their heads out of the sand and grabbing promo. It’s a wonderful sight to behold, and maybe we’ll see some newfound productivity from old friends in 2026.
To close, I want to thank everyone – readers and writers alike – for your enthusiasm, your dedication to AngryMetalGuy.com as an institution, and your undying fealty to me, Angry Metal Guy.9 I know I can come off as harsh. And I know that some people grumble that I’m too hard on them when I read their texts or when they have divergent opinions in the comments, but that’s only true if you’ve never met a passive construction you didn’t love or if you’re wrong about metal. And, as I tell my students, we’re a team. Our goal is to make sure that AMG produces the very highest quality writing, while covering as much of the scene as possible.10 And given the loyalty of our readers, your comments, and “the eye test,” as it were, we are achieving that goal consistently. I’m still very proud of that and, if I stop to think about it, humbled by it, too.
While it feels like there’s a lot to dread after the 2025 that was, we still have a lot to be excited about here. So let’s hope that 2026 isn’t all like it’s felt in the first five days or so. Anyway, I have gone on far too long, have a wordy, overwrought list.
#(ish) 3: Helms Deep // Chasing the Dragon [June 20th, 2025 | Nameless Grave Records | Bandcamp] — Chasing the Dragon is super fun. It’s fun, it’s loud, and it’s a little stupid in a way that I find endearing. And, as I remarked in June, while US Power Metal has been getting a lot of love around these parts, Helms Deep has not been on the receiving end of nearly enough of that love. While other bands showed up to a back alley knife fight, these Florida men showed up with a bejet-packed dragon and a collection of songs that burned hotter than dragonsfire, melting the competition down and shaming their lineages for decades to come. And joking hyperbole aside, Helms Deep doesn’t feel like a novelty act. They aren’t just good ’cause I find them funny. Chasing the Dragon features playing that’s sharp and vital across the board, with guitars that never stand still, a singer who sells every chorus with the right balance of chops, cheese, and buckets of swagger. Said differently, Helms Deep is just dudes playing good, honest heavy metal while having a great time. What more do you need?
#(ish) 2: Vittra // Intense Indifference [September 19th, 2025 | Self-release | Bandcamp] — Vittra’s Intense Indifference shows up hungry, plays fast, hits hard, and gets out before you have time to get bored. Thirty-three minutes of riff-first, bethrashened melodeath go by in a blur; the hooks are sticky, the harmonies are sharp, and the energy is manic and adventurous. While the At the Gates lineage is obvious,11 Vittra pulls in enough Soilwork polish and Mors Principium Est flash to songwriting that’s focused on momentum rather than atmosphere, and the result is addictive. And what really pushes this record from really good to great are the flashes of the unexpected: honkytonk piano, bluesy acoustic passages, and classic rock phrasing that shouldn’t work, but does. It’s great listening to an album this full of piss and vinegar. I get excited when bands pop up that make the kind of thrashy, intense melodic death that never begs for an Insomnium comp. And sure, these guys have room to grow, but Intense Indifference caused me to feel anything but.
#(ish) 1: Arjen Anthony Lucassen // Songs No One Will Hear [September 12th, 2025 | InsideOut Music | Bandcamp] — Arjen Lucassen has been a favorite of mine during the time that AngryMetalGuy.com has been up and running. The “poofy-haired cheesehead”12 behind many of my favorite albums during AMG’s time is still a gem even in 2025. Crazily, Arjen’s first ‘solo record’ Lost in the New Real was released in 2012,13 and Songs No One Will Hear is its direct successor. A true concept record—with Toehider’s god-tier singer, Michael Mills, voicing a radio DJ talking to listeners about impending doom—it reflects both our End Is Nigh Zeitgeist and Arjen’s particular… idiom. Thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, Songs No One Will Hear is both tongue-in-cheek and yet deeply aware of the nature of information, grifting, and societal collapse, while still displaying the kind of referential goofiness that made Lost in the New Real such a charming record.14 The thing that dinged Songs No One Will Hear a little for me is the sense of uncanny familiarity. At times, it sounds like Arjen was working specifically to emulate the structure of Lost in the New Real. That created a bit of cognitive dissonance that I have never quite gotten over. It also drove a lot of replays of its under-the-radar predecessor rather than the album I should have been reviewing. But is Songs one of the best 11 records o’ 2025? I certainly think so.
#10: An Abstract Illusion // The Sleeping City [October 17th, 2025 | Willowtip | Bandcamp] — The Sleeping City had two strikes against it. First, it had the unenviable task of following Woe, a record that could easily have been the template on which they built their sound. It’s hard to break away from an overwhelmingly popular sound, yet these Ore Islanders took a left turn, exhibiting a level of daring I admire. The shift in aesthetic is the story of The Sleeping City in a lot of ways; the synths, the vibe, and the mood lean into dystopian sci-fi, and it’s a choice that works. What I love about The Sleeping City is that it’s detailed and detail-oriented without distracting from the expansiveness of the songwriting, which remains evocative and carefully structured. And while they sound comfortable letting songs breathe, they never get lost in the quest for “atmosphere” that undermines many modern releases. Second,15 the real gripe about The Sleeping City was the mastering job. But even a mastering job that clips peaks and fills valleys shows just how strong the raw material is. And so, finally, The Sleeping City feels like the product of a band choosing growth over safety while being true to themselves. And that’s an admirable trait that I hope they never lose.
#9: Fallujah // Xenotaph [June 13th, 2025 | Nuclear Blast Records | Bandcamp] — Fallujah landing on my list came as a genuine surprise to me, mostly because I really had quietly written them off. I used to like them, but they never carried that In Flames-style of eternal hope for me. Xenotaph pulled me back in by doing a deceptively simple thing: reintroducing attack. Everything about this record feels more immediate; guitars cut, compositions move with purpose, and songs are taut and sharp. The atmospheric elements remain, but they’re now integrated into something heavier and more immediate. I love the balance Fallujah finds, combining that late-Cynic energy with the aggression of brutal and technical death. And the deeper I got, the more Xenotaph rewarded me. Repetition revealed interlinked ideas and layered guitar work that shoots like a web throughout, creating a sinuous structure on which everything rests. As I wrote in my Record o’ the Month blurb, “Fallujah has achieved a conceptual evolution on Xenotaph that feels true to their origins and yet develops their sound in ways that make it accessible, and yet, truly unique.” It isn’t exactly br00tal death metal, but it’s not so drenched in “atmosphere” that it lacks tension. Most importantly, it worked.
#8: Scardust // Souls [July 18th, 2025 | Frontiers Records | Stream or Buy at Qobuz] — Scardust landing at number eight sans review is another casualty of my 2025 Stack o’ Shame, though this was less neglect than simple overextension in a year where too many heavy hitters landed at once. July, yo, what a month. Unfortunately, I missed the review window, then I missed the window to pawn it off responsibly, and by the time I circled back, it was late. However, Scardust’s third full-length is a sharp, confident 42 minutes of symphonic power/prog that feels fully aware and unique. While it doesn’t quite lock together as tightly as Strangers did at a conceptual and compositional level, Souls more than compensates for that with sheer craft. The orchestral and choral arrangements are some of the strongest I heard all year, and Scardust’s chemistry is ridonkulous. The rhythm section especially deserves accolades, with basswork that should be forcing its way into “best of” conversations. As a band, Scardust exists in the interstices of genre, where comparisons kind of work but can’t capture their unique voice. And while the band is impressive, the compositions feel so coherent because of Noa Gruman, who carries the album with control, range, and an incomparable soprano. Her extreme register (that is, growls) stays mostly holstered here, but her presence—and sheer talent—is on constant display, balancing different styles, moods, and feels. And her vocal performance isn’t the only standout vocal performance on Souls. The closing “Touch of Life” trilogy finds Ross Jennings (Haken) popping up in full “weird Ross” mode, which ends up as the cherry on top. The result is smart, muscular, and memorable; an album I’m ashamed to have missed.
#7: Aephanemer // Utopie [October 31st, 2025 | Napalm Records | Bandcamp] — Aephanemer’s Utopie landed, as I mentioned in my Record o’ the Month blurb, squarely at the top of my Stack o’ Shame. I was honored to be able to get access to this and start listening early, and I was immediately impressed. Yet, I got sick. Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth. Meanwhile, Utopie sat there reminding me of my failures until Grin Reaper saved my ass and gave Aephanemer’s newest opus the unhinged tongue bath it so rightfully deserved. Utopie takes everything these French melodic death metallers have been doing over the past couple of albums and tightens the screws until the whole machine purrs with confidence. The neoclassical elements have become a perfect blend that helps everything work perfectly. Utopie flows; songs connect, ideas develop, momentum carries everything forward, and yet Aephanemer does not sacrifice the immediacy and energy that makes melodic death metal such a fine dopamine mine. While I haven’t sat down and learned the parts, I feel like the guitars are more fluid and more expressive, resulting in special melodies propelled by a buoyancy reflected in the theme. And you know me, what I want from great records is a holistic sense of greatness. Happily, Aephanemer accomplishes just that on Utopie. Had I been operating at full capacity when it dropped, I would have written a review that kids would call “extra.”16
#6: Insania // The Great Apocalypse [June 13th, 2025 | Frontiers Music | Stream or Buy on Qobuz] — The Great Apocalypse, contrary to its name, is sneaky. It doesn’t gallop in and smack you in the face with shock or novelty, but instead, it reveals its strength through confidence, craft, and an almost unfair level of replay value. What initially feels like—and has been so often written off as—a solid, familiar Europower record gradually opens up to be something richer and more rewarding. And it’s kept paying dividends the longer I’ve been sitting with it. Insania sounds, as I noted when I wrote the review, like a band fully aware of their lineage and completely at ease with it. But the truly confident understand themselves enough to think differently. The resulting record is full of massive, sticky hooks, choruses that hit with power metal optimism and momentum, and electrifying guitars throughout. In fact, while investigating their discography, I was struck by how much Insania upped their game on The Great Apocalypse. And key to that is the guitar, which elevates the record by resisting predictability and yet coexisting on a meta-level with the genre that they know so well. Songs evolve instead of looping, melodies get reshaped rather than repeated, and familiar ideas or tropes are nudged just enough off-center to stay engaging but familiar. The Great Apocalypse approaches with intention, and Insania performs like a band that’s rediscovering why they love playing this kind of music in the first place. This record is exhilarating, memorable, and deeply satisfying, which is why it belongs among these other great releases.
#5: Kalaveraztekah // Nikan Axkan [May 2nd, 2025 | Self-release | Bandcamp] — In what I’m pretty sure is a first for me, an Ünsïgnëd Bänd Rödëö contestant has made my Top Ten(ish) list. I’ve had plenty of unsigned bands on my lists, but I walked into Kalaveraztekah’s masterful Nikan Axkan utterly unprepared for what I would find. Like a kid buying music in the ’90s, I just looked at that amazing cover art and decided that I was going to join the team reviewing this record instead of the other one. And that twist of fate has earned Mexico’s finest Aztec-themed death metal band a spot on the End o’ Year Metal List o’ Record™.17 As I cleverly wrote in my Record o’ the Month blurb: “There’s no sense that these Hidrocálidos are some kind of novelty act. They aren’t a Mexican Eluveitie, just playing Dark Tranquillity riffs while putting a Ritual Death Flute over it for 40 seconds in every song.”18 Rather, Nikan Axkan is chock full of muscular riffing and the kind of grindy death metal that I’ve always associated with the Mexican scene. Combined with a high-concept connecting to Mexican pre-history and the judicious use of a fucking death flute, I just never quit listening to Nikan Axkan.19 And so here they are, in the Top 5 of my Top 10(ish) of 2025,20 and it couldn’t be more deserved.
#4: Impureza // Alcázares [July 11th, 2025 | Season of Mist | Bandcamp] — I admit, I have tried to lead by example. I have attempted to become a servant leader. Rather than eating up a ton of oxygen and making everything actually about me (instead of just in jest) and what I want as Angry Metal Guy, I have, with time and wisdom, tried to allow others a chance to spread their wings. One of the things that means is that I can’t just bogart other writers’ “discoveries,” and I try not to block them if they grab something before I do.21 So, in that context, you’ll understand that I got pretty excited when I realized that I could review the newest Impureza without poaching it. The band’s approach to metal—infused with flamenco and semi-fantastical alternate-historical high concepts about colonial history—had entranced me previously, but I always felt like they were leaving a lot on the table. Their sound had not quite blended the flamenco and the metal, but rather, the genres sat side by side. Alcázares changes that. From start to finish, Alcázares is addictive, creative, musically impressive, and just a lot of fun. The artful ability of these Orléanais-via-España to marry such disparate styles with genuinely unique approaches to music that run as deeply as the very notion of meter is one of the most impressive feats accomplished in metal in 2025. But it’s not just a meta-concern of the artistic feat that excites me. Alcázares is a fucking banger that can stimulate your intellect, or that can leave your neck sore. Take your pick!22
#3: Phantom Spell // Heather & Hearth [July 18th, 2025 | Cruz del Sur Music | Bandcamp] — Phantom Spell has the benefit of being a genuine surprise. My happy place, when I can afford to be there, is digging through the promo bin and listening to everything I can get my hands on. I have made so many fantastic discoveries there, just immersed in my own little world, listening to samples to get a feel of what we’re being sent. Heather & Hearth looked like classic Steel Druhmcore: Cruz del Sur Records, retro metal, D&D Basic Set art. I popped it in, got dragged in, and totally distracted from the rest of what I was doing. I know that this might seem incongruent, but Heather & Hearth sounds fresh. In a world of hypercompressed, hyper-reamped, extremer-than-thou metal, the act of writing good songs with tons of vocal harmonies, instruments that sit in their sonic corridors, and—despite being recorded by one single dude—a convincingly live vibe feels “like a radical act.”23 I quickly grew to love Heather & Hearth, shared it with all the normies I know who love Ghost (“Isn’t this so much better?”), and began singing its praises. And I’ve been happy to see it popping up on lists throughout list season. It means a lot to me that people can hear just how good Phantom Spell is. And Phantom Spell also proved to be quite generative, in that I wrote the Spotify post as a response to a discussion about why Heather & Hearth wasn’t available there. Easily one of the best records I heard in 2025, and I’m looking forward to hearing so much more.
#2: In Mourning // The Immortal [August 29th, 2025 | Supreme Chaos Records | Bandcamp] — When a record is truly exceptional, the hardest part is often articulating why it has transcended other things without reducing it to a checklist. In Mourning’s fantastic The Immortal resists that kind of accounting in the best possible way. Its melodies are lush and emotionally evocative, capable of landing with equal force whether they’re carried by aching vocals or unfurled through long, expansive, yet intimate, trem-picked guitar passages. The riffing is punishing but disciplined, balancing weighty chug with sharper, blackened melodies, creating a constant tension between death metal heft and sadboi atmosphere without fully committing to drowning the production in reverb. And yet, none of this marks a radical departure from what In Mourning has done before—has been doing since 2008. The crucial difference here is in execution: every compositional choice seems to land exactly where it should be. In a sense, this calls attention to the role of probability, as much as inspiration or songcraft, in composition. Some records feel blessed from the outset, where one can go through the same process again and never produce the same results. The hooks here stick without feeling forced, climaxes are perfectly placed, and the pacing across the record gives each track room to breathe while contributing to the kind of flow reserved for only the best albums. Even moments that might feel familiar hit differently on The Immortal, like everything snaps into place. The Immortal succeeds, then, not just on craft but on feel: it feels heavier, sadder, and more resonant than its predecessors; and it stands comfortably among the strongest melodic death metal releases in years.
#1: Calva Louise // Edge of the Abyss [July 11th, 2025 | Mascot Records | Bandcamp] — Edge of the Abyss ran away with my listening this year in a way I genuinely don’t remember happening before, and that probably tells you most of what you need to know. The record is frantic, restless, and overloaded with ideas, moving between genres and feels with the speed of fast-cut editing; shifting at the drop of a dime. That both makes the record fun to listen to and keeps it surprising and fresh even after dozens of listens. The pace and density line up uncannily well with where my own brain tends to live, and I suspect that’s a part of why it lodged itself so firmly in my rotation. Calva Louise writes songs that feel driven by impulse and curiosity rather than caution or genre boundaries, and that creative energy and freedom are contagious. Jess Allanic’s pop instincts and melodic sense anchor the chaos, lending the lighter passages real emotional weight and memorability, rather than merely serving as connective tissue. Edge of the Abyss’s incorporation of Latin rhythmic elements and melodic sensibilities ended up also being a personal bonus; Latin music has been a refuge for me from musical monotony for years, and hearing them integrated naturally into Edge of the Abyss was exciting, and it generated affection for this wayward Venezuelan and her French and English bandmates. What really sealed the deal for me, though, was how committed the band sounds to its vision. The songwriting is ambitious and fun, but it doesn’t feel scattered. The album has a cinematic feel – complemented by literally cinematic music videos – but doesn’t feel bloated or melodramatic. And Calva Louise sports a swagger unique to bands who are just doing exactly what they want to be doing. Since July, I’ve kept coming back to Edge of the Abyss and forgetting I had even enjoyed other records this year. There’s a real sense of becoming here; of a band pulling its influences together into something that feels unique. And I also feel invested in Calva Louise in a way I haven’t been with many bands. I really am so happy to see them growing and succeeding. I love seeing them landing on people’s lists here and elsewhere. They have so much potential, and I am so eager to see what they do next. But should the worst befall them, I’ll always have Edge of the Abyss, and it already feels like an all-timer.
Honorable Mentions
Sarastus // Agony Eternal [July 1st, 2025 | Dominance of Darkness Records | Bandcamp] — Stolen from me by one Kenstrosity, Sarastus was a joyous discovery by me in the depths of the promo bin. One part black metal with a touch of death n’ roll for vibes, Agony Eternal strikes hard at modern conventions of black metal and sounds fresh by playing fast, unapologetic, engaging music with razor-sharp riffs. Melodic, without being sickly sweet or cheesy, with a ton of attack and great songwriting chops, Sarastus really threads the needle on Agony Eternal, making something that is driven and addictive, but undeniably black metal.
Wytch Hazel // V: Lamentations [July 4th, 2025 | Bad Omen | Bandcamp] — I’ve been back and forth with Wytch Hazel in the past. I have enjoyed what they do, but in the past I’ve been more skeptical of specifically nostalgiacore records that don’t feel like they’re adding much “new.” First, I think I’m just getting past that problem, as the “new” in metal is emphasizing things I don’t love about the scene. But second, I think V: Lamentations is just a more engaging record. From the word ‘go,’ Wytch Hazel writes with a kind of urgency that gives their brand of ’70s-tinged metal an extra kick, and the energy sits so well with me. Maybe the songwriting is just a bit tighter, maybe it’s faster, I don’t know—I didn’t write the proper review. All I know is that I keep circling back to Lamentations in a way that I haven’t done as much with their earlier albums. And that made it easy to put in the running for Listurnalia and to give my personal Angry Stamp o’ Approval™.
Mors Principium Est // Darkness Invisible [September 26th, 2025 | Perception/Reigning Phoenix Music | Stream or Buy on Qobuz] — Probably the grower of the year, Darkness Invisible surprised me by sticking around. When I started reviewing it, I expected not to like it much. I had been a big fan of the band’s previous output and of their former guitarist’s solo record from last year. But with familiarity—and time spent dissecting it—I became increasingly impressed with the album. While the production is busy and pulls it down, the writing forges a new path that better represents the vision of MPE’s founding member, Ville Viljanen. And that vision is bleak, blackened, and surprisingly sticky. No matter your opinion on the end of the previous incarnation, Darkness Invisible at least demonstrates that there is still a vital future for Finland’s most underrated melodic death metal powerhouse. And that’s a future to which I look forward.
Blackbraid // Blackbraid III [August 8th, 2025 | Self-release | Bandcamp] — I have a Gollumesque distaste for modern black metal. I am physically incapable of starting a review or blurb of a black metal band without reminding readers how much I hate “atmosphere” in the post-Cascadian black metal era. “Give it to us raw and wriggling!” I growl at all the fat hobbitses who try to feed me empty, overcooked “atmosphere.” Blackbraid doesn’t want to feed me atmosphere. Instead, Blackbraid’s III trembles with a vibe that brings me back to discovering black metal; at times blistering, at times introspective, but rarely overstaying its welcome and never feeling like its primary goal is to be the band that defanged black metal for good to make it okay to listen to for kids in the suburbs. I’ll be listening to III for a long time.
Tómarúm // Beyond Obsidian Euphoria — This record is too long. It’s got too much hype among the staff. And also, it’s too damned good to be an honorable mention. And yet, there are only so many #(ish)es, and I got to Beyond Obsidian Eurphoria too late to really give it the kind of sustained love that it needs to properly list. Still, once I started listening, I’ve been swinging past it every day. Sometimes twice. The songwriting is a bit wandering, the album is a bit overwhelming, and yet there is an undeniable vibe that Tómarúm traffics in, and that’s sneakily sticky. Combine that techy Death with something akin to Disillusion, and maybe you’ve got your comp. The only complaint I have is that some of the melodies end up intentionally arch in a way that makes me think that they are actively trying not to give the ear something to latch onto. That’s dumb, but it’s also very 2025. And hey, at least there’s a really easy trick for them to sell out with.
…and Oceans // The Regeneration Itinerary [May 23rd, 2025 | Season of Mist | Bandcamp] —The Regeneration Itinerary was a lot more controversial among fans than I expected, but I really enjoyed it. As I wrote in May, “It’s always fun to watch bands defy Angry Metal Guy’s Law of Diminishing Recordings™, and while The Regeneration Itinerary isn’t their best record yet, 30 years after their debut, …and Oceans is still releasing vital music that’s impossible to overlook.” And that’s just true facts as stated by a metal-knower. While not quite the tour de force of its predecessors, this record is a solid bit of weirdo black metal with some of the best art in the biz. I recommend it highly.
Haxprocess24 // Beyond What Eyes Can See [July 25th, 2025 | Transcending Obscurity Records | Bandcamp] — Four songs, three of which are over 10 minutes long, and a combo of what I’d call post-Opeth songwriting with OSDM aesthetics, Beyond What Eyes Can See deserved more attention this year and ended up, instead, on my Stack o’ Shame™. This isn’t a reflection on them; they play vital death metal and deserve accolades for their expansive vision and the way everything flows. They just got eaten up by the July where everything got released. Sorry, boys, but here’s your fig leaf!
Majestica // Power Train [February 7th, 2025 | Nuclear Blast Records | Stream or Buy at Qobuz] — Back in like 2008, I saw a band called ReinXeed play a whole bunch of covers of Swedish dance/electronica “group” E-Type at a Culture Night in Umeå. I remember hearing from people in the local scene that they were “big in Japan,” and I listened to some stuff, but wasn’t super moved by it at the time. In 2019, ReinXeed changed their name to Majestica and got signed to Nuclear Blast. And damnit if they aren’t just a lot better than they were in 2008. Power Train, which is on our collective Stack o’ Shame™, is the band’s third full-length under the moniker, and it rocks the same kind of sickly sweet melodies, guitar gymnastics, and general sense of fun that makes power metal my go-to genre a lot of days. While not quite as sticky and addictive as some other things higher up the list, Power Train was a solid addition to the band’s discography and one of the better power records I heard this year. You’ve come a long way, baby!
Dormant Ordeal // Tooth and Nail [April 18th, 2025 | Willowtip Records | Bandcamp] — While not as high on this record as others on the staff, Dormant Ordeal is undeniably vital. And I’m just never going to write a better blurb than I did when they got Record o’ the Month for April: “This record hits a sweet spot inside of me, best described as the ‘oh yeah, that’s how death metal is done’ spot. The riffs flow, and my brain just opens up the spigots, releasing a veritable tsunami of dopamine. Every riff that cuts, every transition that seethes, and every recognition of the slick, skilled ways that these guys construct songs, I get a nice big kick of that Happy Chemical. Tooth and Nail is dynamic, punishing, aggressive, and better yet, it’s smart.” Man, that guy can write!
Aversed // Erasure of Color [March 25th, 2025 | M-Theory Audio | Bandcamp] — Last, and I guess technically least – but that isn’t taking into account that there were like 10,000 albums released in 2025 and there are only like 25 on this list – is Aversed’s Erasure of Color. Part of the reason for its late arrival is that, despite being our Record o’ the Month for March, Erasure of Color didn’t actually make it onto my personal playlist until quite a bit later. And damn, that was kind of a big miss on my part. Great melodeath with a unique flavor and great intensity; there’s something thoughtful and sharp about this record. Combine that with excellent album art and the Dolphin Whisperer seal of approval, and Erasure of Color has everything fans of melodeath need to carry them through this wasteland. I will need to keep my eyes on Aversed going forward.
#AndOceans #2025 #Aephanemer #AnAbstractIllusion #AngryMetalGuy #AngryMetalGuySTop10Ish #ArjenLucassen #Aversed #Blackbraid #CalvaLouise #ChasingTheDragon #DormantOrdeal #EdgeOfTheAbyss #Fallujah #Haxprocess #HelmsDeep #Impureza #InMourning #Insania #IntenseIndifference #Kalaveraztekah #Majestica #MorsPrincipiumEst #PhantomSpell #Sarastus #Scardust #Tómarúm #Vittra #WytchHazel -
Angry Metal Guy’s Top 10(ish) of 2025 By Angry Metal GuyEvery year has been shitty for a while, and in some ways, 2025 was the shittiest of them all. The widespread sense that the End Is Nigh is what I would charitably call our zeitgeist.1 And I feel comfortable saying, it’s a shitty zeitgeist. But in defiance of the shit burger we’re all eating every day while we wait for the AI drone war to start, 2025 was my best year in a while. It did, in fact, see me more involved on the front and back ends of AngryMetalGuy.com than I’d been in a long time. And like those lists we’ve already published, AMG, both as a persona and community, has been a refuge for me during difficult times. The joy of discovery and the eclecticism inherent in what we do here have been a major part of why I love this blog. So, honestly, that’s been nice.
In terms of the blog’s health, AngryMetalGuy.com is holding steady. We’ve got a growing team of n00bs covering some of the holes we’ve had in the schedule.2 I worked very hard on training them in combination with Druhm, and it’s fair to say we were both happy with the result. We had some of our best candidates to date, and that made me proud and happy. There’s still room for a few more, so we might dig into the pool in the early part of 2026. So if you applied, all hope is not lost. We continue to attract around 1.25 million views a month, and that’s held steady for three years running. Obviously, we would like to continue to grow. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re actually seeing a slight downturn in visitors because of Generative AI. There are, of course, a lot of people who go to Google and write “My Favorite Band – New Album Review,” and they will be greeted by an AngryMetalGuy.com link that tends to place pretty highly on the Google Machine and awaits their complaints with open arms. But I suspect there are other kinds of views we’ve accrued – those which end up in people grabbing album art or looking for release dates – that disappear when people are requesting that ChatGPT do that for them. And while LLMs will link you after plagiarizing you, they’ll only do it if you let them, and we do not. And so any conversions of people checking linked resources are probably lost.3 There have been some weird months here and there with seemingly anomalously low numbers, so who even knows.
The active n00bs have allowed us to revive the three-posts-a-day pace,4 and we only went dark for five days during 2025. As a collective, we posted 699 posts—down from the very peak of 2019’s nearly 1,000 posts!—but in line with where we’ve been since Covid. And, our posts continue to be longer than they were in 2019, averaging 901 words for a total of 629,905 words that we produced for free in 2025. That’s a 2600-page term paper—Times New Roman, 12 point font, double-spaced on A4 paper.5 This dedication to quantity derives from the whip of an analytics-driven Steel Druhm, but wouldn’t be possible without our amazing staff putting their shoulders to the Eternal Boulder ov Metal™ and rolling it uphill every day, saying “One must imagine Sisyphus happy. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
We continue to have international appeal, as well, though the country rankings haven’t changed much from 2024. Like last year, our top five is made up of the English-speaking world (US, UK, CAN, AUS at five) + Germany (at four).6 Weirdly, we are getting a sizable amount of traffic from China, which clocks in at six for the first time. There are almost certainly shenanigans at play with those numbers, as I am not aware of any influx of Chinese fans here recently. Maybe that’s AI traffic. Maybe that’s VPN traffic. Maybe we’ve been infiltrated and are now a communist honey pot. Maybe Druhm is buying traffic. Or, maybe, Winnie the Pooh has finally discovered how excellent the realm of heavy metal really is, and China is going through a different kind of cultural revolution! Regardless, 7-10 is made up of the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, and France, with Spain and Finland dropping out of the top ten. The biggest news, however, when it comes to our international readership, is that signs point strongly to Pope Francis having been our solitary reader in the Holy See. The venerable Franciscan passed away in April of 2025, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that no one appears to have made the pilgrimage from the Vatican to Angry Metal Guy this year.
It’s worth noting that we lost more than a few stalwarts along the way in 2025,7 largely due to the #Cursed-Boomer-Posting chat on Slack, which has torn us apart. There may also have been some other influences, such as marriages, having high-paying jobs, running TV shows, having actual lives, or resenting me.8 Regardless, for all those who have worked hard to make AngryMetalGuy.com go, but who are not here with us anymore, I just want to say thank you. Despite my autistic isolation and standoffishness, I do love you all and miss you. The door is, of course, always open. And I am happy to see some special little guys who’ve been in deep freeze popping their heads out of the sand and grabbing promo. It’s a wonderful sight to behold, and maybe we’ll see some newfound productivity from old friends in 2026.
To close, I want to thank everyone – readers and writers alike – for your enthusiasm, your dedication to AngryMetalGuy.com as an institution, and your undying fealty to me, Angry Metal Guy.9 I know I can come off as harsh. And I know that some people grumble that I’m too hard on them when I read their texts or when they have divergent opinions in the comments, but that’s only true if you’ve never met a passive construction you didn’t love or if you’re wrong about metal. And, as I tell my students, we’re a team. Our goal is to make sure that AMG produces the very highest quality writing, while covering as much of the scene as possible.10 And given the loyalty of our readers, your comments, and “the eye test,” as it were, we are achieving that goal consistently. I’m still very proud of that and, if I stop to think about it, humbled by it, too.
While it feels like there’s a lot to dread after the 2025 that was, we still have a lot to be excited about here. So let’s hope that 2026 isn’t all like it’s felt in the first five days or so. Anyway, I have gone on far too long, have a wordy, overwrought list.
#(ish) 3: Helms Deep // Chasing the Dragon [June 20th, 2025 | Nameless Grave Records | Bandcamp] — Chasing the Dragon is super fun. It’s fun, it’s loud, and it’s a little stupid in a way that I find endearing. And, as I remarked in June, while US Power Metal has been getting a lot of love around these parts, Helms Deep has not been on the receiving end of nearly enough of that love. While other bands showed up to a back alley knife fight, these Florida men showed up with a bejet-packed dragon and a collection of songs that burned hotter than dragonsfire, melting the competition down and shaming their lineages for decades to come. And joking hyperbole aside, Helms Deep doesn’t feel like a novelty act. They aren’t just good ’cause I find them funny. Chasing the Dragon features playing that’s sharp and vital across the board, with guitars that never stand still, a singer who sells every chorus with the right balance of chops, cheese, and buckets of swagger. Said differently, Helms Deep is just dudes playing good, honest heavy metal while having a great time. What more do you need?
#(ish) 2: Vittra // Intense Indifference [September 19th, 2025 | Self-release | Bandcamp] — Vittra’s Intense Indifference shows up hungry, plays fast, hits hard, and gets out before you have time to get bored. Thirty-three minutes of riff-first, bethrashened melodeath go by in a blur; the hooks are sticky, the harmonies are sharp, and the energy is manic and adventurous. While the At the Gates lineage is obvious,11 Vittra pulls in enough Soilwork polish and Mors Principium Est flash to songwriting that’s focused on momentum rather than atmosphere, and the result is addictive. And what really pushes this record from really good to great are the flashes of the unexpected: honkytonk piano, bluesy acoustic passages, and classic rock phrasing that shouldn’t work, but does. It’s great listening to an album this full of piss and vinegar. I get excited when bands pop up that make the kind of thrashy, intense melodic death that never begs for an Insomnium comp. And sure, these guys have room to grow, but Intense Indifference caused me to feel anything but.
#(ish) 1: Arjen Anthony Lucassen // Songs No One Will Hear [September 12th, 2025 | InsideOut Music | Bandcamp] — Arjen Lucassen has been a favorite of mine during the time that AngryMetalGuy.com has been up and running. The “poofy-haired cheesehead”12 behind many of my favorite albums during AMG’s time is still a gem even in 2025. Crazily, Arjen’s first ‘solo record’ Lost in the New Real was released in 2012,13 and Songs No One Will Hear is its direct successor. A true concept record—with Toehider’s god-tier singer, Michael Mills, voicing a radio DJ talking to listeners about impending doom—it reflects both our End Is Nigh Zeitgeist and Arjen’s particular… idiom. Thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, Songs No One Will Hear is both tongue-in-cheek and yet deeply aware of the nature of information, grifting, and societal collapse, while still displaying the kind of referential goofiness that made Lost in the New Real such a charming record.14 The thing that dinged Songs No One Will Hear a little for me is the sense of uncanny familiarity. At times, it sounds like Arjen was working specifically to emulate the structure of Lost in the New Real. That created a bit of cognitive dissonance that I have never quite gotten over. It also drove a lot of replays of its under-the-radar predecessor rather than the album I should have been reviewing. But is Songs one of the best 11 records o’ 2025? I certainly think so.
#10: An Abstract Illusion // The Sleeping City [October 17th, 2025 | Willowtip | Bandcamp] — The Sleeping City had two strikes against it. First, it had the unenviable task of following Woe, a record that could easily have been the template on which they built their sound. It’s hard to break away from an overwhelmingly popular sound, yet these Ore Islanders took a left turn, exhibiting a level of daring I admire. The shift in aesthetic is the story of The Sleeping City in a lot of ways; the synths, the vibe, and the mood lean into dystopian sci-fi, and it’s a choice that works. What I love about The Sleeping City is that it’s detailed and detail-oriented without distracting from the expansiveness of the songwriting, which remains evocative and carefully structured. And while they sound comfortable letting songs breathe, they never get lost in the quest for “atmosphere” that undermines many modern releases. Second,15 the real gripe about The Sleeping City was the mastering job. But even a mastering job that clips peaks and fills valleys shows just how strong the raw material is. And so, finally, The Sleeping City feels like the product of a band choosing growth over safety while being true to themselves. And that’s an admirable trait that I hope they never lose.
#9: Fallujah // Xenotaph [June 13th, 2025 | Nuclear Blast Records | Bandcamp] — Fallujah landing on my list came as a genuine surprise to me, mostly because I really had quietly written them off. I used to like them, but they never carried that In Flames-style of eternal hope for me. Xenotaph pulled me back in by doing a deceptively simple thing: reintroducing attack. Everything about this record feels more immediate; guitars cut, compositions move with purpose, and songs are taut and sharp. The atmospheric elements remain, but they’re now integrated into something heavier and more immediate. I love the balance Fallujah finds, combining that late-Cynic energy with the aggression of brutal and technical death. And the deeper I got, the more Xenotaph rewarded me. Repetition revealed interlinked ideas and layered guitar work that shoots like a web throughout, creating a sinuous structure on which everything rests. As I wrote in my Record o’ the Month blurb, “Fallujah has achieved a conceptual evolution on Xenotaph that feels true to their origins and yet develops their sound in ways that make it accessible, and yet, truly unique.” It isn’t exactly br00tal death metal, but it’s not so drenched in “atmosphere” that it lacks tension. Most importantly, it worked.
#8: Scardust // Souls [July 18th, 2025 | Frontiers Records | Stream or Buy at Qobuz] — Scardust landing at number eight sans review is another casualty of my 2025 Stack o’ Shame, though this was less neglect than simple overextension in a year where too many heavy hitters landed at once. July, yo, what a month. Unfortunately, I missed the review window, then I missed the window to pawn it off responsibly, and by the time I circled back, it was late. However, Scardust’s third full-length is a sharp, confident 42 minutes of symphonic power/prog that feels fully aware and unique. While it doesn’t quite lock together as tightly as Strangers did at a conceptual and compositional level, Souls more than compensates for that with sheer craft. The orchestral and choral arrangements are some of the strongest I heard all year, and Scardust’s chemistry is ridonkulous. The rhythm section especially deserves accolades, with basswork that should be forcing its way into “best of” conversations. As a band, Scardust exists in the interstices of genre, where comparisons kind of work but can’t capture their unique voice. And while the band is impressive, the compositions feel so coherent because of Noa Gruman, who carries the album with control, range, and an incomparable soprano. Her extreme register (that is, growls) stays mostly holstered here, but her presence—and sheer talent—is on constant display, balancing different styles, moods, and feels. And her vocal performance isn’t the only standout vocal performance on Souls. The closing “Touch of Life” trilogy finds Ross Jennings (Haken) popping up in full “weird Ross” mode, which ends up as the cherry on top. The result is smart, muscular, and memorable; an album I’m ashamed to have missed.
#7: Aephanemer // Utopie [October 31st, 2025 | Napalm Records | Bandcamp] — Aephanemer’s Utopie landed, as I mentioned in my Record o’ the Month blurb, squarely at the top of my Stack o’ Shame. I was honored to be able to get access to this and start listening early, and I was immediately impressed. Yet, I got sick. Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth. Meanwhile, Utopie sat there reminding me of my failures until Grin Reaper saved my ass and gave Aephanemer’s newest opus the unhinged tongue bath it so rightfully deserved. Utopie takes everything these French melodic death metallers have been doing over the past couple of albums and tightens the screws until the whole machine purrs with confidence. The neoclassical elements have become a perfect blend that helps everything work perfectly. Utopie flows; songs connect, ideas develop, momentum carries everything forward, and yet Aephanemer does not sacrifice the immediacy and energy that makes melodic death metal such a fine dopamine mine. While I haven’t sat down and learned the parts, I feel like the guitars are more fluid and more expressive, resulting in special melodies propelled by a buoyancy reflected in the theme. And you know me, what I want from great records is a holistic sense of greatness. Happily, Aephanemer accomplishes just that on Utopie. Had I been operating at full capacity when it dropped, I would have written a review that kids would call “extra.”16
#6: Insania // The Great Apocalypse [June 13th, 2025 | Frontiers Music | Stream or Buy on Qobuz] — The Great Apocalypse, contrary to its name, is sneaky. It doesn’t gallop in and smack you in the face with shock or novelty, but instead, it reveals its strength through confidence, craft, and an almost unfair level of replay value. What initially feels like—and has been so often written off as—a solid, familiar Europower record gradually opens up to be something richer and more rewarding. And it’s kept paying dividends the longer I’ve been sitting with it. Insania sounds, as I noted when I wrote the review, like a band fully aware of their lineage and completely at ease with it. But the truly confident understand themselves enough to think differently. The resulting record is full of massive, sticky hooks, choruses that hit with power metal optimism and momentum, and electrifying guitars throughout. In fact, while investigating their discography, I was struck by how much Insania upped their game on The Great Apocalypse. And key to that is the guitar, which elevates the record by resisting predictability and yet coexisting on a meta-level with the genre that they know so well. Songs evolve instead of looping, melodies get reshaped rather than repeated, and familiar ideas or tropes are nudged just enough off-center to stay engaging but familiar. The Great Apocalypse approaches with intention, and Insania performs like a band that’s rediscovering why they love playing this kind of music in the first place. This record is exhilarating, memorable, and deeply satisfying, which is why it belongs among these other great releases.
#5: Kalaveraztekah // Nikan Axkan [May 2nd, 2025 | Self-release | Bandcamp] — In what I’m pretty sure is a first for me, an Ünsïgnëd Bänd Rödëö contestant has made my Top Ten(ish) list. I’ve had plenty of unsigned bands on my lists, but I walked into Kalaveraztekah’s masterful Nikan Axkan utterly unprepared for what I would find. Like a kid buying music in the ’90s, I just looked at that amazing cover art and decided that I was going to join the team reviewing this record instead of the other one. And that twist of fate has earned Mexico’s finest Aztec-themed death metal band a spot on the End o’ Year Metal List o’ Record™.17 As I cleverly wrote in my Record o’ the Month blurb: “There’s no sense that these Hidrocálidos are some kind of novelty act. They aren’t a Mexican Eluveitie, just playing Dark Tranquillity riffs while putting a Ritual Death Flute over it for 40 seconds in every song.”18 Rather, Nikan Axkan is chock full of muscular riffing and the kind of grindy death metal that I’ve always associated with the Mexican scene. Combined with a high-concept connecting to Mexican pre-history and the judicious use of a fucking death flute, I just never quit listening to Nikan Axkan.19 And so here they are, in the Top 5 of my Top 10(ish) of 2025,20 and it couldn’t be more deserved.
#4: Impureza // Alcázares [July 11th, 2025 | Season of Mist | Bandcamp] — I admit, I have tried to lead by example. I have attempted to become a servant leader. Rather than eating up a ton of oxygen and making everything actually about me (instead of just in jest) and what I want as Angry Metal Guy, I have, with time and wisdom, tried to allow others a chance to spread their wings. One of the things that means is that I can’t just bogart other writers’ “discoveries,” and I try not to block them if they grab something before I do.21 So, in that context, you’ll understand that I got pretty excited when I realized that I could review the newest Impureza without poaching it. The band’s approach to metal—infused with flamenco and semi-fantastical alternate-historical high concepts about colonial history—had entranced me previously, but I always felt like they were leaving a lot on the table. Their sound had not quite blended the flamenco and the metal, but rather, the genres sat side by side. Alcázares changes that. From start to finish, Alcázares is addictive, creative, musically impressive, and just a lot of fun. The artful ability of these Orléanais-via-España to marry such disparate styles with genuinely unique approaches to music that run as deeply as the very notion of meter is one of the most impressive feats accomplished in metal in 2025. But it’s not just a meta-concern of the artistic feat that excites me. Alcázares is a fucking banger that can stimulate your intellect, or that can leave your neck sore. Take your pick!22
#3: Phantom Spell // Heather & Hearth [July 18th, 2025 | Cruz del Sur Music | Bandcamp] — Phantom Spell has the benefit of being a genuine surprise. My happy place, when I can afford to be there, is digging through the promo bin and listening to everything I can get my hands on. I have made so many fantastic discoveries there, just immersed in my own little world, listening to samples to get a feel of what we’re being sent. Heather & Hearth looked like classic Steel Druhmcore: Cruz del Sur Records, retro metal, D&D Basic Set art. I popped it in, got dragged in, and totally distracted from the rest of what I was doing. I know that this might seem incongruent, but Heather & Hearth sounds fresh. In a world of hypercompressed, hyper-reamped, extremer-than-thou metal, the act of writing good songs with tons of vocal harmonies, instruments that sit in their sonic corridors, and—despite being recorded by one single dude—a convincingly live vibe feels “like a radical act.”23 I quickly grew to love Heather & Hearth, shared it with all the normies I know who love Ghost (“Isn’t this so much better?”), and began singing its praises. And I’ve been happy to see it popping up on lists throughout list season. It means a lot to me that people can hear just how good Phantom Spell is. And Phantom Spell also proved to be quite generative, in that I wrote the Spotify post as a response to a discussion about why Heather & Hearth wasn’t available there. Easily one of the best records I heard in 2025, and I’m looking forward to hearing so much more.
#2: In Mourning // The Immortal [August 29th, 2025 | Supreme Chaos Records | Bandcamp] — When a record is truly exceptional, the hardest part is often articulating why it has transcended other things without reducing it to a checklist. In Mourning’s fantastic The Immortal resists that kind of accounting in the best possible way. Its melodies are lush and emotionally evocative, capable of landing with equal force whether they’re carried by aching vocals or unfurled through long, expansive, yet intimate, trem-picked guitar passages. The riffing is punishing but disciplined, balancing weighty chug with sharper, blackened melodies, creating a constant tension between death metal heft and sadboi atmosphere without fully committing to drowning the production in reverb. And yet, none of this marks a radical departure from what In Mourning has done before—has been doing since 2008. The crucial difference here is in execution: every compositional choice seems to land exactly where it should be. In a sense, this calls attention to the role of probability, as much as inspiration or songcraft, in composition. Some records feel blessed from the outset, where one can go through the same process again and never produce the same results. The hooks here stick without feeling forced, climaxes are perfectly placed, and the pacing across the record gives each track room to breathe while contributing to the kind of flow reserved for only the best albums. Even moments that might feel familiar hit differently on The Immortal, like everything snaps into place. The Immortal succeeds, then, not just on craft but on feel: it feels heavier, sadder, and more resonant than its predecessors; and it stands comfortably among the strongest melodic death metal releases in years.
#1: Calva Louise // Edge of the Abyss [July 11th, 2025 | Mascot Records | Bandcamp] — Edge of the Abyss ran away with my listening this year in a way I genuinely don’t remember happening before, and that probably tells you most of what you need to know. The record is frantic, restless, and overloaded with ideas, moving between genres and feels with the speed of fast-cut editing; shifting at the drop of a dime. That both makes the record fun to listen to and keeps it surprising and fresh even after dozens of listens. The pace and density line up uncannily well with where my own brain tends to live, and I suspect that’s a part of why it lodged itself so firmly in my rotation. Calva Louise writes songs that feel driven by impulse and curiosity rather than caution or genre boundaries, and that creative energy and freedom are contagious. Jess Allanic’s pop instincts and melodic sense anchor the chaos, lending the lighter passages real emotional weight and memorability, rather than merely serving as connective tissue. Edge of the Abyss’s incorporation of Latin rhythmic elements and melodic sensibilities ended up also being a personal bonus; Latin music has been a refuge for me from musical monotony for years, and hearing them integrated naturally into Edge of the Abyss was exciting, and it generated affection for this wayward Venezuelan and her French and English bandmates. What really sealed the deal for me, though, was how committed the band sounds to its vision. The songwriting is ambitious and fun, but it doesn’t feel scattered. The album has a cinematic feel – complemented by literally cinematic music videos – but doesn’t feel bloated or melodramatic. And Calva Louise sports a swagger unique to bands who are just doing exactly what they want to be doing. Since July, I’ve kept coming back to Edge of the Abyss and forgetting I had even enjoyed other records this year. There’s a real sense of becoming here; of a band pulling its influences together into something that feels unique. And I also feel invested in Calva Louise in a way I haven’t been with many bands. I really am so happy to see them growing and succeeding. I love seeing them landing on people’s lists here and elsewhere. They have so much potential, and I am so eager to see what they do next. But should the worst befall them, I’ll always have Edge of the Abyss, and it already feels like an all-timer.
Honorable Mentions
Sarastus // Agony Eternal [July 1st, 2025 | Dominance of Darkness Records | Bandcamp] — Stolen from me by one Kenstrosity, Sarastus was a joyous discovery by me in the depths of the promo bin. One part black metal with a touch of death n’ roll for vibes, Agony Eternal strikes hard at modern conventions of black metal and sounds fresh by playing fast, unapologetic, engaging music with razor-sharp riffs. Melodic, without being sickly sweet or cheesy, with a ton of attack and great songwriting chops, Sarastus really threads the needle on Agony Eternal, making something that is driven and addictive, but undeniably black metal.
Wytch Hazel // V: Lamentations [July 4th, 2025 | Bad Omen | Bandcamp] — I’ve been back and forth with Wytch Hazel in the past. I have enjoyed what they do, but in the past I’ve been more skeptical of specifically nostalgiacore records that don’t feel like they’re adding much “new.” First, I think I’m just getting past that problem, as the “new” in metal is emphasizing things I don’t love about the scene. But second, I think V: Lamentations is just a more engaging record. From the word ‘go,’ Wytch Hazel writes with a kind of urgency that gives their brand of ’70s-tinged metal an extra kick, and the energy sits so well with me. Maybe the songwriting is just a bit tighter, maybe it’s faster, I don’t know—I didn’t write the proper review. All I know is that I keep circling back to Lamentations in a way that I haven’t done as much with their earlier albums. And that made it easy to put in the running for Listurnalia and to give my personal Angry Stamp o’ Approval™.
Mors Principium Est // Darkness Invisible [September 26th, 2025 | Perception/Reigning Phoenix Music | Stream or Buy on Qobuz] — Probably the grower of the year, Darkness Invisible surprised me by sticking around. When I started reviewing it, I expected not to like it much. I had been a big fan of the band’s previous output and of their former guitarist’s solo record from last year. But with familiarity—and time spent dissecting it—I became increasingly impressed with the album. While the production is busy and pulls it down, the writing forges a new path that better represents the vision of MPE’s founding member, Ville Viljanen. And that vision is bleak, blackened, and surprisingly sticky. No matter your opinion on the end of the previous incarnation, Darkness Invisible at least demonstrates that there is still a vital future for Finland’s most underrated melodic death metal powerhouse. And that’s a future to which I look forward.
Blackbraid // Blackbraid III [August 8th, 2025 | Self-release | Bandcamp] — I have a Gollumesque distaste for modern black metal. I am physically incapable of starting a review or blurb of a black metal band without reminding readers how much I hate “atmosphere” in the post-Cascadian black metal era. “Give it to us raw and wriggling!” I growl at all the fat hobbitses who try to feed me empty, overcooked “atmosphere.” Blackbraid doesn’t want to feed me atmosphere. Instead, Blackbraid’s III trembles with a vibe that brings me back to discovering black metal; at times blistering, at times introspective, but rarely overstaying its welcome and never feeling like its primary goal is to be the band that defanged black metal for good to make it okay to listen to for kids in the suburbs. I’ll be listening to III for a long time.
Tómarúm // Beyond Obsidian Euphoria — This record is too long. It’s got too much hype among the staff. And also, it’s too damned good to be an honorable mention. And yet, there are only so many #(ish)es, and I got to Beyond Obsidian Eurphoria too late to really give it the kind of sustained love that it needs to properly list. Still, once I started listening, I’ve been swinging past it every day. Sometimes twice. The songwriting is a bit wandering, the album is a bit overwhelming, and yet there is an undeniable vibe that Tómarúm traffics in, and that’s sneakily sticky. Combine that techy Death with something akin to Disillusion, and maybe you’ve got your comp. The only complaint I have is that some of the melodies end up intentionally arch in a way that makes me think that they are actively trying not to give the ear something to latch onto. That’s dumb, but it’s also very 2025. And hey, at least there’s a really easy trick for them to sell out with.
…and Oceans // The Regeneration Itinerary [May 23rd, 2025 | Season of Mist | Bandcamp] —The Regeneration Itinerary was a lot more controversial among fans than I expected, but I really enjoyed it. As I wrote in May, “It’s always fun to watch bands defy Angry Metal Guy’s Law of Diminishing Recordings™, and while The Regeneration Itinerary isn’t their best record yet, 30 years after their debut, …and Oceans is still releasing vital music that’s impossible to overlook.” And that’s just true facts as stated by a metal-knower. While not quite the tour de force of its predecessors, this record is a solid bit of weirdo black metal with some of the best art in the biz. I recommend it highly.
Haxprocess24 // Beyond What Eyes Can See [July 25th, 2025 | Transcending Obscurity Records | Bandcamp] — Four songs, three of which are over 10 minutes long, and a combo of what I’d call post-Opeth songwriting with OSDM aesthetics, Beyond What Eyes Can See deserved more attention this year and ended up, instead, on my Stack o’ Shame™. This isn’t a reflection on them; they play vital death metal and deserve accolades for their expansive vision and the way everything flows. They just got eaten up by the July where everything got released. Sorry, boys, but here’s your fig leaf!
Majestica // Power Train [February 7th, 2025 | Nuclear Blast Records | Stream or Buy at Qobuz] — Back in like 2008, I saw a band called ReinXeed play a whole bunch of covers of Swedish dance/electronica “group” E-Type at a Culture Night in Umeå. I remember hearing from people in the local scene that they were “big in Japan,” and I listened to some stuff, but wasn’t super moved by it at the time. In 2019, ReinXeed changed their name to Majestica and got signed to Nuclear Blast. And damnit if they aren’t just a lot better than they were in 2008. Power Train, which is on our collective Stack o’ Shame™, is the band’s third full-length under the moniker, and it rocks the same kind of sickly sweet melodies, guitar gymnastics, and general sense of fun that makes power metal my go-to genre a lot of days. While not quite as sticky and addictive as some other things higher up the list, Power Train was a solid addition to the band’s discography and one of the better power records I heard this year. You’ve come a long way, baby!
Dormant Ordeal // Tooth and Nail [April 18th, 2025 | Willowtip Records | Bandcamp] — While not as high on this record as others on the staff, Dormant Ordeal is undeniably vital. And I’m just never going to write a better blurb than I did when they got Record o’ the Month for April: “This record hits a sweet spot inside of me, best described as the ‘oh yeah, that’s how death metal is done’ spot. The riffs flow, and my brain just opens up the spigots, releasing a veritable tsunami of dopamine. Every riff that cuts, every transition that seethes, and every recognition of the slick, skilled ways that these guys construct songs, I get a nice big kick of that Happy Chemical. Tooth and Nail is dynamic, punishing, aggressive, and better yet, it’s smart.” Man, that guy can write!
Aversed // Erasure of Color [March 25th, 2025 | M-Theory Audio | Bandcamp] — Last, and I guess technically least – but that isn’t taking into account that there were like 10,000 albums released in 2025 and there are only like 25 on this list – is Aversed’s Erasure of Color. Part of the reason for its late arrival is that, despite being our Record o’ the Month for March, Erasure of Color didn’t actually make it onto my personal playlist until quite a bit later. And damn, that was kind of a big miss on my part. Great melodeath with a unique flavor and great intensity; there’s something thoughtful and sharp about this record. Combine that with excellent album art and the Dolphin Whisperer seal of approval, and Erasure of Color has everything fans of melodeath need to carry them through this wasteland. I will need to keep my eyes on Aversed going forward.
#AndOceans #2025 #Aephanemer #AnAbstractIllusion #AngryMetalGuy #AngryMetalGuySTop10Ish #ArjenLucassen #Aversed #Blackbraid #CalvaLouise #ChasingTheDragon #DormantOrdeal #EdgeOfTheAbyss #Fallujah #Haxprocess #HelmsDeep #Impureza #InMourning #Insania #IntenseIndifference #Kalaveraztekah #Majestica #MorsPrincipiumEst #PhantomSpell #Sarastus #Scardust #Tómarúm #Vittra #WytchHazel -
