A Joanna Newsom song is impossible to describe. Not Newsom’s voice, of course, which conjures up adjectives like “gossamer” and “sprightly,” or her harp, which is an instrument she pretty much lays sole claim to in 21st-century pop music, but her songs themselves, the way they bend back on themselves and wander away.

Fables: The Great Fables Crossover collects a storyline that ran through the main Fables series, the Jack of Fables off-shoot series, and the three-issue limited series that spun out of events from Jack of Fables called The Literals.

Chris Otepka, the indie rock singer/songwriter from Elburn, Illinois (now residing in Bellingham, Washington) performs under the stage handle, The Heligoats. On the back of the former Troubled Hubble frontman’s latest LP, Goodness Gracious, is a black ink drawing of a Nubian goat with a rotor system coming out of its spine and a tail boom on its hindquarters. It’s a funny image, but something about it fits the rustic and slightly psychedelic folk-rock contained within.

Silver Streak Comics No. 24 is Image Comics’ second entry into its “The Next Issue Project,” wherein Image creators create the “next issue” of long-gone Golden Age series centered on public domain characters.

The original BioShock did two things right. It told a brilliantly atmospheric story that borrowed heavily from Ayn Rand’s dystopian novel Atlas Shrugged. And it married that story to a first person shooter, a genre that was hitting its peak in 2007. There was really no way that BioShock 2 could match the originality and surprise that the original possessed, but it comes close.

The second in Hip-O’s The Costello Show campaign of live Elvis Costello releases is a concert from June 4, 1978, documenting the then 23-year-old Costello and his recently formed Attractions three months after the release of Costello’s classic sophomore album, This Year’s Model.

Though he’s widely known for The Ten Cent Plague, his 2008 book on the U.S. government’s 1950s war on comics, David Hajdu has long been a music critic for The New Republic. Heroes and Villains is primarily focused on the musical end of things, but as its full title notes, contains explorations into music, movies, comics, and the broader cultural landscape as well.

The realistically drawn and emotionally written, Secret Origin, retells the beginnings of the Silver Age Green Lantern known as Hal Jordan. Geoff Johns (Action Comics, The Flash: Rebirth) and Wizard 2007 Artist of the Year Ivan Reis (Infinite Crisis, Rann-Thanagar War) deftly revisit Jordan’s childhood, Air Force recruitment, his fateful encounter with Abin Sur, and eventual training on Oa under the tutelage of Sinestro.

I’ve always been obsessed with Europe—particularly its compact countries that allow citizens to step from border to border at will. It’s blessed geography that allows them to indulge in mini-bouts of wanderlust in the span of a single weekend, forcing them to expand their comfort zone with multiple languages, cultures, and cusines—all a stone’s throw from home. On his third album Everyone Knows It’s Gonna Happen Only Not Tonight, Belgian musician Dieter Sermeus (The Go Find’s bandleader) perfectly evokes this pocket-sized yearning, fine-tuning electro-spattered folk that could take up residence in any number of indie rock “countries.”