Over the span of his career, Bwana Spoons has been using his highly stylized and imaginative art to create Forest Island—a hyper-kinetic and super-saturated place that his surreal characters call home. A compilation of pieces that could easily stand on their own, and short narratives, Welcome to Forest Island may actually form some grand narrative from cover to cover. Spoons, as a multi-media artist, combines his abilities in painting, design, screen-printing, and toy making in these addictive 144 pages.

Many children of the ‘80s and earlier no doubt read the comic strips in their parents’ Sunday newspapers. Most of the strips were mildly amusing at best (with the exception of The Far Side and a couple of others) and some were downright lame (Family Circus, anyone?). Sometimes there would be a Spider-Man or Superman strip that was tailored more for a mainstream audience than the diehard comic book fan. With Wednesday Comics, DC has reinvented and revitalized the comic strip.

The comical sci-fi miniseries is written by David Tischman (Bite Club, Greatest Hits), with art by Philip Bond (Grant Morrison’s Kill Your Boyfriend, Vimanarama) and David Hahn (Fables, Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four).

Since DC Comics has a habit of recycling its old characters, concepts, and titles, it might be hard to leave preconceived notions at the door when you dig into El Diablo: The Haunted Horseman, a trade collecting the six-issue miniseries from 2008. After all, the original character, Lazarus Lane, was an Old West-based, Zorro-esque character, that originated in the ‘70s. Then there was a fine, if not especially popular, El Diablo series launched in the late ‘80s, featuring a non-powered mystery man in a small Texas town. In 2001, Brian Azzarello’s El Diablo was a fantastic and creepy western with horror overtones. The latest version owes something to all of these, yet is not precisely like any of them.

Having Buffy the Vampire Slayer come back from television death in comic book form has been largely successful for Joss Whedon and Dark Horse Comics. Before the series reached this fourth volume of stories, Mr. Whedon had begun to pass writing duties off to others instead of penning the run exclusively. Unfortunately, Whedon couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have his Buffyverse crossover into the universe he created with his future vampire slayer series Fray.

Issue 1 of Citizen Rex opens the door to a futuristic society in which our lead character, Sergio Bauntin, exists. With autonomous robots operating among the citizens of some undisclosed and corrupt city, this first installment only leaves questions.

North 40‘s Conover County seems like any of the multitude of podunk American towns. There’s nothing much to do except drink, fight and gossip in any order possible. That static cycle forever shifts into the horrific realm after two stupid high school kids open what looks like a Necronomicon, or book of the dead, at the town library. After reciting an ancient incantation, night falls, people black out for several hours and all hell literally breaks loose.

In his first graphic novel—the result of his university thesis—Niklas Asker has created a colorless but emotionally vivid world existing somewhere between the real world and the authorial machinations of one Jess (no last name).

In part one of Search For a Hero, scribe Fabian Nicieza described the pre-Batman R.I.P. Tim Drake best when he fed him an off-handed Brady Brunch joke while fighting Jason Todd. The fallen hero may be the insecure Jan Brady to Drake’s precocious Cindy but the shattering events of Batman’s “death” have left the best detective Batman’s raised in a perpetual state of bewilderment.