With Dark Horse and, surprisingly, Marvel pretty much phoning it in in terms of their major releases this week (The HC version of Stephen King adaptation Dark Tower: The Long Road Home and a rescheduled hardcover collection of Orson Scott Card's second Ultimate Iron Man series being Marvel's two exceptions), it falls to DC to pick up the slack... only they're having an equally quiet week: If you're not interested in the hardcover collection of shenanigans surrounding superhero marriage in Green Arrow/Black Canary's Wedding Album, Justice League origin Vixen: Return Of The Lion or virtual reality leading to wholescale destruction in Wildstorm's Number Of The Beast, then you're almost out of luck... but I'll keep DC's must-have book of the week until later.

Image Comics keep the interest flag flying with the first issue of Zero G, a scifi whodunnit monster movie on paper, while Avatar offer up the first official issue of new Warren Ellis superhero series No Hero.

But the two picks of the week are IDW's paperback collection of Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier comic, and the first issue of DC's Top 10 Season Two, Zander Cannon and Gene Ha's revisit of the Alan Moore series from a few years back that puts Hill Street Blues into a room with superheroes and sees what comes out afterwards — Witty, filled with pathos and beautifully illustrated, it easily dominates the slow week (and would, to be fair, do so on a busy week as well). Add it to your shopping list immediately.

While you're adding things to lists, you can find a complete list of this week's new comic releases here to see what else you might want to think about, and then use the Comic Shop Locator Service to find out where your closest local store may be. Just... stay away from the financial news for awhile, okay?

Talking about the relocation of Marvel's favorite mutants on the WordBalloon podcast, Uncanny X-Men writer Brubaker took responsibility for the decision:

When we were sitting down and talking about what to do with the X-Men post-Messiah Complex... and it was, yet again the Mansion had been destroyed and all this stuff, I just sort of threw out the idea because I remembered that Daredevil had lived in San Francisco. I just thought 'If I were the X-Men, I would move to San Francisco. Like, get as far away from Tony Stark and all those people, stop rebuilding your mansion where there's, like, a huge target for any anti-mutant person in the world and go somewhere where you're going to be able to let your freak flag fly and be loved... It just seemed like, why not go somewhere where people will think that you're cool?

Ellis' new series No Hero doesn't exist within forty years of distraught continuity full of explosions and death, but he explained to us that his choice of setting has much more to do with San Francisco's real-life colorful history:

NO HERO comes partly out of the notion that there was a cultural move in Sixties San Francisco to bring forth a new kind of human (not least through neurochemical roadtesting and devoted ingestion of whatever old shit had been scraped off the bottom of someone's bathtub). Timothy Leary even said that The Beatles were "prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species." Notably, in the same statement, he also called them "mutants." Where else should we be telling stories about the evolutionary future of strange Americans?

It seems that, at least as far as the cape and cowl set goes, San Francisco is finally ascending to take the cultural crown of the US that it so richly deserves.

Both Uncanny X-Men #499 and No Hero #0 hit stores today.

Warren Ellis' No Hero [Avatar Press]

According to Canadian retailer Chris Butcher, the number of this week's Marvel releases seem unusually high in comparison to DC's:

Retailers reading over their invoices for comics and graphic novels shipping [this]week will be shocked to discover that Marvel Comics is shipping about 34 titles next week, to only about 17 titles from DC Comics. It’s a rare thing for Marvel to ship that many titles in a week ([last] week, for example, they only shipped about 17 or so), but to double the output of their closest competitor? That’s very rare indeed… Until you stop to consider that one of DC’s titles shipping [this] week is the next installment in their summer crossover Final Crisis... In addition to numerous Marvel comics scheduled to arrive in the month of June that were seemingly pushed from their original on-sale date to this week (including both [Brian] Bendis [scripted] Avengers books, both X-Men books, [Ed] Brubaker’s Captain America & Daredevil, [Mark] Millar’s Fantastic Four & Marvel 1985, and [Warren] Ellis’ last Thunderbolts) this week also includes three of Marvel’s largest lateness-plagued titles: Hulk #4, Ultimates 3 #4, and even the final issue of Joss Whedon’s Runaways all drop next Wednesday. Plus another 20 comics.

Is it some kind of attempt for Marvel to bury the second issue of Final Crisis, or just the result of trying to get late books out at least in the month they were originally scheduled to appear? We may never know, but at least it'll mean that Marvel fans have a lot to pick up this week. For everyone else, there's always Final Crisis #2, as well as the following:

Dark Horse's Indiana Jones Adventures takes George Lucas' eponymous ode to archeology and pretends that it had a Saturday morning cartoon spin-off that they're then adapting; imagine a version done by Batman: The Animated Series' Bruce Timm or Clone Wars' Genndy Tartakovsky, and you're not a million miles away from what they're aiming at. If you'd rather your childhood heroes were treated with fewer kid gloves, then you owe it to yourself to pick up the first hardcover collection of DC's All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder, in which Frank Miller cashes the checks as he gleefully creates the world's oddest Batman parody. "What are you, dense? Are you retarded or something?" as the saying goes... He's the goddamn Batman.

More respectful versions of familiar icons can be found at the apparently overbearing Marvel — Captain America: The Chosen sees Rambo creator David Morrell write about an alternate end to Steve Rogers' career, while Mythos: Captain America gives another look at his origin as America's favorite soldier. Alternatively, you could pick up the collected edition of Marvel Atlas and find out where all of Cap's origin takes place - Is Marvel's Germany in Europe, or has it been forced out by Latveria?

The two best buys of the week happen to be new books: Warren Ellis' new series No Hero brings superheroes to San Francisco to see which one survives, while Marvel's charity book What If - The Fantastic Four Tribute to Mike Weiringo completes the unfinished final story by artist Mike Weiringo - who died last August - with new art by artists like Art Adams, Alan Davis, Mike Allred and Stuart Immonen with all profits going to The Hero Foundation, which helps current and former creators without insurance or benefits.

As is always the case, you can find the complete list of everything hitting stores here and then find out where said stores are by going here and putting in your zip code. Just remember: Buying a non-Marvel comic this week isn't just a good idea - It's the right thing to do if you want to fight back against big publisher bully tactics. Potentially.