If you've been craving some superhero action but don't know what's going on with your old favorites, DC's Blackest Night #0 and Marvel's Free Comic Book Day Avengers both offer all-new stories that'll bring you up to speed in a fast and stylish manner; both books are written and drawn by the company's top talent (Night boasts story by Geoff Johns and art by Ivan Reis, while Avengers is a Brian Michael Bendis and Jim Cheung co-creation), and hint at what's to come fairly effectively. Other superhero thrills can be found in Wolverine: Origin of an X-Man (Just in time for this weekend's X-Men Origins: Wolverine release), Image's Savage Dragon #148 and Cyberforce/Hunter Killer Preview, and new indie comic Fist of Justice.

If you'd rather look for some more familar characters, Dark Horse and IDW have you covered; the former are putting out two books, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Aliens/Predator, while IDW have a Transformers/GI Joe flipbook ready and waiting for you. If that's not enough, the Dabel Bros. Showcase offers a new Dresden Filesstory as well as - weirdly enough - a preview of an upcoming Star Wars novel from publishing partners Del Rey, while Boom! have a new Warhammer preview (as well as a reprint of the first issue of their Cars series) and Mirage reprint the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to celebrate the characters' 25th anniversary.

Of course, there's also all manner of new work out there for you to discover tomorrow as well. Our pick would be Oni Press' Resurrection #0 (tying in with this week's Resurrection collection, offering up a view of life post-alien invasion), the Comics Festival collection of Canadian cartoonists and, of course, Fantagraphics' Love and Rockets Sampler... which may be neither new nor sci-fi, but is still some of the best comics out there.

A full list of the books available for Free Comic Book Day is available here, and as ever, your local comic book store can be found by clicking here. Visit, find some new favorite things to read, and take advantage of the freebies.

It is, in actuality, another relatively quiet week for new launches this week, oddly enough. San Francisco's Wondercon convention is this weekend, after all, so you'd think publishers attending would want to have something new to show off... but then, they may have used up all their big books at the start of the month for New York Comic Con.

DC Comics are almost entirely quiet, and Marvel's books of note are pretty much confined to New Avengers #50 — in which the New Avengers meet the newer Dark Avengers, for an Avengeroff — and an oversized hardcover collection of the first twelve issues of Mighty Avengers, Marvel's third Avengers title. I'd make a joke here about there being too many Avengers comics, but in May, they're launching two more, including (no joke), Lockheed and the Pet Avengers. Just think about that one for a second.

Also hitting the oversaturation point: Barack Obama. Sure, the gleam is beginning to tarnish a little bit already, but that's not stopping him appearing on the cover of three different publications this week: Wizard magazine has a cover featuring Alex Ross' Superman-inspired pose from last year's San Diego Comic-Con, Youngblood sees him front and center, picking a new team of superheroes to star in the book, and the Savage Dragon has him either shaking hands with the eponymous superhero or, in a Wondercon-exclusive, punching Osama Bin Laden — I promise you, I'm not making that up. That alone is a reason to get to San Francisco this weekend.

Book of the week, then, is almost unique by being a relatively big-name project in an otherwise dead-aside-from-Obama week: Doctor Who: The Whispering Gallery is something that we've mentioned before, but that doesn't mean that Ben Templesmith's art has gotten any less impressive in the meantime. Even if the story is terrible — and that's unlikely, given Leah Moore and John Reppion's history — it's got to be worth picking up for that art alone.

If you voted for John McCain, don't worry (Well, about comics, at least); the complete list of this week's new comic releases will still be able to offer you all manner of possibilities for you to spend your money on. Go and check it out, and then use the Comic Shop Locator Service to find out where that money should be spent. Yes, you can.

The idea that Obama's (very successful) appearance in this week's issue of Amazing Spider-Man was less a shameless publicity stunt on behalf of Marvel than it was an attempt to ride on the coattails of the originality of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon jumped from online fanboy slapfight when Larsen himself joined the conversation:

I can't help but feel very betrayed. They duplicated the incentive cover—and preempted my upcoming one—and even used the "terrorist fist jab." Clearly those in the "house of ideas" looked at what I did and found inspiration.

I hear that they're even doing a story similar to the one I did four years back, where an image-altering villain disguises himself as the President (in my story the Impostor replaced President Bush and took his place for a speech—in theirs the Chameleon, the shape-shifting villain, is going to spoil a speech being given by President-Elect Obama). The whole mess just feels really underhanded. I feel betrayed and, frankly, ripped off and in the real world—the one outside our funnybook bubble—Marvel will spin themselves as these great innovators who came up with this terrific publicity stunt—instead of the thieves they are.

And I know what they're saying when they're called on it—"Presidents have appeared in comics before" and "Erik didn't create Barack Obama" and blah, blah, blah.

The thing that Marvel is attempting to do is to frame the argument. To say "we've featured presidents in the past—this is what we do—it's part of a pattern." But that's a false argument. The "stunt" was an alternate cover featuring Obama— which was something no publisher had done with any president in the past and one that received a lot of press when I did it. If Marvel had done alternate covers with Bush and Clinton or any of the others— they could legitimately claim that they were following a pattern and doing what they've done in the past— but that wasn't the case. And theirs is not simply the appearance of a president in a comic book but one on an alternate cover— and one concocted to try and get some of the same attention that got. I did not create Obama— I did, however, have a character endorse him, long before he was elected while Marvel played footsie with Stephen Colbert— a joke candidate.

"House of ideas" my ass.

Larsen's obvious ire drew out a response from Spider-Man editor, Steve Wacker:

Marvel DOES regularly show politicians and we have for years. That’s the whole point. In fact, Marvel has spent the past year putting a fake presidential candidate in most of our books. The idea that we’d follow that up by putting a Spidey-fan-made-good on our cover can’t really come as a huge surprise to anyone smart enough to be a publisher... And Eric’s notion we stole the idea of the fist bump from him is also absurd. We actually stole it from reality. Like he did. Duh!

...The idea that this was off-limits because the President-Elect had appeared on another comic cover (or that we wouldn’t have had this idea without Erik Larsen) is beyond preposterous. I suspect this is more of an overall “Marvel would be better if I were in charge!” bone to pick that Erik seems to carry around — which, if you get me on the right day, I completely share. But that bone doesn’t mean that anyone at Marvel’s “betraying” him as Erik dramatically puts it.

I’m a company stooge, so I don’t expect Erik’s going to care too much about what I think, but at the very least the writers and artists who are busy not stealing from him don’t deserve his mewling accusations.

Putting aside the facts that, well, real-life Presidents have appeared in comic books for decades, as have villains that take the place of upstanding members of society (Hell, not always villains; a Teen Titans story had JFK replaced by a well-meaning alien so that the real JFK could go and broker peace in outer space), the comic fan community wasn't convinced by Wacker's defense, with comments ranging from "This is ridiculous. Where did Obama bump fist with the star of a comic book in reality? This argument is missing the point so far I can’t even belive Wacker really means it" to "ttaboy, Wacker! You’re sure to get promoted after that response. Why, it practically read as if Brevoort wrote it. Same avoidance of the subject, same sarcastic tone, same disregard for anything non-Marvel. The parallels between the 2 stories are just too many to be chance. Larsen should sue."

We here at io9 approve of that last suggestion; please, let this argument go to court. That way, not only will Larsen have the (ridiculous) day in the sun that he so clearly wants, but also, maybe it'll stop so many comics using Obama for a cheap PR stunt.

Nonetheless, if this is the kind of behavior we can expect from an Obama-run America... it's going to be a long four years.

The February issue of the Image Comics series will feature Barack Obama's first appearance in a comic book as President of the United States, and the newly-released cover shows Obama offering a "terrorist fist jab" to the superhero in colors reminiscent of the already-iconic "HOPE" poster... and we're kind of bored by it already.

What's going on? Obama's not even in office yet, and the novelty of his comic appearances has already worn off through overuse... all from stunt appearances in one series. Is this an example of our ever-decreasing attention span, or has Savage Dragon really been riding the Obama Train a little too long?

Exclusive: Obama comes to comics [PopCandy]

Palin is being shown as a Hockey Mom out to return to the infamous McCarthyist censorship of the 1950s (The cover refers to an editorial by the daughter of Crypt creator, William Gaines, where she refers to the rumors of Palin's interest in book-banning; well, it is Banned Books Week, after all).

Meanwhile, fan-favorite artist Alex Ross has already portrayed Barack Obama as Superman in a painting that premiered at this summer's San Diego Comic-Con, and Image Comics' superhero The Savage Dragon spent his most recent cover endorsing Obama as well (A move that has led to the series' most successful issue in years, saleswise). Some feel that such bias isn't contained to op-ed pieces like those, however; Conservative comic critic Augie DeBlieck Jr. was unimpressed with IDW's two presidential biographies in their Presidential Materials series:

In the end, the "Obama" comic is a nice piece of campaign literature for the Democrat candidate. The "McCain" comic is an indictment, something to be cherished by the Obama fans... I'm not screaming media bias here, by any means. I just think they had two different writers create two different comics. They didn't attempt to make sure the stories were "fair and balanced." They just wanted general biographies that could be fact-checked appropriately. McCain's is so much longer and so much more storied (both good and bad) that his biographer had more to pick and choose from. Obama's biographer could just follow the same short and sweet message that we've been hearing about through the candidate's two books. It makes for a simpler message to convey. None of it is factually inaccurate. It's all in the presentation of those facts, and which ones are used and which ones are omitted. Emphasis is everything.

So, is it just that the comic industry - like, if certain political figures are to be believed every other facet of the media - is just naturally biased towards Obama? We asked DeBlieck whether he thought that this was a case of genuine passion, or a cynical attempt to ride the political zeitgeist and seem relevant:

It's a bit of both. The comics industry can't help itself. It is, from a creator and publisher level, predominately liberal. That's well established. The fact that they have a Democratic candidate as media friendly as Senator Obama just means they can try to leverage it. It's a bandwagon they're all too happy to jump on. (See, for another example, presidential candidate Bill Clinton showing up at Superman's funeral in 1992.) Let's put it this way: If Ronald Reagan came back from the dead tomorrow and cured cancer, you wouldn't see him glorified on a "Tales from the Crypt" comic cover.

Writer Sarah Grace McCandless disagrees. She's one of the people behind the creation of Comics Industry for Obama. The organization - which aims to raise funds for Barack Obama's campaign as well as becoming a network of comic creators supporting the Democratic Party's candidate - is by far the highest profile example so far of the industry not only politicizing itself but also trying to mobilize its audience into doing the same thing, but that has more to do with personal beliefs than any attempt to be cool, she says:

I can tell you off the bat that my personal support for Obama has zero to do with bandwagon motivations, nor does it have anything to with whether or not the comics industry as a whole is predominately liberal. I'm not aware of any research or polls that have been conducted to measure the political preferences of the comics industry, but I would guess that there are artists, writers, editors, publishers, retailers, fans and the like on both ends of the spectrum.

(In an interview with Newsarama, McCandless explained that the organization was inspired by similar efforts like Artists for Hope and the Manifest Hope auctions.)

One attempt to include voices from both sides of that spectrum has been DC Comics' topical series DC Universe: Decisions, which attempts to be fair and balanced by putting together the liberal Judd Winick and the conservative Bill Willingham to co-write a story in which your favorite superheroes start endorsing (fictional) politicians in order to save the world, or something. The resulting comic is fun enough, but ultimately too bland to entertain enough that it wipes away the feeling of pandering to a (possibly fictional) new political potential audience.

Of course, Decisions is just following in the footsteps of the highly successful but equally-politically-confused Civil War from Marvel, keeping alive a grand tradition of naive political lip-service from four-color funnies that's seen Superman help JFK make America a fitter place and Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw. Perhaps this latest burst of political activism from the comic industry is simply taking that proud history one step further — going from subtext to text, commentary to endorsement — due less to a desire to sell out to an increasingly dynamic political landscape filled with characters who have captured the public's attention than the simple, laudable desire to engage with it.

Or perhaps someone's just trying to tell you that Sarah Palin really does just like to hunt witches from the 1950s.

Tales From The Crypt Vs. Sarah Palin [Blog@Newsarama], Comics Industry for Obama [MySpace]