It's a strange mix of new releases this week, as the industry seems to be slowing down for the holidays and yet still managing to release a few must-reads (including a strong contender for book of the year), but we'll get to them later.

Instead, let's start with the TV and movie tie-ins of the week: Battlestar Galactica: The Final Five collects the mini-series that told a possible backstory for everyone's favorite Cylons, and it's better than you might expect. Meanwhile, Star Trek Alien Spotlight: Cardassians fulfills a similar role for Deep Space Nine's ridge-headed badguys. It's clearly backstory week, because Marvel's Ender's Game: War of Gifts special issue also fills in some blanks. Thankfully, DC's Dante's Inferno video game tie-in is much more straight-forward in just adapting the game... that adapts the classic story. Boxes within boxes!

Over in the superhero school of thought, DC have their annual Holiday Special to warm the cockles of your heart, after which you'll be ready for the triple-X-Men-threat of Genext United (The future children of the X-Men unite!), X-Men/Spider-Man (The X-Men and Spider-Man team up during different parts of their history!) and Nation X (The X-Men have their own island! And... stuff... happens on it?). If all of that sounds too much, we'll direct you to the much-anticipated-by-us Spider-Man And Secret Wars, a new series that retells the classic story with far fewer dated references.

Elsewhere, Image have a new Tank Girl special, Tank Girl: Nuggets to offer up festivities for kangaroo lovers. There's also Pilot Season: Murderer, a one-shot that you — yes, you — could help make into an ongoing series about a man who is compelled to kill in order to keep living.

But as topical as that may sound, it doesn't come anywhere close to being book of the week. No, that honor belongs entirely to the first issue of Daytripper, a new series by Brazilian brothers Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon that is as beautifully written as it is illustrated (Visually, it's easily one of the best things you'll have seen this year); admittedly, it's not the most io9-friendly story — it's very grounded in real life, at least in the first issue — but, having seen the first two issues in preview, it's definitely something we'd recommend as one of the best things we've read in a long time.

As ever, the complete Diamond Distributors shipping list will tell you everything that's hitting stores tomorrow, and the Comic Shop Locator will tell you where to find said stores. We just hope that, by the time you get there, you'll be more in the mood for magical realism than killing people.

The Pitt
Few remember - and maybe with good reason - the end of Marvel's late-'80s experiment, the New Universe, in which a man driven mad with seemingly-unlimited power accidentally turns Pittsburgh into a radioactive crater by trying to get rid of his powers, and the world goes to hell from that point onwards: America becomes filled with irradiated monsters, nuclear war and godlike children who demand that we make war no more, or else. A weird and forgotten piece of post-Watchmen superheroics, but one that mixes old-school and new-school with an admittedly naive worldview that still may be too big for one movie.

Secret Wars
One of comics' first as-many-superheroes-at-once extravaganza, it's not just the idea of bringing the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four and random other characters (Spider-Man! The Hulk!) together to battle an army of supervillains that might make this colorful story too expensive to film, but the creation of a patchwork planet for them to fight on, along with the various alien races and/or technology that they meet along the way. Then again, the comic was created to support a 1980s toyline, and we all know how well Transformers and GI Joe have done for movie studios, so perhaps we should never say never...

Ultimatum
This year's strange superhero disaster movie killed off a number of Marvel's more popular characters, amongst them Wolverine, Thor and Doctor Doom - but only in their alternate timeline, "Ultimate" incarnations. Nonetheless, the story - in which Magneto causes all manner of "natural" disasters, destroys New York and decimates the superhero population of the planet before finally being stopped by a mix of X-Men and other superheroes - is pretty much 2012 with added superheroes, the idea of which may be the ultimate (No pun intended) high concept, but the cost of which would make most effects budgets weep.

Invasion!
DC's 1988 crossover is ID4 meets Star Wars, and then some: Different races of alien invade Earth to find out why the planet keeps producing so many superheroes, in the process destroying Australia (This is back when you could do that kind of thing without people getting upset that you've killed off an entire continent), performing genetic experiments on normal humans to see if there's some latent superhero gene (There is) and fighting a war on two fronts, as Earth's superheroes defend their planet with the help of some turncoat aliens. With a cast that's about 50% alien (And multiple types of alien, at that, with only a couple achievable with Star Trek-esque nose attachments), space battles and all manner of high-scale superheroic takes on your favorite war movies, this would be a sfx extravaganza... If anyone would ever be able to afford it.

Flex Mentallo
Flipping between "reality," imaginary worlds, time periods and everywhere in between, Flex may just be one of those unfilmable projects even before you start to think about how much it'd cost to have an army of superheroes destroy a city, combine to form a new reality that we live in, or even just have the orgy that proves Frederic Werthem right. But factor in the need to create surreal fictitious cities for the young Wally to get lost in, atomic explosions and mutations or even just costumes to match Frank Quitely's awesome fashion sense, and you're left with the kind of movie that would need Watchmen-esque precision and care, but for an even-less mainstream audience friendly story.

DC One Million
Again, just the scale of work needed to bring this story to life would make most people in charge of budgets get nervous: Taking place in two different eras (Today and the 853rd century), on multiple planets and with large-scale destruction brought about by a nano-technological virus that comes from a living robotic sun, the necessary design process alone would probably scare off movie producers before it even came to the idea of making it all look convincing. A cast of hundreds of superheroes from both eras (Including a Superman from the future who has to sparkle, just like Twilight's Edward) would just add to cost woes.

Crisis On Infinite Earths
Talking of casts of hundreds of superheroes, DC's 1985 big daddy of all superhero crossovers is the kind of thing that would have to be told in a series of movies, and even then would still be missing all manner of greatness: Requiring multiple Earths to be created just so they could be destroyed, taking place in multiple time periods - including a part of the story where the time periods merge together so we get to see World War II fighter planes fight dinosaurs - and with almost every character in the story (and there really are hundreds) a superhuman and requiring some level of ridiculous costume and special effects to be made real. While it might not be the greatest comic ever (Or even the greatest superhero comic), this might be the most perfect example of a story that is too full of ideal comic book imagination and spectacle to ever make it to the silver screen.

Lenticular technology, which allows printed images to have the illusion of movement when viewed from different angles, may already have rocked my childhood thanks to the Secret Wars toys I used to own, but it's kind of fallen off in recent years. We're hoping that its use on the cover of this DVD set - allowing the image to shift from a Hulk Vs. Wolverine fight to a Hulk Vs. Thor one, as seen below
- reminds everyone of how much fun can be had from moving something from one side to another over and over again.

(For those afraid of motion, this special edition, non-lenticular, cover is also available:
Admit it: The other one is better.)

EXCLUSIVE: 'Hulk Vs' Box Art [Marvel]

Arena, which will be produced by Michael Clayton studio Summit Entertainment and production company Benderspink, plans to take a familiar idea and make it... well, pretty much what you'd expect but with a better budget, if Variety's write-up is anything to go by:

[The s]tory centers on a group of modern-day soldiers who are mysteriously transported from the thick of battle to a terrain-shifting landscape where they must fight the best warriors of all different eras and histories in a gladiatorial fight to the death — or be killed by the all-powerful operators of the "Arena."

Summit enters 'Arena' [Variety]

Here are the main types of annoying reset buttons in science fiction:

The temporal paradox. Someone starts diddling the time-space continuum, and just by coincidence, suddenly all sorts of appalling things happen. The two best examples of this are the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Year In Hell Part 2" and the Doctor Who episode "Last of the Time Lords." In the Trek episode, the starship Voyager is destroyed, only to be restored when a "time-ship" that has been altering history is wrecked. In Doctor Who, Earth's population is nearing "terminal extinction," until the Doctor destroys a "paradox machine" that his arch enemy the Master built. Once that's done, time rolls back a whole year, undoing all the Master's horrible deeds, while David Tennant makes some awful yay-faces:
The godlike being. In the Marvel Comics series Secret Wars, a bunch of Marvel heroes are transported to another planet, called Battleworld, where the only thing to do is merengue. No, wait, I mean fight. And in the penultimate issue, every single Marvel hero... dies! For reals! You see Mr. Fantastic's intestines stretching out all over the place, and Spider-man is all splatted. (Okay, it's not really that graphic.) But then the Beyonder takes back his amazing godlike power from Dr. Doom, who's stolen it, and in the process all the heroes are restored to life. (Several times, in the case of Captain America.) Truly, a mighty resurrection. There's also the Star Trek (again) episode "Shore Leave," where McCoy dies, once and for all... until the magic shore leave planet fixes him up, good as new.

It was all a (virtual reality) dream. It's the "Bobby Ewing in the shower" version of science fiction. In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode, "Vanishing Point," Hoshi gets caught up in a transporter accident, and spends the whole episode dealing with strange illogical events and her crewmates act more and more out of character. And then she finds out that nasty aliens are planning to blow up the ship! Oh noes! But then she finds out the whole thing was just a dream she had during the few seconds the transporter was reassembling her. I also feel like we're told Trinity is doomed doomed doomed in Matrix: Reloaded, and then she's not... because Neo is teh extra awesome, and he can bend the laws of physics in the virtual world.

I tried really, really hard to come up with non-Star Trek examples of the reset button, but it was difficult. Sadly, there's a reason why Star Trek is so closely associated with this particular plot device. It's part of the essential conservatism of Trek, which sticks to the DNA of old-school television (putting the toys back neatly), with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine. It's the kind of sloppy writing and lack of consequences that gives science fiction a bad name among casual viewers.

Most of all, though, we hate the reset button because we envy it — it would be so awesome to have one in real life. It would come in handy in so many situations, to undo all kinds of horrible events, from the death of a loved one to that thing you really didn't mean to say in a business meeting. And yet watching someone wield the reset button isn't fun escapism, it's just annoying. Unlike, say, the transporter, which would be awesome in real life and is also fun to watch.