Admittedly, fans of beefcake may find the amusingly titled Milo Ventimiglia Presents Berserker #1 - All Beef Edition more to their liking. (I promise, I am not making that title up.) But I'm sure there's an audience out there for Barack The Barbarian, the swords and sorcery satire launched by Devil's Due this week.

If equally ridiculous comics are your forte, then DC's Superman: Tales From The Phantom Zone reprints some stories about Superman's least favorite interdimensional prison, while William Shatner Presents Tek War promises to be ridiculous in a whole other, ego-trippical, way.

Marvel Comics's weekly haul may look very grim at first view, with so many books tying into the ongoing Dark Reign storyline. The books The Sinister Spider-Man, about Venom, Zodiac, about a new - and suitably deadly - character up to no good, and Dark Avengers/X-Men: Utopia, bringing Norman Osborn's bad guys to San Francisco to screw around with mutantkind.

But fans of ultraviolence and snark will treasure the complete collection of The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, while everyone else can treasure two recent classics: Kathryn Immonen and David LaFuente's Patsy Walker: Hellcat and a hardcover collection of The Immortal Iron Fist by Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker and David Aja, both of which are as highly recommended as I can manage.

Over at DC, it's all about the ladies for their two new releases. Paul Dini brings together Catwoman, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy for the new series Gotham City Sirens. And Greg Rucka and JH Williams III launch Detective Comics into a new era of greatness, with the beautiful new Batwoman strip (and Rucka and Cully Hamner provide a Question back-up, for extra value).

Dark Horse, meanwhile, have the first issue of their great new Predator series coming out. And IDW have three GI Joe books for you to use as preparation for next month's movie: the Movie Adaptation, a Movie Prequel and the first volume of a new regular series. Who knew that military maneuvers had so much homework?

If you're still looking for more four color fantasies, you could do worse than take a peek at this week's Diamond Distributors Shipping List, which - as ever - is completely printable for a trip to your local comic store. Just make sure that your credit card is ready to take a pounding.

Shônen manga, aka boys' manga (the #1 category in the unapologetically gender-targeted world of Japanese comics), has always involved action and fighting. But after the success of Dragon Ball (which itself arose in the testosterone-heavy climate of early '80s manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star), a new generation of manga started to mix fantasy, comedy and a light attitude with the classic martial arts formula of training and maiming. Forget about the big megahit Dragon Ball-influenced manga like Bleach, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto-those ones are okay, but these are the ones you've got to read.

• One Piece (Eiichiro Oda). Wacky super-powered pirates travel the globe of a fantasy world in search of "One Piece," a legendary lost treasure. The illustration for the article comes from this. Running since 1997 in Japan, this series combines the high spirits and humor of Dragon Ball with its own particular brand of gory (yet usually nonfatal) swordfights and punchups. It's Pirates of the Caribbean meets Dragon Quest meets Yellow Submarine, with blood; plus the world of One Piece is much more fleshed out and internally consistent than Dragon Ball ever was Oda says Toriyama is his favorite artist, and the two of them have even collaborated on a one-shot Dragon Ball/One Piece crossover, Cross Epoch. (It's not officially translated, but unlicensed scanlations can be found online.)

• Jing: King of Bandits (Yuichi Kumakura). The fantastical adventures of a young bandit in a Looney Tunes world of surrealism, wild scenery and strange monsters. This 1995-1998 manga (and its more Gothic sequel, Jing: King of Bandits: Twilight Tales) is episodic, without any real ongoing story, but it's a children's fantasy adventure with style.

• Ranma 1/2 (Rumiko Takahashi). Another must-read kung fu manga, which ran in a competing magazine, Weekly Shônen Sunday, from 1987 to 1996. Ranma 1/2 (from the creator of the rather blah Inuyasha) is very different from Dragon Ball; it's a pure action-comedy, with not much story to speak of, and it's about a group of high school martial artists cursed to transform into various animals and things when they're splashed with cold water. The hero transforms from a guy into a girl, often when naked, leading to much speculative fanfiction. But if you read only two manga about Chinese-style martial arts, let this be number two.

• Eyeshield 21 (Riichiro Inagaki, Yusuke Murata). Action manga. Spiky hair. American football. 'Nuff said. This (intentionally) hilarious, melodramatic sports manga has been running since 2002.

• Shaman King (Hiroyuki Takei). Had enough fighting manga in faraway lands, with silly characters? How about a fighting manga set in the modern world, where the heroes are shamans and wizards fighting a tournament ON THE BEHALF OF VARIOUS THINLY-DISGUISED WORLD MYTHOLOGIES TO DETERMINE WHICH WILL BE THE DOMINANT RELIGION FOR THE NEXT 500 YEARS? This bizarre 1998-2005 manga is full of subversive humor, pot leaves (mostly censored in the English edition), American superhero references and crazy fight scenes. Unfortunately it kind of peters out before the conclusion.

• Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya (Masami Kurumada). Running from 1986 to 1990, this series technically isn't influenced by Dragon Ball; the veteran artist, Kurumada, had been drawing boxing comics and boys' action stories long before Toriyama got started. But the cartoony, nonstop violence and machismo of Saint Seiya is a manga classic, the Green Arrow to Dragon Ball's Green Lantern. The plot theoretically involves martial artists who derive their powers from the Greek gods (they're holy warriors, aka "saints"-an element obscured in the unsuccessful English translation of the anime), but basically it's just one fight scene after another. Its over-the-top insanity and complete lack of logic makes Dragon Ball look like a work of heavy intellectualism.

• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (Hirohiko Araki). Like Saint Seiya, this one's another parallel evolution of action manga. From 1987 to the present day, with breaks of no more than a few months, this horror-superhero-mystery adventure has delivered its own brand of craziness to readers throughout Japan. It starts out as the story of two feuding brothers in Britain in the 1890s, turns into a story about martial artists versus vampires, then about globetrotting psychic-powered heroes who can materialize spirits outside their bodies. The current storyline, Steel Ball Run, is about a transcontinental horse race in the Wild West. With superpowers. Imagine a glam fusion of Burne Hogarth's Tarzan, Bill Sienkiewicz's run on New Mutants, '80s splatter films, and Knights of the Zodiac, and you have an inkling of the idea.

• Dr. Slump (Akira Toriyama). This one isn't the "spawn" of Dragon Ball, it's the older brother. Toriyama's 1980-1984 Dr. Slump, a slapstick comedy about the adventures of a mad scientist and his android "daughter," is full of sci-fi movie references, robots, aliens and poop jokes. Some Japanese culture commentators consider it the last "grassroots" manga megahit, before later shows (including Dragon Ball) became more commercial and calculated. It's Toriyama's personal favorite of his own manga. And he drew it while living with his parents!

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Update: The Sci Fi Channel has let us know that The Diamond Age is still in development. Interestingly, Neal Stephenson is on a panel at this year's CES next week featuring other science fiction innovators (like Lucy Lawless) as they "discuss the mutual influence they've had on each other."