What you've Been Waiting For

It's that time again! Time to look at this week's comic book invoice from Diamond and see what's what.

Let's start with What you've been waiting for - the segment where I point out titles that have gone 2+ months between issues. Some are late, some not, but one thing's for sure - if you're reading the series you've been waiting for this week's issue.

This week I was actually surprised that there weren't more books with big issue gaps since it often seems like all kinds of stuff that we thought we'd never actually see finally ships the last couple weeks of the year.

Ultimate Power #9 (Marvel) is the final issue of the series. The last several issues have taken quite a while between each. We ordered this in August, so October would have been the month for it to originally arrive. But, since issue #8 didn't show up until October 31, there wasn't much chance of that.

Amazing Spider-Man #545 (Marvel) is the last of the "One More Day" crossover series before the comic book switches over to 3 times per week. Hopefully those creative teams have been working hard so that they can keep the series on schedule! The last issue of Amazing came out on September 6.

You might remember last week when Fathom Kiani #4 finally came in. Well this week Aspen has another book come out that's taken quite a while to finally make it's way onto comic book store shelves. This week Shrugged #7 is FINALLY coming out. The previous issue came out on August 22. That one must have been pretty late too, because we ordered Shrugged #7 in December - of last year. Yes, one year ago almost to the day, we sent out our orders for Shrugged #7 and now finally it's shipping. How this didn't get canceled by Diamond is beyond me.

Now let's check in on the mini-series madness of Marvel and DC.

mini-series starting & one-shots for this week

• FANTASTIC FOUR ISLA DE LA MUERTE ONE SHOT - MARVEL
• GIANT SIZE AVENGERS SPECIAL - MARVEL
  
• GREEN LANTERN SINESTRO CORPS SECRET FILES - DC
  
• HULK VS FIN FANG FOOM ONE SHOT - MARVEL (pictured)
• MARVEL ILLUSTRATED PICTURE DORIAN GRAY #1 (OF 6) - MARVEL
  
• MARVEL SPOTLIGHT ONE MORE DAY BRAND NEW DAY - MARVEL
  
• MARVEL SPOTLIGHT X-MEN MESSIAH COMPLEX - MARVEL
• WILDCATS ARMAGEDDON - DC
• X-MEN MESSIAH COMPLEX MUTANT FILES - MARVEL

mini-series ending with this week's issue

• COUNTDOWN ARENA #4 (OF 4) - DC (pictured, top)
  
• ULTIMATE POWER #9 (OF 9) - MARVEL

This week's rundown of mini-series looks worse than what it is. Only one mini-series is starting, the rest are all one-shots. But Marvel has a LOT of them!! Even two Spotlight issues - there's no good reason for them to do that.


What I'm Reading This Week
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #8
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #9
COUNTDOWN ARENA #4 (OF 4)
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 18
CRIME BIBLE THE FIVE LESSONS OF BLOOD #3 (OF 5)
DAN DARE #2 (OF 7)
DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #4 (OF 8)
HOUSE OF M AVENGERS #3 (OF 5)
INVINCIBLE PRESENTS ATOM EVE #1 (OF 2) - pictured
JACK OF FABLES #18
NEW WARRIORS #7
PAX ROMANA #1 (OF 4) - pictured
TEEN TITANS #54
THOR #5