Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

With Marvel Comics celebrating seven decades in business, it’s been putting out a series of one-shots focused on its earlier characters, featuring a brand-new story with yesteryear reprints in the back, all sporting its original Timely Comics shield. One of them is THE HUMAN TORCH COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1, featuring the original Torch — not Johnny Storm. Scott Snyder and Scott Wegener provide a terrific throwback tale tinged with racial overtones, while the backup story from 1940 has the Torch meeting Toro, the Flaming Torch Kid, at a circus. You can tell the story is old just from its first page, with lines like “The Torch is attracted by the gay colored tents” and “Can’t say — but it’s mighty queer!” And that’s all part of its charm.

Another in the birthday series is SUB-MARINER COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1. Roy Thomas and Mitch Breitweiser’s anchoring piece featuring Prince Namor is moody and noir-ish, while Mark Schultz and Al Williamson’s “Vergeltungswaffe!” leans more toward the character’s fantasy origins, being set underwater. Closing out the fin-footed fun is Bill Everett’s debut of the Sub-Mariner from 1939’s first issue of MARVEL COMICS. Boy, is it ever primitive, and boy, do I like it. Namor’s never been among my favorite superheroes — partly because I can’t figure out if he’s really that or a supervillain — but this is a nice little trio of tales, each very different.

Like the clown princes of comics, Scott Gray and Roger Langridge tear THE FANTASTIC FOUR’s villainous dragon character of Fin Fang Foom a new one in the one-shot FIN FANG FOUR RETURN! #1. The pair has turned the creature into comic relief before in MARVEL MONSTERS, but here are a half-dozen more stories, also starring fellow monsters Gorgilla, Googam and Elektro. They get psychoanalyzed by Doc Samson; FFF works as a chef in a Chinese restaurant; Gorgilla gets the CURIOUS GEORGE treatment; Googam gets adopted; Elektro gets arrested; and FFF saves Christmas. Self-deprecating fun all around, and the kind of thing comics companies should do more of.

Given that THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: THE SHORT HALLOWEEN #1 one-shot is written by none other than SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE players Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, you’d think it’d be funny, but it’s really not. Then again, it doesn’t appear to be designed to be joke-driven. But it’s certainly amusing, based upon its premise, with a drunk Halloween celebrant dressed as Spidey constantly confused for the real deal, and vice versa, on a night when The Furious Five unleashes a not-so-well-planned reign of terror. Sometimes celebrity writers are brought on just for their name value, but Hader and Meyers adequately display genuine love for the material. Kevin Maguire drew the fine art. —Rod Lott

Over in Japan, FAUST is considered a “mook” — that’s a magazine and a book — speaking to the disaffected otaku culture, with a mix of cutting-edge fiction and manga. You can see what you’re missing out on with Del Rey’s FAUST: VOLUME TWO, the sophomore edition of the translated anthology. (VOLUME ONE came out last year.)

It opens with “Magical Girl Risuka” by NISIOISIN, which is a pen name, not a brand of ramen. (Strangely, many Japanese authors hide behind these cryptic monikers; others here include VOFAN, x6suke and TAGRO.) The story is a quasi-Lovecraft tribute about a boy who witnesses four people throw themselves in front a moving subway at once, and the titular girl who has the powers to alter time.

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I have some good news and bad news for Repairman Jack fans out there. First, the bad news: In the introduction to the Gauntlet Press edition of GROUND ZERO, author F. Paul Wilson states there are only two more Repairman Jack books coming, with it all culminating in the long-promised, revised and reissued version of NIGHTWORLD.

As with the novels that have followed HARBINGERS, these stories are no longer self-contained, but telling a much larger tale while putting Jack through yet another adventure. This latest is definitely one for his longtime fans, since Wilson ties up a few loose ends while also laying the ground work of what is to come. It shares some of the ideas from the earlier CONSPIRACIES, since the major plot touches on the events of 9/11, and their connection to “the otherness.”

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All the problems of DC’s 1960s “The War That Time Forgot” series from STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES — repetition, repetition, repetition — are not present in DC’s current reboot, THE WAR THAT TIME FORGOT: VOLUME ONE.

Whereas the original stories were the same thing over and over again — World War II soldiers fighting dinosaurs — Bruce Jones’ update aims for an action-driven plot steeped in its own teasing mythology, à la TV’s LOST.

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DUSK: VOL. 1 is an indie vampire graphic novel that is more akin to say, TWILIGHT or BUFFY than, oh, say, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. It’s about a spunky vampire-sycophant who drinks blood and gains some self-esteem and works for them as an assassin. I think.

I say “I think” because DUSK — which is very well-written by David Doub, mind you — falls prey to the curse of indie comics: bad, indecipherable artwork. Black-and-white inks fill every page, at times too much, with blocky figures doing some sort of motion, but we’re not sure what. And I can’t fault author Doub: When you’re doing this off your own dime, you gotta work with what you can afford.

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The thing about Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels is that while they are light reads, they are also nourishing in a way that only the best blockbusters are. I’m not talking Simon West or Stephen Sommers, but guys like James Cameron or the BOURNE movies by Paul Greengrass. They have a brain, a heart, and they engage you without asking you to check your brain at the door the way you would with a James Patterson or Dan Brown novel. If you don’t want to be engaged by your fiction … man, I don’t know what to tell you. Try hard drugs — it’s the same effect and often more interesting an experience.

The setup for TURN COAT — the 11th of a projected 20 — is so simple that I love it: A big-time warden named Morgan, a sort of police officer for wizards, collapses onto maverick wizard Dresden’s doorstep and gasps, “Help me. The wardens are after me.”

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Vampire hunter Laura Caxton is back again! That’s right: David Wellington, one of the brighter lights on the horror fiction scene these days, has brought back the seasoned police detective and vampire slayer from his previous three novels (13 BULLETS, 99 COFFINS, and VAMPIRE ZERO) for a fourth go-round in 23 HOURS. But there are plenty of new challenges for Caxton, and plenty of breakneck action to please fans of Wellington’s previous works.

We find Caxton inside the Marcy State Correctional Institution as the novel begins, having been arrested and tried for the kidnapping and torture of an informant from a previous case. A former cop is a potential target for hardcore inmates, and before the end of page 3, Caxton is the center of a cafeteria riot and brought before a hardened inmate who wants to make Caxton her slave.

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A couple in the midst of sexual congress has their hearts ripped out by a surge of magic, and Chicago’s finest private detective/wizard Harry Dresden is called to help police investigate, in Jim Butcher’s THE DRESDEN FILES: STORM FRONT — VOLUME ONE: THE GATHERING STORM, a graphic-novel adaptation of Butcher’s first Dresden book, STORM FRONT.

Problem is, the magic act requires such a high amount of energy that Dresden is expected of being the only person in the city who could pull it off. So while he’s trying to figure out who’s behind it — and it ain’t the vampire madam, he finds out — he’s pursued by White Council wizards and otherworldly demons who want him to pay for it.

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We’re taking a trip into the future this week, with two private eyes out of their element, and one kick-ass vehicle that was turned into a really lame movie. I did plan on covering a certifiable classic I finished, but to be honest, not a lot really happens in it. It’s more a mediation of a man coming in contact with a giant alien ship called Rama. It was by an author who got an Oscar nomination for a Stanley Kubrick film that ripped off Elvis’ intro music. Still a fantastic read, but a bit too heady for this column.

THE DOOMSDAY BRUNETTE by John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem — I think I’ve had this 2004 book on my shelf since about 2005. I always kept meaning to read it, but like others, I wanted to read the first book in the series beforehand. Well, guess what? Now this and the first book, THE PLUTONIUM BLONDE, are packaged together and I’m too cheap to waste money on it now, which is kind of funny since our narrator/hero Zachary Nixon Johnson berates the reader for not having read the first one.

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THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, Kevin J. Anderson’s first book in what will be the TERRA INCOGNITA trilogy, is a sprawling beast of an action/fantasy book. It tells multiple tales of two nations involved in an inflexible religious war, each eager to destroy the other after diplomacy has failed. Anderson writes from the point of view of both kings and commoners, taking the time to build his characters and their individual stories, intertwining them slowly into the other storylines.

Both nations are also involved in an effort at exploration, hoping to discover new lands and resources. One nation strikes out across the sea in search of a new world, and the other crosses a barren desert to locate previously unknown human inhabitants.

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Wildly intense, literate, contemporary mystery/fantasy with a highly integrated theme of nationalism, segregation, isolationism and political terror, coupled with well-drawn characters living in a complicated world — the physicality of which is difficult to describe, but the metaphysicality of which is the point of the book. Sheesh. Can’t ask for much more than that, can you?

China Miéville’s THE CITY & THE CITY is one of the most captivating mysteries, and one of the most captivating fantasies I’ve read this year. It is the ultimate genre crossover, but with much higher ambitions than just a little entertaining story. The conceit is that there are two cities that exist intertwined with one another, Besźel and Ul Qoma, but that the inhabitants of each city refuse to recognize the existence of the other.

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The more you know about H.P. Lovecraft, the more you’re apt to enjoy CTHULHU UNBOUND, a Permuted Press anthology of “genre-bending tales” involving the author’s vast mythology. Edited by Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri, the collection features 15 stories in a variety of genres, but if you don’t know your Shub-Niggurath from Nyarlathotep, I’m afraid you’ll be mostly lost.

The book’s inventiveness is evident from the start, as Linda L. Donahue’s opening story is a noir detective tale, albeit one with a protagonist who has cloven hooves. Things get more English and proper for Kevin Lauderdale’s “James and the Dark Grimoire,” in which one Aunt Agnes of the Ladies Auxiliary seeks a rare book she thinks is called something like “the Nickel Norman Chrome.”

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