He's a giant robot made out of robotic lions! He's the evil crazed clown who stars in this summer's The Dark Knight! And together, Voltron and the Joker are teaming up to fight cri - Wait, wait. I'm sorry. I mean, "Together, Voltron and the Joker are teaming up to bring excitement to your local comic book store this Wednesday!" Yeah, I know it doesn't have the same ring to it, but it doesn't mean you won't want to grab two new books this week at your local Android's Dungeon. Find out more about them, and the week's other picks, under the jump.
Devil's Due is a publisher that doesn't get the most play here on io9, but its 304-page Voltron: Defender of the Universe Hardcover Omnibus may change that. Collecting the complete Voltron series — including the never-published final 12th issue - this fairly-weighty hardcover has work by 52 and Flash's Mark Waid, Ultimate Spider-Man's Mark Brooks, Dan Jolley, Kaare Andrews (the man who gave the world Spider-Man's radioactive spunk, about which more below), and many, many more, and may be the nostalgia purchase of choice for many of you this week.
For those of you who have more of a Batman fetish, this week also sees the re-release of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's "seminal" The Killing Joke, in a newly recolored, hardcover format. If a beautifully-illustrated comic that cripples one of DC's most well-known superheroines in an offhanded manner and then lets you see her breasts later (We'll see if that detail makes it into the remastered version) isn't enough to entice you to spend $17.99 alone, then I may as well mention that the new hardback also includes a short back-up story written and illustrated by Bolland alone. If you'd rather have more kid-friendly DC superhero fare, you might want to try the first issue of Super Friends, a new series aimed at the under-10s, where superdeformed versions of the Justice League show that — hey! — friendship may be the greatest superpower of all. Or, if you don't want to patronize your kids, give them the first collection of cartoon tie-in Legion of Super-Heroes In The 31st Century instead.
Marvel is having a bit of an off-week, by way of comparison. People who want to see uncomfortably realistic older versions of favorite characters have an unexpected choice, however. On the one hand, there's the Earth X Trilogy Companion (a collection of sketches and rarely-seen work relating to Alex Ross's future Marvel universe). On the other, there's the paperback version of Kaare Andrews' Spider-Man: Reign, which rewrites Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns into a Spider-Man story most notable for including the fact that Spider-Man killed off his wife by having sex with her and poisoning her with his radioactive sperm.
No, seriously.
Yes, yes, I know. There's nowhere to go from there. That's why I'm telling you that that stroke of "genius" (or should that be "stroke" of genius?), along with everything else shipping this week, can be found here, and that you can find out where your nearest comic book store may be by clicking here.
Now, go and wash your mind out to stop thinking about radioactive spider sperm. You know you want to.