Four-Colour Pandemonium: September 2025’s Comic Multiverse Meltdown (comic-book news round-up).
September 2025, that noble month of sharpened pencils, pumpkin-spice lattes and publishers treating us like lab rats in a four-colour maze. Forget the back-to-school sales—this is the season where comics publishers unleash more announcements than Loki has variant cousins. So fetch your beverage of choice (Earl Grey optional, absinthe recommended) and let’s rummage through the longbox of delights, horrors, and “did they really greenlight that?” curiosities.
Dark Horse has been busier than NASA’s launchpad. Their autumn menu offers Space Scouts (Steve Foxe & Fred Stresing), in which teens compete in a galactic reality show before being drafted into an interstellar war. Just what your careers officer warned you about. Over in Eternia, He-Man: The Sword of Flaws promises Teela and chums poking artefacts they really shouldn’t. Star Wars: Tales from Nightlands allows a youthful Anakin Skywalker to meddle with the supernatural, proving he was troublesome long before the mask. Then there’s Nocturnals: Sinister Path, a gothic reboot featuring vigilantes, eldritch gangsters and a Pacific City with more crime lords than it has parking spaces.
Not satisfied with that, Dark Horse also gifts us Adventures of Lumen N., a steampunk romp about Captain Nemo’s granddaughter running amok through 1901 Europe. Magic players can wallow in angst with Magic: The Gathering – Untold Stories: Elspeth, while TexArcanum gives us cowboys lassoing the occult. And just when you thought the nostalgia mines were exhausted, Blue Falcon & Dynomutt #1 rises again, in a grittier take where the robot doggie has more edge than the Batmobile.
Marvel, meanwhile, is in full “Make Mine Multiverse” mode. Punisher: Red Band #1 slaps Frank Castle with a memory wipe and a skull logo rebrand, presumably to keep the T-shirt market interesting. The Undead Iron Fist has Danny Rand refusing to die at the designated age of 33, which is fair enough—most of us were still paying off student loans then. Doom fans will fret in One World Under Doom, and elsewhere we’re promised cosmic knights, symbiotes, and red-hulks aplenty.
The prize for Most Bonkers Crossover surely goes to Alien vs. Captain America. Yes, you read that correctly. Set in WWII, Hydra unleash xenomorphs, and Cap responds by walloping them with his shield. Expect patriotic acid burns. Not to be outdone, Spider-Man ’94 #1 takes us back to the animated ’90s, Santa Claus is Coming to Town reimagines Christmas through Skynet’s dead eyes, and Fantastic Four/Gargoyles #1 has Reed Richards sharing panel space with Manhattan’s granite gargoyles. There’s also Daredevil/Punisher: The Devil’s Trigger, and an Archie × Army of Darkness mini-series in which Ash Williams brings his chainsaw to Riverdale.
Image Comics remains the cool indie cousin with Free Planet, a space-opera dripping with revolution, Bloodletter for Spawn fans who like their debt collection infernal, and Artificial, a sultry android-dating thriller best described as 9 1/2 Weeks meets The Terminator. Over on Comixology Originals, we’re treated to Alienated, The Adventures of Ulysses Monarch, EdgeWorld Season 3, and Outer Lands. IDW chips in with a new Twilight Zone anthology, where the twist endings will leave you questioning your Wi-Fi password.
BOOM! Studios goes for broke with Be Not Afraid, a feminist horror where Nephilim babies are not the cuddly kind, and The War, Garth Ennis’s nuclear paranoia writ large. Dune die-hards get Edge of a Crysknife: Hiding Among the Harkonnens, while Expanse fans can poke about in A Little Death. There’s even The Last Day of H.P. Lovecraft and nun-sploitation with Marian Heretic.
Not to be left out, Dynamite rummages through the Disney vault with The Lion King, where Mufasa teaches Simba the circle of life (and merchandising). ThunderCats roar again with a Panthro one-shot, while Archie inevitably succumbs to the Army of Darkness crossover. At this point, Riverdale has a higher supernatural body count than Sunnydale.
By month’s end, the mash-ups pile higher than Deadpool’s laundry basket. Predator Kills the Marvel Universe #2 promises an extinction-level event and a Predator trophy wall decorated with Wolverine’s claws and Captain America’s shield. The moral? In comics, nothing stays dead, nothing is sacred, and everything is up for crossover.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we can only applaud the lunacy. So sharpen your longboxes, brace your wallets, and prepare for a year where publishers gleefully throw He-Man, Captain America, xenomorphs and Archie into the same pop-cultural blender. Pass the Hobnobs—this is going to get weird.
