I’ve previously read exactly three issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, a three part story called “The River” from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original Mirage Comics run with art by Rick Veitch. It was fantastic, but the series just wasn’t something I wanted to get into at the time. The cowabunga/pizza turtles on TV may have been a big factor in that (although I do have a Donatello action figure in my collection and I was a huge fan of the Turtles arcade game). A lot has happened with the Turtles property since that time and discovering a new comic book series from IDW with Eastman’s name attached certainly piqued my interest.

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Continuing the onslaught of new books for the month of September, this week sees the return of Ultimate Comics X-Men to Marvel’s relaunching Ultimate line. In the spirit of all of these new books (both from DC Comics’ “New 52″ and beyond), we’ve been trying to showcase as many as we can in a what is a truly remarkable time for comics. Ultimate Comics X-Men #1 is a book I would have passed on otherwise, and I’m a serious X-Men fan. Writer Nick Spencer and artist Paco Medina introduce a dramatically new status quo for the mutants of this world here and as first issues go, this one puts a lot on the table.

Spoilers regarding everything you thought you knew about the X-Men will follow.

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Once more DC is releasing another 13 new number ones this week. How can anyone possibly be expected to determine which of these new books they should really buy? There’s just so many of them! To make your life easier, I’ll offer my ill-informed, not-quite-expert opinion on what titles are worth picking up today and each week during this first month of the “New 52.”

So this third week of the “New 52″ DC Universe is the first where there are more books I’m not interested in than ones that I am. Having said that, two of the books I’m most excited about are hitting the shelves today. In my opinion there are four new DCU books that are probably going to be worth checking out and two or three others I’m at least curious about.

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We continue our look at September’s “other” number one issues (i.e. books that aren’t part of DC Comics’ “New 52”) with the debut of Dark Horse Comics’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Nine. The series continues the highly successful transition of Joss Whedon’s television series to comics and it’s arguably everything you’d want and expect. I know it might be unfair, but I had a really difficult time reading this book without considering Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar’s new show Ringer that also premiered last week.

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Last Wednesday, in recognition of the second full week of DC Comics’ New 52 promotion, I recommended the five new DC titles that I thought were most likely to be worthy of your attention and your money sight unseen. Now that we’ve had a week to digest them, the question is how did I do? I think it’s safe to characterize the entire promotion as a monster success for DC at least in terms of PR for month one: tons of sellouts, reprints and series being ordered in the six figures. Overall, I can honestly say the quality of the actual product has been stronger than I was expecting. The books I personally recommended for week two in order of expected quality were as follows: Batwoman, Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E., Green Lantern, Batman and Robin, Deathstroke, and Superboy. So how were they in reality?
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