Another week, another edition of Comics Disassembled led by a giant-sized Superman comic? What in the world? Well, I guess that’s just how it is, so let’s get straight into a headliner light but enormous comic heavy look at ten things I liked or didn’t like from the week of comics.

DC, Progressively Working

Everyone has really focused on the home runs that DC has been hitting of late, and for good reason. They’ve been enormous. The Absolute line has been killer, its Compact Comics line has been incendiary, and its overall plans surrounding James Gunn’s Superman film are smart, all of which add a ton of heat in the market. Comic shops are raving about DC over the past year, and it’s pretty understandable given the successive hits they’ve had.

But one aspect of DC’s recent rise has been lost in the stratospheric highs they’ve accomplished. While they’ve hit a lot of home runs during this stretch, they’ve also, to continue with the baseball metaphor, just stopped striking out. Everything they’ve been doing has made sense (with the possible exception of announcing a volume of Death as part of its next wave of Compact Comics, but they corrected that eventually), from the return of Vertigo and the increased focus on ongoings to the last week of news in the form of the resurrected treasury editions and this week’s item.

This week brought word of a for a new line called, delightfully, DC W.I.P., or Work in Progress for those unfamiliar. This line will be filled with 11″x17″ releases that showcase the inked pages for single issues, like really thin Artist’s Editions. It’s solely built for fans of art, and it’s starting in the smartest possible place. It launches on July 9th — two days before the release of the Superman movie — with a W.I.P. edition of All-Star Superman #1, giving readers a chance to drink deep from Frank Quitely’s astonishing inked pages. It’s going to be $14.99, but it’s a highly specialized thing at a very big size, so that seems reasonable.

I get this. It makes sense. It appeals to me. But that’s the case for pretty much everything DC has done of late. It all adds up. While it isn’t always a massive swing like Absolute or a brilliant idea like those Compact Comics, I still appreciate what it’s up to of late. And there’s a lot to be said when a publisher is a place where they keep bringing things to the table without taking anything off of it. That’s where DC is these days.

Joe Quesada, Doing What Can’t Be Undone

I invariably talk with the clerks of my local comic book shop when I visit each Wednesday, and the subjects typically range quite a bit. Sometimes it’s about recent comics or movies. Other times it’s about completely random things that have nothing to do with anything the shop sells. The point is we talk, and I never know what will come up. Case in point. I was chatting with one of my favorite people there about comics, and I don’t remember how he headed in this direction, but he ended up commenting on how there aren’t Shakespeare comics, and how that’s probably for a reason. I quickly thought about it and realized he was right: I couldn’t think of any Shakespeare comics, beyond, as I told him, modernized adaptations like Ronald Wimberly’s Prince of Cats.

It was an unexpected conversation, but it proved to be a timely one because, uh, Joe Quesada’s making Shakespeare comics? That’s right, The Bard is meeting Joe Q over at his Mad Cave imprint Amazing Comics, as they announced Undiscover’d, a new line of Shakespeare comics from Quesada and his co-creator Charles Dorfman. As they said, “each title reimagines a specific Shakespeare play through a bold new genre and setting—while preserving the original character names and core themes,” and it will eventually feature an array of creators like Garth Ennis, Christopher Priest, Esad Ribić, Ryan Stegman, and J. Michael Straczynski, amongst others.

It’ll all begin where these kinds of things often do. Hamlet will be the first adaptation. It’s called Disciple, and it’ll be co-written by Quesada and Dorfman with art by the actually pretty incredible team of Quesada, inker Wade von Grawbadger, colorist Richard Isanove, and letterer Joe Caramagna. That’s pretty elite! Not exactly a team that screams “HAMLET!” of course. But this is Disciple, not Hamlet, so TBD.

I’m not going to lie: I have no interest in this. Genre takes on Shakespeare in single issue form are not really my kind of thing (or at least I don’t think they are!), unless you’re getting a singular voice to do something with it, like the aforementioned Wimberly. It feels more like an “IP” play (quotes because I’m not sure if this even counts as IP as Shakespeare’s plays are in the public domain), where a publisher tries to do something new with something familiar while getting to capitalize on the connection so many have with these stories. But it’s just not a list of creators whose takes on William Shakespeare are all that intriguing to me, besides Ennis — just because what in the world could he possibly do, besides maybe Richard III or maybe King Lear — and Ribić, and god, I hope they’re working together. Mostly, it’s amusing timing, and a rather unexpected project from a rather unexpected source.

That said, let it be known that my dramatic title for this point is in fact a Macbeth reference, not a burn on Quesada. It did feel fitting, though.