No matter how fastidious you are in maintaining your comic shop pull list in your never-ending battle to make sure you don't miss anything good (or accidentally waste your money on something not so much), it never hurts to do a last minute check on what's coming out this week so you can make those fine-tuned adjustments.

Here are our looks at this week's upcoming comics, and our hot takes on whether they're a pick or a pan. Your mileage may vary.

Meet Jodie Whittaker. For the foreseeable future, she’s The Doctor — and I’m completely fine with that. The idea that Doctor Who could regenerate in a female form had been telegraphed ever since we learned The Master had been reborn as Missy all those episodes ago. It was an intriguing concept, and one that could open up a cornucopia of new story ideas. For my part, I was hoping that the female Doctor was going to be Jenna Coleman, who as a prior companion had announced “I’m the Doctor” on more than one occasion, so that I hoped it was a bit of foreshadowing.

What this comics market needs is a really good, strong Western comic book. When I was younger, I'd heard tales of how the comic book market used to produce for every imaginable genre, until it began to shrink. I couldn't understand it then, as I had every genre I could imagine: there were superheroes, space adventures, horror comics, funny comics, war comics and western comics. I ate up Jonah Hex, Scalphunter and Bat Lash with as much eagerness as I did Superman, Adam Strange, Cain & Abel, Archie and Richie Rich, and Sgt Rock.

Now that I'm older, I can see how the market has expanded, and yet shrunk further. We have so many more titles, but not as many genre adventures. Which is why THE LONE RANGER is such a welcome book. And it helps that it has some fantastic cover art to sell it, packaging an intriguing and relevant story by Mark Russell with panels as gritty as trail dust from Bob Q.

John C. Reilly plays the fool better than most, but don't fool yourself. Remember the lesson of Denzel Washington in Training Day -- good actors can play any role. After seeing The Sisters Brothers you'll view John C. Reilly as a much better actor than you ever expected. 

Catwoman, Green Lantern, and Fantastic Four are generally regarded as examples of the worst superhero films ever made. Now you can add another one to the future Razzie Award winner (loser?) list—Sony Pictures ill-conceived Venom. Calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to actual dumpster fires. No part of this film succeeds. This waste of time should only be viewed as a study aid for aspiring filmmakers to learn what a terrible movie looks like.

Rainbow Brite is one of those pop culture icons of nostalgia that was quite the big deal back in the day, a part of the zeitgeist of the times just as much as Atari arcade games and Rubik's cubes. Where Strawberry Shortcake relied on scents as the selling point, Rainbow Brite was (rather obviously) more color-oriented.

When I saw the Paulina Ganucheau cover, and read the advance promotional material, I hoped this would be a brilliant reboot of the character that would still retain the appeal to an all-ages audience. What I got on the inside was not what I expected, and yet still lives up to my hopes.

DC's latest crisis has just kicked off, and the first repercussions of it are felt in the pages of GREEN ARROW #45, as Oliver Queen and the various members of the Justice League, Titans, and Birds of Prey attend the funeral of Roy Harper -- aka Arsenal and former sidekick and ward to the Green Arrow.

The ceremony takes place on a remote butte, where friends and family give their eulogies while Oliver continues to blame himself -- and the Justice League -- for everything that happened to Roy, from his addiction problems to his ultimate murder at the Justice League's so-called Sanctuary where heroes go to get help and support for their personal problems. Ollie's upset enough to throw a punch at Clark, and threaten to use his ultimate trump card against the Justice League.

Imagine if Lex Luthor was about a million times smarter, and his avowed enemy wasn't Superman, but the reality that created Superman in the first place.

That's (maybe) the plot of REX ROYD, a disjointed collection of mind-f*cks from the mind of Frankie Boyle and Jim Muir. 

Rex is a businessman, CEO of Rexcorp. What the company does is hard to say, There's an indestructible superbeing who helps him, an unnamed British agent with a license to kill, and Eve -- the biblical Eve

The ostensible target is Proteoman -- the book's analog for Superman. Thing is, seems he dies a couple of different times in the book. And as for truth and justice, he seems to just fight because he exists.

It’s something everyone worries about, even if only a little, when putting all your information into some online form: Will my data be kept secure? Who is going to see this other than myself and the agent on the other end? Can I trust this website?

For the most part, with trusted entities, that answer is yes. Barring the occasional intrusion from bad actors working outside the network of a company, you can usually trust that your information won't be mishandled. (Sold to other companies, sure, or even made available to the government -- but that's a story for another day, right Mr. Zuckerberg?) 

So it was a bit alarming when a comic book artist began posting on his social media account the screenshots of personal communiques between Kickstarter and Richard C. Meyer, aka YouTube personality and pariah Diversity & Comics.

As the Critical Blast Bombshell feature has grown over the years, we've seen all kinds of cosplay, running the gamut from heroes to game icons to cartoon characters to science fiction figures, done by cosplayers who've been at it for years or who have just entered the field. But we've never yet featured a cosplayer like Violette.

Violette is bundle of energy and optimism, which no costume can disguise, and her range of cosplay knows no limits. Wherever she goes, she makes people smile with her commitment to making the world a better place through superheroism.

She's done all this, and she's not even ten years old yet. Tremble at what she'll accomplish as she matures!

It was the last evening of 1879 when Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates of Penzance debuted to great success. Now, just a few months shy of an even 140 years, New Line Theatre has debuted a "long lost early draft" where Gilbert had a different kind of scurvy-ridden, rotted-toothed, snarling adversary in mind for a Modern Major General and his darling daughters. 

You're a comics fan. You've probably got a local comics shop, and a local comics shop guy who looks out for your interests. You've left him with a pull list, so you know when you get to the store the things you want to read will be already picked off the shelves for you.

But that doesn't mean you didn't miss something. Here are our looks at this week's upcoming comics, and our hot takes on whether they're a pick or a pan. Your mileage may vary.

Okay, this is not going to sit well with my readers, but I have never watched a single episode of STRANGER THINGS.

I know, I know. Me and some guy in Alaska without electricity, we're the only ones.

So I thought I could at least get a flavor of the show through this new comic book debut from Dark Horse, penned by Jody Houser and illustrated by Stefano Martino and Keith Champagne. And after having read it, I can at least admit that the story is properly titled: STRANGER THINGS than this I've not seen.

The story follows young Will Byers, who has gone missing from his hometown of Hawkins, Indiana. But he's still in Hawkins -- or rather a mirror version of it, in a dark place called the Upside Down, where he's all alone except for some monstrous creatures.

Every once in a great while, a cause arises, a call that requires the action of heroes -- some super, some magical, some simply out of this world.

This time the call came from a little girl named Galilee -- okay, specifically it came from her mom via Facebook, because Galilee is only 5 years old. But it was a call nonetheless. It seems Galilee was having a very common problem with an enemy we've all faced in our lives: bullies.

To be sure, people around the world began to respond. But it caught our attention here when it entered the world of the cosplayers, thanks to a cosplayer named Savannah Marie.

"I met Galilee about two years ago at Cincinnati comic con," Savannah tells us. "I remember her so well because she had this beautiful red hair and was so overly excited to see me."

Last Halloween, Tarot, her husband, and her sister encountered the Spirit of Halloween in a park in Salem. Ever since that time, they have been cursed to appear as the stereotypes of their characters -- i.e. green-skinned witches, and a living skeleton man.

Now, in TAROT, WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #112, the season is upon them once more, and the three, along with their mother, plan to seek out the spirit and entreat him to return them to their original forms. But it's not going to be that easy. The spirit agrees to do so -- if he can be defeated in a game of monsters, taking place on another plane. And if he cannot -- then the entire population of Salem is to be his forever.

Tarot and company agree...and don't do so well. But this is the season of tricks and treats, and a wily opponent knows how to use both of those to her advantage.

Having crossed the halfway point of this 12-issue crossover between the DC Universe and the world of the WATCHMEN, we finally get to a place where we get answers. What has Doctor Manhattan been up to all these years, what is Ozymandias ultimate plan, and, of course...

Whatever Happened to the Justice Society of America?

Johnny Thunder has been convinced that he had a genie at his command once upon a time. So why does nobody remember him? Why does nobody remember Alan Scott, the Green Lantern of the Golden Age, and the rest of the age of heroes that followed him?

The answer is pretty simple: Doctor Manhattan altered the events.

One thing about Tom King that I've noticed: He loves writing for the 3-by-3 grid. You'll see that frequently in HEROES IN CRISIS #1, the latest so-called crisis to hit the DC Universe, and the first to hit it since the promise of an optimistic restart that came with REBIRTH.

Something else came with REBIRTH as well besides optimism, and both are dead after this issue.

The main narrative of the story follows Booster Gold and Harley Quinn, who meet out in the middle of flyover country, have some pie and coffee, then end up in a bloody battle. I will say that Harley is written wonderfully nutty here -- not the non-sequitur, fourth-wall-breaking whacky that we see in SUICIDE SQUAD, but someone who is psychotically out there, but with a sympathetic side. And Booster Gold is written, in foil, as normal and plain as can be imagined.

In a shocking revelation, during a harmless exchange on Twitter, top comic book artist Brett Booth admitted that he doesn't read comic books "anymore".

Known for his stellar work on THE FLASH comic books, Booth is often seen on Twitter interacting with his fans and discussing, among other things, his passion for dinosaur's. Many professionals in their field often keep tabs on what's happening among their competition or creators they support. So it comes as a surprise for someone who has been around as long as Brett Booth to have abandoned the medium that he's well known for being a part of.

Of all the so-called Arrowverse shows, CW's televised adaptation of DC Comics superheroes, SUPERGIRL has been the most problematic. Besides taking place on an entirely different Earth than the other three shows, necessitating a cosmic crisis for the annual uber-crossover to occur, the show has a distinctly different feel to it. Perhaps it's because it's adopted into the Arrowverse, having been taken up after cancellation on it's original network. Perhaps its because the scripts have an undertone of agenda-driven plotting that shoehorns its way into the plots rather than rising organically out of the stories.

Whatever it is, it makes SUPERGIRL more difficult to watch, especially in binge-doses.

BATMAN: DAMNED #1. It's the first book from DC's "Black Label" imprint. It's the book with the singular event everyone's talking about. It's the book that's trending on eBay because of a singular, unimportant image.

It's not the book that's selling because people are talking about the story. That's possibly because the story is dense, hard to follow, and nonsequential in its telling. So let's go there.