A month ago, DC Comics published the hardcover collected edition of their Blackest Night crossover. It's basically everything that's wrong with superhero comics: A bunch of characters who have died a bunch of times before come back from the dead again, this time as zombies who do the bidding of a big evil guy who wants to destroy the universe. It's fan fiction that somehow became "professional"-grade comics, and the only real goal it accomplishes is copyright protection, peeing on some long-forgotten lame characters to make sure that everybody knows who owns them.

Two months ago, DC's Wildstorm imprint published A God Somewhere, a book that represents everything that's right with superhero fiction. The set-up—a man suddenly gets Superman-like powers— is obviously nothing new, and even some of the follow-through (extreme violence occurs, not unlike the end of Alan Moore's Miracleman run) has been done before. But the book grounds the superhero elements by making it a story of three friends, giving a weight and a subtlety to the proceedings that makes Blackest Night look even dumber in comparison.

But the best comic I've read this summer is from DC's Vertigo imprint. Revolver is the story of Sam, an unexciting office drone who drags through his days until suddenly, for no apparent reason, he wakes up in a universe where America is being attacked by mysterious terrorists. When he falls asleep there, he wakes in his normal life again. As he bounces between the worlds, his lives grow further and further apart. While trying to escape the war zone that America has become, he becomes brave and cunning, and he learns secrets about his friends and coworkers that he employs in the "normal" world. Revolver is fresh, invigorating storytelling that doesn't feel like a story that's been done to death a billion times before. I heartily recommend it.