Is it safe to say that a science fiction renaissance is happening in comic books right now? I've already talked about my appreciation for Greg Rucka and Michael Lark's new comic series Lazarus. It's one of many new Image Comics series that eschews superhero tropes entirely while leaning more toward full-on science fiction. Two new comics from Vertigo Comics are sci-fi-oriented, too, and they're just as interesting as the indie stuff.

Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy's The Wake is now on its third issue—I picked up the most recent one on its release last Wednesday—and it's proving to be the best thing Snyder has ever written. I've always appreciated Snyder's talent, but nothing he's written has completely come together for me; American Vampire seemed a little too obvious, his Batman feels too intent on shocking the reader. The Wake, though, succeeds because it's wildly ambitious and unwilling to be glued down to a single genre. It's a scientific adventure story—comparisons to The Abyss are not exactly right, but they're not entirely wrong, either—mixed with a dystopian drama and a serial killer story. Each issue starts in the far future sometime around the end of the world, and then the story snaps back to the present, in which a gifted marine biologist is recruited to a team that's been assembled to examine a mysterious aquatic life-form discovered by a secret government agency. Maybe the reason the script is so sharp is that Snyder is working with a great artist. Murphy's Punk Rock Jesus was a fun, sarcastic sci-fi poke in the eyes of theology, and it proved that he was a gifted writer on his own. His challenging layouts for The Wake give the story a complexity that some of Snyder's other work has lacked. His pages insist that you take your time with them, working through the panels to ensure that you get the nuance and even tone of Snyder's dialogue exactly right in your head before continuing. This isn't a beginner's comic book—Murphy's figures are too sketchy, and his layouts too complex—but it is a hell of a ride. The Wake is only supposed to run for eight issues, and unlike most of Snyder's other work, I'm looking forward to (not dreading) finding out how the whole thing wraps up.

The first issue of Collider isn't as cleanly satisfying as the first issue of The Wake was. But maybe that's because Collider has a hell of a premise to lay out. It's about an Earth where the laws of physics aren't as reliable as we know them to be. So naturally, the government has set up a department that rushes to the scenes of physics failures (in the first issue, a group of school kids start floating around when gravity spontaneously fails) and re-establishes the natural laws. Writer Simon Oliver has too much work to do, and he accomplishes his primary task of setting up a world, but the issue feels, necessarily, overstuffed. The best reason to hope for Collider's success falls firmly on the art side: Robbi Rodriguez's cartoonish artwork is all motion and energy and power, making him the perfect artist to illustrate a dozen impossible things in a little over twenty pages. The coloring, too, is fantastical in just the right way. As some of Grant Morrison's comics have proved over the years, a well-designed comics page can still accomplish a lot more than even the biggest special effects budget imaginable, when it comes to portraying mind-blowing concepts. I hope that Oliver, now that he's gotten the amiable introductions out of the way, gives Rodriguez a workout in issues to come.

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It doesn't go along with the sci-fi theme I established at the beginning of this post, but I have to mention that Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve issue number 13 came out from Drawn & Quarterly last Wednesday, too. This issue isn't as ambitious as number 12 was, but it's still pretty damn good. Tomine's intentional Salinger and Carver riffs were getting on my nerves a few years back, but now he's settled into what he does best—the telling of short stories that in prose would be called 'literary fiction'—with the confidence of middle age. He's his own storyteller, now. And the first story in the book—about a washed-up pot dealer who somehow winds up in a relationship with a woman way too cute (and young) for him—is exactly what Tomine does best. it's funny, and bitter, and dark, and it ends at just the wrong time, when you're clamoring to see what happens next. Which makes it, really, the perfect time to end a story.