Welcome back for another installment of Preview Monday! This week, we’re giving you exclusive first looks at SUPERBOY ANNUAL #1 and SAUCER COUNTRY #11.

The crossover event “H’El on Earth” continues as Superboy and Superman find themselves trapped in another dimension while their battle against H’el rages on. Members of the Justice League have been called in as reinforcements, but it’ll be up to the Man and Boy of Steel to discover an escape route to rejoin the battle. Can they succeed and learn to work together? Or will earth crumble to the power of H’el? Find out this Wednesday in SUPERBOY ANNUAL #1, written by Tom DeFalco and illustrated by Yvel Guichet, Tom Derenick, Julius Gopez, Iban Coello, and Jonas Trindade. Click here for an exclusive preview of the issue.

Also this week, Arcadia takes a break from the election in order to help Michael solve the mystery of what’s causing him to slip between different realities. In order to do so, they must return to the places of Michael’s childhood to investigate. Will they discover the source of his insanity? Or is it all in Michael’s head? Written by Paul Cornell and drawn by Mirko Colak and Andrea Mutti, SAUCER COUNTRY #11 is a special done-in-one tale that lands in stores this Wednesday. Click here for an exclusive preview of the issue.

Steig Larsson and I are lifelong feminists. Stop cheering, honestly, there’s no need.  Yeah, so not quite the reaction from most of you. In fact, most of readers won’t have made it this far into the column. For a broad readership, feminism isn’t a vanilla vote-getter. It’s not like being for freedom or against poverty or in favor of animal sanctuaries.

            Feminism, in most people’s minds, carries with it implications of reproach. Most people don’t know what feminism is, but they’re pretty sure they’re on the wrong side of it. You’re not. End of.

            Feminism means accepting that gender is a continuum, not a binary. Gender roles don’t really look like this:

Proper men   ----    void   ----   Proper women

They actually look like this:

Machoman – cage fighter – sportsman – normal person – Gender Neutral – normal person – prone to knitting – sighs at flowers - Sobbing Starlet looking for a powerful husband.

Everyone is somewhere along the line from female to male. Plot your position, let other people be who they are, and get on with it. Men are from Mars, but so are women.

            The fallout from that premise is that we all have an equal right to legal protection, to work and be independent, to not have our faces kicked in while we’re cooking the dinner.

Larsson was a self-declared feminist. If you think being a female feminist leaves you open to ridicule, try being a guy. That would put him at the “machoman” end of the gender spectrum, although possibly momentarily.

The Millennium Trilogy is a dangerous piece of feminist propaganda wrapped up in a populist narrative. His first novel was called “Men Who Hate Women” in Swedish. Every section of “Men Who Hate Women” has a frontispage with a startling statistic about sexual violence in Sweden. He has (spoiler alert) a woman save a man who is about to be sexually violated.

But, somehow, that provocative, lay-out-your-stall title was thought not to quite work in English. Not snappy enough.  The title became “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.”The frontispages were kept in the book but didn’t make it into the movies, not cinematic enough. Also, in the movies, Salander seems to live with a makeup artist. As an ex-goth myself I can tell you, it doesn’t look like that if you put on your own makeup in a dark flat. It might look okay in the dark flat, but when you go out into daylight it looks as if you put your head into the makeup bag and shook it. So these comics are an act of love, an attempt to bring it back to the hardcore story Larsson wrote. Steig, pal, a warm hand to your back, wherever you are.

--Denise Mina

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Vol 1 available now.

When I was ten, I was walking through Center City Philadelphia with my mother, trying to make our way to the trains at Suburban Station and head home to Germantown. It was something we did every day, but this day was different: police officers lining the streets, barriers put up at intersections, large cranes looming above, massive trailers parked on the sidewalk.

“They're filming a movie,” my mother told me. It was such an odd thought, that the world that I watched on my black-and-white TV every night actually be based on my physical landscape. We sat in the crowd on the corner and waited for a scene to take place. A lady next to us said that a car would come speeding down the street and turn the corner. And that's what happened.

My mom took me to see the movie, Blowout. It was a political thriller starring a young TV star, John Travolta. I didn't understand most of it—I was 10—but I saw that scene that I had witnessed firsthand. It took 5 seconds. A car showed up, it turned a corner, and the movie moved on. Such a simple, pointless moment, but for me the act of taking down the thin membrane between fiction and reality was momentous.

The 1970s was the landscape of my childhood, but it was also the landscape of the Vietnam War, Watergate, rising gas prices, hostages in Iran, and the foundations of the cultural wars that are still raging in America today. Storytelling genres reflect the needs of their times, and the political anxiety of that moment translated into a slew of political films: Day of the Jackal, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men. They spoke to their era. And with that tradition in mind, I created RIGHT STATE to speak to ours.

The art for RIGHT STATE comes from a crazy little Italian redhead who can create an image the way a Titan could create a sword: Andrea Mutti. He made this story come alive, with a realistic intensity that makes me look like a better storyteller than I am.

As a writer, I'm always looking for ways to explore the themes of the day in stories that are interesting and engaging and can run with the ideas of the moment. With RIGHT STATE, we take the genre into the modern era, something that speaks to the intense societal anxieties of our age. Creating RIGHT STATE was a joy and a thrill, and I hope the experience is the same for its readers.