It's that magical time of year when we all indulge in the thrill of letting ourselves be spooked and alarmed by the things that go bump in the night and this week's best new comics are all tailor-made to get at the heart of some of the things that scare us the most.

Every morning, millions of people across the world crawl from their homes and make agonising journeys underground through the dark, dank portals we commonly refer to as subway systems. In exchange for money and pieces of our souls, these portals get us where we need to go — and, unfortunately, the prices we pay for those journeys climb ever higher and higher.

As relaxing as turning the pages of a comic book can be, it’s increasingly common for people to do the vast majority of their reading on the glowing electronic screens we carry with us at all times. And if they’re already online, a person might soon find themselves drawn elsewhere — deeper into the digital rabbit hole of the internet that’s just a few taps away.

There was once a time when we all feared that hyper-intuitive artificial intelligence and robots might one day pose a threat to humanity, but to look at our current technological landscape, it's seeming much more likely that our collective obsession with our phones and the growing gig economy might be what does us in.

What does a perfect world look like, exactly? Is it a place where everyone agrees to get along because we’ve set aside our differences, or is it a place where the trauma that so often gives birth to those differences never existed at all?

If you, like me, are a sensible person who knows better than to willingly put yourself in obvious danger, then you know to stay far away from large bodies of water, because they are teeming with aquatic horrors just waiting to kill you. This is a fact.

In times of great need or extreme stress, pretty much everyone's survival instinct kicks in and we all default to certain coping mechanisms that have gotten us through our entire lives. For some people, that means cooking. For others, it means performing.

Our perception of reality is defined by a unchanging set of rules. That which goes up must eventually come back down. Those who are long dead are destined to stay that way. If those rules changed, however, our relationship with reality would break down. For instance, how would you react if gravity suddenly vanished? If you're anything like the heroes of this week's best new comics, the answer is... complicated.

Superhero comics operate on wish fulfilment. Readers get pulled into storylines featuring metahuman abilities because the power to fly or do things at superspeed seem like they'd let us solve all our problems. But a new comic from two great writers looks at the gap between a normal life and superhero adventures.