We all have at least a few deeply-held beliefs that would alarm our peers were they ever to be made public. But having faith in the wild ideas lurking in their minds is what makes the heroes of this week’s best new comics fascinating, even if they themselves don’t properly feel that way.

Special powers or prophesied destinies aside, having conviction and powerful faith in something is often what makes comic book heroes special. Usually, that faith is in something larger and more grandiose such as a deity or mystical being, but the heroes of this week’s best new comics draw strength from the faith they have in themselves.

While we’ve all had our fair share of off days, where we find ourselves confronted with surprising situations that aren’t to our liking, it isn’t often that we’re forced to deal with events so wildly out of the ordinary that we have no frame of reference as to how to respond. For the heroes of this week’s best new comics, though, that’s precisely what they’re faced with.

For many heroes, being able to survive in apocalyptic futures and perhaps turn the course of history for the better ultimately boils down to being some sort of chosen one who just happens to be blessed with special, otherworldly gifts.

For others like the heroes in this week’s best new comics though, their strength comes from being tested and tried by the unique circumstances of their lives.

There’s a certain kind of power that comes with knowing the deep truths about things, whether they be individual people, discrete situations, or events that have yet to occur.

This week’s best new comics all feature characters who know this to be true, but for each of them, learning the actual nature of the way things are is something that’ll push them to reconsider everything they once thought they knew.

You have to be a truly special kind of person to live your life fully as a superhero. Not just the whole business of having a secret identity, but to really be a superhero from top to bottom in an existential sense. You have to find deep, meaningful fulfillment in being of service to others, regardless of the task at hand.

When you’re in school, you’re supposed to be focusing on your studies — but the heroes (and villains) in this week’s best new comics understand that a well-rounded academic experience includes things that aren’t listed on any syllabus. It’s not just about what you’re learning in class, but rather what you’re experiencing along with your peers.

Self-discovery and introspection are integral parts to any comic book that tells the origins of a character, but the very best stories always manage to find a way to make a character’s reflections about themselves feel relatable.

Though we don't always think of them as such, the games we play as children (and, let's be honest — as adults) often help us creatively process information in ways that end up being useful in our everyday lives. For the heroes of this week's best new comics, though, the lines between fantasy and reality are so blurred that it's difficult to discern one from the other.

If and when we make contact with life from other planets, there are a number of different ways that things could play out. Everything could be perfectly peaceful, and maybe even kick-start a new age of scientific advancement. Or, we could be thrown into a cataclysmic war against beings we're not at all equipped to fight.

It's not often that bo staffs and laser guns end up being lumped in with one another, but the plots of this week's best new comics just so happen to make that very much the case.

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.

You know that feeling you get when someone with an egg avatar slides into your DMs at 3 a.m. to tell you how much they wish you didn’t exist, and you wonder to yourself, “Who the is this person and what the hell is wrong with them?” Of course you do. So do the heroes of this week’s best new comics.

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.

The Boy Scouts and vending machine sandwiches aren't really similar, though they are both designed to provide people with the things they need: guidance, information, or, well, nourishment.

If you spend any time on social media, then you’ve undoubtedly at some point found yourself exhausted, annoyed, and wondering if the internet was a mistake. Those of us who spend too much time staring at screens often joke about how we should never tweet or post and should perhaps just log off.

Everyone has different ways of coping with the day-in-day-out toil of working a job, optimistically trudging toward whatever one’s version of a “weekend” is. But for many, to work often means to pour yourself into labour that doesn’t necessarily bring you any sense of joy, freedom or expression.