By Austin Lanari

The Paybacks now in its second volume moves from Dark Horse to Heavy Metal and continues to be the most fun you'll have with superheroes in the Western hemisphere. I don't read as many superhero books as I used to. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out whether that's because something has changed with me as a reader or the number of good superhero books being published has declined. (For what it's worth, I wager it's quite a bit of both). In any case, there are still some great superhero books out there, just not in the places you'd expect. One-Punch Man is probably the most popular, or at least the one with the most meteoric rise in the last year. My favorite on the manga side of things is actually My Hero Academia. That's for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it's sort of carrying a torch that Naruto used to carry, it's smart without being annoyingly cerebral, character designs are original and interesting, and it takes seriously the relationship heroes have to their society.