Last year, I talked about the first issue of Oni Press’s new anthology, Xino. The creative teams showed us myriad visions of the hell-future we’re dragging ourselves towards. Since then, the final two issues have released with more stories of all the ways in which the world scatters us, leaves us hopeless, and devours. But at least the stories are all fun.

The ten stories included in the last two issues of Xino range from finding hope amid certain destruction by an overwhelming alien force to a few friends taking their class project robot out for a spin around town. But the depth and breadth of stories present, at no point do any of them feel as though they’re calling their twists too early or do those same twists come off as contrived. There’s a delicate balance that’s difficult to achieve, but so many of them do it expertly—it’s like watching those first episodes of The Twilight Zone for the first time and never knowing where the stories could possibly go. For instance, in “Visceral” by Justin Jordan, Molly Mendoza, and Jim Campbell, four friends are lost in the woods on a hiking trip. After days of being lost, they notice a town that isn’t marked on their maps, but run into it as they’re desperate for food and aid. But upon arriving, the town is empty. It looks as though there had been people there, but they had simply vanished. Until one of the four tries to pick up a phone and is promptly bitten by the phone while everything else begins to slowly chew away at the group.

To have such consistency and bold speculative imagination recommends anthologies series like Xino should as one of the main outlets for comics right now. With the limited space for each story, the format gives the audience just enough from a creative team to know what kind of stories they’ll be creating in the future. These stories serve as previews for what will likely be a favorite series, even if that series isn’t the same as the anthology story. As an incubator for creativity, anthologies in US comics feel like a necessity that just isn’t given the support stories need to thrive in a larger market.

Even if some anthologies do fall to the wayside, the stories will stick with us. The twist at the end of Hagal Palevsky, Carson Thorn, and Jim Campbell’s “Testimonial” will plague my nightmares for years for both its prescience and crushing inevitability. And that feeling—that the story will stick around—is something we all want from our comics. Even if the story only sticks with one person, they’re going to keep coming back to it over and over again because it worms its way so deeply into our minds. 

Get excited. Get collected. 

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.