You want more Mad Max: Fury Road and comics are here to help

Luckily, there are plenty of comic books coming out right now that have the cure for what ails you. So lets take a very tense road trip through The Comics You Should Read Now That You've Seen Mad Max. Our first stop is...

Mad Max

DC Comics' Vertigo imprint is releasing several prequel comics to Fury Road over the next four months, and the first is out today. Mad Max: Fury Road: Nux & Immortan Joe tells the secret origins of everybody's favorite War Boy and tooth-ed tyrant, leading deftly into next month's Mad Max: Fury Road - Furiosa. Those two one shots will be followed in July by the two-issue miniseries Mad Max: Fury Road - Mad Max, with all stories being co-written by director George Miller himself.

But let's not stop at the tie-ins. There's plenty to choose from in the over-the-top post-apocalypse where the only non-scarce resource is bullets genre. Like...

Concrete Park

Concrete Park is the brainchild of actress Erika Alexander and screenwriter/artist Tony Puryear. It takes place some time in the future, when the human race has simply decided to sentence its youthful (universally black and brown) offenders with jail time spent mining resources on another planet. In a metaphor as deliberate as it is obvious, even after they've completed their sentences they cannot leave the nearly resourceless desert in which they've been exiled, and must eke out a survivalist existence. There's a lot to take in in the series' first collected edition: crashing space ships, conflicted queer lady gang leaders, aliens and, of course, plenty of barcode tattoos. The first two collected volumes are available in trade or digitally from Dark Horse Comics.

I'd tell you to buckle up because for our next stops, we're going a bit off the genre road, but this is the muscle car post-apocalypse, there are no seat belts. What I'm trying to say is, if you enjoyed the "Who killed the world?" philosophy of Fury Road and its visual splendor, allow me to introduce you to...

And if an entire universe full of women replacing the manliest greek myths isn't enough for you, if all you could think about after Fury Road was planning your Imperator Furiosa tattoo, then you're probably ready for...

Bitch Planet

Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro's Bitch Planet is a bold and boldfaced attempt to both celebrate and reclaim the complicated subgenre of exploitation film that is the women in prison movie. Much like the Final Girl, exploitation films exist in a liminal space between art that was intended to objectify or diminish its female characters, and art that accidentally created stories and characters that many women have found surprisingly empowering or enjoyable.

Bitch Planet concerns Kamau Kogo and her allies, a group of women brought together when they're all convicted of various forms of "non-compliance" (a crime that runs the definitional gamut from murder to "persistent obesity") and sent to the orbiting women's prison known colloquially as Bitch Planet. They live in a ultra-capitalistic society that has turned misogyny into a preached philosophy — bordering on religion — a bread-and-circuses global government hosts year-round, international tournaments of a ruthless, full contact bloodsport.

But ratings are slipping, and the sport's producers come up with a risky plan to bring them back up: an all-women team sourced exclusively from the Non-Compliant. As a former Olympic athlete, Kamau is tapped to lead a hand-picked roster, but she's reluctant to join what is clearly an internationally televised death trap until...

She finds out that if they make it to the final game, she can turn those death trap tables on the men keeping her down.

DeConnick and De Landro are doing an incredible job of not allowing their message to be subverted by the necessary visual content of the book, and that's without the feminist essays in each issue, penned by a diverse variety of contributors, or the witheringly satirical advertisements on the back of each cover.

Bitch Planet has four issues out at the moment.

All road trips should end some place familiar, and Fury Road was no exception. So lets wrap ours up with another story of women fighting for what's theirs in a war-torn apocalypse...

A-Force

Secret Wars is upon us, and that means that the Marvel multiverse has come to an end, and the remnants of it are fighting for survival on a planet divided into factions by timeline and place. One of those factions is the A-Force, an all-female group of Avengers from a universe in which women form the majority of the leadership of the Marvel superhero society, because they're all clever and competent, so why not?

Written by Ms. Marvel's G. Willow Wilson, the first issue of A-Force hits shelves today, with a team roster of She-Hulk, Medusa, Dazzler, Nico Minoru and the newly introduced Singularity, a genderless sentient pocket universe that chooses to identify as female while embodied in our dimension.

So there you have it. Two comics coming out today, and three recently established stories just waiting for you to dive in, all ready to feed that urge. In general, I advise people not to become addicted to Mad Max: Fury Road, as it will take hold of you and you will resent its absence. But while you're resenting, there's lots of comics to read.