It’s time for the most wonderful Omnibus time of the year! That’s right, today is the kickoff of Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 12th Annual Secret Ballot – and, I am thrilled beyond words to say that I am both announcing and co-organizing this year’s poll alongside the legendary Tigereyes and Omar!
[cue screaming in excitement and waving my arms around Kermit-style]
Announcing Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 12th Annual Secret Ballot!
I first covered the poll on CK back in 2017 after voting in it every year. I gave the most-comprehensive breakdown of past year polling data on the internet, but my equally comprehensive look at every book in the Top 60 was cut short by a very minor life event – my move to New Zealand!
Then, last year, I got to join Omar on Near Mint Condition to share the results of the 11th Annual poll LIVE (which involved waking up at 4am, but was totally worth it).
This year my participation in the poll goes far beyond either of those prior endeavors. That’s because Omar and Tigereyes tapped me – along with my colleague TaylorTalksComics – to co-host the poll announcement. Not only that, but Tigereyes entrusted Omar, Taylor, and I to completely alter the way the poll is produced (with support from the delightful Dom of X and Omar’s behind-the-scenes data guy James).
For the past decade-plus of polling, Tigereyes has accepted secret ballots via email. I’ve never been privy to this process, but I’ve talked with Tigereyes about it in the past. Everyone has their own kooky ways of naming and mapping their most-wanted omnibuses. Even for something incredibly obvious, like “Uncanny X-Men Volume 6,” people have tons of different ways of naming it. They could call it that, or they could call it “Uncanny X-Men Classic Vol. 6,” “X-Men by Claremont Vol. 6,” “X-Men Vol. 6: Mutant Massacre,” or even “the next X-Men Masterworks omnibus.”
Once voting closed, Tigereyes would dump all of those responses into a spreadsheet and try to sift through them to find the common links between people’s votes.
At the time, that usually meant sorting through about 200 responses. However, with the increased exposure and intense interest in last year’s poll, Tigereyes received more than 600 responses. That means there were more than 6,000 individually named books on the poll to sift through, rename, and match up.
With the expectation that this year’s poll will generate even more votes, it was time to try a different tactic. This year’s ballot will actually list books for people to vote on, rather than them naming them on their own. The challenge is that the ballot has to include every single book someone might name – and omnibus fans love their obscure references even more than the general comic-buying public. Not only that, but the names have to be obvious enough that people understand what they might contain without listing a full mapping for each book.
Omar and his data guru James shared their potential list with me ahead of this announcement, based on last year’s votes plus suggestions from several pre-polls. The list was over 800 books long. And, some of those books were named in vague ways that meant even I couldn’t figure out what book they were referring to – and I’m a walking encyclopedia of Marvel’s bibliography!
That lead to an intense session of spreadsheeting, research, and mapping between Omar, Dom, and I that lasted this entire weekend as we prepped the poll options so James could build the ballot and Taylor could assemble a presentation for the stream. Omar, Dom, and I reviewed every one of those 812 books one by one in a process that took well over a 24 total hours of work from the assembled team.
We removed 284 entries for one of three reasons – (1) they duplicated other entries, (2) they were a smaller or less-inclusive version of another entry and would garner more votes if they were combined, or (3) they didn’t have enough material to constitute a full omnibus as Marvel currently produced them.
However, we didn’t just cut the poll down – we also added about 100 additional ballot entries! Almost all of those came from me. I wanted to be absolutely sure no one would miss their most-wanted book on the poll. That involved delving into my CK backend data to research every character and line. I added tons of X-Men books to make sure we covered nearly every issue ever printed, but also became “Captain of the Imprints” as I mapped the full lines of Marvel 2099, Marvel UK, New Universe, CrossGen, and Malibu Ultraverse to make sure they were all represented as fully as possible.
I’m incredibly proud of the work we did as a team, which in a way felt like making an abridged Comic Guide to the entire Marvel Universe! We’ll be listing every one of our final list of 600+ books on this stream before opening the poll… but, we can’t possibly explain the contents of every book or why we named them like we did.
That’s where Crushing Krisis comes in! Stay tuned over the next two weeks as I list every single poll option in a series of posts breaking down all of your voting options – right up until the final voting deadline of 5 April. Then, a week later, I’ll cover the books that made the final results!
More of a DC fan? Don’t worry… as soon as I hope off of this stream, we’re going to start building our list for our first ever comprehensive DC Omnibus poll – coming to Near Mint Condition and Crushing Krisis this May!