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Brian Bendis

Brian Bendis leaves Marvel for DC! (Plus, breaking down Marvel Legacy’s writer roster)

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A few hours ago DC Comics dropped the biggest bombshell comics industry news we’ve heard in years. Forget special events or character deaths – this is truly a “nothing will ever be the same” kind of event.

It’s hard to imagine industry news bigger than that, aside from perhaps Jim Lee abandoning DC to head back to Marvel! Anything less couldn’t possibly compare. That’s because Bendis’s hand in steering the development of Marvel’s comic universe over the course of the past 17 years cannot possibly be overstated.

Brian Bendis completely rebuilt the Avengers franchise into a multi-title behemoth over the course of seven years, defining Marvel’s Universe along the way in a series of major events that fundamentally altered the company’s status quo.

He has solely written the Ultimate version of Spider-Men since 2001, including creating Miles Morales and bringing him to the main Marvel Universe.

He created Jessica Jones and set Daredevil on a course that had seen continued critical success through present day. He took previously forgotten characters like Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Spider-Woman and brought them back to prominence for other writer’s to develop.

That assessment doesn’t even mention his Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men, Iron Man, or any number of other major titles.

Brian Bendis has  just written a lot of comic book issues and stories. Even as a non-fan of most of Bendis’s output, I cannot possible deny his impact.

While it will be a little while before we learn who will be the new driving force behind Marvel’s creative direction, the more imminent question is: who will replace Bendis writing four titles a month!? We’re heading into Marvel Legacy with him writing Spider-Man, Iron Man, Jessica Jones, and The Defenders.

Plus, we have to make sure to leave at least two writers with room to steer The Avengers franchise, which will be up for a shake-up in April. Plus, we need to staff the impending returns of Wolverine and the Fantastic Four (both heavily speculated as potential Bendis territory). And, finally, we ought to spare at least one writer for a marquee X-book.

Let’s take a moment to dissect Marvel’s current roster of writers in Marvel Legacy and figure out how to reassign those books. [Read more…] about Brian Bendis leaves Marvel for DC! (Plus, breaking down Marvel Legacy’s writer roster)

House of M Omnibus – The #59 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

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The House of M Omnibus is the #59 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017 on Tigereyes’s Secret Ballot. 

Visit the Marvel Masterworks Message Board to view the original posting of results by Tigereyes.

What Is It? House of M (2005) is an alternate reality mystery that finds the Avengers and the Astonishing X-Men in a world where mutants dominate a society that is racist against regular humans. It prominently stars Wolverine, Cyclops, Emma Frost, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Magneto.

House of M was Marvel’s first major, line-wide event since Onslaught in 1996 as well as the first significant X-Men and Avengers crossover since then. It was also the first time that Marvel thrust its entire line into an alternate universe story (in an expansion of their strategy for the X-Men-only Age of Apocalypse in 1995).

House of M resulted in massively changed status quo for several Marvel characters, including Ms. Marvel and Wolverine. In its aftermath, Marvel’s mutant population was decimated from millions to just a few hundred, which began a six-year mega-arc that eventually ended in Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012.

The House of M (2005) mini-series event ran for 8 issues from August 2005 to November 2005.

Past Ranking: This is the debut appearance of this book on the ballot!

Creators: Written by Brian Michael Bendis with pencils by Olivier Coipel, inks by Tim Townsend (with Scott Hanna, Rick Magyar, & John Dell III), colors by Frank G. D’Armata (with Paul Mounts), letters by Chris Eliopoulos, and covers by Esad T. Ribic.

Probable Contents: This omnibus would definitely collect House of M (2005) #1-8 plus The Pulse: House of M Special (2005) #1 and Secrets of the House of M (2005).House_of_M_2005_0001_Olivier_Coipel_Gatefold_Variant

Those contents have already been published in an oversize hardcover, which is just 312 pages long. Marvel reprinted a similar hardcover of Civil War for their 2016 film, but it was not relabelled as an omnibus. What else could this volume contain?

Click to expand a discussion of further content for this volume.

 

Can you read it right now? Yes! The House of M trade paperback has “evergreen” status at Marvel – meaning they always keep it in print. However, all of the various supporting books are long since out of print and may cost you a lot of money to purchase. Learn more about them in the Guide to Marvel Universe Events.

And, fear not – every single issue of House of M and its tie-ins are available on Marvel Unlimited for just $10 a month!

The Details:

House of M is one of Marvel’s biggest and most-accessible stories of all time for a litany of reasons.

It featured a team of blockbuster creators, told an alternate reality tale that was massive in scope, kicked off Marvel’s modern age of yearly line-wide events, and was an Avengers and X-Men team-up that actually changed everything that came afterwards for both teams.

However, it might be most notable for being a major inflection point for Marvel. The pre-House of M Marvel of early 2005 would be unrecognizable to readers of both today and of a decade prior to House of M.

Marvel’s line was beginning to expand after their gaunt late-90s bankruptcy years, but it was not the interconnected universe to which fans of the early 90s were accustomed. Titles tended to keep to themselves, without major interaction across Marvel’s Universe. Crossovers were all but extinct. Most of the hype and fan interest was around Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, which launched fresh, modernized version of their four core franchises starting in 2000.

Yet, the prior year had brought with it two major shake-ups in the main Marvel Universe that captured fan imagination (and, in one case, ire). [Read more…] about House of M Omnibus – The #59 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

8 Must-Read Marvel Runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2008 to 2012

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Today in my best-of-Marvel retrospective, we’re looking at ten mega-sized runs from Secret Invasion in 2008 to Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012 that really ought to be omnibuses.

If you want to see any of them in that mega format, perhaps they ought to be your vote in the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot – choices are due this Sunday!

However, even sans a mighty omnibus edition, all of Marvel’s modern runs are easily collected in hardcovers and trade paperbacks listed in Crushing Comics’s Guide to Collecting Marvel Comic Books, and 100% of the issues are available on Marvel Unlimited, a $10/month Netflix-for-Marvel-comics.

Whether you’re a new comics fan or a grizzled vet, read with this in mind: These potential mappings are just my own shot, and the may include errors, omissions, or choices that could be improved. That’s part of the fun, for me – it’s like playing “Fantasy Corrections Department”! If you see something fishy or have a vociferous disagreement, I’d love to know what that is via the comments, below.

Let’s begin! [Read more…] about 8 Must-Read Marvel Runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2008 to 2012

New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Jessica Jones

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[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I’m excited to debut this month’s second new comic guide – The Definitive Jessica Jones Reading Order!

This new guide is available exclusively to CK’s Crushing Comics Club Patrons until December 18th. Want early access? Visit CK on Patreon to learn more.

alias_vol_1_01This new guide goes beyond listing the collections that include Jessica Jones’s major appearances. It’s a reading order for every issue she’s ever appeared and recaps the action from her guest appearances so you can follow her complete story from Alias to today without reading dozens of comic books.

In fact, if you loved Jessica Jones on Netflix, you can get nearly her complete Marvel appearances on your bookshelf in just 10 books! More on that below.

Jessica Jones is a modern Marvel success story – a character launched in an anything goes, adults-only comic in 2001 when Marvel was crawling out of their bankruptcy years who stuck around and is now at the forefront of their Netflix television offerings and back with a new solo series this month.

And, like a massive amount of Marvel’s 2000s successes, it’s all because of Brian Bendis.

Brian Bendis invented Jessica Jones from the spaces between superhero stories. It imagined what happened to the heroes who weren’t quite heroic enough, and dropped out of the business. What would these more marginally-powered people do for a living? And what would they do when their paths occasionally crossed with the more heroic.

There were so many connections to the history of the Marvel Universe in Jessica Jones’s original series, Alias, that when I read it for the first time a few years ago it sent me digging through my back issues.

Had there really been a hero called Jewel who was briefly in The Avengers? Was Jones née Campbell really a classmate of Peter Parker’s in early Spider-Man stories? Was she really Ms. Marvel’s best friend?

new-avengers-2010-008While the official answer is “no,” Bendis definitely did his homework in finding moments that could suggest that Jessica existed in the past. He also lent more credence to his creation by combined her with actual marginal heroes like Luke Cage and Spider-Woman, who hadn’t been put to good use for a few years and made perfect sense kicking around beneath notice with Jessica Jones.

(Yes, we also probably wouldn’t have Luke Cage on Netflix without Bendis’s influence. Little did we know he had them both earmarked for his future run on Avengers. It’s wild to think about it!)

Jessica Jones’s Netflix series picks up some plot points verbatim from Alias, but by fast forwarding to a confrontation with Purple Man it skips letting Jessica live with all the character flaws Killgrave left in his wake. Alias plays these beats for two years of single issues. Jessica is depressed and without direction, a hard-drinking nymphomaniac who can’t quite hide how much she cares about others even as she is bent on self-destruction.

It’s hard to say where the show will go without the specter of Killgrave haunting Jessica’s every move the way it did in the comic. That’s not only because it can’t crib as directly from Alias, but because after Jessica Jones transforms into a do-gooding, domestic figure who is often played shrilly against Luke Cage for easy laughs by Bendis in his run on New Avengers.

2017 will be an interesting year for Jessica Jones. Will a new Jessica Jones solo series recapture Alias’s magic? Will her TV show find interesting material having already burned through her single defining story?

I can’t wait to find out. In the meantime, you can catch up on everything that came before with The Definitive Guide to Jessica Jones. Or, if you’re newer to Jessica Jones in a comic form, you can capture all of her significant issues in just 10 easy-to-find volumes. [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Jessica Jones

The Definitive Jessica Jones Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Jessica Jones comic books issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated October 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

jessica_jones_vol_1_1_maleev_variant_textlessJessica Jones went from a random adults-only non-hero made up from the whole cloth of spaces between superhero bash-ups to one of Marvel’s biggest screen stars.

Brian Bendis invented Jessica Jones for the 2001 Marvel MAX title Alias. It was by far the most explicit in-continuity title Marvel had published to date, featuring the hard-drinking, nymphomaniac, perennial failure Jessica Jones and her one-woman agency, Alias Investigations.

Unlike the first season of her Netflix show, the title wasn’t all about Purple Man – there were several plots of Jones’s investigations and entanglements on the fringes of the superhero world.

Jessica Jones caught the attention of Marvel readers, as did her author Brian Bendis. When he made the jump from writing more fringe, street-level titles to the big leagues of relaunching The Avengers, he brought Luke Cage with him. Luke had been reintroduced to readers in Alias, and Jessica Jones wasn’t far behind.

That left the character in an odd spot for an entire decade. The roguish, messed-up, inappropriate Jessica of Alias was irretrievably erased in favor of a nagging romantic partner and occasional straight-up superhero – and she was entirely controlled by Brian Bendis. She was still fun to read, but that original magic wore off.

2016 brings with it her first solo series since The Pulse ended in 2006 – this time, simply bearing her name. Yes, it’s still written by Brian Bendis, but it also features original penciler Michael Gaydos and colorist Matt Hollingsworth.

Will the magic return with the original creators reunited? We’ll see.

Just want to read the core JJ material? No problem. I’ve highlighted all of her major stories, and I sum up all of the skippable guest appearances and cameos.

Want to understand every issue, ever? I cover every single appearance Jessica Jones has made, explaining were to collect the major ones and what happened in the minor ones so you don’t feel like you have to track them down if you don’t want to. [Read more…] about The Definitive Jessica Jones Collecting Guide and Reading Order