Brian Bendis

Echo – Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Guide to Echo, Maya Lopez (New for Patrons!)

January 8, 2024 by krisis

It’s time for another new Marvel Comics reading order for Patrons of Crushing Krisis, and this one is right on time for a big MCU TV debut! This guide is for a character who has appeared in Marvel Comics for the past 25 years, but has only been truly highlighted for the first time in the past few years. Want to read only her appearances that mattered the most? Then check out my Guide to Echo!

Guide to Echo – Maya Lopez

As someone who has kept up with all of Marvel’s in-continuity comics since 2010, I’ve read many issues with Echo in them. However, as I started putting together this Echo Guide I realized I didn’t really understand her origins – or her abilities!

That’s in part because I had never read David Mack’s pair of arcs that introduced Echo in Daredevil (1998) – in part because they weren’t collected and in print when I did my Daredevil read back in 2014. The issues are just as dense and entertaining now as they were 25 years ago. The first arc closely maps to Echo’s story in the MCU Hawkeye show, and the second delves into her origins in the style of a 1990s Vertigo comic (or, more-accurately, Mack’s own indie book Kabuki).

However, as I assembled this guide I realized my absence of knowledge is also because Echo is so often in the background of the comics where she appears, rather than at the center of a story.

Rocket Raccoon – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

New for Patrons: Guide to Rocket Raccoon

April 20, 2023 by krisis

After a brief respite from churning out new reading orders for Patrons of CK, I’m back with a fourth guide to solo members of the Guardians of the Galaxy as their third film approaches! As with the other Guardians, this guide is for a character invented in the 70s, used briefly in the 80s, and then forgotten until the the 00s. He has the least pre-Guardians material of the core team (except for Groot), but the most solo series of them all since the release of their first movie in 2014! Of course, I’m talking about everyone favorite not-actually-a-raccoon, now completely covered in my Guide to Rocket Raccoon!

Guide to Rocket Raccoon

Creating a guide for Rocket was different than making guides for Star-Lord, Gamora, and Drax because I’ve literally read all but six comics he has ever appeared in. It was more like creating a guide to one of my beloved X-Men!

The six issues I had never read before were Rocket’s introduction from Bill Mantlo, first in black-and-white serialized space epic “The Sword In The Star!” and later in Incredible Hulk and Rocket’s own mini-series. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Rocket Raccoon

Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot Results & Mappings

April 17, 2023 by krisis

This morning I had the absolute pleasure of announcing the results of the Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot with Near Mint Condition!

The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot is an annual poll conducted by a mysterious comic book forum user named Tigereyes. The rules are simple: anyone can email Tigereyes up to 10 picks for their most-wanted, never-before-printed omnibuses of material originally printed by Marvel, even if they may no longer own the licensing rights.

Each first vote gets 10 points, each second vote gets 9 points, all the way down to your tenth vote getting just 1 point. After the voting period, Tigereyes goes through the gargantuan effort of tallying up all the votes – which also involves figuring out what everyone meant by their sometimes inconsistently-named or cryptically-described votes.

For me, the reveal of the results of the Tigereyes Secret Ballot is an international comics-loving holiday. I used to be the primary person on the internet creating statistics from the results every year! However, when I attempted to cover the entire poll entry-by-entry in 2017 I stalled out at the halfway point as the results straddled our move to New Zealand.

That’s why it was worth waking up at 4am NZ time to be ready to share this year’s results with my good friends Omar and Jess on the Near Mint Condition channel, thanks to some last-minute planning with Omar over the weekend.

Our show was nearly three hours long as we dug into the potential contents of every book on the list and whether we’d read them or not. As always, I had just as much fun appearing on-camera as I did chatting with all of the wonderful Minties in the live chat!

Don’t have time for the full 3-hour tour? We actually run down the full 60-book list in just 15 minutes, starting just before the 12-minute mark. I’m sharing the full list below, but it’s more than just a list – every omnibus includes a full suggested omnibus mapping along with a link to the relevant collecting guide on Crushing Comics.

That’s right, y’all – this is a post with SIXTY omnibus mappings in it, mapping well over 2,000 issues of comics. (Actually, it’s even more than that – there’s one tie, and in several entries I get into mapping second volumes if they would complete a run). That makes that one of the longest blog posts in 23 years of CrushingKrisis history.

Are you ready to be rocked by the Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus vote? Strap in, true believers, and prepare to be mapped like you’ve never been mapped before.