Conan

Marvel Solo Heroes Omnibus Mapping (A-M) for the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 12th Annual Secret Ballot

April 1, 2024 by krisis

Until April 5, I’ll be loosely mapping missing and most-wanted Marvel omnibus volumes every day! Today you’re in for a LOT of mapping, because this post covers every non-mutant, non-Spider solo hero I have yet to cover! That’s more than 100 maps of potential omnibuses for dozens of amazing Marvel characters starts here (and continues in the next post)!

This post explains titles and potential Omnibus Mapping for entries on the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 12th Annual Secret Ballot. You can vote right now (until 5 April 2024 @ midnight US ET) or watch our mega-length announcement stream reviewing every single voting option.

Below I cover America Chavez, Ant-Man (Pym, Lang, & O’Grady), Black Cat, Black Knight, Black Panther, Black Widow, Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell & Danvers), Conan, Crystar, Darkhawk, Deadpool, Deathlok, Echo, Falcon, Frankenstein, Galactus, Hawkeye, Hellcat – Patsy Walker, Hellstrom, Hercules, Iron Fist, Jack of Hearts, Jessica Jones, Ka-Zar, Kang, Killraven, Kingpin, and Luke Cage.

It’s so much mapping that I had to break it into two parts so I wouldn’t break your browser! See the next post for the remainder of the alphabet and the rest of the maps.

We don’t have many options left to explore, but one of them is THE BIGGEST category of books on the pool: mutants! Stay tuned this week for a massive amount of X-Men mapping!

If you’re not sure of what to vote for, stick around for my explanations. Or, if you’ve already voted, learn why the team behind the poll decided on these books and titles – including some of my mistakes and regrets as one of the editors of the options on the final poll.

Or… just find some great comics to read!

Remember: These mappings are just my suggestion of how Marvel could assemble these books. They are meant to help you decide on your votes and build your personal reading list, but your vote on the poll is NOT an endorsement of my specific map. It’s a vote in favor of Marvel creating a book with that title or covering that period.

Over-the-top comics posts like this one are made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis. For less than the cost of a single comic issue a month you can fuel my in-depth comics coverage, plus gain access to dozens of exclusive collecting guides & reading orders – including all of the Crushing Comics Guide to Marvel Comics.

Updated: Guide to Conan The Barbarian

September 13, 2023 by krisis

On Monday I released a new guide celebrating a new #1 comic I loved in Birds of Prey (2023) #1. Today I’m back with a major guide update for another new comic I am really digging – the new Titan Comics relaunch of Conan the Barbarian (2023)! You can find that, and every other Conan comic ever published, in my Guide to Conan!

Guide to Conan The Barbarian

The last time my Conan guide had a major overhaul was in 2019. It was still early in Marvel’s relaunch of the licensed property – around the time of their launch of the in-continuity Savage Avengers (2019).

A lot has happened with Conan since then! [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Conan The Barbarian

Conan The Barbarian, Vol. 1 – The #54 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

May 12, 2017 by krisis

Conan The Barbarian Omnibus, Vol. 1 is the #54 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? Marvel’s first ongoing Conan series launched in October 1970 and ran continuously through issue #275 in December 1993 alongside several other Conan ongoing comics and magazines.

Past Ranking: Tied for #38 in 2016, its first year on the survey.

Creators: Conan The Barbarian (1970) was written by Roy Thomas through issue #115 and again from #240-275. This early run featured pencils mostly by Barry Windsor-Smith with colors by BWS and Mimi Gold through #24, as well as Gil Kane, and John Buscema (with Neal Adams and Rich Buckler on the tail end).

Probable Contents: Conan The Barbarian (1970) #1 to 23-26, or even as far as #42, as well as material from Savage Tales (1971) #2-3 (and maybe also #1 and 4-5).

There’s the added wrinkle that Dark Horse would be releasing this collection rather than Marvel – more on that below.

Can you read it right now? Yes, via Dark Horse’s Chronicles of Conan, as well as the Barry Windsor Smith illustrated content in special Archives editions. See the Guide to Conan for the full details.

All of the possible content of this omnibus is available via Comixology Unlimited, and Amazon has all 34 volumes(!) of Chronicles of Conan available digitally in Kindle/Comixology versions.

The Details:

Marvel went through a craze of licensing properties and spawning horror comics in the 1970s. While many of these experimental expansions are now mostly-forgotten, one of the earliest spawned and entire group of comics and would only grow in popularity over the years – Conan!

Marvel’s Conan’s comics are neither a direct adaptation from novels originally by Robert E. Howard or entirely their own story. Instead, they are loose adaptions of key tales, inserting connective tissue between them. They are also mostly one-shot stories – even when they begin to continue more directly from the end of the previous story, each issue tends to be self-contained with a definitive end.

What is Conan really about? Conan is a Cimmerian, a people known for their barbarism, but he has thrown in against the Vanir in a regional conflict between different tribes of men. The comic follows his adventures, sometimes as a soldier, sometimes as a mercenary, and often simply as a wanderer encountering all of the brutality of the fiefdoms in his region.

These early Conan stories were written entirely by Roy Thomas, and they have a relatively set formula. Issues tend to open in the midst of conflict, or with Conan wading into a trap. There’s often a brief alliance with a gorgeous woman who is brutally killed. Conan is frequently too stubborn to retreat once gaining the upper hand, determined to continue until he slays the big bad or burns down an entire city, tower, or dungeon. [Read more…] about Conan The Barbarian, Vol. 1 – The #54 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

10 Marvel runs from the 90s you might have missed (and that ought to be omnibuses) – 1990 to 1997

May 3, 2017 by krisis

It’s our third installment of backwards time travel through Marvel runs that could easily fit into an omnibus volume to help inspire your votes on the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot.

Today I’m taking a slightly different perspective than I did for 1998 to 2008 and 2008 to present. For those installments, I focused on runs I knew well or at least could recommend from context. However, when it comes to runs I’ve read, the 90s are pretty thoroughly covered over both by existing omnibuses and the current votes of the poll. Add to that how much of this period are covered by the end of runs from the 80s, that I’ve already mapped X-Men, and my temporary avoidance of exhaustively mapping Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and the pickings wind up being pretty slim!

Thus, this list comes with a caveat – I’m not necessarily suggesting you run out and buy and read all of these runs right now. I mean, I own nearly all of them, and even having not read them cover to cover I can tell you that most of them are very 90s comic books.

However, they also represent under-collected material that’s relatively unknown to modern readers. While it might be more reasonable to see all of it covered with Epic Collections, I think it would be more expedient to see them collected in this format than to wait around for trade paperbacks.

Ready to dig deep into the extreme 1990s? [Read more…] about 10 Marvel runs from the 90s you might have missed (and that ought to be omnibuses) – 1990 to 1997

Conan The Barbarian: Marvel’s Most Well-Collected Hero (really!)

March 15, 2017 by krisis

Today I bring you a first for Crushing Comics – a guide to a licensed character who has lived with two different publishers over the course of his nearly 5o-year comics career: The Definitive Conan Comics Collecting Guide and Reading Order!

In fact, I’d say that Conan might be Marvel’s best-collected hero of all time – better than X-Men and Spider-Man! More on that, below.

I’ve always been fascinated with Conan, starting from catching scenes from Arnold’s 1982 film on my parent’s TV as a kid and a tattered old copy of Conan The Barbarian #62 I somehow inherited straight through my first attempt at penning new releases posts in 2015.

It was in researching that post that I became obsessed with how deep Conan’s reprinted archives were – Dark Horse had issued dozens of paperbacks covering his entire primary run at Marvel as well collections covering over 100 issues in the new Dark Horse continuity.

Possibly my first comic book ever! I still have the tattered copy in my attic as a keepsake.

As I said then, “[N]ow I kind of want to read Conan. This is how it happens.” I’m a sucker for long runs, and an even bigger sucker for coherent collected shelves.

While I’ve managed to avoid the siren call of collecting these dozens of books, I couldn’t resist trying to untangle the various releases.

Marvel held Conan license from 1970 to 2000 and produced several distinct continuities of Conan in that period – including 23 years of Barbarian (the majority written by Roy Thomas) plus a magazine called The Savage Sword of Conan and King Conan, a title with stories of the more mature hero.

Marvel rebooted Conan in 1994 before Dark Horse acquired the rights (which included rights to reprint Marvel’s stories!). Then, in 2003, Dark Horse launched their own Conan continuity, originally written by Kurt Busiek and hewing very closely to the original Robert E. Howard stories.

Dark Horse’s Conan has run through s sequence of titles ranging from 12 to 50 issues in length, starting with plain old Conan, followed by Conan The Cimmerian – even though that’s actually a befitting title for an initial volume considering it’s how Robert E. Howard originally described him:

Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

Between the two publishers, they’ve printed over 850 original Conan comics across multiple continuities and timelines – which definitely merits some guidance when it comes to collecting, especially seeing as some volumes have nearly the same names as each other! And so my Guide to Conan was born.

Just how collected are those Conan issues? Would you believe over 90% of them are available in a modern collected edition from 2003 and forward? Keep reading to learn how it breaks down.