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Dark Avengers
Crushing Comics S01E043 – Survival Skills + Mighty Avengers, Dark Avengers, and more!
Today I start out by wondering how I – or, anyone, for that matter – learns basic survival skills like how to balance their checkbooks and what flowers not to eat in the wild.
After that, I unwrap quite a large brick of oversized hardcovers, and give some rapid fire thoughts on Dan Slott’s Mighty Avengers, Brian Bendis’s Dark Avengers, a brief history of Thunderbolts, Iron Man: Iron Age, Fear Itself, and more!
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 43 features Dan Slott’s Mighty Avengers: Dark Reign, Brian Bendis’s Dark Avengers, Invaders Now, Iron Man: Iron Age, Onslaught Unleashed, and Fear Itself: Shattered Heroes.
Crushing Comics S01E21 – X-Men: Manifest Destiny and Dark Avengers / X-Men: Utopia
After a brief digression about how weight training helps with comic collecting, I unwrap a hefty brick of six books, including a pair of X-Men “Manifest Destiny” volumes and the X-Men’s throwdown with Norman Osborn’s Dark Avengers. The episode ends in a cliffhanger, as I tease what the other half of the brick holds in store.
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 21 features X-Men: Manifest Destiny (Amazon), Uncanny X-Men: Manifest Destiny (Amazon), and Avengers/X-Men: Utopia (Amazon / eBay). This material is covered in the guide to Uncanny X-Men’s Matt Fraction era as well as in the guide to Bendis’s Dark Avengers.
8 Must-Read Marvel Runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2008 to 2012
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
A Bendis Avengers Reading Order
I’m excited to unveil my first non-X-Men comprehensive reading order: Avengers Reading Order – The Bendis Years (2004 – 2012)
The guide includes the story-by-story or “trade reading order” of all the Avengers team titles from Brian Bendis taking over Avengers with issue #500 in 2004 to the end of his run on the 2010 volumes of Avengers and New Avengers in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012. That’s over 350 individual issues from more than a dozen titles. In most cases, I explain the placement of each story and offer special notes for reading.
Head to the guide right now, or read on for more background on the period and how I assembled this Avengers resource.
B
rian Bendis completed the modernization of the Avengers begun by Kurt Busiek in 1998, taking them from a quaint card-carrying club of do-gooders to the Marvel’s Justice League. If Busiek helped to centralize and modernize a team that had lost its core in the mid-90s, Bendis made them Marvel’s ubiquitous, movie-ready flagship.
After his introduction of new members like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, and Dr. Strange, it became completely normal for any Marvel hero to be drafted into the team if it served a story. The period also expanded the team franchise from its previous all-time high of two books in the late 80s to a minimum of four.
It also tangled with a crazy line-up of line-wide events, rivaling 90s X-Men for the amount of interruptions of its plot – to the point that the interruptions became the plot, and standalone arcs were mere breaks in the action.
I am historically not a major Avengers reader. In my backlog of 90s floppies I have a decent run of 300s-era Avengers, but it’s mostly owing to Steve Epting’s amazing covers rather than being particularly allegiant to the series.
My early collected edition bookshelf reflected that, with just a few Avengers books marking major Scarlet Witch stories. (Just like Marvel and Fox, I consider her to be as much an X-Men character as an Avengers one.)
That changed in 2012. We were surging towards Avengers vs. X-Men, which came with rumors of Brian Bendis taking over the X-Men books. I foolishly thought knowing something about The Avengers’ recent history would help me be less depressed about the shoe-horning of Avengers into a rightfully X-Men story or Bendis likely derailing all of their awesome plotlines.
I browsed through New Avengers collected editions trying to decide what to sample, and I realized I could not make heads or tails of them. There were two different New Avengers runs with similar numbering and a set books with similar titles and covers that had wildly different contents! [Read more…] about A Bendis Avengers Reading Order