Hercules

Guide to The Champions – now available to the public!

January 23, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

I’m happy to announce that my Guide to The Champions is now available to all CK readers! This guide covers both the 1975 Champions of Los Angeles as well as the 2016 revival of the team as a squad of Marvel’s young characters in the wake of Civil War II This guide exists thanks to the ongoing support of the outstanding Patrons of Crushing Krisis.

Guide to The Champions

When I first covered how to collect the 1975 edition of The Champions they didn’t merit their own guide page. They had 17 issues of their own and then faded into Marvel history while their members scattered to the winds. I relegated them to my Guide to X-Men Ongoings due to the team including Angel and Iceman.

In reality, the problem with reassembling The Champions wasn’t just that Iceman and Beast had been incorporated into The Defenders (visit the Guide to Defenders), and later into X-Factor (visit the newly-updated Guide to X-Factor)

It was also that Marvel lost the ability to publish comics with the “Champions” title! [Read more…] about Guide to The Champions – now available to the public!

The Champions – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Marvel’s The Champions comic books and omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated November 2018 with titles scheduled for release through July 2019.

Reading and Collecting The Champions

The Champions is one of Marvel’s most unusual teams, with a strange history both on the page and behind the scenes.

The team began its life as a pitch by writer Tony Isabella. While the details have grown hazy over the years, one thing is certain – Isabella had designs on Angel and Iceman, the two X-Men left over after the original team was splintered by the arrival of the Giant Size X-Men team, and the other three characters – Hercules, Black Widow, and Ghost Rider – were thrust upon him. The title was written entirely by Isabella and then by Bill Mantlo (with Claremont filling in on #4) along with a merry-go-round of artists.

The series opens with them all five characters on the UCLA campus, each for their own reasons, when it comes under assault by a strange group of anachronistic villains. They turn out to be agents of the god Pluto, who intends Hercules to be wed to Hippolyta!

Despite this oddball set-up, The Champions weirdly worked well. It’s a series about heroes being heroes because they simply cannot help it, joined together by proximity more than friendship or destiny. It gave Iceman and Angel a chance to breath away from Cyclops and Jean. It gave Black Widow a rare chance to shine after her breakup with Daredevil – she would go on to become the team’s chairman. And, it showed just how brutal and terrifying Ghost Rider could be – as he tended to have an unsettling effect on his teammates.

If fans took interest, this team could have become the de facto West Coast version of the Avengers years before that team made its debut. Alas, despite Marvel’s best efforts to promote the book it ended early, with its epilogue shuffled into a pair of Spider-Man issues.

That was the end of The Champions for forty years – unusual, given Marvel’s propensity for reviving their intellectual property every so often. In this case, it was because they were barred from doing so! While Marvel’s Champions were dormant, Heroic Publishing had began publishing a Champions comic book to support their popular 1980s role playing game.

Whether Marvel wanted to get the gang back together or not, they couldn’t – so Iceman and Angel returned from X-Factor to the X-Men in 1991, Black Widow and Hercules anchored the “Leather Jacket” Avengers, and Ghost Rider briefly expanded into his own franchise in the 90s.

Flash forward to 2016. Marvel is launching a youthful new team in the wake of Civil War II featuring characters like Miles Morales and Ms. Marvel that is quite deliberately not The Avengers. What could they be called? While the obvious answer seems like it ought to be “New Warriors” (especially with Nova on the team!), Marvel’s editorial team got a twinkle in their eye and asked Legal if they might be able to revive The Champions trademark – and they could!

That’s how we got a new Champions team so unlike the first one – it’s literally just an IP grab by Marvel of their own IP!

Surprisingly, this new Champions turned out to have some real staying power. Marvel’s youngest generation of heroes were never quite the right fir for the Avengers team they hero-worshipped as kids. They’re much more compelling when they are left to their own devices.

Updated: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Hercules

November 30, 2017 by krisis

Today I’ve updated the guide of Marvel’s marquee Olympian – The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Hercules!

Want to learn more about Marvel’s take on the Greek God, but don’t need a rundown of every issue in which he’s made an appearance? Keep reading for a summary of Hercules’ history, a review of what he’s been up to in 2017, and a tally of how many Hercules comics have been collected overall!

Incredible Hercules by Pak & Van Lente Omnibus – The #52 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

May 13, 2017 by krisis

Incredible Hercules by Greg Pak & Fred Van Lente Omnibus is the #52 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017 on Tigereyes’s Secret Ballot.

Visit the Guide to Hercules for the full details on how to collect this run, which spun out of World War Hulk.

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

What Is It? Incredible Hercules (2008) took over its sequential numbering from Incredible Hulk, where both Hercules and Amadeus Cho had been supporting players during World War Hulk.

It was the first time Hercules had his own starring ongoing title. It took him on a heroes journey of owning his godhood and becoming a leader, then ultimately rejecting it to rely on his humanity to be a hero.

Incredible Hercules (2008) ran from February 2008 to April 2010 and was followed by a trio of connected mini-series and a second 11-issue ongoing, Herc (2011), which ran from June 2011 to January 2012.

Past Ranking: This year is the book’s debut placement in the ballot results.

Creators: Written by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente with an assortment of artists including Rafa Sandoval, Salva Espin, Clayton Henry, Rodney Buchemi, Reilly Brown, Ariel Olivetti, Khoi Pham, Neil Edwards, and more!

Probable Contents: Incredible Hulk (1999) #112, Incredible Hercules (2008) #113-141, Hulk vs. Hercules: When Titans Collide, Assault on New Olympus Prologue, Hercules: Fall of an Avenger (2010) #1-2, Heroic Age: Prince of Power (2010) #1-4, Chaos War (2010) #1-5, Chaos War: Chaos King (2011) #1, Chaos War: God Squad (2011) #1, Chaos War: Ares (2011) #1, Herc (2011) #1-10 & 6.1, and maybe Deadpool Team-Up Vol. 2 (2010) #899. See below for a full reading order. [Read more…] about Incredible Hercules by Pak & Van Lente Omnibus – The #52 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

12 Must-Read Marvel Runs (that ought to be an omnibus) – 1998 to 2008

May 2, 2017 by krisis

As we continue our trip backwards down Marvel Memory Lane, I’m here to convince you to read – or, at least, covet – 12 more Marvel runs, this time from 1998 to 2008.

While my concurrent period of X-Men looked at 2001 to 2008, for the rest of the Marvel Universe 1998 was a better starting point. That’s because Marvel’s Avengers and Fantastic Four franchises relaunched new volumes in 1998, and Spider-Man and Daredevil were rebooted within the next year as well.

(That wound up being less relevant to this post than I planned, since I decided not to touch mapping Fantastic Four or Spider-Man in the style of my exhaustive X-Men mapping. I also won’t hit the titles that are just waiting for a sequel – namely Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man. See my Orphan Report for more on those. And, one of the best runs from this period – Christopher Priest’s Black Panther – is already in the survey results.)

I’ve read less of Marvel outside of X-Men, so I’m being a little choosier with these runs so I don’t lead you astray! That’s not only a choosiness in quality, but in self-containment. While Marvel’s Universe was a little more siloed from 1998 to 2005, once New Avengers arrived titles became increasingly intertwined and reliant on events to launch and intersect with them until we hit peak tie-in after Secret Invasion in 2008, with the entire Marvel Universe being affected by Dark Reign in one way or another.

These runs aren’t that – they’re comics you could sit down and enjoy today regardless of your foreknowledge about a certain plot or character. While some of them intersect event series, none of them rely on your reading the main event to enjoy their chapters.

If you want to see any of these runs released in all-in-one omnibus editions, perhaps you should include some of them on your Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot – votes are due this Sunday!

However, omnibuses are not your only hope! The majority of these runs are collected in hardcovers and trade paperbacks listed in Crushing Comics’s Guide to Collecting Marvel Comic Books, and the vast majority of the issues are available on Marvel Unlimited, a $10/month Netflix-for-Marvel-comics.

Of course, all potential collection mapping comes with a disclaimer: all of my suggestions are subjective and subject to improvement, or at least spirited debate. If you have a correction, alteration, or disagreement, there’s no need to be shy – I’d love to hear from you in the comments, below.

Let’s dig in!