Jason Aaron

20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015

April 28, 2017 by krisis

Each year, a mysterious and intrepid comic book fan known only as Tigereyes reaches out to some of the biggest collected editions communities on the web to ask them a single question: What are the top 10 Marvel Omnibuses you’d most like to buy?

Thus, the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot was born.

While we only get to see the top 50 or so results of the survey each year, based on the number of voters it’s entirely possible that there are over ten times that many omnibuses nominated by voters. The long tail of the survey would make not only for interesting analysis, but terrific rainy-day reading.

To help inspire that long tail as well as your own rainy day reads, I’m covering dozens of Marvel runs that would make for terrific omnibuses. For the past four days I highlighted every potential missing X-Men omnibus from 1963 to 2015. Now, I’m going to stroll backwards through time to look at the rest of Marvel, starting with their newest comic runs released from 2012 to present.

The fact that these books aren’t currently omnibuses (and may never be) doesn’t have to stop you from sampling them – even if you’ve never read a comic before in your life! Each one is a terrific self-contained comic experience that can be enjoyed without any crossovers or companion series.

You can either pick up existing collections as outlined by Crushing Comics’s Guide to Collecting Marvel Comic Books, or just sign up for Marvel Unlimited, a Netflix-for-comics where 100% of the issues from today’s post are available to read on any device.

Conan Comics – Defintive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Jan 17, 2025! The Conan comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated January 2025 with titles scheduled for release through August 2025.

Robert E. Howard’s Conan has lived many lives in comics, from a young barbarian to a grizzled old king. Those lives are split into four distinct publishing eras of Conan comics.

His first life in comics was at Marvel from 1970 through 2000, largely under the pen of veteran Roy Thomas in his long-running series Conan the Barbarian as well as the long-running Savage Sword of Conan.

Then, in 2003, Conan comics made the jump to Dark Horse Comics – initially under the pen of Kurt Busiek. Dark Horse launched his book with reverence, assuring fans that they would present adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s original work and its implied connective tissue. The comics were widely-beloved by fans of the character.

Then, in a major twist, Marvel won the license back starting in January of 2019! That not only meant Marvel could release new Conan titles, but that they could also incorporate him into the modern Marvel Universe, as well as reprint their original Conan comics plus reprint the entirety of Dark Horse’s 15 years of Conan in paperback Epic Collection!

Most-recently, at the end of 2023 Marvel relinquished their license back to intellectual property holder Heroic Signatures, who began publishing their own comics directly through Titan Comics in 2023.

Each of those publishing eras is covered in full in the guide below! In each case, titles are listed in the guide chronologically by release date. However, in the table of contents, Marvel’s original run from 1970 to 2000 are listed as an alphabetical index by title, since Marvel published many series outside of the spine of the major ongoing titles.

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New Collecting Guide: Doctor Strange (plus, 5 suggestions for new fans)

July 11, 2016 by krisis

I’m happy to share The Definitive Doctor Strange Collecting Guide and Reading Order! It includes every Doctor Strange issue ever published with notes on trade-reading order and guest appearances.

Agamatto-eyed readers may have spotted it last week, but as of today the guide is officially out of its beta-release phase and ready to help you collect Marvel’s most-famous mystic.

This is the first of several new and revised collection pages I’ll be highlighting over the next few weeks; you can already see several of them in action in Crushing Comics.

Doctor Strange was one of Marvel’s original Silver Age heroes, debuting in 1963 in Strange Tales, a title he split with Nick Fury. He is a brilliant-but-prideful surgeon whose career is ruined when his hands are injured in an accident, and in his quest to repair them he stumbles into the world of mysticism.

Like Fury, he was one of the few freshly-invented Silver Age solo heroes not to be hoovered up by The Avengers. This was exploited by his inclusion in The Defenders, a team of relative outcasts that also included The Hulk, Namor, and Silver Surfer.

Aside from a brief blip at the beginning of the 70s, Strange starred in an ongoing book in continuous publication through 1996, when his third volume was cancelled with no replacement.

Unlike fellow hot-in-the-90s hero Ghost Rider, Strange got no ongoing revival in the 00s, although he was finally absorbed by the Avengers under Brian Bendis’s tenure (partially due to his participation in The Illuminati).

After playing a critical (some may say “starring”) role in Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers mega-story that began in 2013, Doctor Strange finally found his way back into an ongoing title from Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo in the fall of 2015 in anticipation of his big screen debut in 2016.

I’ve always had affection for the good doctor, but I did some foot-dragging on giving him his own guide due to his relatively low profile in past years. However, with his movie coming up this fall, it was finally time to attack his guide – no small feat, since he’s had over a dozen series and one-shots to call his own plus a starring role in most incarnations of The Defenders.

If that all sound great but you’re kind of new to this comics game, what should you sample to find out of you like Doctor Strange? Here’s a few books to try: [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Doctor Strange (plus, 5 suggestions for new fans)

Doctor Strange – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 22, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading-order on collecting Doctor Strange & Strange Academy comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, trade paperback graphic novels, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through November 2025.

Collecting Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange has had several ongoing titles over the years collected in a variety of formats – plus, his own magic school with Strange Academy.

At this point, every Doctor Strange issue has been collected! However, there are a few specific formats of books that cover large portions of this title, and I’ll cover those first – Omnibuses, Masterworks, Epics, and Essentials.

Do you need a quick introduction with a few suggested reads? Head to my blog post announcing this guide.
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Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Comic Book Series, Ranked

September 17, 2015 by krisis

After Avengers vs. X-Men at the end of 2012, Marvel reloaded their entire line save for a handful of just-launched books and dubbed the era of titles “Marvel Now.” There have been a few incremental waves of additional launches since then, but the main spine of Marvel has been telling consistent stories since then – the Avengers and X-Men flagships, their big three Avengers heroes, and Spider-Man.

The stories haven’t only been consistent – they’ve been really good. Unlike the 2011 DC New 52 launch, Now hit the stands with nothing bad in the bunch. Even as some books declined as the period wore on, we got other amazing winners in the intermediate waves.

Now that we’re only weeks away from the next major period of Marvel where every book will be refreshed, I thought it was the right time to look back about what was so awesome about Marvel Now by ranking every book we got along the way – over 70 ongoing titles!

As with my Writer-Rankings last week, being low on the list doesn’t mean a book was bad – just that it’s not my top pick for you to spend your hard-earned dollars on.

The criteria: I’m a trade-waiter, so books had to release at least one trade by this week. Books from before Now only count if they made it through 2014. No series that were explicitly disclaimed as limited (short series that got cut off by Secret Wars do count). Two volumes of a book by the same author or with continuous story count as one entry – like Daredevil Volume 3 and Volume 4, both by Waid, or Iron Man and Superior Iron Man.

The final trades for these series were too late-breaking for me to evaluate them fairly: All-New Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 3, Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier, Deathlok, Savage Hulk, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Uncanny Avengers Vol. 2, Wolverines.

Let’s get to it! [Read more…] about Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Comic Book Series, Ranked