Jessica Jones

Every Missing Marvel Solo Hero Omnibus from H to M, Mapped – Hawkeye, Hercules, Ms. Marvel, & more! | 13th Annual Tigereyes Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Poll

April 24, 2025 by krisis Leave a Comment

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for Marvel Omnibus fans – time for the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 13th Annual Secret Ballot! This post explains every Marvel Solo Hero omnibus that does NOT exist from H to M (that we haven’t mentioned yet) – all of which will appear as options on the 2025 poll.

For the next two weeks, I’ll be covering Marvel’s entire publishing history by mapping missing omnibus volumes to fill in every gap in your Marvel oversize shelf! That’s all leading to the kickoff of the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 13th Annual Secret Ballot on Near Mint Condition on April 28, 2025.

This is the first of three solo hero posts covering heroes with four or fewer omnibuses of material to collect, including Hawkeye (Clint Barton & Kate Bishop), Hellcat – Patsy Walker, Hercules, Howard the Duck, Iron Fist, Jack of Hearts, Jessica Jones, Ka-Zar, Kang The Conqueror, Killraven, Kingpin – Wilson Fisk, Luke Cage, Machine Man, Man-Wolf, Miracleman, Mockingbird, Monica Rambeau – Spectrum, Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur, Moon Knight, & Ms. Marvel.

Note that the following heroes already have their own posts: Ghost Rider & The Midnight Sons (includes Man-Thing & Morbius, Hulk, Iron Man (includes Ironheart), Thor & Asgard (includes Jane Foster), and X-Men solo characters.

If you’re not sure of what to vote for, stick around for a list of books vetted by a gang of the biggest mapping nerds on the internet with explanations from yours truly – keeper of the most-definitive guides to Marvel’s collected editions on the planet.

Or, if you don’t care about omnibuses, just use this post to learn about Marvel’s history and find some great comics to read!

The book titles and mapping in this post were curated with the help of the incredible BrandXK! BrandXK proudly supports The Hero Initiative, an incredible charity that helps to support comic creators in their times of need – especially with medical expenses.

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.

Comic Book Review: Secret Empire #0 by Spencer, Acuna, Reis, & Lanham – On bad stories, responsible portrayals, and Holocaust etiquette

April 19, 2017 by krisis

Should certain stories be off-limits?

Consider if you have ever watched a movie or read a book where you felt a certain story beat was in particularly poor taste. Perhaps it should have been avoided altogether.

Does that mean no author ought to attempt it again?

I find that to be a difficult question to answer. Personally, I loathe plots where someone who is abused comes to trust or love their abuser. I think that plot relies on outdated trope about the internalization of cruelty as a form of affection.

Creators ought to be wise enough to steer clear of that plot in most instances, but I don’t think it should be outlawed. I can imagine a time when you might want to steer into that curve – not to be divisive or subversive, but to say something about your flawed characters. But it’s not a curve that should be mistaken for terrific character development.

There are other plot points that result in me getting up and walking away from the book or TV show I had been consuming a moment prior, whether they be personally triggering, advocating harmful behavior, racist, sexist, homo- or trans- phobic, or just plain dumb.

I don’t think any of them ought to be off-limits. Writing a bad story is entirely up to you. I won’t stand in your way, nor should anyone else.

I do think some portrayals of plots ought to be off-limits – not by rule, but in practice – because they irresponsibly normalize dangerous behavior without context. People are now savvy enough to understand how to reject dangerous stories at face value, but not all consumers understand how to reject dangerous framing of concepts.

This can be insidious. I cannot watch a TV show or a movie that portrays sexual violence with a romanticized gaze. If you are going to make the choice to depict a sexual assault, it should be viscerally disturbing to the viewer. Their gut should twist. Not because you are editorializing about sexual assault, but because that’s what sexual assault is.

It is the difference between my ability to endlessly re-watch Watchmen despite it disturbing rape scene and my inability to make it through the sexual violence in the first season of Game of Thrones. One was viscerally disturbing. The other one kind of wanted to be sexy. Yet, many people causally watch both the former and the latter.

(You can substitute another topic for sexual violence, if you prefer.

This week, the depiction of death by suicide has become a hot topic due to its portrayal on 13 Reasons Why.

Romanticized portrayals of violence or self-harm erode a viewer’s ability to discern the objective truth of an event in reality. The fictionalized version takes over – whether that’s the seductive ease of ignoring informed consent or the glamorization of suicide.

It’s not that people object to suicide as thematic content. It’s the way it was framed.

Last week, news broke that a new BBC show depicting the UK Black Panther movement was centering a South Asian woman as it primary protagonist rather than a black woman. Regardless of the dubious historical accuracy of such a choice, choosing to cast non-black woman as central to a black civil rights movement erases black women from their own history. We saw a similar act of erasure of trans women of color in the movie Stonewall.

It’s not that people object to non-black characters appearing in historic civil rights narratives. Is the lack of portrayal of black woman.)

Having established my particular dichotomy of offensive story vs. irresponsible portrayal, now let me lay this one on you:

Last year, Marvel Comics and author Nick Spencer made Steve Rogers – the original Captain America – a Nazi.

(Let’s not split hairs – Hydra is a Nazi organization whose ideals have been slightly sanitized for comics. More on that in a moment.)

He isn’t pretending. He wasn’t brain-washed. Hydra used the Cosmic Cube to retroactively change Steve Rogers from American boy with a heart of gold to Nazi-sympathizing double-agent.

On one hand, I don’t think Cap being altered to be a truly vile villain should be off-limits as a story. I don’t think making him the symbol of everything he has fought against ought to be immediately rejected.

On the other hand, Nazis. [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: Secret Empire #0 by Spencer, Acuna, Reis, & Lanham – On bad stories, responsible portrayals, and Holocaust etiquette

New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Jessica Jones

November 13, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I’m excited to debut this month’s second new comic guide – The Definitive Jessica Jones Reading Order!

This new guide is available exclusively to CK’s Crushing Comics Club Patrons until December 18th. Want early access? Visit CK on Patreon to learn more.

alias_vol_1_01 This new guide goes beyond listing the collections that include Jessica Jones’s major appearances. It’s a reading order for every issue she’s ever appeared and recaps the action from her guest appearances so you can follow her complete story from Alias to today without reading dozens of comic books.

In fact, if you loved Jessica Jones on Netflix, you can get nearly her complete Marvel appearances on your bookshelf in just 10 books! More on that below.

Jessica Jones is a modern Marvel success story – a character launched in an anything goes, adults-only comic in 2001 when Marvel was crawling out of their bankruptcy years who stuck around and is now at the forefront of their Netflix television offerings and back with a new solo series this month.

And, like a massive amount of Marvel’s 2000s successes, it’s all because of Brian Bendis.

Brian Bendis invented Jessica Jones from the spaces between superhero stories. It imagined what happened to the heroes who weren’t quite heroic enough, and dropped out of the business. What would these more marginally-powered people do for a living? And what would they do when their paths occasionally crossed with the more heroic.

There were so many connections to the history of the Marvel Universe in Jessica Jones’s original series, Alias, that when I read it for the first time a few years ago it sent me digging through my back issues.

Had there really been a hero called Jewel who was briefly in The Avengers? Was Jones née Campbell really a classmate of Peter Parker’s in early Spider-Man stories? Was she really Ms. Marvel’s best friend?

new-avengers-2010-008 While the official answer is “no,” Bendis definitely did his homework in finding moments that could suggest that Jessica existed in the past. He also lent more credence to his creation by combined her with actual marginal heroes like Luke Cage and Spider-Woman, who hadn’t been put to good use for a few years and made perfect sense kicking around beneath notice with Jessica Jones.

(Yes, we also probably wouldn’t have Luke Cage on Netflix without Bendis’s influence. Little did we know he had them both earmarked for his future run on Avengers. It’s wild to think about it!)

Jessica Jones’s Netflix series picks up some plot points verbatim from Alias, but by fast forwarding to a confrontation with Purple Man it skips letting Jessica live with all the character flaws Killgrave left in his wake. Alias plays these beats for two years of single issues. Jessica is depressed and without direction, a hard-drinking nymphomaniac who can’t quite hide how much she cares about others even as she is bent on self-destruction.

It’s hard to say where the show will go without the specter of Killgrave haunting Jessica’s every move the way it did in the comic. That’s not only because it can’t crib as directly from Alias, but because after Jessica Jones transforms into a do-gooding, domestic figure who is often played shrilly against Luke Cage for easy laughs by Bendis in his run on New Avengers.

2017 will be an interesting year for Jessica Jones. Will a new Jessica Jones solo series recapture Alias’s magic? Will her TV show find interesting material having already burned through her single defining story?

I can’t wait to find out. In the meantime, you can catch up on everything that came before with The Definitive Guide to Jessica Jones. Or, if you’re newer to Jessica Jones in a comic form, you can capture all of her significant issues in just 10 easy-to-find volumes. [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Jessica Jones

The Definitive Jessica Jones Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Jessica Jones comic books issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated October 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

Jessica Jones went from a random adults-only non-hero made up from the whole cloth of spaces between superhero bash-ups to one of Marvel’s biggest screen stars.

Brian Bendis invented Jessica Jones for the 2001 Marvel MAX title Alias. It was by far the most explicit in-continuity title Marvel had published to date, featuring the hard-drinking, nymphomaniac, perennial failure Jessica Jones and her one-woman agency, Alias Investigations.

Unlike the first season of her Netflix show, the title wasn’t all about Purple Man – there were several plots of Jones’s investigations and entanglements on the fringes of the superhero world.

Jessica Jones caught the attention of Marvel readers, as did her author Brian Bendis. When he made the jump from writing more fringe, street-level titles to the big leagues of relaunching The Avengers, he brought Luke Cage with him. Luke had been reintroduced to readers in Alias, and Jessica Jones wasn’t far behind.

That left the character in an odd spot for an entire decade. The roguish, messed-up, inappropriate Jessica of Alias was irretrievably erased in favor of a nagging romantic partner and occasional straight-up superhero – and she was entirely controlled by Brian Bendis. She was still fun to read, but that original magic wore off.

2016 brings with it her first solo series since The Pulse ended in 2006 – this time, simply bearing her name. Yes, it’s still written by Brian Bendis, but it also features original penciler Michael Gaydos and colorist Matt Hollingsworth.

Will the magic return with the original creators reunited? We’ll see.

Just want to read the core JJ material? No problem. I’ve highlighted all of her major stories, and I sum up all of the skippable guest appearances and cameos.

Want to understand every issue, ever? I cover every single appearance Jessica Jones has made, explaining were to collect the major ones and what happened in the minor ones so you don’t feel like you have to track them down if you don’t want to. [Read more…] about The Definitive Jessica Jones Collecting Guide and Reading Order