Mark Gruenwald

Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot Results & Mappings

April 17, 2023 by krisis 4 Comments

This morning I had the absolute pleasure of announcing the results of the Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot with Near Mint Condition!

The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot is an annual poll conducted by a mysterious comic book forum user named Tigereyes. The rules are simple: anyone can email Tigereyes up to 10 picks for their most-wanted, never-before-printed omnibuses of material originally printed by Marvel, even if they may no longer own the licensing rights.

Each first vote gets 10 points, each second vote gets 9 points, all the way down to your tenth vote getting just 1 point. After the voting period, Tigereyes goes through the gargantuan effort of tallying up all the votes – which also involves figuring out what everyone meant by their sometimes inconsistently-named or cryptically-described votes.

For me, the reveal of the results of the Tigereyes Secret Ballot is an international comics-loving holiday. I used to be the primary person on the internet creating statistics from the results every year! However, when I attempted to cover the entire poll entry-by-entry in 2017 I stalled out at the halfway point as the results straddled our move to New Zealand.

That’s why it was worth waking up at 4am NZ time to be ready to share this year’s results with my good friends Omar and Jess on the Near Mint Condition channel, thanks to some last-minute planning with Omar over the weekend.

Our show was nearly three hours long as we dug into the potential contents of every book on the list and whether we’d read them or not. As always, I had just as much fun appearing on-camera as I did chatting with all of the wonderful Minties in the live chat!

Don’t have time for the full 3-hour tour? We actually run down the full 60-book list in just 15 minutes, starting just before the 12-minute mark. I’m sharing the full list below, but it’s more than just a list – every omnibus includes a full suggested omnibus mapping along with a link to the relevant collecting guide on Crushing Comics.

That’s right, y’all – this is a post with SIXTY omnibus mappings in it, mapping well over 2,000 issues of comics. (Actually, it’s even more than that – there’s one tie, and in several entries I get into mapping second volumes if they would complete a run). That makes that one of the longest blog posts in 23 years of CrushingKrisis history.

Are you ready to be rocked by the Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus vote? Strap in, true believers, and prepare to be mapped like you’ve never been mapped before.

Crushing Comics S01E27 – Thoughts on being a “comic book fan,” Squadron Supreme, Wolverine’s Origin, & more!

November 27, 2017 by krisis

Are fans of comic book movies still “comic book fans”? I struggle to articulate my answer to the question as I struggle to open what turns out to be a pretty big bundle of books. It starts with Mark Gruenwald’s classic Squadron Supreme and how it represented Marvel being a little more like DC than they normally were back in the 80s. Then we move to a pair of Fantastic Four retcons before winding up with Wolverine’s pair of Origin series.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 27 features Squadron Supreme by Mark Gruenwald (Amazon), which was later recollected as Squadron Supreme Classic Omnibus (Amazon), Fantastic Four: The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine (Amazon), Spider-Man/Fantastic Four (Amazon), and Wolverine Origin (Amazon) and Origin II (Amazon), recently recollected as Wolverine: Origin – The Complete Collection (Amazon).

Read more about collecting the Fantastic Four and Wolverine!

Captain America by Mark Gruenwald, Vol. 1 – The #45 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

May 19, 2017 by krisis

Captain America’s comic had gotten pretty routine by the time Mark Gruenwald showed up in 1985, which is probably why no one suspected he would turn in a decade-long run that would redefine Cap and his gallery of rogues for years to come!

Captain America by Mark Gruenwald, Vol. 1 is the #45 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.

Past Ranking: A 2017 debut!

Creators: Written by Mark Gruenwald with pencils by Paul Neary, Tom Morgan, and Kieron Dwyer.

Probable Contents: Collects Captain America (1968) #307-350 & Annual 8 and Iron Man #228.

Based on the recent Society of Serpents Epic Collection starting from the tail end of Carlin’s run at #302, it’s possible we’d see this volume begin there as well.

That’s a hefty omnibus, and for good reason – it would take two more volumes of similar size to make it through Gruenwald’s entire run of Captain America! See 10 Marvel runs from the 80s that ought to be omnibuses – 1981 to 1989 for more details.

Can you read it right now? Yes! The entirety of this run is covered in a pair of Epic Collections and an older trade. Visit the Guide to Captain America for details. Also, the entirety of this run is on Marvel Unlimited!

The Details:

Mark Gruenwald revitalized Captain America without an ounce of cynicism and irony, and he did it by being true to the character and introducing a parade of compelling new supporting players and villains. Even the biggest gimmick of the first third of his run – Steve Rogers quitting as Cap – doesn’t play as a gimmick because it’s so true to his character.

Writers of today, take note. [Read more…] about Captain America by Mark Gruenwald, Vol. 1 – The #45 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

10 Marvel runs from the 80s that ought to be omnibuses – 1981 to 1989

May 4, 2017 by krisis

It’s the penultimate stop in our trip backwards through time to find all of the Marvel runs most in need of Omnibus treatment.

Why? For fun. For accumulating rainy-day reading. And, to fuel our 2017 Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot votes!

Marvel in the 1980s is really a tale of two different Marvels. The first half of the decade featured many continuing 70s series, a handful of limited series, and relatively few new ongoing titles – most of which were direct spinoffs of characters from other books.

However, after Secret Wars II in 1986 the line got a serious shake-up, with many titles outside of what I think of as “The Big 9” and their satellite books getting cancelled or rebooted, plus tons of new ongoing and limited series and a whole new line of comics with New Universe!

(“The Big 9” are all of the lines of books that made it from the Silver Age to 2005 while being published continuously, even if that meant being restarted along the way – , Avengers, Captain America, Daredevil, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, and X-Men. After 2005, Thor went on hiatus, and Fantastic Four has been on hiatus since 2015.)

(In a totally weird turn of events, we can now probably add Deadpool to that list of evergreen lines.)

Marvel released a lot of comics in the 1980s, so what should Marvel prioritize getting into omnibuses? I’ve already covered all of the X-Men runs from this period, and I’m not touching Spider-Man or Fantastic Four mapping at the moment. Plus, many key 80s runs are on the survey already, like Peter David’s Hulk, Iron Man by by Michelinie & Layton Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil – but that still leaves a ton of potential runs to cover! [Read more…] about 10 Marvel runs from the 80s that ought to be omnibuses – 1981 to 1989