Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Matt Fraction

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

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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.

[Read more…] about Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot Results & Mappings

Updated: Guide to Uncanny X-Men in the 00s – The Trade Paperback Era

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If you were worried that my weekly series of X-Men Guide updates would go on hiatus during my Indie Comic Month, have no fear! There’s no higher priority for me at Crushing Comics than getting every one of my X-Guides completely up-to-date! However, it turns out there wasn’t too much to update in this guide, which is for the first era of Uncanny X-Men to be completely collected in color. It’s my guide to Guide to Uncanny X-Men in the 00s – The Trade Paperback Era!

Guide to Uncanny X-Men in the 00s – The Trade Paperback Era

I titled this guide “The Trade Paperback Era” because it picks up Uncanny X-Men in the 00s as Marvel began to transition to the standard practice of issuing trade paperback collections of almost every series as their story arcs completed.

The trade paperback era represents a massive shift in the comic industry. Not only did it change the way comic stories were structured as authors began “writing for trade,” but it created an entirely new market of readers! Readers who might previously drop into a comic store only a few times a year no longer had to suffer for their lack of a pull list. And, whenever a series started to accumulate a critical mass of popularity or acclaim, it could be easily ordered by book stores.

Previously, regular trade paperback releases were mainly reserved for prestigious, adult-oriented series like Sandman, whose readers might never venture out of a bookstore and into a comic shop. A key story arc or crossover from a superhero comic might see trade release, but Marvel and DC weren’t in the practice of collecting every issue of every title.

Suddenly, everything was recollected. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Uncanny X-Men in the 00s – The Trade Paperback Era

Jane Foster, Mighty Thor & Valkyrie – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Doctor Jane Foster comic books as herself, The Mighty Thor, and Valkyrie in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated June 2022 with titles scheduled for release through December 2022.

Jane Foster spent 50 years as a minor supporting character before becoming a full-time superhero, but being minor didn’t make her unremarkable.

(Note: This summary and guide contains major spoilers for Jane Foster and for Thor, due to the way their plots relate! If you want a quick, non-spoiler reading list, skip down to the Greatest Hits section.)

Foster was introduced in Thor’s second issue, Journey Into Mystery (1956) #84, as the attending nurse at the private practice of Thor’s human alter-ego, Dr. Donald Blake.

For a woman in Marvel’s Silver Age, nurse Jane Foster is often particularly assertive – especially compared to Marvel contemporaries like Jean Grey and the Invisible Girl. While this established Foster as her own character and an opinionated medical professional, her assertiveness often came at the cost of belittling or patronizing Dr. Blake for being disabled

Jane Foster’s period as Thor’s romantic interest is much more short-lived than you might realize – she is written out of his ongoing comic in January 1967 after a negative first encounter with Odin, less than five years after her debut! In fact, many of her memories of her time with Thor are erased.

It would be almost a decade before her return, in which Jane Foster becomes inextricably tied to Thor’s ongoing Asgardian love interest, Sif. However, this run isn’t as long as it looks on paper – Jane spends the first few issues of it comatose, and she is hardly seen or referenced after Thor (1966) #250 in 1976!

When Foster finally does make an on-panel return in 1983, it’s to be swiftly married off and shuffled off the page save for occasional recaps of her relationship. She next turns up in 1994 towards the close of the first volume of Thor, separated from her husband, caring for her son, and embroiled in a caper involving the High Evolutionary’s AniMutants.

Starting in 1998, author Dan Jurgens casts Jane in a new role – Doctor Jane Foster. There’s no on-page explanation given for when, why, or how Foster completed medical school. The change allows her to drive an ongoing subplot with Thor’s new Earthly alter-ego, as well as make appearances in Iron Man and Avengers as “token medical expert.” There are passing mentions of her husband and son, but they don’t appear.

J. Michael Straczynski and Matt Fraction bring Dr. Foster back as a key player in Thor’s adventures from 2006 to 2011, again relying on her expertise as a doctor to insert her into their subplots.

However, it is Jason Aaron that would bring Jane Foster her most memorable plot and her superheroic turn. She begins as a supporting player in Aaron’s Thor: God of Thunder, revealing to Thor that she has cancer with an uncertain prognosis. As one of several woman supporting characters in the run, she is a prime suspect as the secret identity behind the new female Mighty Thor that debuts in the final pages of God of Thunder and continues to her own Thor (2014) series.

Jason Aaron’s story for Jane and for the new Thor is complex and satisfying as it stretches across multiple series from 2014 to 2018, giving Jane Foster her first true arc as a character as drawn by industry super-star Russel Dauterman. It’s one of Marvel’s true evergreen masterworks of narrative of the 2010s. By the finale, it seems like Foster’s story is complete and completely resolved… but, Aaron and co-writer Al Ewing had more plans for her following Aaron’s Thor finale in War of the Realms, which spun Jane Foster into a new status quo as a Valkyrie!

Jane Foster makes nearly 200 appearances before she transforms into the Mighty Thor, but are any of them worth reading? I did all of the homework so you don’t have to! I read every single Jane Foster appearance, ever for this guide so I could summarize her pre-Mjolnir greatest hits for you as well as give you a summary of her action in every appearance.

Whether you want to read every appearance like I did or just get the summary so you can dive into her time as a superhero, this guide has you covered. [Read more…] about Jane Foster, Mighty Thor & Valkyrie – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Crushing Comics S01E080 – X-Men: Nation X and X-Necrosha

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I’m down to just three more bricks of comic books, but this first one is huge – it’s got over a half a dozen X-Men hardcovers inside! In the first of a three-part unwrapping, I dig into X-Men: Nation X and X-Necrosha, and discuss why this might be my favorite modern period of X-Men comics.

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

Episode 80 features X-Men: Nation X and X-Necrosha, covered in guides to Uncanny X-Men and X-Force, respectively.

Crushing Comics S01E21 – X-Men: Manifest Destiny and Dark Avengers / X-Men: Utopia

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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.