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Mighty Avengers
Crushing Comics S01E045 – Bendis’s New Avengers & Mighty Avengers, Secret Invasion, + the pre-internet joy of comic shops)
Do you remember how thrilling it used to be to spot a new comic shop out in the wild, back before there was internet shopping and endless databases of physical and digital back issues?
Then you, too, are old. No matter your age, join me for a few minutes of reminiscing before I open my final package of Bendis New Avengers and Mighty Avengers and dig in to why these books don’t stand alone well without Secret Invasion.
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 45 features New Avengers Vol. 5, Vol 6, & Vol 7, Mighty Avengers: Assemble (Vol. 1), and Mighty Avengers: Secret Invasion (Vol. 2). See the guides to New Avengers and Mighty Avengers for more information.
Crushing Comics S01E043 – Survival Skills + Mighty Avengers, Dark Avengers, and more!
Today I start out by wondering how I – or, anyone, for that matter – learns basic survival skills like how to balance their checkbooks and what flowers not to eat in the wild.
After that, I unwrap quite a large brick of oversized hardcovers, and give some rapid fire thoughts on Dan Slott’s Mighty Avengers, Brian Bendis’s Dark Avengers, a brief history of Thunderbolts, Iron Man: Iron Age, Fear Itself, and more!
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 43 features Dan Slott’s Mighty Avengers: Dark Reign, Brian Bendis’s Dark Avengers, Invaders Now, Iron Man: Iron Age, Onslaught Unleashed, and Fear Itself: Shattered Heroes.
20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015
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.
[Read more…] about 20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015
A Bendis Avengers Reading Order
I’m excited to unveil my first non-X-Men comprehensive reading order: Avengers Reading Order – The Bendis Years (2004 – 2012)
The guide includes the story-by-story or “trade reading order” of all the Avengers team titles from Brian Bendis taking over Avengers with issue #500 in 2004 to the end of his run on the 2010 volumes of Avengers and New Avengers in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012. That’s over 350 individual issues from more than a dozen titles. In most cases, I explain the placement of each story and offer special notes for reading.
Head to the guide right now, or read on for more background on the period and how I assembled this Avengers resource.
B
rian Bendis completed the modernization of the Avengers begun by Kurt Busiek in 1998, taking them from a quaint card-carrying club of do-gooders to the Marvel’s Justice League. If Busiek helped to centralize and modernize a team that had lost its core in the mid-90s, Bendis made them Marvel’s ubiquitous, movie-ready flagship.
After his introduction of new members like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, and Dr. Strange, it became completely normal for any Marvel hero to be drafted into the team if it served a story. The period also expanded the team franchise from its previous all-time high of two books in the late 80s to a minimum of four.
It also tangled with a crazy line-up of line-wide events, rivaling 90s X-Men for the amount of interruptions of its plot – to the point that the interruptions became the plot, and standalone arcs were mere breaks in the action.
I am historically not a major Avengers reader. In my backlog of 90s floppies I have a decent run of 300s-era Avengers, but it’s mostly owing to Steve Epting’s amazing covers rather than being particularly allegiant to the series.
My early collected edition bookshelf reflected that, with just a few Avengers books marking major Scarlet Witch stories. (Just like Marvel and Fox, I consider her to be as much an X-Men character as an Avengers one.)
That changed in 2012. We were surging towards Avengers vs. X-Men, which came with rumors of Brian Bendis taking over the X-Men books. I foolishly thought knowing something about The Avengers’ recent history would help me be less depressed about the shoe-horning of Avengers into a rightfully X-Men story or Bendis likely derailing all of their awesome plotlines.
I browsed through New Avengers collected editions trying to decide what to sample, and I realized I could not make heads or tails of them. There were two different New Avengers runs with similar numbering and a set books with similar titles and covers that had wildly different contents! [Read more…] about A Bendis Avengers Reading Order