Mike Carey

X-Men Omnibus Mapping for the Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 12th Annual Secret Ballot

April 2, 2024 by krisis

Until April 5, I’ll be loosely mapping missing and most-wanted Marvel omnibus volumes every day! It’s finally time, y’all… time to MAP MY X. This post offers maps for flagship X-Men series – books with “X-Men” in the title! Then, in the following posts I’ll look at other X-Team titles and solo characters.

This post explains titles and potential X-Men 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.

For this post, it’s important you understand that I don’t think all of these books are a good idea! Some of them were votes on past polls or popular comments from Near Mint Condition viewers.

Also, many of these maps are not even my idea. As Marvel has progressively (and recently) recollected 90s and 00s X-Men in paperback, they have clearly shown their plans on how they group this material. If Marvel told me how to map something, that’s the map I used! Our fanciful mappings of years past are less relevant than ever.

With those disclaimers out of the way: Are you ready to see all of the omnibuses we’d need to collect every issue of every book with “X-Men” in the title from 1963 to 2023 – as well as collecting every major run of the Age of Krakoa? Strap in, folks – it’s gonna be a long post!

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.

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

April 17, 2023 by krisis

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.

Guide to DC Comics Lucifer – now available to the public!

August 4, 2022 by krisis

I’m happy to announce that my Guide to Lucifer at DC Comics is now available to all CK readers to celebrate for The Morningstar’s appearance in Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman thanks to the ongoing support of the Mighty Patrons of Crushing Krisis.

Guide to Lucifer

Many viewers have wondered if Tom Ellis’s seductive version of Lucifer would appear in Netflix’s The Sandman, and were surprised to learn that the character would instead be an androgynous golden-haired version played by Gwendoline Christie.

If you read Gaiman’s introduction of the character with Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg in The Sandman (1988) #4 you’ll see yet another depiction – The Morningstar is drawn as an overt homage to a pre-Ziggy Stardust David Bowie!

My guide lists all of Lucifer’s appearances throughout The Sandman as well as how to collect the subsequent 75-issue Lucifer series by Mike Carey, on which the CW show is very loosely based.

Plus, don’t miss on Dan Watters’ excellent 2018 revival of the title and character for DC’s relaunched Sandman Universe!

New for Patrons: The Definitive Guides to The Sandman Universe

October 30, 2018 by krisis

Today’s new guide Patrons of Crushing Krisis is actually three guides (or maybe four, by the time you read this), which seems like overkill for what is essentially a single title with an obvious ten-volume paperback line. But, it’s really so much more than that…

Sandman Universe – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Books of Magic – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Lucifer – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I am fascinated by how Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (and, in fact, all of the extended Sandman Universe) bridges the gap between comic books and serious literature.

That fascination has lasted for over 25 years – almost as long as Gaiman’s reinvention of the Golden Age character has existed.

Even the most-knowledgable comic fan could be forgiven for not knowing that Morpheus the King of Dreams was merely an iteration on an already-rebooted Golden Age DC hero. The original Sandman, Wesley Dodds, was a minor character who ran for seven years in the Golden Age and then popped back up twenty years later in the Earth 2 Justice Society of America in the Silver Age.

Without Gaiman and Morpheus, Dodds would probably be that one JSA member whose name you could never recall. His Silver Age iteration certainly wouldn’t jog your memory – a Kirby/Simon creation meant to be Mr. Sandman who lasted just six issues and who was later retconned in Wonder Woman to be a professor lost in the world of dreams.

There was no harm in Neil Gaiman revamping such a character to a more adult version early in the Post-Crisis years in 1989. At the time, Gaiman was still a relative unknown, coming off of the slept-on Black Orchid mini-series – a similar act of excavation and reinvention. He was so used to tepid reception to his early work that he expected Sandman to run just eight issues, which is why the first eight form such a satisfying arc despite being a mix of one-shots and continuing stories. He though that would be the whole series!

Instead, The Sandman became the springboard off of which Gaiman launched his multimedia fame in a miraculous three-year run from 1990-93 that saw him release Books of Magic at DC, the novel Good Omens (with Terry Prachett), win a World Fantasy Award in a category where Sandman wasn’t even eligible, essentially give birth to what we know as the modern American graphic novel market with the first two Sandman trade paperbacks, and top it off with the landmark Death: The High Cost of Living (the collection of which would be introduced by his friend and frequent name-checker, Tori Amos). [Read more…] about New for Patrons: The Definitive Guides to The Sandman Universe

DC Comics Lucifer – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for DC Comics Lucifer comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated August 2022 with titles scheduled for release through January 2023.

Lucifer Morningstar. Rebellious Angel of Heaven. Lord of Hell.

We first meet the DC Comics Lucifer of the Sandman Universe in The Sandman (1989) #4, where he is modeled on Space Oddity era David Bowie. He is a prickly and clever opponent for the still-recovering Morpheus, but one who allows for a battle of wits with his proxy rather than a physical confrontation.

That’s why it’s so surprising when Lucifer abdicates his throne in “Season of Mists,” handing the key to his kingdom to his former foe, Morpheus and decamping to the mortal coil to live on Earth.

Lucifer continues as a supporting character through the end of Neil Gaiman’s run on Sandman, also appearing in The Demon and Books of Magic in the 90s. When we find him in Mike Carey’s 1999 mini-series, he is running a piano bar in his exile when an agent of Heaven asks him to intervene in a human wish-granting scheme.

This highlights the central conflict of this version of Lucifer. Does he have free will? Does anyone? In choosing to abandon hell or aid heaven, is Lucifer flouting the shape of God’s plan or going along with it? This Lucifer seems to yo-yo between rebellion and self-destruction, never quite sure which which will cause more deviation from God’s plan. [Read more…] about DC Comics Lucifer – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order