Phil Noto

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.

Updated: Guide to Cable

January 15, 2023 by krisis 2 Comments

It’s time for another update to a long-standing X-Guide! It’s another guide where I re-wrote every word and rebuilt every link from scratch to make it clearer than every before how to follow the story of one of the most-complicated X-Characters. Welcome to my all-new, all-different Guide to Cable!

Guide to Cable

This Guide to Cable didn’t exist when I first launched Crushing Comics back in 2010.

At the time, Cable’s 1993 series wasn’t particularly well-collected and his 2008 series was just wrapping up, so the bulk of his collected editions were actually from the run of Cable & Deadpool from 2004 to 2008. At the time Deadpool hadn’t been associated with the X-Men for well over a decade (this was just before Uncanny X-Force was announced!), but he had several well-collected series to his name.

Faced with a decision between an under-collected X-Character and well-collected non-X-Character, it made sense to package the pair of them together thanks to their shared series and intertwined origins. Thus, the Guide to Cable & Deadpool was born. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Cable

This Week in X: Astonishing X-Men, Phoenix Resurrection, Rogue & Gambit, & more!

January 5, 2018 by krisis

I’m finally caught up to Marvel’s present day after a long abstention after Secret Wars, and that means I’m keeping up with the status quo of my favorite mutants for the first time since 2015. And, since I’m keeping up, why shouldn’t you, too?!

This is a pilot of my new weekly recap of what’s new in X-Men comics. These are quick hit reviews, not feature-length write-ups or extensive recaps. My hope is that they’ll help you figure out the right books to be buying, and how to catch up with the current status quo of each title.

This weeks line-up is Astonishing X-Men (2017) #7, Iceman (2017) #9, Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey (2018) #3, Rogue & Gambit (2018) #1, X-Men: Gold (2017) #18, and X-Men: Grand Design (2018) #2.

Is this helping you decide what to buy or catch up with the present? Let me know in a comment! But, beware: spoilers abound!

20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015

April 28, 2017 by krisis

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.

Cable – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Cable comic books definitive 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 January 2023 with titles scheduled for release through April 2023.

No single character defines so much of what is right and what is wrong about the venerable X-Men franchise as Nathan Christopher Dayspring Summers AKA Cable.

Cable was the creation of Rob Liefeld in 1990 when he took over pencilling New Mutants and was charged with creating a leader for the team that contrasted with Professor X’s non-violent philosophy. The character he came up with couldn’t be more of a 90s extreme – a Terminator-esque mysterious time-traveler with a glowing eye, a metal arm, a massive gun, countless pouches, and a set of shoulder pads that tripled the width of his body.

(Alex Ross would later say, “I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character.”)

Cable (and Liefeld) lead the New Mutant team out of passivity and lower sales to become one of Marvel’s biggest sales phenomenons, shedding all but three cast members in the process and relaunching as mega-seller X-Force just one year later in 1991. The first issue was the top-selling comic of all time for exactly one month, until X-Men (1991) #1 outpaced it the next month.

However, something even more interesting was going on with Cable thanks to the plot of another X-book: X-Factor. In the wake of X-Tinction Agenda, X-Factor saw Cyclops’s son with Madelyne Pryor (Mr. Sinister’s clone of Jean Grey) being kidnapped to the moon. There, baby Nathan was infected with a techno-organic virus by former Sinister mentor Apocalypse before being whisked off to the future by Sister Askani in an effort to save his life.

Was it intention or coincidence that a telekinetic baby who was the heir apparent to the X-Men franchise was infected with a metallic virus and sent to the future just months after a telekinetic time-traveler with a missing eye and a metallic arm landed in the present? It didn’t matter, because fan obsession with the idea that Cable could be Cyclops’s son quickly took over and made Liefeld’s extreme new character more in-demand than he was before!

That sort of long-term, interconnected, soap opera plotting is a major part of what makes X-Men comics great. However, Cable’s subsequent adventures offer the insufferable underbelly of X-Men: constantly revised powers, convoluted time travel, unendingly retconned secret agendas, and multiple apparent deaths. Even as a Cable fan it can be hard to say what his current mission is or how many more intermittent jumps to the future he’s conducted since his last appearance.

Despite that, Cable has been central to some biggest comic blockbusters in the past few decades – including co-headling a series with Deadpool, driving both Messiah Complex and Second Coming, anchoring the Avengers “Unity Squad” of Uncanny Avengers along with Rogue, and ushering in the final stages of the pre-Hickman era in 2019.

Cable’s ongoing frenemy relationship with Deadpool is a big part of his lasting appeal. While he’s a militant curmudgeon on his own, as the Merc With a Mouth’s eternal straight man it’s a little easier to see the heart of gold that makes him so central to the X-Men franchise over 30 years after his debut.

Note that this guide refers to Cable and “Nathan” interchangeably throughout when referring to the character and not the title.