Realm of Kings Archives

rsz_2016-06-06_095604 One of my favorite comic community happenings of each year is when a message board member named TigerEyes announces that it’s time for the “Annual Secret Ballot: Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibus.”

For the uninitiated, what this means is that over a hundred of the biggest Marvel fans and collectors who like to chat each other up on the internet send in their picks for what Marvel material is most worthy of compiling into an oversize Marvel Omnibus Edition, massive tomes that sometimes run over 1,000 pages and up to 50 issues of collected comics.

Whether it’s causation or correlation, books from the secret ballot tend to get printed by Marvel. Here’s the breakdown from the first three years of the survey:

2013 survey: 10 of 29 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).
2014 survey: 12 of 52 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).
2015 survey: 7 of 52 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).

That makes the secret ballot not only a fun exercise, but a useful straw poll to get an idea of what could be coming our way. In fact, the majority of omnibuses released in 2016 that are not from the past three years of comics are from the poll.

I’ll be tackling the results of the 2016 poll starting with this post, complete with likely contents, explanations, how to read the material right now, and the likelihood we’ll ever see the books in print.

Let’s get started! And, if you want to know more about all of the books that have been released to date, my Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is built on a database full of all of the information about these massive tomes so you can sort and filter them. It’s the only tool of its kind on the web!

A comprehensive guide to line-wide Marvel Events – including story overviews, characters, issue lists, and how they can be read via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperbacks. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated November 2018 with titles scheduled for release through February 2019.

Secret Wars. Inferno. Age of Apocalypse. Civil War. Secret Invasion. Avengers vs. X-Men. When it comes to epic-sized comic book events, Marvel Comics is the all-time champion.

These line-wide Marvel Events are overarching stories that can involve dozens of Marvel heroes – if not all of them, all at once! Events occur as either or both of direct crossovers between ongoing titles and special limited-series.

That can make them hard to keep track of, especially at the current rate of one or more events each year. It’s also hard to track down every issue or graphic novel. It’s easy to miss issues or buy the same comic in overlapping collections.

That’s why I created this page – it includes summaries, issue lists, and collection info for every major Marvel event, ever.

Click the links below to leap down the page to the corresponding section. I have omitted most line-specific crossovers with only one or two cross-line spinoffs, such as X-Men’s Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Hulks. [Read more…] about Collecting Marvel Universe Events as graphic novels