Roger Stern

Doctor Strange – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading-order on collecting Doctor Strange & Strange Academy comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, trade paperback graphic novels, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated August 2024 with titles scheduled for release through May 2025.

Collecting Doctor Strange

Doctor Strange has had several ongoing titles over the years collected in a variety of formats – plus, his own magic school with Strange Academy.

At this point, every Doctor Strange issue has been collected! However, there are a few specific formats of books that cover large portions of this title, and I’ll cover those first – Omnibuses, Masterworks, Epics, and Essentials.

Do you need a quick introduction with a few suggested reads? Head to my blog post announcing this guide.
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Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #30 to 26

June 10, 2016 by krisis

Omnibus on Shelf We’ve reached the halfway point of the 2016 Secret Ballot for Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibus by Tigereyes. I covered #35-31 in the last installment.

Here’s your early warning: this batch of books includes not one but three X-Men titles, and boy do I have opinions about those! Also, all five of these books placed lower in previous years.

I’ve failed to say this previously, but if you have any extra intelligence to add about the probable runs or opinions about the comics therein, please leave a comment! Even when ti comes to X-Men, I don’t know (or remember!) everything about these books – and you might.

Want to learn more about the Marvel Omnibus editions that already exist and the issues they cover? My Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is the most comprehensive tool on the web for tracking Marvel’s hugest releases – it features every book, plus release dates, contents, and even breakdowns of $/page and what movies the books were released to support.

Now that you’ve been adequately warned, let’s x-amine what I have to say about #30 through 26! [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #30 to 26

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #50 to 45

June 6, 2016 by krisis

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!

The Avengers (1963) #1-402 (1963-1996) – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Avengers comic books from 1963 to 1996, including Avengers (1963) #1-402 as written by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Roger Stern, John Byrne, Bob Harras, and more via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Comics – Guide to Marvel Comics. Last updated August 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

The Fantastic Four were Marvel’s “first family” and The Avengers were its first super-group.

In its 1963 debut, Avengers pulled together all but one of Marvel’s most-successful early Silver Age heroes from their disparate anthology titles – Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Ant-Man & Wasp. (The hero they omitted was Spider-Man.)

After just four issues the line-up was tweaked to drop Hulk and add Captain America, unfrozen after the Golden Age in a sly bit of retconning from Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, and the Avengers as we know and love them were born.

The Silver Age run of the book established many of the relationships we take for granted in modern day Marvel. Issue #16 found Cap leading the new “kooky quartet” of former villains Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. A few years later the team would add characters like Black Widow and Black Panther to the cast and head into the famous storylines that debuted Vision and Ultron.

That original 1963 Avengers title lasted for 33 years until it was cancelled in the wake of the 1996 Onslaught crossover event. By the time the book ended it had seen dozens of heroes become members, eventually graduating from being anchored by its “holy trinity” of Iron Man, Thor, & Cap to feature a broad array of cast members like Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel, Starfox, She-Hulk, Hercules, Crystal, Sersi, and more!

This guide addresses how read and collect every issue of this main Avengers title. If you’re looking for other Avengers titles from the same period, they have their own guides – including a Guide to Avengers West Coast. And, if you want to continue reading Avengers from this point forward, simply move on to the Guide to Avengers (1996 – 2005).

There are hundreds of different collections of this era of this initial thirty-year run of The Avengers. However, there are a few specific formats of books that cover large portions of this title, and I’ll cover those first – oversize Omnibuses, premium hardcover Masterworks, affordable digest Mighty Marvel Masterworks, chunky paperback Epic Collections, and the classic black-and-white Essentials.

Then, I’ll get into the issue-by-issue chronological breakdown of the 400+ issues of this title across the Silver, Bronze. and Copper AKA Modern Age – including where the run was intersected by major stories like Secret Wars, Inferno, Infinity Gauntlet, and Onslaught.

Note: This guide is focused on collections that will allow you to collect a continuous run or key stories from The Avengers. This guide does not contain every collection that includes just a handful of issues of Avengers. For example, a modern Doctor Doom collection containing two issues of Avengers would be omitted.