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New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – April 5 2023

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Let’s take a look at what’s out from Marvel Comics this week! This post covers Marvel Comics April 5 2023 releases.

This list includes every comic and digital comic out from Marvel this week, plus collected editions in omnibus, hardcover, paperback, and digest-sized formats. For each new release, I’ll point you to the right Crushing Comics guide.

Marvel Comics April 5 2023 Collected EditionsAdam Warlock Omnibus, one of Marvel Comics April 5 2023 releases

This is a slim week for new collected editions – there’s just four books out, and one is a reprint!

Adam Warlock Omnibus (2023 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302949877 / digital)
See Guide to Adam Warlock. This collects Warlock’s full Silver & Bronze Age Warlock saga all in one place for the first time, from his debut as “Him” in the pages of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four to Jim Starlin’s psychedelic late-70s space epic! You can read this and continue directly to Infinity Gauntlet.

Fantastic Four Epic Collection Volume 3: The Coming of Galactus
(2023 paperback, ISBN 978-1302950415 / digital)
See Guide to Fantastic Four. This is the third time this particular Epic has been back to print. That speaks not only to the fact that it’s one of the Marvel’s most-significant stories of all time, but also speaks to the ongoing success of the Epic Collection line as we head into its second decade. It’s doing exactly the thing it’s meant to do – getting books all into the same format and reprinting them whenever necessary!

Marvel-Verse: Guardians of the Galaxy (2023 digest-size paperback, ISBN 978-1302950705 / digital)
See Guide to Guardians of the Galaxy. This collects a smattering of stand-alone Guardians stories from the middle of Bendis’s run through the beginning of Duggan’s run, including one previously uncollected issue – Guardians of the Galaxy: Dream On (2017) #1. A decent, if scant, sampler platter if you’re averse to sampling digitally on Marvel Unlimited – but it’s hard to take it seriously without any material from the 2008 series.

Star-Lord: The Saga of Peter Quill (2023 paperback, ISBN 978-1302950712 / digital)
See Guide to Star-Lord, Peter Quill. This is the collection if you want to grab Star-Lords earliest set of continuity stories in the Marvel Universe. I say “continuity” stories because the character of Peter Quill as Star-Lord first debuted in the 1970s, but all of his early adventures have been since rendered as occurring in a separate reality due to some unresolvable time travel shenanigans. That means when Quill pops up in the 2003 Thanos ongoing series, it’s technically his first appearance (though, making things even more confusing, at the time he was assumed to still be the same character as that 1970s version). All of this and more is explained in my guide!

Read on for a rundown of Marvel Comics April 5 2023 single-issue releases, including a link to their accompanying guide pages on Crushing Comics. [Read more…] about New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – April 5 2023

Updated: Guide to X-Men Legacy

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This week’s X-Men guide update includes some of my favorite runs of all time, because they each had keen single-character focus that mined past continuity to allow characters to grow and change. It’s my Guide to X-Men Legacy.

Guide to X-Men Legacy

Guide to X-Men Legacy

X-Men Legacy was Mike Carey’s reinvention of X-Men (1991) in the wake of “Messiah Complex” in 2008. He made the bold move of jettisoning a fan-favorite team lead by Rogue to refocus the book entirely on Professor Xavier. It was one of the few times in X-Men history Xavier was truly the lead character in an X-Men book – the other being Claremont’s short-lived Excalibur (2004).

After a year of focusing on Xavier, Carey pivoted his focus back to Rogue. Rogue had been a lead character many times over, even anchoring a pair of mini-series and an ongoing title. However, no one had ever before dug so deeply into her character and her powers as Carey. In giving Rogue a respite from the idea of her powers as a curse, he was able to unify the many aspects of her personality we had seen (and loved) over the years – as revolutionary, rebel, leader, lover, and mentor.

Simon Spurrier did something similar on his 2012-2014 run of X-Men Legacy, except he was working with a character with barely any history at all! Professor Xaver’s son Legion had only ever figured heavily into a handful of past comic arcs – his introduction in Claremont’s New Mutants, the final 30 issues of Claremont’s run, LegionQuest as a lead-in to Age of Apocalypse, and Zeb Wells’ recent run on New Mutants. Yet, Spurrier treated him similarly to how Carey dealt with Rogue – digging into why his powers and his life had always been so fractured, and what his humanity looked like beneath that.

I wish this Guide to X-Men Legacy update included new collected editions, especially of Carey’s incredible run on Rogue. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen new collections containing any Legacy issues since the 2018 reprint of Spurrier’s run, aside from a few issues recollected in last year’s Avengers vs. X-Men omnibus. That doesn’t mean there was nothing to update! I added links to buy and read the entire run digitally, clarified the contents of several collections, and slightly tweaked the recommended reading oder.

With Marvel just wrapping up the reprints of the 2001-2012 era of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men (1991) last year it feels like the time is right to recollect X-Men Legacy (2008), which has never been collected beyond its original hardcovers and trade paperbacks. Perhaps we’ll see it recollected in the new “Modern Epic” line – especially if Rogue continues to have a prominent role in the X-Men line in 2023 and beyond.

The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

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My pull list just keeps getting bigger and better! This week, The Pull List is twenty-six issues long with seven new number ones, four issues with Batman, and an average rating of 3.17.

What did I pull this week? Well, I’m still not caught up on my Superman, but I’ve got a pretty big cross-section of DC and Marvel on my list, plus a handful of smaller publisher titles!

  • Aftershock Comics
    • Monstro Mechanica (2017) #3
  • Boom! Studios
    • Giant Days (2015) #35
    • Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6
  • Dark Horse
    • Incognegro – Renaissance (2018) #1
  •  DC Comics
    • Batman (2016) #40
    • Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles (2018)#2
    • Justice League (2016) #38
    • Milk Wars: Mother Panic / Batman Special (2018)
    • Swamp Thing Winter Special (2018) #1
    • Young Monsters In Love (2018) #1
  • Image Comics
    • Paper Girls (2015) #20
    • Twisted Romance (2018) #1
    • VS (2018) #1
    • Witchblade (2017) #3
  • Marvel Comics
    • Avengers (2017) #679
    • Black Bolt (2017) #10
    • Black Panther – Sound And Fury (2018) #1
    • Hawkeye (2017) #15
    • Iceman (2017) #10
    • Infinity Countdown (2018) – Adam Warlock One-Shot
    • Rise of the Black Panther (2018) #2
    • Rogue & Gambit (2018) #2
    • Runaways (2017) #6
    • Spider-Man (2016) #237
    • X-Men: Gold (2017) #21
    • X-Men: Red (2018) #1

Marvel/DC Issue of the Week: Justice League (2016) #38, DC Comics

4.5 starsJustice League is finally back to being amongst DC’s most exciting books every month with Christopher Priest at the helm for the first time since Darkseid War in the latter part of New 52 in 2015.

Marco Santucci’s pencils on this are brilliant right out of the gate! Flash’s one-man reenactment of Sandra Bullock in Gravity is riveting and an absolutely amazing blend of real science and comics magic. It plays out over a League realizing just how reliant they’ve become on technology, both to back them up and to tell them what to do and where to be.

What makes the story unusual is that Batman is the physical representation of that weakness – not Cyborg. As a brilliant tactician who is just a regular man, Batman uses technology to enhance his detective skills and the breadth of his knowledge. Yet, that can easily be used as his own Kryptonite when there’s a situation he cannot strategize his way out of.

Just as Flash keeps emphasizing “I’m only a scientist, not an engineer” as he tries to arrest his free float through space, Cyborg is an engineer first and a tactician second. He’s not Batman. He “doesn’t want to be the boss.”

What happens when Cyborg has to take charge of the League in a way that’s greater than just Boom Tubing them from place to place? Can he fake being a leader with engineering in the same way Flash fakes being an engineer with science?

I don’t know, but I am transfixed by this Christopher Priest arc!

Small Publisher Issue of the Week: Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6, Boom! Studios

4.5 starsWith the way this book has been going, it’s going to be really hard for anything to excite me more in a week that it’s on the stands.

If you haven’t seen my breathless catch-up on this Greg Pak/Takeshi Miyazawa series in this week’s Back Issue Review, here’s the skinny: years ago a giant semi-organic robot crashed to Earth and bonded with a pilot, and ever since then four mechs descend into our atmosphere each year.

To find the four pilots that will bond, the US maintains a Hogwarts-esque Mech Academy to train the best and the brightest. We need them, because a race giant Kaiju monsters named Shargs are constantly creeping into our orbit and can only be repelled by the mechs.

We’re in the middle of the second arc of this book now after it was extended past a mini-series, presumably for just being unbelievably excellent (and also selling a few copies). I cannot tell you the last time I got this nervous about characters in a comic book being in peril.

This series continues to perfectly toe the line between Pacific Rim and Harry Potter, and I just want there to be 20x as much of it so I can keep reading more! [Read more…] about The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

Updated: Uncanny Avengers Collecting Guide & Reading Order

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Today I have my first update to a team guide, and it’s a team I have had a love/hate relationship with over the past decade – The Definitive Guide to the Uncanny Avengers!

Don’t need a full reading order right now, but want to know what the Avengers are doing with the X-Men’s “Uncanny” adjective? Keep reading for a brief history, where to start reading, what the team has been up to in 2017, and just how much of it you can own in oversize format.

[Read more…] about Updated: Uncanny Avengers Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)

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This is the end, my friends! The last in a series of four posts covering how Marvel could cover every X-Men comic book in omnibus volumes.

This post covers every X-Men series from Messiah Complex to the end of Marvel Now in an effort to give you maximum ideas for the The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot, where you vote for the comic runs you’d most like to see in an oversized format. Monday I covered all of X-Men from 1963 to 1991, Tuesday I reviewed 1991 to 2001, and yesterday I broke down 2001 to 2008.

With 21 more omnibuses from Messiah Complex to AvX and another 10 from Marvel Now, this edition brings our grand total of potential X-Men volumes to 113 possible omnibuses – which begs the question: How many of these could we possibly see in our lifetimes before books become completely obsolete and comics are downloaded directly into our brains?

At Marvel’s current rate of only a handful of X-Men omnibuses a year, it’s never going to happen.

Yet, with most Marvel omnibuses selling between 1,000 and 2,500 units in their first week, it makes me wonder how many of these books we could see if Marvel abandoned the outdated Direct Market model for determining their pre-order volume and sell-through.

Picture this – in October 2017 Marvel partners with Kickstarter plus one of the big online comic book sellers as a distributor to introduce the new “X-Men Omnibus Club: Year 1.” [Read more…] about Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)