Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Salvador Larroca

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

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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.

[Read more…] about Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot Results & Mappings

Updated: Guide to X-Treme X-Men

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I’m back with another X-Guide Update! This guide was NOT a guide I expected to have to update this year, and certainly not for two different reasons. First, Marvel is relaunching this title (with its original creative team!) into a new series later this year that picks up directly from its end in 2004. Second, certainly related to that, Marvel is publishing the first of two omnibuses that will cover the entire run! Of course, I’m talking about my Guide to X-Treme X-Men!

Guide to X-Treme X-Men

This guide covers all three volumes of X-Treme X-Men – the 2001 Claremont/Larroca team of fan-favorites that ran alongside Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, Greg Pak’s 2012 Exiles-style revival starring Dazzler, and the newly-announced Claremont/Larroca flashback series.

You can find the trade reading order for all of that, where three different supporting mini-series (Savage Land, X-Pose, & Mekanix) fit into the original run, where characters can be found next, plus links to buy physical and digital collections and read right now on Marvel Unlimited!

Wolverine: Black White & Blood #2 – BUY IT or SKIP IT? | This Week in X

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It’s This Week in X for Wolverine: Black White & Blood #2, released 16 December 2020!

Wolverine: Black White & Red #2 is another anthology issue of two-color Wolverine stories, and it comes with an all-star cast of creators – Vita Ayala + Greg Land, Saladin Ahmed + Kev Walker, and CHRIS CLAREMONT + Salvador Larroca.

Which one was our favorite? The answer might surprise you! Join Peter, Tyler, and Fariha’s specially-nominated guest New Mutant, Harry, for this epic discussion.

Join Peter, Tyler, and Fariha’s specially-nominated guest New Mutant, Harry, for this epic discussion.


(watch on YouTube)

Need help making sense of reading and collecting the X-Men? Crushing Comics can help!

Want to keep up with comics commentary all week long? Follow Crushing Comics on Twitter and subscribe to my channel on YouTube.

Crushing Comics, S01E02: Thor by JMS & Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction

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Here’s the first full-length episode of my new show, Crushing Comics! (Episode 1 was just a brief teaser.)

The main theme of Season 1 will be unwrapping dozens of anonymous bricks of books from my collection, which each contain an oversize surprise. It’s liking unboxing my past seven years of hauls all over again!

Episode 2 features Thor by JMS Omnibus (Amazon / eBay), as covered by the Guide to Thor and Iron Man by Matt Fraction (Amazon Vol. 1 / Amazon Vol. 2 / eBay) as covered by the Guide to Iron Man.

All three books get a thumbs-up from me, but you’ll have to watch to here all about Thor’s big Ragnarok, plus learn how I cannot pronounce the names of either of the major creators on that run.

Avengers by Jonathan Hickman, Vol. 2 – The #38 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

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No, your eyes do not deceive you and it is not a typo – we’ve got a tie for the #38 most-wanted omnibus, and that tie brings us the newest of all the runs in the survey results.

Avengers - 2012 - 0024Avengers by Jonathan Hickman, Vol. 2 is the #38 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017 on Tigereyes’s Secret Ballot. Visit the Marvel Masterworks Message Board to view the original posting of results by Tigereyes.

Past Ranking: This is a 2017 debut; Volume 1 debuted at #10 with a bullet in 2016.

Probable Contents: It’s complicated. I cover it in full at the bottom of the post.

Creators: Written by Jonathan Hickman.

The co-writers and other artists vary wildly depending on what gets collected, but the core issues that we’ll see no matter what were drawn by Salvador Larroca and Leinil Francis Yu (Avengers) and Simone Bianchi, Rags Morales, Valerio Schiti, Kev Walker, and Larroca (New Avengers).

Can you read it right now? Yes! This Avengers and New Avengers portions of this run have now been collected in three formats, all still readily available. Avengers World is around in TPB only. It’s all covered on the Guide to Avengers Flagships.

Plus, all three series are available in full on Marvel Unlimited – Avengers, New Avengers, and Avengers World.

The Details:

The first Avengers by Jonathan Hickman Omnibus will be in our hands in a matter of weeks, and it collects exactly what fans were hoping for (and exactly what I predicted last year) – an integrated run of Avengers and New Avengers that incorporates Infinity, ending with Avengers (2013) #23 and New Avengers (2013) #12.

There is much debate over what a second volume of Hickman Avengers will contain, and I’ll cover that in detail below. What’s in common between the three possibilities is that it will surely cover both Avengers and New Avengers through the start of the “Eight Months Later / Time Runs Out” period, which begins in Avengers #35 and New Avengers #24.

The issues leading up to that point are very different across the two titles. [Read more…] about Avengers by Jonathan Hickman, Vol. 2 – The #38 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017