Crushing Krisis

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Scarlet Witch

Krisis on Near Mint Condition, Mapping Scarlet Witch!

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Earlier Tonight I was incredibly excited to re-unite with my “Map My X” compatriots Ødfel and Ryley as well as Near Mint Condition host Omar to dig into mapping a theoretical Scarlet Witch omnibus!

If you’ve never seen one of our “Map My X” streams before, here’s what you need to know: it is a game of fantasy omnibus mapping.

All four of us enter with sometimes wildly different potential maps of 30-60 issues worth of material to cram into a single Marvel Omnibus with a maximum page count in the 1600-page range. Then we haggle for two hours between the four of us and our live commenters over what’s in, what’s out, and what awesome cover should grace the front of the book.

And, if Marvel eventually gets around to printing it, we get to see just how right we were – like when we perfectly hit the mark with our New Mutants, Vol. 2 mapping!

Here’s our incredibly deep diving into the Scarlet Witch Reading Order from her debut in 1964 through the early 1990s (plus, a glimpse at the state of my totally rock-and-roll mane of curls, a frequent topic in the comments section):

The final mapping we all agreed to in the video was:

Scarlet Witch Classic Omnibus, collecting Uncanny X-Men #4-5 (and material from 6-7 & 11), Strange Tales #128, Avengers (1963) #16, 76, 128, 185-187, 234 (and material from #181-182), Giant-Size Avengers #1 & 4, Vision & Scarlet Witch (1982) 1-4, Marvel Team-Up #125 (2nd story), Marvel Fanfare #6 & 58 (2nd story), Marvel Two-in-One #66, Doctor Strange (1974) #60, Vision & Scarlet Witch (1985) #1-12, West Coast Avengers #2 & 42-45 (and material from 46), Marvel Super-Heroes (1999) #10 (1st story), Solo Avengers (1987) #5 (2nd story), Marvel Comics Presents (1988) #60-63 (3rd story), Avengers West Coast #47-57 & 60-62 (and material from 58-59), Darkhold: Pages from the Book of Sins (1992) #3-7, and Scarlet Witch (1994) #1-4 (plus extras from the Vision & The Scarlet Witch – The Saga Of Wanda And Vision 2021 trade paperback).

However, that was NOT the mapping I walked in with! I felt the book should include more classic material and cut off after Avengers West Coast #62, to be followed up with a The Avengers & Scarlet Witch volume to collect the remainder of West Coast.

Here was the map I walked into the show planning to pitch:

Scarlet Witch Classic Omnibus, Uncanny X-Men (1963) #4-7 & 11 (and material from 53), Strange Tales (1951) #128, Avengers (1963) #16-18, 22, 25, 75-76, 128, 181-182, 185-187, 234, & 312 (and material from 47-49), Giant-Size Avengers (1974) #1 & 4, Marvel Two-In-One (1974) #66, Vision & Scarlet Witch (1982) #1-4, Marvel Team-Up (1972) #125 (2nd story) & #129-130, Marvel Fanfare (1982) #6 & 58 (2nd story), Power-Man & Iron Fist (1978) #102, Doctor Strange (1974) #60, Vision & Scarlet Witch Vol. 2 (1985) #1-12, West Coast Avengers Vol. 2 (1985) #2 & 42-45 (and material from 46), Marvel Super-Heroes Vol. 3 (1990) #10 (1st story), Solo Avengers (1987) #5 (2nd story), Marvel Comics Presents (1988) #60-63 (3rd story), and Avengers West Coast (1989) #47-57 & 60-62 (and material from 58-59).

What’s the difference? Aside from the slightly earlier cut-off, I was planning to include a lot more material to form a more complete Scarlet Witch Reading Order!

I erred on the side of including more of Scarlet Witch’s Silver Age material, both to establish her leaving the Brotherhood, and to show some of her key early adventures with the Avengers, including all of their major Magneto encounters.

I also felt it was worth including a Team-Up two-parter with Vision from #129-130, as well as a Wanda-focused issue of Power-Man & Iron Fist. And, finally, I had less of a problem with double-dipping all of “Vision Quest” and “Darker Than Scarlet” from the Avengers by John Byrne omnibus, since they are her signature stories.

Want to work through your own Scarlet Witch mapping? Check out my previously patrons-only Definitive Guide to The Scarlet Witch to find a complete Scarlet Witch Reading Order of all of her appearances from the Silver Age through 2018!

New For Patrons: Definitive Guide to Scarlet Witch

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Today I launched a long-awaited guide especially for Patrons of Crushing Krisis – The Definitive Scarlet Witch Collecting Guide and Reading Order! This guide was their top pick in a Patrons’ Choice poll for April.

This guide covers Wanda Maximoff’s entire chronological Marvel history, including every single appearance from her debut as a villain in X-Men #4 to joining The Avengers in Avengers #16 to her later romance with Vision, breakdown in “Avengers Disassembled,” return in Children’s Crusade, and – finally – a 15-issue Scarlet Witch solo series in 2016-17.

Even with her mid-2000s hiatus from comics, Scarlet Witch’s Avengers membership accounts for nearly 45 years out of the Avengers’ 54 years as a franchise – making her one of the longest-running, most-permanent heroes on the team’s roster. It’s only in the course of the past decade that it isn’t a truism that Wanda would be appearing somewhere in the Avengers line-up, and recently it seems she can be expected to co-anchor Uncanny Avengers along with Rogue.

Want access to this guide? Patrons’ Choice guides get picked from a pool of pages I’m not planning to work on for many months, so this one isn’t scheduled for released to the public anytime soon! But, you can be reading it tomorrow in exchange for covering $1.99 a month of CK’s hosting expenses.

The Definitive Scarlet Witch Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive Scarlet Witch issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for comic books, omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated October 2017 with titles scheduled for release through April 2018.

Wanda Maximoff is The Scarlet Witch – one of the most powerful mutants in Marvel’s universe, and the sometimes daughter of Magneto. She is able to alter reality at her whim with blasts of pure chaos, causing anything from a wall suddenly crumble down upon a villain to an alteration to the fabric of our universe.

Variant cover of Scarlet Witch (2016) #4

Scarlet Witch is one of Marvel’s earliest reformed villains and one of their most dedicated heroes. She forms a link between the X-Men and Avengers franchises that has been in place since 1965.

For the prior year, Wanda and her brother Quicksilver had appeared together as members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants since their debut in X-Men (1963) #4. However, in May of 1965 the mutant twins shocked both Marvel’s characters and their readers by applying for membership with Captain America’s reformed Avengers in Avengers (19630 #16.

While Quicksilver has come and gone from The Avengers since then, Scarlet Witch has remained a mainstay of the team. Her initial membership ran for a nearly-continuous 20 years before she spun off into a year-long maxi series with her beau The Vision in 1985, which depicted their unusual romance and eventual home life. Wanda even gave birth to a pair of twins.

After that domestic interlude, Wanda returned to active Avengers membership with the West Coast Avengers. Under the pen of John Byrne, she had her own “Dark Phoenix” period, turning on her teammates. However, she quickly returned to heroism and broke away from The Avengers with her other teammates to form the more proactive Force Works in 1994, lead by Iron Man (but not before briefly headlining her own limited series).

A subsequent return to The Avengers was short-lived, as the results of Onslaught shunted Wanda and her teammates into a pocket universe in 1996 before they returned in a new flagship title in 1998. Scarlet Witch was a founding member and an ongoing anchor of the team.

Everything changed in 2004, when red-hot writer Brian Michael Bendis was given free reign to rebuild the flagging Avengers franchise. His answer was a four-issue arc called “Avengers Disassembled,” which would both elevate and irrevocably alter Scarlet Witch’s profile in the Marvel Universe. It’s follow-up, the X-Men and Avengers crossover House of M, would emphasize Wanda as the link between the two teams and also prove her to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

After that climax, five whole years passed with only the scantest hints of Wanda’s continued existence. She returned in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, which both addressed her absence and resolved her seeming connection to a pair of Young Avengers – Wiccan and Speed – who closely resembled Wanda and her brother.

With Scarlet Witch back in action, she was a natural choice to anchor a “Unity” team of Avengers and X-Men in Uncanny Avengers in 2012 to welcome the Marvel Now era. A second volume of that book called into question her long-established link to Magneto (which many fans took as a rebuke of FOX being able to use Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in their X-Men movies). Then, after Secret Wars, she starred in her own ongoing series for the first time in 2016 before making a return to Uncanny Avengers in 2017.

[Read more…] about The Definitive Scarlet Witch Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Avengers West Coast by Thomas & Thomas – The #40 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

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Completionism is a a crazy impulse. There are hundreds of Avengers issues unrepresented by oversized volumes, but omnibus collectors are super-focused on getting the relatively unheralded back third of Avengers West Coast into an oversize volume to complete their bookshelves.

The funny thing is, I’m not sure all of the voters realize just how strong and cohesive this Roy & Dann Thomas run on Avengers really is.

Avengers West Coast #97The Avengers West Coast by Thomas and Thomas Omnibus is the #40 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 and head to the Guide to Avengers West Coast to see how you can read this run right now.

Past Ranking: This volume leaps up five spots from #45 in the 2016 survey.

Probable Contents: Avengers West Coast (1989) #63-100, 102, & Annual 5-8, Avengers Annual 19, Darkhawk Annual 1, and Iron Man Annual 13,

That’s 43 issues, which means the book could also include the full Bloodties crossover: Avengers West Coast (1989) #101, The Avengers (1963) #368-369, Uncanny X-Men (1963) #307, & X-Men (1991) #26.

However, that would leave behind 20 issues of five related miniseries – U.S. Agent #1-4 (after #95 & Annual 8), Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #1-4 (after #97), Spider-Woman #1-4 (after #101), Scarlet Witch #1-4 (after #101), and Hawkeye #1-4 (after #102).

What to do? More on how to reconcile that, below.

Creators: Written by Roy Thomas and Dann Thomas with pencils by Paul Ryan and Dave Ross with Tom Morgan, George Freeman, Herb Trimpe, and Andrew Currie.

Can you read it right now? Mostly. Issue #76-79 and #83-88 remain uncollected (as is the U.S. Agent mini-series), but everything else has been captured. Visit Guide to Avengers West Coast for the full details. Unfortunately, most of this run is not on Marvel Unlimited.

The Details:

Avengers West Coast had gone for years as a forgotten era of Avengers as far as reprints were concerned until Marvel’s Cinematic Universe began focusing strongly on its core cast of Iron Man and Hawkeye, and later Scarlet Witch and Vision.

Suddenly, West Coast reprints were abounding – a set of Marvel Premier Classic hardcovers, corresponding paperback reprints, two omnibuses, half of an Avengers by John Byrne volume, and a handful of trades covering the latter run of the series. The only remaining gaps are #76-79 and #83-88, two stories split by the massive “Galactic Storm” crossover.

Comic books fans are nothing if not obsessive completists, so that makes a final omnibus edition of Avenger West Coast sorely tempting – especially since it’s all co-written by comic book royalty Roy Thomas along with his wife Dann (who was the first woman to ever script an issue of Wonder Woman!) mostly to illustration by a pair of strong pencillers – Paul Ryan through #69 and Dave Ross from #71 through the end of the series. [Read more…] about Avengers West Coast by Thomas & Thomas – The #40 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

House of M Omnibus – The #59 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

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The House of M Omnibus is the #59 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.

What Is It? House of M (2005) is an alternate reality mystery that finds the Avengers and the Astonishing X-Men in a world where mutants dominate a society that is racist against regular humans. It prominently stars Wolverine, Cyclops, Emma Frost, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Magneto.

House of M was Marvel’s first major, line-wide event since Onslaught in 1996 as well as the first significant X-Men and Avengers crossover since then. It was also the first time that Marvel thrust its entire line into an alternate universe story (in an expansion of their strategy for the X-Men-only Age of Apocalypse in 1995).

House of M resulted in massively changed status quo for several Marvel characters, including Ms. Marvel and Wolverine. In its aftermath, Marvel’s mutant population was decimated from millions to just a few hundred, which began a six-year mega-arc that eventually ended in Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012.

The House of M (2005) mini-series event ran for 8 issues from August 2005 to November 2005.

Past Ranking: This is the debut appearance of this book on the ballot!

Creators: Written by Brian Michael Bendis with pencils by Olivier Coipel, inks by Tim Townsend (with Scott Hanna, Rick Magyar, & John Dell III), colors by Frank G. D’Armata (with Paul Mounts), letters by Chris Eliopoulos, and covers by Esad T. Ribic.

Probable Contents: This omnibus would definitely collect House of M (2005) #1-8 plus The Pulse: House of M Special (2005) #1 and Secrets of the House of M (2005).House_of_M_2005_0001_Olivier_Coipel_Gatefold_Variant

Those contents have already been published in an oversize hardcover, which is just 312 pages long. Marvel reprinted a similar hardcover of Civil War for their 2016 film, but it was not relabelled as an omnibus. What else could this volume contain?

Click to expand a discussion of further content for this volume.

 

Can you read it right now? Yes! The House of M trade paperback has “evergreen” status at Marvel – meaning they always keep it in print. However, all of the various supporting books are long since out of print and may cost you a lot of money to purchase. Learn more about them in the Guide to Marvel Universe Events.

And, fear not – every single issue of House of M and its tie-ins are available on Marvel Unlimited for just $10 a month!

The Details:

House of M is one of Marvel’s biggest and most-accessible stories of all time for a litany of reasons.

It featured a team of blockbuster creators, told an alternate reality tale that was massive in scope, kicked off Marvel’s modern age of yearly line-wide events, and was an Avengers and X-Men team-up that actually changed everything that came afterwards for both teams.

However, it might be most notable for being a major inflection point for Marvel. The pre-House of M Marvel of early 2005 would be unrecognizable to readers of both today and of a decade prior to House of M.

Marvel’s line was beginning to expand after their gaunt late-90s bankruptcy years, but it was not the interconnected universe to which fans of the early 90s were accustomed. Titles tended to keep to themselves, without major interaction across Marvel’s Universe. Crossovers were all but extinct. Most of the hype and fan interest was around Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, which launched fresh, modernized version of their four core franchises starting in 2000.

Yet, the prior year had brought with it two major shake-ups in the main Marvel Universe that captured fan imagination (and, in one case, ire). [Read more…] about House of M Omnibus – The #59 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017