Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Secret Wars

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 Avengers Flagship Titles, 2010 – Present

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Today I’m excited to bring you a complete from-the-ground-up re-build and major update of one of the most-important guides to reading Marvel Comics from 2010 to present… Avengers flagship titles (2010 – present) – The Definitive Collecting Guide!

This massive update was made possible by Patrons of Crushing Krisis. It covers hundreds of issues across over 20 volumes of comics that have been collected in more than 250 different print editions, spanning four major eras of Avengers. Whether you want to buy collected editions, build a digital collection, or read as a Marvel Unlimited subscriber, this guide has you completely covered. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Avengers Flagship Titles, 2010 – Present

Crushing Comics S01E035 – What are you carrying on your back? + Secret Wars, House of M, & Secret War

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This episode begins with me contemplating the things other than comics I lugged around the world with me (some, unintentionally). Do you have these things in your life? Action figures, board games, old sleeping bags, and serving platters someone loaned you for a big party?

Luckily, this brick of comic books are definitely things I mean to bring with me to Wellington – the original Secret Wars, House of M, and Secret War (no “s”).

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 35 features the oversize hardcovers of Secret Wars (1984), House of M, and Secret War. Learn more about all three books in my Guide to Marvel Events!

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

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #12, 11, and 10

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Omnibus on ShelfI’m back with #12, 11, and 10 from the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus secret ballot by TigerEyes. I covered #13-15 in the last installment.

Today we’ll examine a pair of late-80s classics by a single writer and one modern-day epic that was at both highly enjoyable and fundamentally broken.

Why just three books? Other than my fingers being a little exhausted, I wanted to have the time to dig a little deeper both into the content of the books and how they might be collected. This three-omnibus installment wound up being just as long as some of the posts with twice the books!

Marvel has released these oversized omnibus editions for over a decade now, with a staggering amount of their most-popular material now covered in the format – from Silver Age debuts to modern classics. Is your favorite character or run of issues already in an Omnibus? My Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is the most comprehensive tool on the web for answering that question – it features every book, plus release dates, contents, and even breakdowns of $/page and what movies the books were released to support.

Alright, there’s plenty more to read below, so let’s get going with the next three most-wanted oversized hardcover omnibuses! [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #12, 11, and 10