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Valkyrie

Guide to Jane Foster, Mighty Thor & Valkyrie – now available to the public!

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I’m happy to announce that my Guide to Jane Foster – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie is now available to all CK readers to help them get ready for Thor: Love & Thunder thanks to the ongoing support of the Mighty Patrons of Crushing Krisis.

Guide to Jane Foster – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie

Check out my original guide announcement for CK Patrons for an entire essay on what I learned from researching my Guide to Jane Foster!

This guide isn’t just a walkthrough of Jane’s time as The Mighty Thor from 2014 to 2019. It’s a reading order for every Jane Foster issue, ever. That includes a full issue-by-issue recap of all of her more than 180 appearances before becoming a hero, a full collecting guide to her time as The Mighty Thor, plus coverage of her current heroic mantle of Valkyrie.

Jane makes 198 primary appearances in her own titles or in Thor titles, plus her time as a team member in Avengers, and many guest appearances from the 1960s through the present day. If you’re just interested in the core of Jane Foster, I’ve got that covered in a “Greatest Hits” section that distills 40 years of continuity down to just 18 key appearances as a civilian prior to her time as The Mighty Thor in 2014.

Finally, if you’re after only Jane’s time as a superhero, Marvel has that covered in a pair of newly-released paperbacks:

Jane Foster: The Saga of the Mighty Thor (2022 paperback, IBSN 978-1302934873 / digital)
Collects Thor (2014) #1-8 & Annual 1 (2nd story); Mighty Thor (2015) #1-5, 8-11, 13-14, and Generations: Unworthy Thor and Mighty Thor (2017) #1. This collects all of the introduction and build-up of Jane’s story, but the climax and transformation is in the next volume.

Jane Foster: The Saga of Valkyrie (2022 paperback, ISBN 978-1302934828 / digital)
Collects Mighty Thor (2015) #702-706, material from Mighty Thor: At the Gates of Valhalla (2018) #1 and War of the Realms: Omega (2019) #1, and Valkyrie: Jane Foster (2019) #1-10. This won’t read as well as a standalone as it does with the build-up from the “Saga of the Mighty Thor” volume, but it is fantastic material!

New for Patrons: Guide to Marvel’s Valkyrie

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Today I’m back with another new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis that helps complete the coverage started with last week’s Guide to Jane Foster, Mighty Thor & Valkyrie…

Guide to Marvel’s Valkyrie

One of the best aspects of the past decade of Marvel Comics is that it has made use of characters from every corner of the Marvel 616-Universe, moreso than any prior decade. That has included stalwart favorites, forgotten supporting characters, and a massive list of new stars who went from debut to title-anchoring characters in a span of years.

That is very, very impressive.

After creating over 100 comic guides, I know that some characters have a tendency to completely disappear after a major run tapers off due to low sales. Hey, if it happened to the X-Men it can happen to anyone! Just look at how many characters DC has completely erased in the same decade!

Jokes aside, many of Marvel’s Bronze Age mainstays didn’t survive the one-two punch of Jim Shooter’s linewide realignment in the mid-80s plus transition to a cooler, grittier, more extreme world of comics heading into the 90s.

This was especially true of the second-tier stars of the original 1972-1986 run of The Defenders. Hulk still had his ongoing title, Dr. Strange hopped from his 70s title to the brief Strange Tales to his lengthy 1988 ongoing, and Namor scored a new ongoing in 1990. The supporting cast – both of the original team and the “New Defenders” soft reboot – were not so lucky. Characters like Nighthawk, Hellcat, Gargoyle, Devil-Slayer, Cloud, and Valkyrie went virtually unknown to most 90s readers.

This is the most surprising for Brunnhilde The Valkyrie, who occupied an existing role in the Marvel Universe as the head of Odin and Hela’s Valkyrior, those Norse warrior women on winged steeds who ferried souls of dead warriors to the afterlife. Yet, Valkyries in general appeared more in the late 80s than Valkyrie in specific thanks to Dani Moonstar’s ongoing connection to Asgard in New Mutants! [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Marvel’s Valkyrie

New for Patrons: Jane Foster Guide – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie

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I’m back with a new Marvel Guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis that’s about to be very relevant in a few weeks with the release of Thor: Love & Thunder, for a run that I hold in very high regard…

Guide to Jane Foster – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie
Note: This guide is now available to ALL READERS!

Jane Foster is one of a particular group of Marvel’s Silver and Bronze Age supporting characters who had a few hundred appearances without ever having a specific story of their own until relatively recently.

That recent story is a huge one. Jane Foster’s turn as The Mighty Thor during Jason Aaron’s run on Thor might be Marvel’s most-definitive modern classic of the 2010s! It’s big, it’s gorgeous, and it’s an incredibly emotional read. It is by far my top recommended reading from both Marvel and DC from the past decade!

It would’ve been easy to simply pull together a Jane Foster Guide to her as Thor and her subsequent transformation to Valkyrie. I’ve read every single issue of Marvel since that transformation and I have extensive notes on them all!

Yes, it has been recollected across many formats – Omnibus, deluxe hardcover, Complete Collection, and a pair of new “greatest hits” style paperbacks – but her story covers a finite set of issues across a number of specifically ordered series.

Yet, I had questions about Jane’s past. When did she stop being Thor’s love interest to get married to another man? When did she go from Nurse Foster to Doctor Foster? Had she ever been super-powered in the past? And, did any of her past stories have an influence on Aaron’s modern direction for her character?

Thor of you who have been following me for a while will not be surprised to hear that these questions lead me down a rabbit hole of inquiry, as I realized that no other Jane Foster Guide or wiki on the internet answered them the way I wanted them to be answered.

The solution? Read every single panel of Jane Foster from 1962 to 2012 and summarize it in my guide.

What did I learn? [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Jane Foster Guide – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie

Collecting Defenders comic books as graphic novels

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Defenders comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated November 2018 with titles scheduled for release through March 2019.

Who are The Defenders? Or, perhaps the better question is, what are The Defenders?

The Defenders (1972) #1The concept of this unofficial team of heroes originated with the cancellation of Dr. Strange’s 1968 series, itself an outgrowth of Strange Tales. When a multi-part story teaming up the Doctor with Namor and Hulk was slotted to begin in what turned out to be the final issue (#183), the remaining chapters wound up running in Sub-Mariner #22 and Incredible Hulk #126.

Later, the Namor/Hulk team-up added Silver Surfer to the mix in Namor #34-35 as “Titans Three.” Then, the entire foursome assembled in Marvel Feature #1-3 before spinning off into their own title.

This quartet of characters worked so well together because they are all massively powerful loners. Each one of them could easily battle a Silver Age Avengers line-up to a stand-still single-handedly and they’d each bristle at trying to remain a member long-term.

Together, they kept that curmudgeonly attitude, which made the main draw of The Defenders that it was a team that wasn’t a team – all while battling enemies from other dimensions and outer space. It latter added other unlikely members like Valkyrie, Luke Cage, Moon Knight, Hellcat, and Daimon Hellstrom.

The original, 1972 Defenders volume has been collected in a variety of formats as a key part of Marvel’s transition from Silver to Bronze age. Over the years the original team has seen many revivals of its title and concepts (both of loners and of protecting our dimension).

In 2017 the title took a left turn as it was co-opted for Marvel’s Netflix team of Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones – who could have easily been deemed Mighty Avengers based on those characters’ recent publication history.
[Read more…] about Collecting Defenders comic books as graphic novels