War Machine

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

June 14, 2016 by krisis

Omnibus on Shelf I’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

Iron Man, Tony Stark – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Apr 10, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Iron Man comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2025 with titles scheduled for release through December 2025.

Collecting Iron Man: Tony Stark

Tony Stark wasn’t Marvel’s first super-scientist super-hero, but over the course of more than 55 years of publishing he has become their most famous.

That’s in no small part thanks to Iron Man leading the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008, but even before he made it to the big screen Tony Stark was one of Marvel’s most-memorable flawed heroes.

Tony Stark was born to riches and gifted with a superior intellect. That lead him into the family business, which turned into making weapons of mass destruction before he became one himself – both to escape his captors and to keep shrapnel from digging more deeply into his heart.

Only a few months into his heroic career, Stark become a founding member of The Avengers alongside Thor and, shortly after, the legendary Captain America. His initial run with the team wouldn’t last long – he took his leave in issue #16 and wouldn’t be back for the better part of a decade.

Tony Stark’s most significant early character development would be his “Demon in a Bottle” story in 1979. In the midst of an armor malfunction and an accusation of murder, Stark turns to a bottle for comfort.

After spending years portrayed as a carefree playboy with endless resources, adding Tony Stark’s struggle with alcoholism to his physical wounds made him seem more human than ever.

Stark went on to rejoin the Avengers and become an anchoring member of the West Coast Avengers before branching out to a new franchise with Force Works in the mid-90s before he was swept out of continuity into the Heroes Reborn universe along with all of the rest of the core Avengers in the wake of Onslaught.

Tony Stark took on a new higher profile in the wake of Avengers Disassembled as the troubled soul of the Marvel Universe. First, Warren Ellis reinvented his armor in the classic “Extremis” arc. Then, Tony found himself opposed to his longtime brother Steve Rogers in Civil War, where he took the side of Supehero Registration (much to the consternation of many fans).

In the wake of Civil War, Stark founded the Mighty Avengers and became the face of “The Initiative,” a plan to put an Avengers team in every state. However, he lost the public’s trust in the wake of Secret Invasion, with Norman Osborn usurping his role. This lead to Tony Stark’s most-acclaimed run to date landing at the height of his new-found film fame – the Eisner-winning Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca. This period saw Tony losing Stark Industries, but reconciling with a revived Captain America, with the two of them returning to lead the Avengers.

Marvel Now and All-New, All-Different Marvel would bring more turbulence to Tony Stark’s life – reforming the Illuminati to destroy worlds in Hickman’s Avengers, learning he was adopted in Gillen’s Iron Man, becoming all the evil he had once sworn off in Taylor’s Superior Iron Man, and then being lead to his seeming death in Bendis’s Invincible Iron Man and Civil War II.

In 2018, Fresh Start finds Tony Stark reset back to status quo – anchoring the Avengers and heading up Stark Unlimited.

There are hundreds of different collections of Iron Man, especially his original run from 1963 to 1996. However, there are a few specific formats of books that cover large portions of this title, and I’ll cover those first – Essentials, Epics, Masterworks, and Omnibuses. [Read more…] about Iron Man, Tony Stark – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Avengers West Coast – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 25, 2025! The Avengers West Coast & Force Works definitive collecting guide and reading order for comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback format. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through December 2025.

The Avengers had the best kind of problem in the early 80s, whether your perspective was from within comic book continuity or behind the scenes: there were just too many darn Avengers!

The Avengers had gradually shifted its focus from Marvel’s major heroes who anchored their own books (like Iron Man and Captain America) to a roster of characters that needed a team book to thrive. That meant plenty of fan favorite characters would be left out during any given run.

The best solution was to follow a trend set by Spider-Man and just recently by Chris Claremont’s X-Men: launch a second Avengers book!

West Coast Avengers launched with Hawkeye as a central focus. He was chief amongst those team-based, fan-favorite characters, hot off of his own limited series. Hawkeye was initially joined by his wife, Mockingbird, Tigra, and West Coast natives Wonder Man and Rhodey Rhodes as Iron Man.

From a story perspective, the central conceit of the book was that America was a big country, and the NYC-based team couldn’t always be responsive to threats across the nation. In practice, it allowed writers like Steve Engelhart, John Byrne, and Roy Thomas to tell big stories that still focused on character history and personalities. Byrne, in particular, used it to dig deeply into the story of Scarlet Witch.

As comics became more entrenched in extreme, violent themes, the relative staid Avengers team was disassembled in favor of an Iron Man lead Force Works. (The in-continuity reason was the team’s standoff with the UN Security Council over happenings in Genosha in the “Blood Ties” crossover in the penultimate issue of the series.)

Despite a flashy launch with a pop-up cover, Force Works never caught fire like the similarly themed X-Force, and was cancelled as part of the line-wide removal of Avengers in 1996 as they headed off to the Heroes Reborn pocket universe in the wake of Onslaught.