X-Factor

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

April 17, 2023 by krisis

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.

X-Factor Math & Maps: Collected Issue Counting and Future Omnibus Mapping

January 26, 2023 by krisis

A few weeks ago I updated the Guide to X-Factor to present day, which means now it’s time for mathing and mapping X-Factor! How much of X-Factor been collected from its start in February 1986 to the team’s most-recent appearance Dec 2021? How many issues have been collected in color, Epic Collection, or Omnibus formats? And, what’s the perfect X-Factor mapping to collect the remaining issues into an impressive shelf of omnibus volumes

Get ready for the deepest possible dive into the data behind the physical collections of X-Factor!

This is a pilot of a new post format that acts as a companion to major guide updates. It’s a way to bring back my popular series of omnibus-focused posts from 2017, where I looked at dozens of likely entries on Tigereyes’ annual Marvel Omnibus straw poll and then mapped the results.

Those posts were major favorites for many readers, but each one could take as long as a brand new comic guide – and, back in 2017 I still had many guides still to build. Oh, and there was also the brief interruption where I found out we would be moving to New Zealand in the middle of the 50-post series!

To get started with our X-Factor Math & Maps, let’s look at the current collection standings for X-Factor:

Series	Total Issues	in Color*	in Epic	in Oversize
X-Factor	325	282	74	176
as a percentage:		82.46%	22.77%	54.15%

* I am no longer including Essentials in my tally of collected issues now that they are long out of print and Marvel has retired the black-and-white reprint format.

How does that break down across every X-Factor series? What am I even counting? Read on to find out! And, when you’re done, be sure to leave a comment to let me know if you’d like to see more posts like this in the future.

Updated: Guide to X-Factor

January 12, 2023 by krisis

Now that I’m digging back into my comic guides, it’s time to start attacking my backlog of 150+ guides that haven’t had a significant revision in half a decade! Time flies when you’re reading comics. This week, I’ve reached back to update one of CK’s earliest guides. Actually, I re-wrote every word and rebuilt every link from scratch to make it easier than ever to find the physical and digital collections you want. Welcome to my all-new, all-different Guide to X-Factor.

Guide to X-Factor

My last update of the Guide to X-Factor was in the middle of the Reign of X, which means it wasn’t missing too many collections – just the newest Epics and the relatively fresh second and third volumes of the Peter David Omnibus line.

However, that doesn’t meant the page was easy to use! The guide had grown to be a labyrinth of collections with 20 years worth of competing oversized hardcovers, Epics, and paperbacks. That approach to guide organization predates Marvel’s more-organized approach to the contents of Omnibuses and Epic collections. Now that collection formats are getting tidier, the guide should follow! Now, major collection formats have their own sections that you can easily open or skip.

As a result, I rebuilt every collection link on the page. That’s not the only big change to this guide. I’ve added all of the features of the newest guides on the site, including a “Where to Start” section, digital purchase links, reformatted images, and links to read on Marvel Unlimited!

This was one of my milder rebuilds, since it didn’t require adding many new collections or researching character appearances. It still took a whopping five hours altogether, which is almost as long as it takes to create a small new guide from scratch! I’ve got my work cut out for me keeping everything updated, but the more often I do it the easier and quicker it becomes.

Enjoy this renewed Guide to X-Factor – and, let me know in the comments which of my 200+ guides you’d love to see me update next!

Newly Announced: Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 5 (+ the problem with its mapping explained)

August 30, 2022 by krisis

This weekend, Marvel announced their most-anticipated omnibus via my friend and colleague Omar’s YouTube channel, Near Mint Condition: Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 5!

(That isn’t an exaggeration; the online omnibus community produces a yearly secret ballot to determine its most-wanted books and this one tops the list, as also reported by Omar.)

This is the last omnibus X-fans need to complete their oversized bookshelf of Uncanny X-Men (1963) #1-321. That means it’s time for the celebration to begin! Let the X-villagers rejoice!

Well… not quite.

The hesitation comes down to the initially-announced contents of the book, what fans assumed it would contain, what Marvel has recently reprinted, and how Marvel plans to continue collecting Uncanny X-Men in omnibus in the coming years.

(Note: Omar very kindly invited me to a discussion of this topic on his channel, but I couldn’t make it work across time zones. Plus, I’m trying to keep my X-Men X-Posure contained to CK, at the moment.)

Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 5 Contents

The contents of this volume, as announced by Omar on Near Mint Condition, are:

Uncanny X-Men (1963) #194-209 & Annual 9, New Mutant Special Edition (1985) #1, Nightcrawler (1985) #1-4, Longshot (1985) #1-6, and material from Marvel Fanfare (1982) #33.

I’ll explain why all of those issues are in the omnibus in just a moment. First, let’s talk about what’s missing. Or, should I say “missing” – since not everyone agrees.

What is Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 5 “missing”?

The initial solicited contents of Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 5 skips two runs that many buyers of all of the X-Men omnibus line anticipated it would include, for reasons I’ll cover below.

Here is what the contents do not currently include:

Uncanny X-Men (1963) Annual 10 and New Mutants (1983) Annual 2
Avengers (1963) #263; Fantastic Four (1961) #286; X-Factor (1986) #1-8 & Annual 1, and potentially some other related material

If you know your X-mapping well, you will immediately see the problem with these exclusions! By leaving Annual 10 out of this volume, Marvel has invented a difference between the mapping of the X-Men “Classic Omnibus” line that begins with Volume 1 and the X-Men “Event Omnibus” line that begins with Mutant Massacre. But, there’s no reason that difference has to exist!

If you’re not a X-Men mapping X-Pert yet, keep reading for a complete X-Plainer. [Read more…] about Newly Announced: Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 5 (+ the problem with its mapping explained)

X-Factor (2020) #5 – Resurrection Drama and The Krakoan Community | This Week in X!

December 3, 2020 by krisis

It’s “This Week in X” for X-Factor (2020) #5, released 2 December 2020! This is a full-spoilers post and episode.

The premise set up by this issue is that The Five want X-Factor’s oversight on more than just proof of death. They’re asking them for the go-ahead to continue with resurrections after Rockslide’s troubled return at the beginning of X of Swords (the details which it doesn’t seem like Lorna has shared with the rest of this group).

X-Factor (2020) #5 really needed this episode all to itself to spread out, because there are a STAGGERING amount of characters for us to cover in this issue – so many we don’t quite mention them all (sorry Mercury!).

We discuss many of those characters; the post-X of Swords resurrection drama as it relates to Wind Dancer, Rockslide, and Gorgon; Leah Williams’ masterful Emma Frost; terrific and heartbreaking data pages; and how well Leah Williams and David Baldeon weave a complex sense of community on Krakoa.

Join Peter, Tyler, and Fariha’s specially-nominated guest New Mutant, Harry, for this epic discussion on “This Week in X,” the show where we cover every in-continuity X-Men comic book released by Marvel, every week.

Now that X of Swords has ended, we’ll be posting an individual video for each X-Men issue every week, with our combined conversation (plus our intro discussions!) presented as a single podcast episode.