Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

X-Men Legacy

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.

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Updated: Guide to X-Men Legacy

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This week’s X-Men guide update includes some of my favorite runs of all time, because they each had keen single-character focus that mined past continuity to allow characters to grow and change. It’s my Guide to X-Men Legacy.

Guide to X-Men Legacy

Guide to X-Men Legacy

X-Men Legacy was Mike Carey’s reinvention of X-Men (1991) in the wake of “Messiah Complex” in 2008. He made the bold move of jettisoning a fan-favorite team lead by Rogue to refocus the book entirely on Professor Xavier. It was one of the few times in X-Men history Xavier was truly the lead character in an X-Men book – the other being Claremont’s short-lived Excalibur (2004).

After a year of focusing on Xavier, Carey pivoted his focus back to Rogue. Rogue had been a lead character many times over, even anchoring a pair of mini-series and an ongoing title. However, no one had ever before dug so deeply into her character and her powers as Carey. In giving Rogue a respite from the idea of her powers as a curse, he was able to unify the many aspects of her personality we had seen (and loved) over the years – as revolutionary, rebel, leader, lover, and mentor.

Simon Spurrier did something similar on his 2012-2014 run of X-Men Legacy, except he was working with a character with barely any history at all! Professor Xaver’s son Legion had only ever figured heavily into a handful of past comic arcs – his introduction in Claremont’s New Mutants, the final 30 issues of Claremont’s run, LegionQuest as a lead-in to Age of Apocalypse, and Zeb Wells’ recent run on New Mutants. Yet, Spurrier treated him similarly to how Carey dealt with Rogue – digging into why his powers and his life had always been so fractured, and what his humanity looked like beneath that.

I wish this Guide to X-Men Legacy update included new collected editions, especially of Carey’s incredible run on Rogue. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen new collections containing any Legacy issues since the 2018 reprint of Spurrier’s run, aside from a few issues recollected in last year’s Avengers vs. X-Men omnibus. That doesn’t mean there was nothing to update! I added links to buy and read the entire run digitally, clarified the contents of several collections, and slightly tweaked the recommended reading oder.

With Marvel just wrapping up the reprints of the 2001-2012 era of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men (1991) last year it feels like the time is right to recollect X-Men Legacy (2008), which has never been collected beyond its original hardcovers and trade paperbacks. Perhaps we’ll see it recollected in the new “Modern Epic” line – especially if Rogue continues to have a prominent role in the X-Men line in 2023 and beyond.

Crushing Comics S01E073 – X-Men: Endangered Species, Messiah Complex, & Age of X

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I’m back with the second half of my “big brick of X-Men” cliffhanger from Monday’s episode – and this half has one of my all-time favorite X-Men stories! Hear why Messiah Complex both resolves threads of House of M and makes the best jumping-on point for reading about Cyclops as a revolutionary.

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

Episode 73 features X-Men: Endangered Species and X-Men: Messiah Complex (covered in the Guide to Uncanny X-Men by Brubaker, Fraction, & Gillen) and X-Men: Age of X (covered in the Guide to X-Men Legacy).

Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)

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This is the end, my friends! The last in a series of four posts covering how Marvel could cover every X-Men comic book in omnibus volumes.

This post covers every X-Men series from Messiah Complex to the end of Marvel Now in an effort to give you maximum ideas for the The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot, where you vote for the comic runs you’d most like to see in an oversized format. Monday I covered all of X-Men from 1963 to 1991, Tuesday I reviewed 1991 to 2001, and yesterday I broke down 2001 to 2008.

With 21 more omnibuses from Messiah Complex to AvX and another 10 from Marvel Now, this edition brings our grand total of potential X-Men volumes to 113 possible omnibuses – which begs the question: How many of these could we possibly see in our lifetimes before books become completely obsolete and comics are downloaded directly into our brains?

At Marvel’s current rate of only a handful of X-Men omnibuses a year, it’s never going to happen.

Yet, with most Marvel omnibuses selling between 1,000 and 2,500 units in their first week, it makes me wonder how many of these books we could see if Marvel abandoned the outdated Direct Market model for determining their pre-order volume and sell-through.

Picture this – in October 2017 Marvel partners with Kickstarter plus one of the big online comic book sellers as a distributor to introduce the new “X-Men Omnibus Club: Year 1.” [Read more…] about Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)