Near Mint Condition announced a Marvel omnibus for May 2027 that sticks with Marvel’s dedication to quickly collecting runs by their hottest creators as soon as they’re completed… plus, a hotly demanded reprint for May 2027: announcing Avengers by Jed MacKay Omnibus plus a reprint of Avengers by Jonathan Hickman Omnibus Vol. 1!
These two books are the absolute peak of modern day Avengers in two different ways. If you are a fan of Avengers on film, these are the sorts of blockbuster runs that will resonate with you as as a comic book reader.
Avengers by Jed MacKay Omnibus collects the complete run of Avengers (2023). This was a familiar, back-to-basics Avengers cast with a very modern sensibility drawn from two big DC flagship teams: Justice League & The Authority.
Like the Justice League, MacKay’s Avengers spent much of this run headquartered above Earth so they could rapidly respond to incidents anywhere around the globe. And, like The Authority, this was a hyper-powerful team who was fighting for the very survival of Earth itself as they try to beat back a series of “Tribulation Events” … predicted by Kang!
I loved absolutely everything about this blockbuster run, which eventually brought Storm back into the fold as an Avenger and broke artist Farid Karami to widespread acclaim. While I appreciate street-level superheroes, I like my flagship superteams big, bold, and fighting for the very survival of the human race!
I don’t quite love absolutely everything about this omnibus, though. That’s because it should absolutely double-dip MacKay’s Blood Hunt (2024) event series in its entirety. The event was effectively a full arc of Avengers (2023), complete with the entire cast! Blood Hunt was absolutely one of the many Tribulation Events that Kang warned the team about, and this book will feel weirdly incomplete without it included.
That said, it’s still a terrific omnibus of strong modern material, including art that absolutely demands to be seen in oversize format (even if the coloring was a bit shit).
Meanwhile, Marvel is also back to print for the second time with Avengers by Jonathan Hickman Omnibus Vol. 1, just four years after a prior reprint in 2023 (which was six years after the first printing in 2017).
Let’s face it: Hickman’s Avengers ought to be an evergreen title for Marvel. It’s a historic run by one of the hottest writers of this millennium. It tells one massive, complete, complex story. And, it has been pilfered several times over by the MCU, including Thanos’s Black Order and the plot of the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday!
I’m on the record as finding Hickman’s Avengers run quite tiresome… but, not this half of the run. I largely love everything about this through the end of Infinity (2013) and then the wheels fall off for me. I think that’s because you could just feel Hickman’s stress levels rising on the back half of the series as he jettisoned all of the fun in-between arcs material and had to stay laser-focused on main plot threads and looming deadlines to make it to Secret Wars in 2015.
You can see the contents of both of these books in my Avengers Collecting Guide & Reading Order (2010 – Present)! Did you have the MacKay book on your Marvel Omnibus 2027 Fantasy Draft ballot? It was #15 for me, so I am reaping some MAJOR points for this one!
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