comic books

Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!

Definitive Spider-Woman Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Spider-Woman and Spider-Girl comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated November 2024 with titles scheduled for release through February 2024.

Marvel’s Many Spider-Women

Marvel never intended to have a Spider-Woman.

It’s true! The first Spider-Woman was introduced in a rush because Marvel was concerned that the rights-holder of the Spider-Man cartoon would be able to secure a copyright on the character by introducing her first.

Since then, the codename of “Spider-Woman” has had a tangled history at Marvel, being occupied by no less than four characters (plus a handful of Spider-Girls). However, none of these characters were part of Marvel’s A-list until 2006, when Spider-Woman joined the Avengers. Since then, she has been one of the most-used guest-stars in the Marvel Universe.

That development greatly simplifies keeping tracking of the Spider-Woman herself, but in 2014 Marvel amped up the Spider-Women in a major way, introducing Silk and Spider-Gwen, plus re-emphasizing Spider-Girl. [Read more…] about Definitive Spider-Woman Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Avengers (1963) #1-402 (1963-1996) – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Sept 29 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Avengers comic books from 1963 to 1996, including Avengers (1963) #1-402 as written by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Roger Stern, John Byrne, Bob Harras, and more via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Comics – Guide to Marvel Comics. Last updated September 2025 with titles scheduled for release through June 2026.

The Fantastic Four were Marvel’s “first family” and The Avengers were its first super-group.

In its 1963 debut, Avengers pulled together all but one of Marvel’s most-successful early Silver Age heroes from their disparate anthology titles – Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Ant-Man & Wasp. (The hero they omitted was Spider-Man.)

After just four issues the line-up was tweaked to drop Hulk and add Captain America, unfrozen after the Golden Age in a sly bit of retconning from Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, and the Avengers as we know and love them were born.

The Silver Age run of the book established many of the relationships we take for granted in modern day Marvel. Issue #16 found Cap leading the new “kooky quartet” of former villains Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. A few years later the team would add characters like Black Widow and Black Panther to the cast and head into the famous storylines that debuted Vision and Ultron.

That original 1963 Avengers title lasted for 33 years until it was cancelled in the wake of the 1996 Onslaught crossover event. By the time the book ended it had seen dozens of heroes become members, eventually graduating from being anchored by its “holy trinity” of Iron Man, Thor, & Cap to feature a broad array of cast members like Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel, Starfox, She-Hulk, Hercules, Crystal, Sersi, and more!

This guide addresses how read and collect every issue of this main Avengers title. If you’re looking for other Avengers titles from the same period, they have their own guides – including a Guide to Avengers West Coast. And, if you want to continue reading Avengers from this point forward, simply move on to the Guide to Avengers (1996 – 2005).

There are hundreds of different collections of this era of this initial thirty-year run of The Avengers. However, there are a few specific formats of books that cover large portions of this title, and I’ll cover those first – oversize Omnibuses, premium hardcover Masterworks, affordable digest Mighty Marvel Masterworks, chunky paperback Epic Collections, and the classic black-and-white Essentials.

Then, I’ll get into the issue-by-issue chronological breakdown of the 400+ issues of this title across the Silver, Bronze. and Copper AKA Modern Age – including where the run was intersected by major stories like Secret Wars, Inferno, Infinity Gauntlet, and Onslaught.

Note: This guide is focused on collections that will allow you to collect a continuous run or key stories from The Avengers. This guide does not contain every collection that includes just a handful of issues of Avengers. For example, a modern Doctor Doom collection containing two issues of Avengers would be omitted.

Master of Kung Fu gets collected (or: After 100 years, Fu Manchu is still a villain)

September 25, 2015 by krisis

This was the news last night from the Diamond Retailer Summit via Heidi MacDonald, EIC of Comics Beat:

Holy shirt!!!!! MASTER of Kung Fu omnibus!!!!!! Huzzah!!!! #diamondsummit pic.twitter.com/TtEj382Giz

— Heidi MacDonald (@Comixace) September 24, 2015

Photo of Marvel’s slide from the summit by Heidi MacDonald of ComicsBeat.

This is a series you’ve probably never heard of, yet it’s both historically significant and solidly entrenched in the top 10 most-wished-for Omnibus editions from Marvel’s online collector community.

What’s the story behind the excitement and why does this seemingly obscure series merit four massive volumes? To figure out the answer, we need to travel back in time over 40 years to 1974.

Similar to Marvel 70s horror titles Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night that emerged in 1972, Master of Kung Fu both featured a major non-Marvel character and was built to serve a public craze.

In this case, the craze was the titular Kung Fu. It was blowing up in the summer of 1973 thanks to a culmination of factors including the television show Kung Fu, a number of successful movies imported from China’s booming cinema, and one man: Bruce Lee. To read more background, I suggest starting with a marvelous pair of blog posts from “A Shroud of Thoughts” – parts 1 and 2.

Marvel wanted to license the popular Kung Fu to take advantage of the nationwide interest in martial arts (which also yielded Iron Fist), but they failed to obtain the rights. Instead, they turned to another pre-existing mythology: the story behind villain Fu Manchu, a fictional criminal mastermind who coined the mustache of the same name. He was created by author Sax Rohmer in 1912 in a serialized novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Fu Manchu was popular enough to merit an initial trilogy of serialized books in the 1910s and even more starting in the 1930s, plus a number of film adaptions ranging from 1929 to 1980. The character can be a controversial one – even in the 1930s he was seen as a racist caricature representing the “Yellow Peril” of an East-Asian threat to the wider, whiter world.

Enter Marvel Comics. [Read more…] about Master of Kung Fu gets collected (or: After 100 years, Fu Manchu is still a villain)

All-New, All-Different Marvel – a book-by-book break-down

September 24, 2015 by krisis

ANAD-Marvel-Comics-2 It’s upon us! Even though Marvel’s mega-event Secret Wars won’t quite be over until December, they’re pressing ahead with a line-wide All New, All Different Marvel relaunch starting in October with over sixty new books debuting into the spring, and more announced each week. That’s a lot of comics, many of them with completely fresh directions and creative teams – how can you wade through to find the most-interesting titles?

As always, I took care of the sifting for you! Here’s a list of every book Marvel has announced to date, the amount of hype I’m feeling on it, a one-sentence summary of the concept and creative team, and the elevator pitch on why you should care.

Ready? Here we go! Updated November 2!

A-Force
Hype Factor:
What is it? An all-female team of Marvel heroes
Who’s creating it? Written by G. Willow Wilson (Ms Marvel) with art by Jorge Molina, one of Marvel’s most consistent artists

Why read it? Even for someone like me who lives for the women of Marvel, this assemblage of female heroes seems like a bit of a hodgepodge. At least Marvel Now’s Fearless Defenders had a cleverer central trope, but, it began with a pair of B-list players. Here, Marvel is pulling out all of the stops short of Storm and it’s probably going to pay off. Plus, Wilson was ace on her brief run on X-Men Vol. 4 – she clearly did the homework on the character’s rich histories, and they never sounded so good.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Hype Factor:
What is it? Marvel’s comic version of the TV team
Who’s creating it? Original Green Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim

Why read it? It’s Agent Colson and friends mashing up with/against Hydra, which should be very palatable to Marvel’s TV fans. However, it’s going to take a lot for this to top both the prior Coulson-starring books, Ales Kot’s Secret Avengers and Mark Waid’s Agents of SHIELD. Plus, Guggenheim was weak on his X-Men arc in Marvel Now – the history was there, but the voices were off. Is that because a TV writer writes for actors and not pictures on a page? Either way, I’ll believe it when I read it.

All-New, All-Different Avengers
Hype Factor:
What is it? A team of second-generation heroes takes the Avengers mantle (but not the budget)
Who’s creating it? Writer Mark Waid with artists Adam Kubert and Mahmud Asrar

Why read it? Take four of Marvel’s hottest properties of the past few years – Falcon as Captain America, the black and hispanic teen Spider-Man, a female Thor, and the new Afgani-American teen Ms. Marvel. Add a pubescent Nova and cinematic smashes Iron Man and Vision. Oh, and Waid will write it hot off of one of the best (and most playful) Daredevil runs of all time. Yeah: everybody’s going to buy this comic book. I’m slightly less excited by the artists – Kubert is wildly uneven and Marvel has yet to find the right colorist for Asrar. Still, this book will be a smash.

my first custom-bound comics project

September 20, 2015 by krisis

Top to bottom: Marvel’s B&W Essential She-Hulk Collection, my bind of the same issues, my Sub-Mariner bind, a color Spider-Man Epic collection of about the same length as my bind, and a color Marvel Masterworks collection of about half the length without its dust jacket.

Just a quick one today to share a project I completed earlier this year.

Even with my primary focus being on graphic novel collections of individual comic books, I have a ton of single “floppy” comics boxed up in my house. Some of them are from my original 1990s collection, which I’ve bought others to fill gaps between official collected editions. The rub is I am completely disinterested in reading single comic book. So much picking up and putting down, plus those annoying bags and boards to keep them safe. I love a book I can bring with me to bed or on my commute.

As a result, I took a spare low-grade run of The Savage She-Hulk plus some cheap Saga of The Sub-Mariner recap comics and sent them off to be custom bound per my exact specifications. Some people carefully clip out unnecessary pages and back covers, but I wanted to begin by just getting some whole comics bound.

Here are the results – the only difference between the two books is that the She-Hulk bind is oversewn (stitches pass through all pages a short distance in from the spine) and Sub-Mariner is sewn through the fold (each comic is effectively one signature of the book, with stitches through the fold of the book).

What I loved about learning about book-binding was that it wasn’t just about comic books. I didn’t get to work on anything with a hardcover in my years of print production, and this really opened my eyes to the types of binding methods used in the books we encounter every day.