comic books

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

Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Apr 10, 2025! The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Marvel’s Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner, in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2025 with titles scheduled for release through November 2025.

Collecting Hulk

There are hundreds of different collections of Hulk comic books starting from his debut in 1962 and continuing through the modern day. 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 Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Defenders – Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Updated Mar 25, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Defenders comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through July 2025.

Who are The Defenders? Or, perhaps the better question is, what are The Defenders?

The concept of this unofficial team of heroes originated with the cancellation of Dr. Strange’s 1968 series, itself an outgrowth of Strange Tales. When a multi-part story teaming up the Doctor with Namor and Hulk was slotted to begin in what turned out to be his final issue (#183), the remaining chapters wound up running in Sub-Mariner (1968) #22 and Incredible Hulk (1968) #126.

Later, the Namor/Hulk team-up added Silver Surfer to the mix in Sub-Mariner (1968) #34-35 as “Titans Three.” Then, the entire founding foursome of The Defnders assembled in Marvel Feature #1-3 before spinning off into their own title.

This quartet of characters worked so well together because they are all massively powerful loners. Each one of them could single-handedly battle a Silver Age Avengers line-up to a stand-still. Plus, they’d each bristle at trying to remain a member of a team in the long-term.

Together, they kept that curmudgeonly attitude, which made the main draw of The Defenders that it was a team that wasn’t a team – all while battling enemies from other dimensions and outer space. The original quartet was completed with a fifth member – Valkyrie – who debuted in the pages of issue #4.

The book later added other unlikely team members like Luke Cage, Moon Knight, Hellcat, and Daimon Hellstrom.

The original, 1972 Defenders volume has been collected in a variety of formats as a key part of Marvel’s transition from Silver to Bronze age. Over the years the original team has seen many revivals of its title and concepts (both of loners and of protecting our dimension).

In 2017 the title took a left turn as it was co-opted for Marvel’s Netflix team of Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones – who could have easily been deemed Mighty Avengers based on those characters’ recent publication history.
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Moon Knight – The Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Updated Mar 25, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading order on collecting Moon Knight comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through November 2025.

Moon Knight is Marvel’s distorted Bruce Wayne.

Marc Spector is a willingly schizophrenic, playboy millionaire, former military mercenary, and sometimes cab driver who avenges crime while tacitly under the command of an Egyptian god, whose powers are both a blessing and a curse that deepens Spector’s insanity.

Basically, he’s every bit as unstable as Batman ought to be played, with the added bonus of multiple identities and never quite being sure he can believe the reality around him.
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Runaways – Comic Book Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Runaways comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated November 2024 with titles scheduled for release through January 2025.

The Runaways are a unique gift to the Marvel Universe from author Brian K. Vaughan, who would later write such modern classics of the medium as Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Saga.

The Runaways are are a team that are not a team and a heroes that don’t mean to be heroes. They’re just kids – regular, average kids. They aren’t even friends with each other.

Instead, they are thrust together by the insane circumstance of their parent’s plotting. Some of them discover inherent powers they were never aware of, while others inherit special artifacts or technology, but they are kids first and super-powered teens second.

Over time that initial direction has faded, new cast members have been added, and the Runaways have begun to make more connections across the Marvel Universe.

Yet, part of the continuing gift of the Runaways – and part of why their new connections are so interesting – is that they never needed to be in the Marvel Universe in order to exist. Vaughan could have just as easily penned them as a creator-owned title. It’s surprising he did not, as Marvel was long since out of the game of creating new teams of characters wholesale without attaching them to another franchise.

As a result, the Runaways cast offers something magical every time they do bump up against a Marvel stalwart. Those characters seem more fantastical to the Runaways than they do to us as readers, which in turn helps us to see them with new eyes.

Over time, these random characters thrust together and forced to be friends and occasional heroes have transformed into Marvel’s most-modern family – a family of that chose each other, and will support each other until the end.

Thunderbolts and Dark Avengers – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated May 8, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Thunderbolts and Dark Avengers comics books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Comics – Guide to Marvel Comics. Last updated May 2025 with titles scheduled for release through August 2025.

The Thunderbolts were a curious creation for Marvel, and its most-recent enduring property after 1991’s Deadpool. The team was introduced in early 1997, at a time when the Avengers and Fantastic Four had been banished to the Heroes Reborn pocket universe in the wake of Onslaught. Their absence left a super-team gap in the modern Marvel universe, which was obliging filled by the Thunderbolts.

The Thunderbolts were posed as a brand new super team not only in the Marvel Universe, but in the promotion around the new title. That made it all the more shocking when the end of the first issue revealed the do-good team to be the Masters of Evil masquerading behind newly made heroic identities! Fans flipped out, sales shot up, and Marvel had a new franchise on its hands.

After a brief hiatus in the early 2000s, the title returned and ran through the beginning of Marvel Now. However, it would twice detour its cast to a second title – Dark Avengers. [Read more…] about Thunderbolts and Dark Avengers – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order