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Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – New Material

January 10, 2012 by krisis

Uncanny X-Men issue #534.1, from Uncanny X-Men: Breaking Point

Today I bring you a list of the best collections of new X-Men material released in 2011, which collect stories originally published over the last 18 months of comics.

Occasionally I wonder if comic collecting as an adult is merely a shameless attempt at recapturing our youth now that we have the budget to appreciate it properly – especially as I and many other fans (let’s be honest) fetishize premiere format reprints of the comics we coveted as a kids. (Last week’s post covered the best of those from 2011.)

Is there anything to this hobby other than rewarding our inner teenage geeks?

If there’s an answer to be found in X-Men comics, it must be on this list. These are the twelve new X-Men stories that captured my imagination like those old issues I still obsess over, and I categorize “the wonder of feeling like a kid again” separately from “trying to recapture youthful feelings with a dose of well-preserved nostalgia.” [Read more…] about Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – New Material

Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – Reprinted Material

January 3, 2012 by krisis

Welcome to 2012 – I am still a comic book geek.

Specifically, the X-Men.

Yep. That’s a lot of comic books.

Specifically, I own something like 95% of every X-Men comic book ever reprinted.

On New Years’ Eve I said to myself, “You dashingly handsome scoundrel, how can you use your obsession to aid people who like the X-Men a normal, healthy amount – unlike you?”

The answer? I will count down for you the top twelve collected editions reprinting X-Men comics originally released before 2010. There’s a vast world of thousands of X-Men comics that have been released since 1963, and not all of them are readily available to buy in book format. These reprints mean that hard-to-get, or never-before-reprinted issues can be bought in handy collections with better reproduction of the line art than original issues.

(As for new X-Men material from 2011, that will require a whole new post to cover!) [Read more…] about Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – Reprinted Material

Avengers & New Avengers flagship titles (2010 – present) – The Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Updated Apr 10, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Avengers flagships comic books from 2010 to present, including Avengers & New Avengers, Avengers by Hickman, Avengers by Aaron, & Avengers by MacKay via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Comics – Guide to Marvel Comics. Last updated April 2025 with titles scheduled for release through December 2025.

In 2005, Marvel stopped publishing a comic called “Avengers” for the first time since 1963 in the wake of Brian Bendis’s “Avengers: Disassembled” event. In its place was his relaunched New Avengers, and later Mighty Avengers along with it.

That changed in 2010, when Marvel and Bendis launched the twin Avengers flagship books of Avengers (2010) and New Avengers (2010), each focused on a different element of the team – the heavy-hitters and the street-level characters. He would later add Avengers Assemble (2012) to focus on a movie-friendly team.

After that point, Avengers flagships continued into Jonathan Hickman’s relaunch of Avengers (2012) and New Avengers (2013), his Infinity (2013) event, the addition of Avengers World (2014), and the lead-up to his Secret Wars in 2015.

The return of the Marvel Universe launched with two flagship titles – All-New All-Different Marvel included Mark Waid’s All-New All-Different Avengers (2015) and Al Ewing’s New Avengers (2016). It later added David Walker’s Occupy Avengers (2016).

The refocus on classic characters and foes in Marvel Legacy saw those two flagship titles transform into Waid’s Avengers (2017) and Ewing’s U.S.Avengers (2017), culminating in the “Avengers: No Surrender” weekly event. (Some of the All-New team also spun out into Waid’s Champions (2017) – see Guide to The Champions.)

Then, Marvel Fresh Start kicked off with the launch of Jason Aaron’s lengthy run on Avengers (2018), which includes the Heroes Reborn (2021) event and tie-ins to Avengers / X-Men / Eternals: Judgment Day (2022). (While “Avengers: No Road Home” is listed below, for Savage Avengers see Guide to Conan the Barbarian).

This guide tracks all of those flagship Avengers titles from 2010 forward as well as supporting books and events tied closely to those titles and Avengers one-shots from those periods.

For Avengers+X-Men titles from 2010 to present, check out the Guide to Uncanny Avengers. Also, see Guide to Young Avengers, which includes both actual “Young Avengers” titles as well youthful or in-training teams like Avengers A.I. (2013).

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Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers – Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers comic books via omnibuses and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Collecting Avengers Graphic Novels: A Definitive Guide. Last updated November 2024 with titles scheduled for release through March 2025.

Secret Warriors was a rarity when it launched in 2009 – a brand new team book not relying on an existing name and from a creator not only new to Marvel, but new to comics in general!

(You could perhaps argue that the concept was a mashup of the youthful New Warriors and the variable-cast Secret Defenders, that it was a play on Bendis’s Secret War event with Nick Fury, or even that it was an early Hickman hint of his impending Secret Wars(!) – but that’s an ultra-geeky conversion for another time!)

That creator behind the new title was Jonathan Hickman and the rest, as they say, is history.

Jonathan Hickman became one of the most famous writers in comics in the span of just half a decade. Secret Warriors was the first building block of his extensive examination of Marvel’s secret history both on Earth and across the universe, tied together by Nick Fury and culminating in Secret Wars in 2015.

While Secret Warriors was still running, Marvel spun off a new Avengers team at the top of The Heroic Age in fall 2010 called Secret Avengers. Though it had no direct connection to Secret Warriors, the theme was similar – as America’s top cop, Steve Rogers assembled a rotating strikeforce of covert Avengers to tackle the biggest mysteries and threats.

Secret Warriors ended its run as a self-contained series, but the Secret Avengers branding stuck – the title would see additional volumes that collapsed the concepts of the two books, with SHIELD running the secret team of Avengers. Both series bear a strong resemblance to the television show Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD – it has re-used many of Hickman’s concepts and characters from Secret Warriors. [Read more…] about Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers – Collecting Guide & Reading Order

New Avengers by Brian Bendis Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Updated Jan 30, 2026! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting New Avengers (2005) by Brian Bendis comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Collecting Avengers: A Definitive Guide. Last updated January 2026 with titles scheduled for release through May 2026.

Collecting New Avengers by Brian Bendis (2005 – 2010)

NAvgV01 - 0001 The Avengers no longer existed in the wake of Brian Bendis’s shocking Avengers Disassembled, but a breakout from The Raft super-villain prison brings together a team of unlikely allies – classic Avengers Captain America and Iron Man, but also long-time solo heroes like Spider-Man! As they cooperate to wrangle the villains and dig deeper into the mystery of their breakout, they quickly realize they are a team of new Avengers.

This title offered an ever-changing cast of heroes who gathered only to be splintered again and again by events like Civil War and Secret Invasion. Altogether, the series descends into one of Marvel’s darkest periods before it resolves back to a unified set of Avengers teams at the end of Seige.

Along the way, scribe Brian Michael Bendis makes some unlikely changes to the Avengers franchise – Wolverine and Spider-Man join the team, and Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Spider-Woman, and Dr. Strange all become fixtures. In fact, after Civil War splinters the team and discards Iron Man and Ms. Marvel there are hardly any “classic” Avengers on the team, save for a disguised Hawkeye!

With the launch of this series, Marvel began the practice of releasing an initial “Premiere Hardcover” of each run before offering a trade paperbacks, meaning that there are always two editions of the same book with the same issues collected. Then, later, Marvel issued “Deluxe Hardcovers”to collect multiple editions of the original hardcovers (which quickly fall out of print). Finally, some single issues are also featured elsewhere as a part of event tie-ins or creation collections.

For a full reading order of this period of Avengers, see Avengers Reading Order: The Bendis Years.

There are several options for collecting this run of New Avengers: