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

Wolverine, Logan – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated May 8, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading order on collecting Wolverine via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Collecting X-Men: A Definitive Guide. Last updated May 2025 with titles scheduled for release through January 2026.

Collecting Wolverine

Wolverine is second only to Spider-Man in sheer quantity of stories told about a single character in the modern Marvel Universe. Collecting his every appearance is a close-to impossible task.

That can make it hard to be a fan who wants to read about your favorite 5’3″ Canucklehead without picking up expensive back issues. Luckily, those comics have been collected into dozens of softcover graphic novels, called “trade paperbacks.”

This guide lists three types of Wolverine collections – ongoing series, limited series where he is a title or starring character, and significant story-arcs. It is split into several sections and eras: [Read more…] about Wolverine, Logan – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

But I Regress, pt. 2

August 11, 2010 by krisis

Where were we? Oh, I was telling you about how with the responsibility of owning a home I have suddenly regressed to being a teenager.

Last time I detailed my overwhelming love for comic books, and how it was vanquished by the great expanse of the internet.

To this day I marvel at how mercenary I was about my decision. When it came down to $40 a month on comics or on internet access I phoned up the comic store and canceled my orders without a second thought.

How could I?

Comics were a world I could dive into and experience alone, but the internet was a world I could lose myself in along with millions of other people.

To put it in today’s terms, comics weren’t social.

I wanted them to be. I’d skulk at the comic shop … beg my mother to let me find a pen pal at the back of The Maxx. I would read the letters page in X-Men and imagine being able to talk all day with people as obsessed with the characters as I was.

The internet had all of that, available 24/7. Within days I was on a Dungeons & Dragons listserve and in a Final Fantasy fanfic club. After years of being a pretty insular only child, I found out I had things in common with people. Lots of things!

And, while building my first website became a top priority, so did Warcraft II.

I have never been much of a PC gamer, so was completely unfamiliar with the concept of real-time strategy war games. When my friend Lucas made me download the WCII demo over my 14.4k modem I was floored – it was like Risk crossed with Dungeons & Dragons, but with none of the plastic pieces or dice rolls.

(I was the kind of kid that, when bored, would set up elaborate six-person games of Risk between my GI Joes and play each side against each other for hours. Actually, I still do that a few times a year with my LOTR Risk, just sans the GI Joes.)

(My wife finds this fascinating)

All it took was one modem game of Warcraft II on the single demo map and I was hooked. I had an army of orcs to do my bidding, and friends to trade taunts with all night. And sea turtles!

I had no interest in quick, decisive battles. When we both bought the full game I’d make maps packed with endless gold mines so we could entrench and battle for hours on end.

Much as my comic obsession stayed mostly contained to X-Men, my RTS urge was isolated to Blizzard games. Even after buying my first guitar put the whammy on many of my other adolescent hobbies (say goodbye, fanfic!), I remained a devoted late-night WCII addict.

The addiction was made worse senior year when one of my friends slipped me their extra copy of Starcraft. It was Warcraft . . . in space!

I think that – and how it relates to my current predicament – is a story for next time.

The impetus for this whole tale is my recently-launched Guide to Collecting X-Men in TPBs, which is meant to aid former adolescent addicts such as myself in catching up on what they’ve missed.

But I Regress, pt. 1

August 3, 2010 by krisis

With the launch of my monster definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels, I have officially become a fifteen year-old.

Allow me to explain. Or, to begin to, as I’m sure this is a multiple-post-spanning story (just as that website feature was a multiple-month spanning obsession to research).

A few months ago Philly-local social media mover/shaker/sandwich-connoisseur @MikeyIl threw a series of events for the Ford #FiestaMovement. One of them was an all-local art show, featuring work by my partner-in-fame Britt Miller, as well as Eddidit and others.

Being Britt’s unpaid intern / personal assistant / life coach and a faithful supporter of friends and local artists, I got my ass there – even though the event was smack in the middle of negotiating the price of our house with our Realtor over the phone.

(Literally. Drunk friends: “What are you doing?” Me, to phone: “Hold on a second.” Me, to friends: “Oh, I just got another few thousand dollars knocked off the price of our house.” Drunk friends: “Wowwww.”)

Where was that fateful art show held?

Brave New Worlds. A comic book shop.

Here at Crushing Krisis I haven’t ever fully explained my addiction to comic books, c. 11/1991 – 4/1996.

X-Men #24, one of my favorite comic covers.

It was a brief but tumultuous affair. Comic books combine my love of serial narrative with an OCD urge to make meticulous, alphabetical lists. They created a 10-year-old who would do anything to earn $40 a month to pick up every book bearing the image of Wonder Woman or an X-Man.

(Seriously, I’m surprised I wasn’t peddling coke for my neighbor. It’s a good thing my guitar habit didn’t get to drug-running levels of expense until after college, when I was salaried.)

For only collecting for four-and-a-half years, my comic collection is prodigious. Not only did I collect new issues weekly, but in the pre-spreadsheet days the adolescent OCD Godzilla in my soul – a mere tadpole, at the time – compiled lists of back issues by hand… lists twenty and thirty pages long, complete with estimated budgets and timelines for purchase. Every few months my father engaged my whim, and I checked off line after line.

I was hardcore. The guys at the comic store treated me like I was twice my age (now ironic) because I was so on top of my shit with my pull lists and my back issue pricing and my discussions of the Magneto’s morality and if the ends truly justified the means.

Then came the internet. AOL dial-up cost by the hour, and I was hooked on it within minutes of my first sign-in in January of 1996. Four months later my wallet issued an ultimatum: limit my internet usage, or jettison my comic addiction – now complicated by Marvel’s 90s’ decadence of holographic covers and limited series.

The real decider was probably a demo of Warcraft II, a living digital board of Risk I could play over and over again with my friends over my 14.4 baud modem.

I dropped the comics and never looked back.

Until last month.

(To be continued! In the meantime, if you’re a closet x-fan who wouldn’t know a pull list from their elbow, check out definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels – the easiest (and cheapest) way to be an adult comic book fan.)

Excalibur – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive, chronological comic book collecting guide and reading order for Marvel’s Excalibur and Knights of X in omnibuses, hardcovers, trade paperback, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated September 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

Introduction to Excalibur

Excalibur is one of the most peculiar of all of the original X-Men spinoffs, and that’s a large part of why it is was beloved by fans and continues to be revived – though never quite in the same form.

In 1988, Excalibur was a light-hearted departure from a particularly heavy period of main X-Men series. Chris Claremont packed up three of his favorite X-Men – Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, and Rachel Summers (Phoenix II) – and flew them across the pond to the pencils of former Marvel UK collaborator Alan Davis. They added Marvel UK characters (and non-mutants) Meggan and Captain Britain (Psylocke’s brother) to create an irreverent, firmly British spin on an X-book.

It initially launched in the wake of “Fall of the Mutants” in Uncanny X-Men. Claremont’s flagship book found the mutants besieged from foes on all sides.

The lighthearted Nightcrawler and idealistic Kitty Pryde were both early sacrifices to this status quo as casualties of “Mutant Massacre” a year earlier. By the time they healed the X-Men were no longer a fit for them – and, in continuity, believed to be dead!

Meanwhile, Claremont creation Captain Britain had wrapped up a 10-year run at Marvel UK across a number of different comic titles and anthology. The latter five years of his life were stewarded a by a rising star artist named Alan Davis (as well as, briefly, Alan Moore), but with Davis moving on to work on Batman and the Outsiders it looked like the end of the line for Captain Britain.

Claremont collaborated with Davis on a pair of annuals that imported the character (and his sister, Psylocke) to the states, but he was too unknown in the American market to support his own ongoing there.

(There was also the problem of Rachel Summers, who had been supplanted as team psychic by Psylocke, and who brought her own complications of her extensive future knowledge, connection to Cyclops, and massive powers.)

This was the genesis of Excalibur, which saw Claremont reteaming with Davis and using his extensive knowledge of British culture (he was born there) to return to Captain Britain, to give Nightcrawler room to be the dashing swashbuckler he always hinted at in X-Men, and to write Kitty’s coming of age away from the horrors facing the X-Men.

Excalibur was my favorite book in the 90s because of its stable core of lovable characters, and its sensible handling of alternate timelines.

The challenge of the “Excalibur” brand name is that X-Men fans tend to associate it as much with Kitty and Nightcrawler as they do with Captain Britain, but the former two characters have long since been reabsorbed by the core of the X-franchise while Brian Braddock has moved firmly away from mutants.

In 2001, Ben Raab – who had written the final fifth of the initial volume – returned with a four-issue mini-series to follow up on some plot threads.

Claremont relaunched the title in 2004 as focused on Xavier and Magneto living on Genosha in the run-up to House of M, but the name never made any sense for a book that was completely divorced from the themes of the original.

Later, in the wake of House of M introduced a “New” version set in London that paired Captain Britain with Dazzler and Juggernaut, but didn’t capture fan’s hearts like the original did.

In 2019, the Dawn of X relaunch curated by Jonathan Hickman tapped the “Excalibur” name for a new spin on the concept. Tini Howard’s new volume focused not on the Britishness of the brand name, but on Captain Britain and their magical connections to Otherworld established by Claremont’s original run. It also swaps Brian Braddock for his sister Betsy as Captain Britain, and duplicates the original import of fan favorites Kitty and Nightcrawler by bringing in Rogue and Gambit – along with Jubilee, Rictor, and Apocalypse! The book would be one of two anchors to the first big event of the new era of X-Men – X of Swords (alongside the X-Men flagship title). [Read more…] about Excalibur – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

X-Treme X-Men – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The X-Treme X-Men comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, & digital collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated December 2024 with titles scheduled for release through February 2025.

The X-Men line received a major shake-up to its status quo in 2001. To make way for Grant Morrison’s tightly-focused cast in New X-Men (2001), Marvel spun off some of its most beloved X-characters into a third flagship X-title: X-Treme X-Men, penned by veteran scribe Chris Claremont and launched with artist Salvador Larroca.

This new team boasted heavy-hitters and fan-favorites Storm, Rogue, Psylocke, Bishop, along with newer charaxters Thunderbird, and Sage, It would later feature Cannonball, Gambit, and Shadowcat. Beast, and Wolverine also appeared, though they were shared with Morrison.

It’s important to note that, at its launch, X-Treme X-Men was the only X-team that featured a consistently fantastical, heroic theme. Morrison’s New X-Men trended more cerebral and sci-fi, while Austen took Uncanny X-Men to a more soapy, relationship-focused feel. Meanwhile, X-Force relaunched as the tongue-in-cheek X-Statix. At the time, X-Treme was alone in carrying the banner of a classic X-Men feel.

It was also the only comic book at the time to feature Storm, Rogue, or Bishop, who barely even make a guest appearance elsewhere during this run.

X-Treme ran for the full length of Morrison’s run on New X-Men. Afterwards, Morrison’s slimmer, scholastically-focused team was in turn spun off into Astonishing X-Men, penned by Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. Astonishing borrowed Kitty Pryde from this book, with the main two X-Men titles absorbing most of the other characters.

The title went unused for almost a decade before being revived in 2012 for an unlikely purpose – a reality-hopping Dazzler vehicle penned by Greg Pak that might have been better off known as Exiles. Then, in 2022, Chris Claremont returned for a revival.