Crushing Krisis

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Exiles – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Exiles 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 September 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

The launch of Exiles in 2001 by writer Judd Winick with penciler Mike McKone was Marvel’s first long-running ongoing with a continuously-told story combining reality-hopping and alternate versions of heroes.

Exiles (2001) - 0001

Prior to the launch of Ultimate Comics in 200o, Marvel Comics had a slim list of ongoing titles that lived permanently in alternate continuities. Exiles was nothing like Ultimate Comics.

Ultimate had the goal of the alternate universe as verisimilitude – the same main Marvel Universe only more modern, and the fascination was watching it splinter.

The pitch for Exiles followed the debut of Ultimate Comics and swiped the title of a 1990s Malibu series, but it had much more to do with Marvel’s classic series What If. What If never told a consistent story – in fact, there were hardly ever two issues which focused on the same tale! Each one-shot issue hopped to a new reality to imagine the most twisted possibilities.

Exiles combined that reality-hopping approach with a somewhat consistent team, much like Chris Claremont’s classic Excalibur story “The Cross-Time Caper.” Instead of starting with a team of known 616-reality heroes, Winick & McKone drew inspiration from Age of Apocalypse.

Age of Apocalypse had presented four months of an alternate reality full of X-Men reimagined to take advantage of their best and worst qualities. Exiles would do the same, only with a palette of infinite realities from which to choose.

Lead by the short-lived but hugely-popular X-Men character Blink (from Age of Apocalypse – not the main universe version!), the adventures of these alternate-reality X-characters had no impact on the main X-continuity (though Nocturne, a founding member, would briefly cross over to main 616 continuity).

Despite that, the book is regarded highly by fans – at least, it was when it was helmed by creator Judd Winick. By contrast, any issues penned by Uncanny scribes Chris Claremont and Chuck Austen aren’t as popular. [Read more…] about Exiles – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Paper on Twitter @ #140conf: Day 2, pt. 5

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Two great panels – one from journalists, and another from the comic book industry – talking about how their two newsprint industries can move seamlessly into the social web.

This is the quote of the entire conference, because at least half of it has been about this:

“The role of journalists and editors now is to form [news] into a piece of narrative and inform. Real time web becomes right time web,” getting the information people want to them in a digestible format at the right time.

Also, my paraphrase from the comic panel:

It’s not a surprise that creators are celebrities – they are the artist and the auteur. It’s different than film or television stars.

[Read more…] about Paper on Twitter @ #140conf: Day 2, pt. 5

The Happinomics of Magneto

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Today on the bus an attractive, muscle-bound, black man was sitting across from E and I rocking to an unknown sort of music. He was wearing a muscle-shirt version of this Magneto t-shirt.

I turned to E and said, “That guy’s shirt is awesome.” She nodded in agreement.

Then I motioned to the man to take off his headphones.

“Your shirt is awesome.”

“You know who it is?”

“Magneto!”

“Yeah!”

We chuckled at each others fanaticism. He replaced the headphones in his ear and I went back to talking to E.

He smiled until we got off the bus.

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Happinomics is an Ad Busters article about how small changes to the way we interact with the strangers around us can make us tangibly happier. In their example, the interaction is talking on the bus.

Almost watching the Watchmen

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Despite my lengthy jag as a comics fan I was a latecomer to Watchmen. I was certainly aware of it, and the archetypes that it played out, and I had paged through it a few times in book stores or on friends’ shelves. It took me until seeing the magnificent trailer on The Dark Knight to get truly and viscerally interested in the film.

For a while I insisted I would stay completely spoiler free so as to best enjoy the movie version, but we all know my will is weak when it comes to these things. I bought my own copy of the graphic novel at Newbury Comics during my birthday weekend with Erika, and devoured it promptly (it had been long sold-out within the city limits of Philadelphia, at that point).

I concede the masterwork that is the novel, but remain pretty skeptical that the film will pull a Matrix-level March shocker out of the bag – good action films simply don’t come out in March, unless they’re going to be huge sleepers that play through Memorial Day.

All that said, here’s two ends of the spectrum:

(1) Harry @ Ain’t It Cool goes typically apeshit over a clip of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre breaking into a prison – just about the only present-tense action sequence in the entire book. The problem is the clip sucks – the slow-mo is completely overblown, and the score is awful. Watch:

(2) On the other hand, IGN sneaks a overwhelmingly positive Australian review of the flick past the supposed misdirected US press embargo (usually not a good sign, especially for genre flicks).

While other purported reviews are cobbled together based on inferences from the trailer and knowledge of the book, this one seems to be the real deal – more detail about the performances behind Rorschach and Nite Owl, and even acknowledging that Dr. Manhattan’s penis got enlarged for the screen (an overly astute observation – he’s only truly full-frontal a handful of times in the book).

(I wonder if they’ve also kept in the awkward Ménage à trois from Chapter III; that would definitely be ooky on screen.)

Less specifically, Wil Wheaton heartily endorsed it in a spoiler-free review, stating:

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is as close to a perfect film adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen as we were ever going to see, and when his super-ultimate-here’s-everything cut comes out in the fall, I think it will be perfect. But what I saw yesterday is truly remarkable: a big studio movie adaptation of one of the most — if not the most — important graphic novels of my lifetime that not only didn’t fuck it up, but brought it to life brilliantly.

And, furthermore, so did my fucking television-as-literature idol Jacob Clifton in his FaceBook status of moments ago:

Jacob Clifton liked the movie even more than the comic, yet again. By a lot.

(Stalking? What? Me? I have no idea what you’re talking about.)

So, will it suck, or not? I’m trying to avoid my typical habit of passing judgment before I make it to the theatre next week with Wes and Gina, but I have my doubts that Zach Snyder has the nuance to get past the construction of comic book panel dioramas with no emotions inside. I’ll be quite cheery to be proven wrong.

[Ed. Note: I wound up absolutely loving it in the theatre, though I found the extended Director’s Cut unnecessary.]

how far from your star to mine?

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Okay, three remainders from that post.

First, I bought the set of Le Complexe du Chimpanzé graphic novels for me and bro to read. I made it through the first one with my English/French dictionary gripped firmly in one fist. It’s a future tale of a relic of past space exploration coming back to haunt NASA, and how the ordeal splinters the relationship between America’s top astronaut and her young daughter.

I imagine he’ll get through them a bit more quickly than I will, being the better French-speaker of the two of us due to fact that he’s still taking French. (Luckily, most of my pre-Honeymoon French exposure is from watching subtitled sci-fi movies, so I had more of the vocabulary than I thought I would.)

Second, this article is ancient, but it’s still excellent: Image Story, by Michael Dean.

If you were a Marvel comics reader in the early nineties names like Lee or McFarlane meant you were definitely buying a book (but, not Liefeld, who has always been a hack). Suddenly, all of those names formed a super-group, left “the plantation” of Marvel, and set up their own shop – Image Comics. The article offers a detailed account of how Image came to be, what their business model looked like from the inside, and how they unwitting destroyed the comic industry.

(Incidentally, Jim Lee remains one of my favorite comic artists, but the artist who supplanted him on X-Men – Andy Kubert – ranks higher on my list.)

(Incidentally^2, Andy is currently pencilling a Batman arc with recent Newbury-Award-winning author, film-inspirer, and prolific blogger Neil Gaiman that is apparently selling out as quickly as it hits the shelves. They previously collaborated on 1602, which means I should probably own it. Despite my general Batman-comics distaste I will certainly buy the brief two-issue collection published in July (ISBN 1401223036))

Lastly, a webcomic I’ve never read before: Subormality. As recommended by Desh, who I trust implicitly on such matters (but not on music – there we differ substantially). Note the Rob Liefeld joke buried in the first panel.

See, I actually can’t resist fictional universes.