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After I deliver a rousing monologue on the utter meaninglessness of canon in comics I unwrap a pair of books that helped the Avengers franchise branch out – the Avengers West Coast omnibuses (which brings me back to the flexibility of canon when it comes to Mockingbird)!
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 38 features Avengers West Coast Omnibus Volumes 1 and 2, covered in the Guide to Avengers West Coast.
Completionism is a a crazy impulse. There are hundreds of Avengers issues unrepresented by oversized volumes, but omnibus collectors are super-focused on getting the relatively unheralded back third of Avengers West Coast into an oversize volume to complete their bookshelves.
The funny thing is, I’m not sure all of the voters realize just how strong and cohesive this Roy & Dann Thomas run on Avengers really is.
The Avengers West Coast by Thomas and Thomas Omnibus is the #40 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017 on Tigereyes’s Secret Ballot. Visit the Marvel Masterworks Message Board to view the original posting of results by Tigereyes and head to the Guide to Avengers West Coast to see how you can read this run right now.
Past Ranking: This volume leaps up five spots from #45 in the 2016 survey.
Probable Contents: Avengers West Coast (1989) #63-100, 102, & Annual 5-8, Avengers Annual 19, Darkhawk Annual 1, and Iron Man Annual 13,
That’s 43 issues, which means the book could also include the full Bloodties crossover: Avengers West Coast (1989) #101, The Avengers (1963) #368-369, Uncanny X-Men (1963) #307, & X-Men (1991) #26.
However, that would leave behind 20 issues of five related miniseries – U.S. Agent #1-4 (after #95 & Annual 8), Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #1-4 (after #97), Spider-Woman #1-4 (after #101), Scarlet Witch #1-4 (after #101), and Hawkeye #1-4 (after #102).
What to do? More on how to reconcile that, below.
Creators: Written by Roy Thomas and Dann Thomas with pencils by Paul Ryan and Dave Ross with Tom Morgan, George Freeman, Herb Trimpe, and Andrew Currie.
Can you read it right now? Mostly. Issue #76-79 and #83-88 remain uncollected (as is the U.S. Agent mini-series), but everything else has been captured. Visit Guide to Avengers West Coast for the full details. Unfortunately, most of this run is not on Marvel Unlimited.
The Details:
Avengers West Coast had gone for years as a forgotten era of Avengers as far as reprints were concerned until Marvel’s Cinematic Universe began focusing strongly on its core cast of Iron Man and Hawkeye, and later Scarlet Witch and Vision.
Suddenly, West Coast reprints were abounding – a set of Marvel Premier Classic hardcovers, corresponding paperback reprints, two omnibuses, half of an Avengers by John Byrne volume, and a handful of trades covering the latter run of the series. The only remaining gaps are #76-79 and #83-88, two stories split by the massive “Galactic Storm” crossover.
Comic books fans are nothing if not obsessive completists, so that makes a final omnibus edition of Avenger West Coast sorely tempting – especially since it’s all co-written by comic book royalty Roy Thomas along with his wife Dann (who was the first woman to ever script an issue of Wonder Woman!) mostly to illustration by a pair of strong pencillers – Paul Ryan through #69 and Dave Ross from #71 through the end of the series. [Read more…] about Avengers West Coast by Thomas & Thomas – The #40 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017
The Mockingbird 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 October 2017 with titles scheduled for release through March 2017.
When most comics fans think of the most fearsome, non-powered Avenger, they’ll typically name Hawkeye – or, perhaps Black Widow (though whether she has any enhancements is debatable).
The best answer is actually Bobbi Morse AKA Mockingbird, but part of her allure is that you would have never thought of her.
Mockingbird has the athleticism of Hawkeye (she’s a trained gymnast and combatant), the secret agent training of Black Widow (she’s a member of SHIELD, where she graduated top of her class), plus she holds a PhD in biology. Her origins find her roughing it in the Savage Land as Ka-Zar’s original blonde love interest before turning out to be a SHIELD agent under deep cover. Her first solo story finds her going under even deeper cover by dropping out of SHIELD for her assignment before returning to SHIELD to root out their double agents.
Yes, she’s pretty awesome. So, why is she so often forgotten by Avengers fans?
First, because until the 2010s she has always been cast as a love interest – first to flirt with Ka-Zar and then after just a two-issue breather on her own she’s married to Hawkeye! She joins the Avengers seemingly through marriage, as if she’s being added to a health insurance plan. Though she later is a founding member of Avengers West Coat, she plays second fiddler to her headline star husband.
Second, there’s the matter of how she exits Avengers West Coast. I won’t spoil it here in the intro (although I do, slightly, below), but it left us without Mockingbird appearances for over 15 years! That’s a long time to forget about a hero.
Third, because it’s just her style. As a double- and sometimes triple-agent, Mockingbird has never been a character who sticks out as the big star – even after her return in Secret Invasion (as championed by writer/editor Jim McCann), she remained a supporting player.
That all changed thanks to her popularity as a Hawkeye-free character on Agents of SHIELD, and after a rapturous response to her first solo one-shot in 2015 (due in large part to writing by Chelsea Cain) she graduated to her own series in 2016 as she returned to widespread use in All-new, All-Different Marvel. [Read more…] about Mockingbird, Bobbi Morse – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order
I’m back with the next five votes for most-wanted Omnibus volumes from major Marvel fans as collated via the Annual Secret Ballot by TigerEyes. I covered #50-46 in the last installment.
These next five low-ranked books are an interesting mix – flagging support for a pair of prior mid-list favorites, several debuts, and one book that’s held steadily in the 40s for three years.
If you have any extra intelligence to add about the probable runs or opinions about the comics therein, please leave a comment! I have read only a handful of issues from all five of these books combined, so most of my knowledge comes from reading about Marvel’s history and some good ol’ fashioned research.
Do want to learn more about the Marvel Omnibus editions that already exist and the issues they cover? My Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is the most comprehensive tool on the web for tracking Marvel’s hugest releases – it features every book, plus release dates, contents, and even breakdowns of $/page and what movies the books were released to support.
And now, onto entries 45 through 41! [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #45 to 41
The Avengers West Coast comic books definitive collecting guide and reading for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated November 2018 with titles scheduled for release through July 2019.
The Avengers had the best kind of problem in the early 80s, whether your perspective was from within comic book continuity or behind the scenes: there were just too many darn Avengers!
The Avengers had gradually shifted its focus from Marvel’s major heroes who anchored their own books (like Iron Man and Captain America) to a roster of characters that needed a team book to thrive. That meant plenty of fan favorite characters would be left out during any given run.
The best solution was to follow a trend set by Spider-Man and just recently by Chris Claremont’s X-Men: launch a second Avengers book!
West Coast Avengers launched with Hawkeye as a central focus. He was chief amongst those team-based, fan-favorite characters, hot off of his own limited series. Hawkeye was initially joined by his wife, Mockingbird, Tigra, and West Coast natives Wonder Man and Rhodey Rhodes as Iron Man.
From a story perspective, the central conceit of the book was that America was a big country, and the NYC-based team couldn’t always be responsive to threats across the nation. In practice, it allowed writers like Steve Engelhart, John Byrne, and Roy Thomas to tell big stories that still focused on character history and personalities. Byrne, in particular, used it to dig deeply into the story of Scarlet Witch.
As comics became more entrenched in extreme, violent themes, the relative staid Avengers team was disassembled in favor of an Iron Man lead Force Works. Despite a flashy launch with a pop-up cover, Force Works never caught fire like the similarly themed X-Force, and was cancelled as part of the line-wide removal of Avengers in 1996 as they headed off to the Heroes Reborn pocket universe in the wake of Onslaught.
[Read more…] about Collecting Avengers West Coast as Graphic Novels