Crushing Krisis

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Avengers

A Bendis Avengers Reading Order

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I’m excited to unveil my first non-X-Men comprehensive reading order: Avengers Reading Order – The Bendis Years (2004 – 2012)

The guide includes the story-by-story or “trade reading order” of all the Avengers team titles from Brian Bendis taking over Avengers with issue #500 in 2004 to the end of his run on the 2010 volumes of Avengers and New Avengers in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012. That’s over 350 individual issues from more than a dozen titles. In most cases, I explain the placement of each story and offer special notes for reading.

Head to the guide right now, or read on for more background on the period and how I assembled this Avengers resource.

BNAvgV01 - 0001rian Bendis completed the modernization of the Avengers begun by Kurt Busiek in 1998, taking them from a quaint card-carrying club of do-gooders to the Marvel’s Justice League. If Busiek helped to centralize and modernize a team that had lost its core in the mid-90s, Bendis made them Marvel’s ubiquitous, movie-ready flagship.

After his introduction of new members like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, and Dr. Strange, it became completely normal for any Marvel hero to be drafted into the team if it served a story. The period also expanded the team franchise from its previous all-time high of two books in the late 80s to a minimum of four.

It also tangled with a crazy line-up of line-wide events, rivaling 90s X-Men for the amount of interruptions of its plot – to the point that the interruptions became the plot, and standalone arcs were mere breaks in the action.

I am historically not a major Avengers reader. In my backlog of 90s floppies I have a decent run of 300s-era Avengers, but it’s mostly owing to Steve Epting’s amazing covers rather than being particularly allegiant to the series.

My early collected edition bookshelf reflected that, with just a few Avengers books marking major Scarlet Witch stories. (Just like Marvel and Fox, I consider her to be as much an X-Men character as an Avengers one.)

That changed in 2012. We were surging towards Avengers vs. X-Men, which came with rumors of Brian Bendis taking over the X-Men books. I foolishly thought knowing something about The Avengers’ recent history would help me be less depressed about the shoe-horning of Avengers into a rightfully X-Men story or Bendis likely derailing all of their awesome plotlines.

I browsed through New Avengers collected editions trying to decide what to sample, and I realized I could not make heads or tails of them. There were two different New Avengers runs with similar numbering and a set books with similar titles and covers that had wildly different contents! [Read more…] about A Bendis Avengers Reading Order

Avengers Reading Order – The Bendis Years (2004 – 2012)

A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2017.

Avengers (2010) - 0001 promoThis reading order encompasses all of the core Avengers team titles and accompanying events that occurred during Brian Bendis’s tenure writing The Avengers. That began with Avengers #500 in 2004 and ran through the end of the 2010 volumes of Avengers and New Avengers (as well as Avengers vs. X-Men) at the end of 2012.

Technically, this is a “trade reading order” because it orders the stories largely in accordance to how they were originally collected for trade paperback and premiere hardcover. However, the idea of “trade reading order” doesn’t have too much meaning at this point, since most of this material has been collected in at least one additional format, plus many fans are now reading digitally!

So, why not just give you the issue-by-issue order?

When it comes down to it, I not only want to help you read comics, I want to help you enjoy reading comics. Outside of a direct crossover, reading a stack of shuffled single issues from multiple titles isn’t generally a rewarding read – even when many of the issues are coordinated by the same writer.

This reading order guide takes advantage of the natural breaks in stories created by Marvel’s collected editions wherever possible so you can read in bigger chunks. This means you can read without switching titles mid-book, mid-story, or even mid-issue.

To learn how to purchase these issues in various collected editions, visit the page links below for each title. Individual runs are also linked to their home guide elsewhere on Crushing Comics.

Note that while I include the Avengers-in-training titles Young Avengers, Avengers: The Initiative, and Avengers Academy in this reading order, none were written or concepted by Brian Bendis and they are not generally strongly integrated into the central stories of his Avengers. You can easily skip these titles in your Avengers read, if you prefer.

And, finally, for a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of this guide, read my announcement blog post. [Read more…] about Avengers Reading Order – The Bendis Years (2004 – 2012)

Marvel Collected Editions Solicits – March, 2017

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Marvel_logoHere’s a holiday surprise for you – another month of Marvel solicitations just arrived on Amazon! These books take us though the Amazon release date of March 28, which means these books will hit the direct market on March 14. I covered the January and February solicits last month.

I’ve broken out the books below. They don’t yet list their contents, so I’ve made a few educated guesses until we can fill in the final contents. If you pre-order with Amazon, please keep in mind that Amazon releases dates are two weeks later that Direct Market release dates.

Please note: This post will not be updated with corrected dates, titles, or issue ranges for these titles. For the most up-to-date information, visit the accompanying collection guide pages.

Marvel Masterworks

There’s only one of these books released each month, so this big reveal is a guaranteed feature of each new month of solicits. [Read more…] about Marvel Collected Editions Solicits – March, 2017

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses – What’s been printed and what’s gone missing?

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Omnibus on ShelfAlright eager readers – like modern-day Marvel with their absurd .1 issues, I have one more interstitial installment of extra material about Marvel’s Most Wanted Omnibuses to share with you before I recap the final two spots of this year’s secret ballot tomorrow.

For this installment, I want to take a look at the books that have been printed and the ones that have mysteriously gone missing from the survey – and why that might be!

Not counting a few newly-revealed omnibuses for early 2017, the 83 books voted on in the first three years of the survey have yielded 20 Marvel Omnibus volumes. Whether you look at the survey as a guessing game or information that Marvel actually considers, seeing one out of every four books get printed is not such a bad ratio!

There have also been 21 books previously voted on that haven’t hit omnibus and aren’t represented this year, plus a few more than dropped off the survey and came back. If they didn’t get printed, why did we lose track of them?

Allow me to explain… [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses – What’s been printed and what’s gone missing?

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – 6 books that missed the cut

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Omnibus on ShelfWe’re hurtling towards a conclusion of 2016’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses from TigerEyes’ secret ballot, but before I could even get the whole list out some of them have been announced for publication in 2017!

This isn’t all that unusual – they whole reason TigerEyes runs this survey in May and June of each year is to beat the solicitations for January of the following year. Anticipating we’d see a few of the most-wanted books picked off, he reveal a list of the next six books that just missed the cut.

These six books will all be big contenders next year (unless they’re printed before then). Let’s dive in… [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – 6 books that missed the cut