Greg Rucka

Tigereyes Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot Results & Mappings

April 17, 2023 by krisis

This morning I had the absolute pleasure of announcing the results of the Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus 11th Annual Secret Ballot with Near Mint Condition!

The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot is an annual poll conducted by a mysterious comic book forum user named Tigereyes. The rules are simple: anyone can email Tigereyes up to 10 picks for their most-wanted, never-before-printed omnibuses of material originally printed by Marvel, even if they may no longer own the licensing rights.

Each first vote gets 10 points, each second vote gets 9 points, all the way down to your tenth vote getting just 1 point. After the voting period, Tigereyes goes through the gargantuan effort of tallying up all the votes – which also involves figuring out what everyone meant by their sometimes inconsistently-named or cryptically-described votes.

For me, the reveal of the results of the Tigereyes Secret Ballot is an international comics-loving holiday. I used to be the primary person on the internet creating statistics from the results every year! However, when I attempted to cover the entire poll entry-by-entry in 2017 I stalled out at the halfway point as the results straddled our move to New Zealand.

That’s why it was worth waking up at 4am NZ time to be ready to share this year’s results with my good friends Omar and Jess on the Near Mint Condition channel, thanks to some last-minute planning with Omar over the weekend.

Our show was nearly three hours long as we dug into the potential contents of every book on the list and whether we’d read them or not. As always, I had just as much fun appearing on-camera as I did chatting with all of the wonderful Minties in the live chat!

Don’t have time for the full 3-hour tour? We actually run down the full 60-book list in just 15 minutes, starting just before the 12-minute mark. I’m sharing the full list below, but it’s more than just a list – every omnibus includes a full suggested omnibus mapping along with a link to the relevant collecting guide on Crushing Comics.

That’s right, y’all – this is a post with SIXTY omnibus mappings in it, mapping well over 2,000 issues of comics. (Actually, it’s even more than that – there’s one tie, and in several entries I get into mapping second volumes if they would complete a run). That makes that one of the longest blog posts in 23 years of CrushingKrisis history.

Are you ready to be rocked by the Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus vote? Strap in, true believers, and prepare to be mapped like you’ve never been mapped before.

N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game campaign on Backerkit (TTRPG Tuesday)

February 14, 2023 by krisis

While I remain committed to not making any resolutions in a new year, two of the things I’d like to try doing are having a neat bit of synchronicity at the moment with the current fan-funding campaign for The Fifth Season Roleplaying game, based on the novels by N.K. Jemisin.

One of those two things is reading more physical books. I know some people are into trying to read 52 books a year, or even 100. For me, reading in quantity is never a big challenge. I’ve read 80,000 pages of comic books in a single year!

What I’m not so great at doing is giving my eyes a rest from the screen and from digesting artwork to sit down with a book of prose. Plus, sometimes it can be hard to find a full range of diversity in American floppy comics comic authors and stories, but the work of literature is much, much larger.

At the #1 spot on my “books I’d read if I made time to read books” list is The Fifth Season from N.K. Jemisin, a book about a fractured family on a wounded planet. It has occupied that spot even since it won the Hugo Award for best novel back in 2016 – long before I read her absolutely brilliant DC Comics series The Far Sector, which debuted the new Green Lantern Sojourner “Jo” Mullein.

Not only that, but when I asked my beloved college D&D friends for sci-fi/fantasy novel recommendations that weren’t just straight white people writing about straight white worlds, The Fifth Season was their first recommendation!

As quick as I am to acquire a new comic I’m interested in reading, I’m snail-paced at snagging a book I might want to read. Even after having my interest confirmed in a recommendation from friends, it took me a full three months to remember to request the book from the Wellington library system – which had all of one copy – so then I had to wait another two months to receive it.

That weatherbeaten paperback novel has been sitting on my bedside table, waiting to be cracked open and read for all of my incredibly-busy past three weeks – including the day I received an ad for The Fifth Season’s table-top RPG rulebook.

(Somehow I have engineered it that Facebook will only serve me ads for nerdy Kickstarter campaigns. It’s the only website on the internet where I don’t have ads blocked, so it’s like I live in a world where the only things anyone ever advertises are RPGs and board games. It’s a paradise.)

As it happens, that advertisement piqued my interest not only because of the book on my bedside table recommended by D&D friends, but also another thing I’d love to do this year related to my gaming gang: I’d like to learn some RPG systems other than Dungeons and Dragons and 5th Edition! This goal was on my list even before the OGL drama of a few weeks ago, and even though that came to a happy resolution it doesn’t change the fact that I’d love to extend my game-running skills outside of D&D. [Read more…] about N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game campaign on Backerkit (TTRPG Tuesday)

Crushing Comics S01E039 – Greg Rucka’s Lady Sabre & Alex Alice’s Siegfried (+ a sidebar on feminism)

December 14, 2017 by krisis

After some more musing on how getting physically fit can improve your life I open a very indie brick of books.

First, I unwrap Greg Rucka’s Lady Sabre & the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, and I spend a lot more time enthusing about Kickstarter (and feminism in comics writing) than I do explaining the book (perhaps some other time!).

Then, I pull out the three gorgeous volumes of Alex Alice’s Siegfried (plus P. Craig Russel’s The Ring of the Nibelung) – some of my favorite books out of my entire collection!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 39 features Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett’s Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether Kickstarter Edition (which you can read for free online) and Alex Alice’s Siegfried Volumes 1, 2, and 3.

Crushing Comics S01E14 – Wolverine: Enemy of the State, Wolverine/Elektra: Redeemer, & SHIELD: Architects of Forever (plus, the Jonathan Hickman indie library)

November 14, 2017 by krisis

It’s part two of talking through the massive brick of comic books I pulled off the shelf last episode, including a Wolverine blockbuster, and apocryphal tale of Elektra, and the one Jonathan Hickman book I just hate – plus, a quick overview of Jonathan Hickman’s indie bibliography.

Want to start from the beginning? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 14 features Wolverine: Enemy of the State (Amazon / eBay), which was also in the Wolverine by Mark Millar Omnibus (Amazon / eBay) along with Old Man Logan; Wolverine/Elektra: The Redeemer by Greg Rucka (Amazon / eBay); and SHIELD: Architects of Forever (Amazon / eBay). Both Wolverine books are covered in the Guide to Wolverine.

The Punisher by Rucka & Checchetto – The #42 Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus of 2017

May 22, 2017 by krisis

It makes perfect sense that Greg Rucka would be the author to turn in the most-memorable in-continuity Punisher story in recent memory and the one with the best-developed female characters. After all, he’s not only known for stellar super-hero runs on titles like Wonder Woman, but also beat-cops drama on DC’s Gotham Central.

However, if Rucka’s success in this story makes perfect sense, the big surprise is the superstar turn from artist Marco Checchetto on his first lengthy run.

The Punisher by Rucka & Checchetto is the #42 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, check out Guide to Punisher for details on how to collect this and every other Punisher run, ever.

Past Ranking: A 2017 debut!

Probable Contents: Punisher (2011) #1-16 & Punisher: War Zone #1-5, a crossover with Daredevil #11 and Avenging Spider-Man #6, and material from Spider-Island: I Love New York City (maybe adding the non-Rucka Punisher: The Trial Of The Punisher (2013) #1-2)

Creators: Written by Greg Rucka.

Line art on The Punisher (2011) by Marco Checchetto (with Matthew Southworth, Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano, Mirko Colak, and Mico Suayan). Line art on Punisher: War Zone (2012) by Carmine Di Giandomenico. Color art on both series by Matt Hollingsworth.

Can you read it right now? Yes, but the four paperbacks collecting the 23 core issues of this run have become exorbitantly expensive to track down, which is part of the reason this omnibus is such an attractive prospect. Find the details in the Guide to Punisher.

Marvel Unlimited includes both The Punisher (2011) and Punisher War Zone (2012) in full.

The Details:

It’s hard to separate the quality of Rucka’s run from fans’ sense relief and delight that Punisher was back to basics and back to the streets of New York City after less-than-beloved runs from Matt Fraction and Rick Remender. This 2011 iteration of Punisher finds Frank Castle back in New York with little explanation. It’s simply where he ought to be.

(For the record, Remender’s is good but fucking weird.)
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