One of my favorite comic community happenings of each year is when a message board member named TigerEyes announces that it’s time for the “Annual Secret Ballot: Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibus.”
For the uninitiated, what this means is that over a hundred of the biggest Marvel fans and collectors who like to chat each other up on the internet send in their picks for what Marvel material is most worthy of compiling into an oversize Marvel Omnibus Edition, massive tomes that sometimes run over 1,000 pages and up to 50 issues of collected comics.
Whether it’s causation or correlation, books from the secret ballot tend to get printed by Marvel. Here’s the breakdown from the first three years of the survey:
- 2013 survey: 10 of 29 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).
- 2014 survey: 12 of 52 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).
- 2015 survey: 7 of 52 books were later printed as Omnibus (or are solicited).
That makes the secret ballot not only a fun exercise, but a useful straw poll to get an idea of what could be coming our way. In fact, the majority of omnibuses released in 2016 that are not from the past three years of comics are from the poll.
I’ll be tackling the results of the 2016 poll starting with this post, complete with likely contents, explanations, how to read the material right now, and the likelihood we’ll ever see the books in print.
Let’s get started! And, if you want to know more about all of the books that have been released to date, my Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is built on a database full of all of the information about these massive tomes so you can sort and filter them. It’s the only tool of its kind on the web!
[Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #50 to 45
There are hundreds of different collections of Fantastic Four, especially their original run from 1961 to 1996. However, there are a few specific formats of books that cover large portions of this title, and I’ll cover those first – Essentials, Epics, Masterworks, and Omnibuses.
Namor. The Sub-Mariner. The King of Atlantis. He was Marvel’s first superhero, their first anti-hero, and their first mutant.