Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Punisher

New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – January 24, 2024

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It’s the fourth new comic book day of the new year! This post covers Marvel Comics January 24 2024 releases. Missed last week’s releases? Check out last week’s post covering Marvel Comics January 17 2024 new releases.

This week in Marvel Comics: a ROMnibus appears, Straczynski & Gillen’s Thor runs finally reunited, Al Ewing up to something with Magneto, and more!

This list includes every comic and digital comic out from Marvel this week, plus collected editions in omnibus, hardcover, paperback, and digest-sized formats. For each new release, I’ll point you to the right guide within my Crushing Comics Guide to Marvel Comics to find out how to collect each character in full – and, if a guide is linked from this post, that means it is updated through the present day!

Marvel Comics January 24 2024 Collected EditionsROM: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus Vol. 1, released by Marvel Comics January 24 2024

Marvel Two-in-One Epic Collection: Two Against Hydra
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302931766 / digital)
See Guide to Fantastic Four or Guide to Thing (eventually). Marvel is slowly-but-surely pressing on with their collections of this Thing team-up title, which included a few more significant stories than its sibling Marvel Team-Up (1972). This volume (and all collections of this material, in general) skips issue #21, which includes a team-up with Doc Savage – Marvel no longer has the rights to reprint it.

ROM: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus Vol. 1
(2024 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302956714 / digital)
See Guide to ROM, Spaceknight. We never thought it could exist, but here it is – the ROMnibus! FYI, there are THREE DM variants of this omnibus cover – Frank Miller X-Men, George Pérez, and Sal Buscema. Marvel will cover this series in a trio of omnibuses, and there’s no guarantee they will print it in any other format (like Epic Collection), so this could be your one chance to finally own a reprinted, remastered collection of this material.

Siege
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302952792 / digital)
See Guide to Marvel Universe Events. Marvel has been working through paperback reprints of most of their line-wide events in the past year, likely to serve as complements to the Epic and Modern Era Epic lines. This event isn’t particularly satisfying to read on its own – all three of the Avengers books at the time heavily filled out the action, in particular New Avengers.

Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: The Menace Revealed Vol. 4
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302953911 / digital)
See Guide to Star Wars Legends – The Old Expanded Universe. This is not only the last Epic of this era (which stretches from pre-prequels through the prequel trilogy), but also potentially the second to last of the Legends Epics! There’s only one major uncollected series remaining – Star Wars: Invasion (2009) #0-16. After that, we’re just down to recollecting old Star Wars comics coverage omnibus format and Epic reprints.

Strange Academy: Year Two
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302953003 / digital)
See Guide to Doctor Strange. This collects the back half of the original 2020 series and its “Finals” mini-series from 2022. Strange Academy had such a massive cast to start that sometimes it could be hard to zero in on the characters, their histories and powers, and how they related to each other. Here at the end the book is hyper-focused on one particular relationship and conflict, which escalates to a pretty epic level by the end. This is a rare in-continuity Marvel book that would work well for a YA crowd, though I’d perhaps call it for 10YO+ due to some themes related to drug use.

Thor by Straczynski & Gillen Omnibus
(2024 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302953010 / digital)
See Guide to Thor, The Odinson. This is a relatively rare release from Marvel in that it specifically expands the content of a prior omnibus release! The Thor by JMS omnibus was a great read that kicked off the modern era of Thor, but it has always been an incomplete work since Gillen dropped in to finish off JMS’s abandoned plot threads before Matt Fraction took the reins. Now this volume completely plugs that gap, butting perfectly up against Thor by Matt Fraction and Loki by Gillen. Plus, it adds Gillen’s excellent Beta Ray Bill material. Strong recommendation from me on this one for Thor fans – it’s the ground level of his modern comics! [Read more…] about New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – January 24, 2024

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

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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.

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Haul Around the World: Excalibur, Luke Cage, Monica Rambeau, & Punisher as an avenging angel!

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It’s another Classic Collection version of Haul Around the World, shot BEFORE my big move! This was my order from mid-February 2019.

In this order I get to freak out with excitement over Marvel hitting a number of very different gaps in their color collections coverage – the end of Luke Cage’s original solo title, the post-Claremont pre-Davis gap in Excalibur, Monica Rambeau’s solo stories as Captain Marvel and the deeply weird Punisher: Revelations.

Plus… a tease of the next oversize book to hit my shelf, which might be my most-anticipated omnibus of the decade!

In this haul:

Haul Around The World: Why no EPICs for New Warriors? Plus: Daredevil, Gambit, & more!

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Your eyes do not deceive you – this video is a Classic Collection, since it was shot before my big move!

That’s because I’ve got a whole year of haul videos to catch up on, because this was my order from January 1, 2019. In this order I go deep on Marvel’s peculiar new strategy of following up ancient classic collections with new trades, plus talk up my Gambit binding projects, love of Moon Knights and Lumberjanes, and more!

In this haul:

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

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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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