Rob Liefeld

Crushing Comics S01E042 – My Macabre Childhood Favs + X-Force Omnibus by Rob Liefeld

December 19, 2017 by krisis

In this episode my Clue t-shirt sends me on a brief trip down memory lane about all the macabre stuff I liked as a kid. What was your totally peculiar interest as a child?

Afterwards I unwrap one of the most mainstream comics of my childhood: the initial run of Rob Liefeld’s X-Force! It’s at once the perfect metaphor from mutants moving on from an eternal high school and a bit of a let down when it comes to the big ideas behind the guns and pouches.

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

Episode 42 features the X-Force Omnibus, Vol. 1. For more information, head to the Guide to X-Force.

Cable – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Cable 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 November 2018 with titles scheduled for release through July 2019.

Looking for Deadpool? You’re not crazy – he and Cable used to share a page! See The Definitive Deadpool Collecting Guide and Reading Order.

No single character defines so much of what is right and what is wrong about the venerable X-Men franchise as Nathan Christopher Dayspring Summers AKA Cable.

Cable returns in Uncanny Avengers - 2015 - 0003 textless Cable was the creation of Rob Liefeld in 1990 when he took over pencilling New Mutants and was charged with creating a leader for the team that contrasted with Professor X’s more non-violent philosophy. The character he came up with couldn’t be more of a 90s extreme – a Terminator-esque mysterious time-traveler with a glowing eye, a metal arm, a lot of guns, and a set of shoulder pads that tripled the apparent width of his frame.

(Alex Ross would later say, “I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character.”)

Cable (and Liefeld) lead the New Mutant team out of passivity and lower sales to be one of Marvel’s biggest phenomenons, shedding all but three cast members in the process and relaunching as mega-seller X-Force.

However, something even more interesting was going on with Cable thanks to the plot in another X-book – X-Factor. In the wake of X-Tinction Agenda, X-Factor saw Cyclops’s son with Mr. Sinister’s Jean Grey clone Madelyne Pryor being kidnapped to the moon and infected with a techno-organic virus by former Sinister mentor Apocalypse before being whisked off to the future by Sister Askani.

Was it intention or coincidence that a telekinetic baby who was the heir apparent to the X-Men franchise was infected with a metallic virus and sent to the future just months after a time-traveler with a missing eye and a metallic arm with hints of telekinesis landed in the present? It didn’t matter, because fan’s obsessions with the idea that Cable could be Cyclops’s son quickly took over and made the character more in-demand than he was before!

That sort of long-term, interconnected, soap opera plotting is what a major part of what makes X-Men comics great. However, Cable’s subsequent adventures offer the insufferable underbelly of X-Men – constantly revised powers, convoluted time travel, unendingly retconned secret agendas, and multiple apparent deaths. Even as a Cable fan it’s hard to say what his current mission is or how many more intermittent jumps to the future he’s conducted since his last appearance.

Despite that, Cable has been central to some major blockbusters in the past few decades – including an co-headling with Deadpool, driving both Messiah Complex and Second Coming, and in 2015 anchoring the Avengers “Unity Squad” along with big-league characters like Captain America, Rogue, Human Torch, and Quicksilver – oh, plus his old buddy, Deadpool.

That Deadpool relationship is no small part of Cable’s lasting appeal – while he’s a militant curmudgeon on his own, as the Merc With a Mouth’s eternal straight man it’s a little easier to see the heart of gold that makes him so central to the X-Men over 25 years after his debut.

Marvel Collected Editions Solicits – January and February, 2017

June 13, 2016 by krisis

I got in from a walk with that toddler to a big surprise – Amazon has listed all of Marvel’s collections for the first two months of 2017! That includes a few huge surprises from the omnibus survey, plus a few other books I’ve been pining for.

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 these are the big bombshells from the announcements. [Read more…] about Marvel Collected Editions Solicits – January and February, 2017

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #35 to 31

June 9, 2016 by krisis

Omnibus on Shelf Today I’ve got numbers #35 through 30 of the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus secret ballot by TigerEyes. I covered #40-36 in the last installment.

This group of contenders are all returning Top 50 votes from last year’s survey save for one, which weirdly has vaulted onto the survey after being collected for the first time (usually that sort of thing takes the edge off of people’s desire for an omnibus).

Do you own an oversized tome of your favorite character’s comic books? My Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide is the most comprehensive tool on the web for tracking Marvel’s hugest releases – it features details on every oversize book, including a rundown of contents and if the volume is still readily available for purchase.

Here we go with #35 through 31! [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #35 to 31

Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – Reprinted Material

January 3, 2012 by krisis

Welcome to 2012 – I am still a comic book geek.

Specifically, the X-Men.

Yep. That’s a lot of comic books.

Specifically, I own something like 95% of every X-Men comic book ever reprinted.

On New Years’ Eve I said to myself, “You dashingly handsome scoundrel, how can you use your obsession to aid people who like the X-Men a normal, healthy amount – unlike you?”

The answer? I will count down for you the top twelve collected editions reprinting X-Men comics originally released before 2010. There’s a vast world of thousands of X-Men comics that have been released since 1963, and not all of them are readily available to buy in book format. These reprints mean that hard-to-get, or never-before-reprinted issues can be bought in handy collections with better reproduction of the line art than original issues.

(As for new X-Men material from 2011, that will require a whole new post to cover!) Read more…

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4. Uncanny X-Men Marvel Masterworks, Vol. 7 HC
Collects Uncanny X-Men #151-159, Annual 5, and Avengers Annual 10.

We’d be kidding ourselves if a new edition of UXM Marvel Masterworks didn’t make the list every year, but it’s for a good reason – these are premium quality, carefully preserved reprints of X-Men material that has rarely ever seen reprint in the past.

This edition sees the return of the amazing Dave Cockrum to art duties, and the return of the vicious Emma Frost to the rogues gallery. Plus, the X-Men return to space for the first time since Dark Phoenix, and Rogue makes her debut in the pages of the Avengers! (Not previously collected in full.)

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3. X-Men by Claremont/Lee Omnibus, Vol. 1 HC
Collects Uncanny X-Men #244-269, Annual #13, X-Men Classic #39

Take two parts Chris Claremont, the writer of ever X-Man tale for over a decade. Add one part the savagely beautiful detailed line-art of Marc Silvestri, and one part explosive newcomer Jim Lee settling in for his first lengthy run on an ongoing title. Lee is renowned as the best comic artist of a generation, and here you can see him grow by leaps and bounds with every issue – which seems to also inspire Silvestri to improve his craft.

Many fans have whined that this is really the Anti-X-Men – the book opens with the team dissolving, and it never truly comes back together in this edition. I say, shove it. This disparate group of stories served to lead into the amazing creative crescendo of Claremont/Lee spending an unbroken year churning out classic issues before both of them jumped ship and the X-line got hijacked by constant gimmick events. (Not previously collected in full.)

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2. X-Men Omnibus, Vol. 2 HC
Collects X-Men #32-66, Avengers #53, KaZar #2-3, and Marvel Tales #30.

While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby laid the bedrock of what it meant to be a mutant, it is this volume that presaged the amazing scope and drama of the X-Men stories that would be told over the next forty years.

Here the original five start to transform from teens to team, and we get the incomparable creative pairing of Roy Thomas with Neal Adams. While this was the period that lead to the X-Men going on hiatus, on re-read you can hardly fault the adventurous plots that ensue. (Also collected in HC and TPB Marvel Masterworks.)

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What could be more classic than Classic X-Men, and more beautiful than early Jim Lee? Well, nothing. But the this next book wins just about every other award there is for X-Collections in 2011 – Most Surprising, Best Complete Saga, Most Shocking, Best Run from a Single Creative Team, Most Mammoth – the list is nearly endless.

…and, my number one collection of the year is…

1. X-Statix Omnibus
Already SOLD OUT at Amazon in just two months – try Cheap Graphic Novels or Tales of Wonder. Collects X-Force#116-129, Brotherhood #9; X-Statix #1-26; Wolverine/Doop #1-2; Dead Girl #1-5; and material from X-Men Unlimited #41, I <3 Marvel, and Nation X #4.

X-Statix is really weird. Do not think of it as an X-Men comic, or even a Marvel superhero comic, as it relies very little on foreknowledge of either. It is an indie comic about a deadly and incredibly popular reality television show that happens to star a team of lethal mutants with short life expectancies. There are no “villains” to speak of, though the team certainly faces ongoing challenges.

Instead, think of it as something like Reality Bites or Chasing Amy – or even Hunger Games – a self-aware piece of fiction that constantly comments on the real world culture it is woven within. It is a comic dissecting the convention of superheroes, much in the tradition of Watchmen. Except, instead of a dystopian 1984 we get a celebrity-as-reality obsessed modern day with absolutely no overarching plot.

With no villains and no major arc, you might wonder: what is this 1000+ page book even about? Sex, sexual identity, racial identity, celebrity, drugs, suicide, ethics of pharmaceuticals – you know, the same things our lives are about. It just so happens that each struggle is framed in terms of what it would mean to be a superhero struggling with that incredibly common human condition.

(Previously collected as a series of HCs and TPBs.)

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That’s my countdown! Have I left off any of your major favorite reprints of 2011? Chime in with a comment, and tune back in next week (really!) for 2011’s top 12 collections of new material.

Collecting X-Force, Uncanny X-Force, & X-Statix as Graphic Novels

X-Force, Uncanny X-Force, and X-Statix comic books in a 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 November 2018 with titles scheduled for release through July 2019.

X-Force was born in an act of pure marketing: artist Rob Liefeld was ultra hot on Marvel’s New Mutants at the early height of the speculator craze, and he wanted to take the team in a new, more XTREME direction. Thus, X-Force was born – a team of proactively violent mutants lead by Cable for whom the ends always justified the means.

X-Force Vol03 - 0027 promo Liefeld didn’t last all that long on the title before defecting to Image, but X-Force has been a part of the X-Men brand ever since. After a detour as the reality TV-inspired X-Statix and brief retread by Liefeld in 2004, it was brought back to major popularity and acclaim in 2008 as Wolverine’s covert team of killers as authorized by Cyclops.

When that series wound down, X-Force returned under the coveted “Uncanny” adjective, and there may have never been a series more deserving – Rick Remender penned a fierce all-time classic that began as a hunt for Apocalypse but turned into much more. In addition to writing the best Archangel story of all time, Remender brought Psylocke to the X-Force brand and turned her into its marquee star, along with Grant Morrison creation Fantomex.

Seeking to capitalize on its popularity, Marvel launched not one but two X-Force titles with Marvel Now! in 2012 – Cable & X-Force and Uncanny X-Force, Vol. 2. They were later consolidated into the darkly comedic X-Force, Vol. 4 with both Cable and Psylocke in 2014 penned by Simon Spurrier. [Read more…] about Collecting X-Force, Uncanny X-Force, & X-Statix as Graphic Novels