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The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

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My pull list just keeps getting bigger and better! This week, The Pull List is twenty-six issues long with seven new number ones, four issues with Batman, and an average rating of 3.17.

What did I pull this week? Well, I’m still not caught up on my Superman, but I’ve got a pretty big cross-section of DC and Marvel on my list, plus a handful of smaller publisher titles!

  • Aftershock Comics
    • Monstro Mechanica (2017) #3
  • Boom! Studios
    • Giant Days (2015) #35
    • Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6
  • Dark Horse
    • Incognegro – Renaissance (2018) #1
  •  DC Comics
    • Batman (2016) #40
    • Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles (2018)#2
    • Justice League (2016) #38
    • Milk Wars: Mother Panic / Batman Special (2018)
    • Swamp Thing Winter Special (2018) #1
    • Young Monsters In Love (2018) #1
  • Image Comics
    • Paper Girls (2015) #20
    • Twisted Romance (2018) #1
    • VS (2018) #1
    • Witchblade (2017) #3
  • Marvel Comics
    • Avengers (2017) #679
    • Black Bolt (2017) #10
    • Black Panther – Sound And Fury (2018) #1
    • Hawkeye (2017) #15
    • Iceman (2017) #10
    • Infinity Countdown (2018) – Adam Warlock One-Shot
    • Rise of the Black Panther (2018) #2
    • Rogue & Gambit (2018) #2
    • Runaways (2017) #6
    • Spider-Man (2016) #237
    • X-Men: Gold (2017) #21
    • X-Men: Red (2018) #1

Marvel/DC Issue of the Week: Justice League (2016) #38, DC Comics

4.5 starsJustice League is finally back to being amongst DC’s most exciting books every month with Christopher Priest at the helm for the first time since Darkseid War in the latter part of New 52 in 2015.

Marco Santucci’s pencils on this are brilliant right out of the gate! Flash’s one-man reenactment of Sandra Bullock in Gravity is riveting and an absolutely amazing blend of real science and comics magic. It plays out over a League realizing just how reliant they’ve become on technology, both to back them up and to tell them what to do and where to be.

What makes the story unusual is that Batman is the physical representation of that weakness – not Cyborg. As a brilliant tactician who is just a regular man, Batman uses technology to enhance his detective skills and the breadth of his knowledge. Yet, that can easily be used as his own Kryptonite when there’s a situation he cannot strategize his way out of.

Just as Flash keeps emphasizing “I’m only a scientist, not an engineer” as he tries to arrest his free float through space, Cyborg is an engineer first and a tactician second. He’s not Batman. He “doesn’t want to be the boss.”

What happens when Cyborg has to take charge of the League in a way that’s greater than just Boom Tubing them from place to place? Can he fake being a leader with engineering in the same way Flash fakes being an engineer with science?

I don’t know, but I am transfixed by this Christopher Priest arc!

Small Publisher Issue of the Week: Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6, Boom! Studios

4.5 starsWith the way this book has been going, it’s going to be really hard for anything to excite me more in a week that it’s on the stands.

If you haven’t seen my breathless catch-up on this Greg Pak/Takeshi Miyazawa series in this week’s Back Issue Review, here’s the skinny: years ago a giant semi-organic robot crashed to Earth and bonded with a pilot, and ever since then four mechs descend into our atmosphere each year.

To find the four pilots that will bond, the US maintains a Hogwarts-esque Mech Academy to train the best and the brightest. We need them, because a race giant Kaiju monsters named Shargs are constantly creeping into our orbit and can only be repelled by the mechs.

We’re in the middle of the second arc of this book now after it was extended past a mini-series, presumably for just being unbelievably excellent (and also selling a few copies). I cannot tell you the last time I got this nervous about characters in a comic book being in peril.

This series continues to perfectly toe the line between Pacific Rim and Harry Potter, and I just want there to be 20x as much of it so I can keep reading more! [Read more…] about The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

Updated: Uncanny Avengers Collecting Guide & Reading Order

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Today I have my first update to a team guide, and it’s a team I have had a love/hate relationship with over the past decade – The Definitive Guide to the Uncanny Avengers!

Don’t need a full reading order right now, but want to know what the Avengers are doing with the X-Men’s “Uncanny” adjective? Keep reading for a brief history, where to start reading, what the team has been up to in 2017, and just how much of it you can own in oversize format.

[Read more…] about Updated: Uncanny Avengers Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)

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This is the end, my friends! The last in a series of four posts covering how Marvel could cover every X-Men comic book in omnibus volumes.

This post covers every X-Men series from Messiah Complex to the end of Marvel Now in an effort to give you maximum ideas for the The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot, where you vote for the comic runs you’d most like to see in an oversized format. Monday I covered all of X-Men from 1963 to 1991, Tuesday I reviewed 1991 to 2001, and yesterday I broke down 2001 to 2008.

With 21 more omnibuses from Messiah Complex to AvX and another 10 from Marvel Now, this edition brings our grand total of potential X-Men volumes to 113 possible omnibuses – which begs the question: How many of these could we possibly see in our lifetimes before books become completely obsolete and comics are downloaded directly into our brains?

At Marvel’s current rate of only a handful of X-Men omnibuses a year, it’s never going to happen.

Yet, with most Marvel omnibuses selling between 1,000 and 2,500 units in their first week, it makes me wonder how many of these books we could see if Marvel abandoned the outdated Direct Market model for determining their pre-order volume and sell-through.

Picture this – in October 2017 Marvel partners with Kickstarter plus one of the big online comic book sellers as a distributor to introduce the new “X-Men Omnibus Club: Year 1.” [Read more…] about Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)

Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 3: 2001 to 2008)

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I’m back with a third installment of the ultimate X-Men omnibus mapping, finding a way to squeeze just about every issue of X-titles into a cohesive bookshelf of handy omnibus volumes.

Okay, they’re not actually all that handy. Most of them could probably be wielded as a deadly weapon.

Today’s era begins with Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men starting on #114 in 2001 and ends with the final issue of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, which is the last thing that happens to any X-Men prior to Messiah Complex. Of course, there are a lot of other series contained in that material – you’ll immediately note that neither of those historic runs address a single issue of Uncanny X-Men!

Every one of those issues is covered in this post. Why? To give you ideas for the The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot, where you vote for the comic runs you’d most like to see in an oversized format. Monday I covered all of X-Men from 1963 to 1991, and yesterday I covered 1991 to 2001.

There are 25 potential omnibus volumes in this material! Many of their contents are high debatable, but that’s part of the fun – collected edition mapping is a contentious pastime. Heck, I don’t even agree with how Marvel does things half of the time! If you have a correction or disagreement don’t hold back – sound off in the comments below.

Now, prepare to be fully educated in the seedy underbelly of this period of all-star X-Men writers, including some books I am sure you never knew existed unless you are a superfreak of a walking Encyclopedia-X like I am.

[Read more…] about Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 3: 2001 to 2008)

Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #2 and 1 Most-Wanted!

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Omnibus on ShelfWe’ve arrived – it’s the finale of my annotated countdown of Marvel Most-Wanted Omnibuses, from the annual Secret Ballot officiated by TigerEyes. I covered #3-4 in the last installment.

As you’ll see in a moment, the top two are a pair of books that hold special interest for me, so this will be a fun one!

Before we get started, I want to thank everyone who has been tuning in daily to read these recaps – especially because you could have easily spoiled the anticipation by Googling to see the ballot results!

Now that you’ve formed a habit of stopping by, I hope you’ll keep it up. I’ll be back to posting comic reviews but I also have a ton of Marvel collections content dreamt up, starting with an absolutely monstrous post tomorrow that acts as an epilogue for this Most-Wanted Omnibus series. To stay up-to-date each week on site content – including new and expanded comic guide pages, you can join my mailing list, “Crushing On Crushing Krisis”:

For more details on all of Marvel’s existing omnibuses, visit my Marvel Omnibus & Oversized Hardcover Guide. It’s the most comprehensive tool on the web for details on every oversize book, including a rundown of contents and if the volume is still readily available for purchase. I’m always working to add more and more-updated information.

Okay. This is it. The final pair of most-wanted omnibuses. Are you ready? [Read more…] about Marvel’s Most-Wanted Omnibuses of 2016 – #2 and 1 Most-Wanted!

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