The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers comic books via omnibuses and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Collecting Avengers Graphic Novels: A Definitive Guide. Last updated November 2024 with titles scheduled for release through March 2025.
Secret Warriors was a rarity when it launched in 2009 – a brand new team book not relying on an existing name and from a creator not only new to Marvel, but new to comics in general!
(You could perhaps argue that the concept was a mashup of the youthful New Warriors and the variable-cast Secret Defenders, that it was a play on Bendis’s Secret War event with Nick Fury, or even that it was an early Hickman hint of his impending Secret Wars(!) – but that’s an ultra-geeky conversion for another time!)
That creator behind the new title was Jonathan Hickman and the rest, as they say, is history.
Jonathan Hickman became one of the most famous writers in comics in the span of just half a decade. Secret Warriors was the first building block of his extensive examination of Marvel’s secret history both on Earth and across the universe, tied together by Nick Fury and culminating in Secret Wars in 2015.
While Secret Warriors was still running, Marvel spun off a new Avengers team at the top of The Heroic Age in fall 2010 called Secret Avengers. Though it had no direct connection to Secret Warriors, the theme was similar – as America’s top cop, Steve Rogers assembled a rotating strikeforce of covert Avengers to tackle the biggest mysteries and threats.
Secret Warriors ended its run as a self-contained series, but the Secret Avengers branding stuck – the title would see additional volumes that collapsed the concepts of the two books, with SHIELD running the secret team of Avengers. Both series bear a strong resemblance to the television show Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD – it has re-used many of Hickman’s concepts and characters from Secret Warriors. [Read more…] about Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers – Collecting Guide & Reading Order