In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, Luke Cage (Power Man) & Iron Fist get the discounts, plus Spider-Woman and Silk on the Marvel side. Dark Horse offers up the Black Hammer and Umbrella Academy. Meanwhile, the Batman Day Sale continues.
Where did the New Releases and Sale pages go?
In case you’re having troubles with the new UIX (a LOT of people have been):
So let’s talk about about the latest Comixology/Amazon navigation change, which Comixology was talking up on it’s Twitter. They’re trying to fix things, but it’s still a little odd.
The upshot is that they’re implementing a little better sorting.
- Volumes in a title are now grouped together. (Not always in numerical order – that’s still handled poorly if there are more than 10 volumes.)
- It’s sometimes in alphabetical order. The tendency appears to be to have the highlighted title at the beginning and then slip in a… more alphabetical order later. In the Batman Day Sale, they run all the collected editions and then run all the single issues after that. In the Luke Cage sale, all Luke Cage/Power Man material comes before Iron Fist material, so it’s not really alphabetical.
It’s a little easier read, but the inconsistency with alphabetizing can be confusing.
The bad news is they removed to ability to change the display order. In other words, you can no longer search by publication date to see what the most recent book on sale is. (i.e., what just started to get discounted) You also can’t sort price (helpful for bargain hunting and to jump right to the $0.99 single issues when those are available). We have a philosophical problem with taking features away from users and we used those sorts.
On to the sales:
Bats
We broke down the big Batman Day Sale last time, but it’s still running. Click through for a closer look.
Sweet Christmas!
The Marvel Luke Cage and Iron Fist Sale runs through Monday, 9/19.
The chronology moves something like this: Initially there was a Luke Cage, Hero For Hire. This eventually was retitled Power Man. Running in parallel was Iron Fist, first in Marvel Premiere, then in the Chris Claremont/John Byrne solo series. Then the two titles merged to form the off-beat Power Man and Iron Fist. Power Man and Iron Fist might be best known for the Jo Duffy run, but it also has early work by Kurt Busiek, Priest and Denys Cowan, among others.
There have been a few revivals since, but the one that’s nearest to our heart is The Immortal Iron Fist. People are most familiar with the first half of the series, with the celebrated team of Ed Brubaker/Matt Fraction/David Aja. We’re here to tell you that the back half by Duane Swierczynski/Travel Foreman is also pretty darn good. Plus, more Fat Cobra! Don’t sleep on the back half.
Along Came a Spider-Woman
The Marvel Spider-Woman Sale runs through Monday, 9/19.
Or maybe a Spider-Man/Silk sale if we want to be accurate.
So the sorting by series is broken here and the Spider-Woman titles are co-mingled, so let’s straighten that out:
- Spider-Woman ’78-83 – The original run
- Spider-Woman ’14-’15 –Dennis Hopeless / Greg Land / Javier Rodriguez
- Spider-Woman ’15-’17 – Dennis Hopeless / Javier Rodriguez / Veronica Fish
- Spider-Woman ’20-’22 – Karla Pacheco / Pere Perez
Ditto for Silk. The “main” series are:
- Silk ’15 – Robbie Thompson / Stacy Lee
- Silk ’15-’17 – Robbie Thompson / Stacy Lee / Irene Strychalski
- Silk ’21 – Maurene Goo / Takeshi Miyazawa (Amazon has the wrong creator credits)
And then when they list Silk: Out of the Spider-Verse, that’s really the two series that start in ’15 collected along with some other relevant Spider-Man/Spider-Verse titles.
What do we like out of this? We’re not really current on Spider-Woman/Silk, but we can tell you that the original Spider-Woman comic is a deeply weird book. Lots of magic early on. Morgan Le Fey, Werewolf By Night, The Brothers Grim. If you like the more bizarre corners of 70s Marvel for its strangeness, it’s worth a look.
Getting Hammered
The Dark Horse World of Black Hammer Sale runs through Monday, 9/26.
This critical darling by Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston is very much a world building experience. Start with the core series and then branch to the spin-offs as the spotlighted characters catch your fancy. There’s plenty of imagination to go around.
Where’s My Umbrella?
The Umbrella Academy Sale runs through Monday, 10/17.
Why yes, there’s a new season on Netflix and we might even start on that tonight. Funny how sales line up with such things…
This one’s a lot easier to define: it’s a series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba about an extremely dysfunctional family of superhumans who are more than a little scarred by their adoptive upbringing. One series link for the collected editions and no fuss. Good comic, too. We enjoyed it.
Still On Sale
- The Marvel Monthly Sale – X-Men: Grand Design & Other Stories Sale runs through Monday, 10/3
- The IDW Star Trek Sale runs through Thursday, 9/22
- The IDW Recent Hits Sale runs through Thursday, 9/29
