Dark Horse Comics Archives

In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, Marvel puts Ultimate Spider-Man on sale and almost the entire Doctor Strange catalog. DC discounts their Team-Ups and Dark Horse has an Eric Powell sale.

Where did the New Releases and Sale pages go?

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In case you’re having troubles with the new UIX (a LOT of people have been):

The Original Ultimate Spider-Man

The Marvel Ultimate Spider-Man Sale – The Life & Death of Peter Parker runs through Monday, 3/18.

While the contents of the sale don’t match the name, this is the original Brian Bendis/Mark Bagley Ultimate Spider-Man. The first Ultimate title and (along with Daredevil) what originally made Bendis his reputation at Marvel. And it’s a good run, too.

What this isn’t is the Death of Peter Parker. Neither that, nor the Ultimate Comics Spider-Man (relaunched) series that led into it are included in the sale. It’s puzzling, to be honest.

That said, it makes it really easy to sum up the sale:

Ultimate Spider-Man – essentially, the Peter Parker years. Mark Bagley is artist for most of the run. Skip the omnibus (too expensive for V.1-3 of these larger collections), get the regular editions.

And seriously, Bendis and Bagley do a great job with it.

The Doctor Will See You Now

The Marvel Doctor Strange Sale runs through Monday, 3/18.

And it’s most of the Doctor Strange material that’s been collected in book form. Alas, the Masterworks are not in this sale and they’re a little further along the 70s/80s series than the Epics are.

Strange Tales – This is a cluttered series page, but its the original Lee/Ditko run, but it breaks down to Epic Edition 1.
Doctor Strange ’68-’69 – Epic Edition 2 catches the rest of the original Strange Tales and most of the first solo series (Some next level Gene Colan art in the solo run.) This was a Jan ’04 release, BTW, so first time discounted.
Doctor Strange ’74-’87 – The Epics pick up with the tale end of the ’68 series, catch the Marvel Premiere issues (enter: Englehart & Brunner) and then into the regular series, then you’ll need “regular” collections for the Stern/Smith run.
Strange Tales ’87-’88 – The rest of the Peter B. Gillis run from Strange Tales with art by Chris Warner, Kevin Nowlan, Terry Shoemaker and Richard Case.
Doctor Strange ’88-’96 – Probably best known for the Roy & Dann Thomas run with Butch Guice and Geoff Isherwood as notable artists.
Doctor Strange ’15-’18 – Initially Jason Aaron/Chris Bachalo with Donny Cates tagging in towards the end. (The omnibuses here are the better buy)
Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme ’16-’17 – Robbie Thompson / Javier Rodriguez
Doctor Strange ’18-’19 – The Mark Waid / Jesus Saiz / Barry Kitson era with Strange in space.
Doctor Strange, Surgeon Supreme (’19) – the very much under-rated and too short Mark Waid / Kev Walker run. Walker knocks it out of the park here.
Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise – Tradd Moore

For reasons unknown, the Jed MacKay material isn’t in this sale…

What’s good? The original Lee/Ditko run is great and you can get that in the first Epic Collection. Things pick up again when Englehart and Brunner show up towards the end of the Marvel Premiere run and the whole ’74-’87 run is solid, though we have a particular soft spot for the Roger Stern / Marshall Rogers / Paul Smith material towards the end. Yes, Doctor Strange had A list creators most of the time. That’s your core.

Another personal favorite is Doctor Strange: The Oath by a pre-Saga Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin. They’ve both moved on to bigger things, but a long run by those two would have been a real highlight.

Something under the radar? The final Waid/Walker run is also a lot more under the radar than it should be.

Let’s Fight and Then Team Up

The DC Team-Ups Sale runs through Monday, 3/18.

This sale is fairly straight forward – teams and team-ups.

The more recent series we’d recommend the most is Batman/Superman: World’s Finest by Mark Waid and Dan Mora. This is probably the best example of the “classic DC feel” of anything they’ve put out in the last decade or so. And let’s be real: an awful lot of the classic DC feel was thrown out the window when New 52 came around. The first two volumes are on sale, the third one just came out (it’s on our shortlist) and it’s a good time to jump on.

Other things that caught our eye:

Batman and Robin ’11-’15 – The Peter J. Tomasi / Patrick Gleason run
Doom Patrol ’87-95 – Grant Morrison / Richard Case; One of Morrison’s early breakout books and still one of his best. The Brotherhood of Dada is a creative high point. It looks like the Rachel Pollack omnibus never made it to digital?
Justice League International – Keith Giffen / J.M. DeMatties / Kevin Maguire / Bart Sears / Adam Hughes; The bwa ha ha ha era was not without it’s dark moments, but there was more bwa ha ha and it was fabulous.
JLA – Grant Morrison/Howard Porter reset the Justice League with a classic run and were followed by Mark Waid/Bryan Hitch, Joe Kelly / Doug Mahnke and Chris Claremont/John Byrne.
New Teen Titans – Marv Wolfman / George Perez – arguably DC’s flagship book for at least the first half of the 80s. Marv had a looooooong run, too. $3.99/volume for a classic.
Suicide Squad ’87-’92 – John Ostrander/Luke McDonnell/Geoff Isherwood; Establishing the super villain equivalent of The Dirty Dozen, nobody realized how influential this would become 30 years later.