Disney Archives - Comics.Cheap

Mutations

This one can basically be defined as the actual “X-Factor” titles and various crossovers, Events and guest appearances. Let’s focus on the X-Factor titles.

X-Factor ’86-’98 – The first run, and a long one in the days before constant relaunches. The two things highlighted by the collections are Louise & Walt Simonson run and Peter David’s first run with Joe Quesada and Larry Stroman.

X-Factor ’05-’13 – commonly referred to as the Peter David era, and yes, he’s written a ton of X-Factor. This is where Madrox the Multiple Man steps in with the detective agency motif. (You can save a couple bucks on the early volumes with the X-Factor by Peter David: The Complete Collection omnibuses)

All-New X-Factor ’14-’15 – I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know X-Factor was relaunched in Marvel’s “All-New” era. Still Peter David.

X-Factor ’20-’21 – The House of X / Powers of X era run by Leah Williams and David Baldeon

And then all manner of X-Men family Event/Crossover collections.

Recommendations? It depends on what you’re looking for. The first two Epic Collections of the original run are more of the traditional X-Men school (and since it’s reuniting the original team, it should be). When Peter David pops up later in that run, things get quirky in a hurry. It’s not like David is exclusively a humorist, but there’s a lot more humor in his work. His second run is a completely different creature than the how X-Factor began.

The Classic Marvel Punch-Up

Oh, yes… this is a reoccurring confrontation that goes back to the EARLY days of Marvel: Ben Grimm facing off with the Hulk. More often than not, this would happen in the pages of Fantastic Four and the various writers would go back to it every so often.

What you’re looking at here depends on whether you’re more of a Hulk person or FF person. After all that first Hulk Epic Collection is duplicating content from the FF Epic Collection and we personally find FF to be the stronger feature at the time. And actually, that’s probably what we’d recommend here if you were only picking one – Fantastic Four Epic Collection Book 2, which also gives you some early Doctor Doom, Namor and X-Men, in addition The Hulk.

House of Mouse

This is really two sales under one umbrella:

First, it’s a sale on the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comic strip. While perhaps not as heralded as Dick Tracy or Terry and the Pirates, Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse was an influential adventure strip and he stayed on it for decades.

Second, it’s a sale on the “Disney Master’s” line, which probably needs a word of explanation. It’s not clear that ALL of these titles are from the international markets, but certainly a number of them are Disney comics produced for the European markets (where Disney is very popular) and are making a US market debut.

This week in Comixology Sales, it’s Batman Day and there’s a whole lot of Batman floating around, Marvel has a big run of Iron Man on sale and if you like Disney, especially Carl Barks and Don Rosa Uncle Scrooge, that’s at a discount, too.

(Disclosure: If you buy something we link to on our site, we may earn commissions)

Batman Day

The DC Batman Day Sale runs through Monday, 9/20 and it comes in three parts: Graphic Novels, Single Issues I and Single Issues II. Yes, that means a couple thousand single issues, including some oddities like Batman Family and the usually excellent – and mostly uncollected: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (the original run, not the later digital-first edition). Oddly enough, no Detective Comics single issues.

For collected editions, well… it’s mostly all there, from the current Tynion run (through Joker War) all the way back. You can easily pick your own flavor of Batman, but we’d point out a couple things…

Legends of the Dark Knight: Norm Breyfogle V. 1 is a nice thick volume containing the beginning of Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle run. Early enough the John Wagner was involved. You get the debuts of The Ventriloquist and The Ratcatcher, a Clayface reunion and a tale of The Demon, among other things. Strong collection.

If you’d like something a little lighter on the wallet, while it’s included in the larger Archie Goodwin collection, Batman: Night Cries by Goodwin and Scott Hampton is a mere $1.99 for the standalone graphic novel.

Not the Ozzy Version

The Marvel Iron Man: Massive Golden Avenger Sale runs through Sunday, 9/19.

This one is a real jumbled mess to browse, so we’re going to break this down by series. The rule of thumb is that Epic Collections tend to be slightly better values than the Masterworks, but pick your format. Masterworks are released in order, Epics are… a little eclectic in their releases.

Iron Man’s story starts in Tales of Suspense. Call us heretics, but we don’t think Shellhead really soars until Archie Goodwin shows up at the end of this run and takes Tony into the solo title. That would be By Force of Arms if you go Epic or Masterworks V. 4.

So then the long running Iron Man series is one of eras. The opening run with Archie Goodwin is pure gold. While it’s not bad after Goodwin, it next takes a bit leap with David Michelinie and Bob Layton turn up. Both runs, really. The first run with John Romita, Jr. brings the classic “Demon in a Bottle” and the later run with Mark Bright brings “Armor Wars.” You can’t lose when those two are on Iron Man. And, honestly, the Denny O’Neil/(mostly) Luke Mc Donnell run in between the Michelinie/Layton runs is under-rated. The “Iron Monger” final arc ending in #200 is a good one that Hollywood embraced.

The next superlative run was dubbed Iron Man: Heroes Reborn. This is Kurt Busiek and Sean Chen. For inexplicable reasons, only about 1/2 of the series has been collected, but you can get all that has been in one volume. (Sorry Kurt, you can protest all you want, but your run is a highlight.)

And the final entry on the highlights list is the Matt Fraction/Salvador Larroca run. This run gets special recognition for the “World’s Most Wanted” arc. When Dark Reign’s “non-event” event dropped, Fraction put the story arc on pause and delivered a KILLER self-contained epic about Tony Stark on the run. And then popped back to what he was planning on doing a year later. Great run. You can save a little money by getting the omnibus edition that collects the first 3 volumes.

*The first volume of the current Christopher Cantwell/Cafu Iron Man is $2.99. We’re enjoying it, but we’re not ready to put it on the wall before the first arc is over. 😉