Once and Future Archives

In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, it’s time for even more Black Friday Sales. Possibly, because it’s Black Friday? Another Marvel sale, plus BOOM!, IDW and Image.

Where did the New Releases and Sale pages go?

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

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

And with Black Friday now in place, here’s another batch of sales for the occasion. Earlier in the week, we broke down the Marvel Epic Collection Sale and the DC Black Friday Sale, so go back and have a look at those if you haven’t seen them.

What Have You Done For Me Lately ?

The Marvel Latest and Greatest Sale runs through Thursday, 12/1.

And yes, we’ll happily recommend three things we’ve been enjoying from this bunch:

Jed MacKay’s emerged as a writer to keep an eye on and two V. 1’s of his pop up here:

The Death of Doctor Strange is an accurate title for this MacKay/Lee Garbett series that does kill off Stephen Strange, though to say much more about this clever and twisty series would move into the realm of spoilers.

Moon Knight: The Midnight Mission is the opening act in the MacKay/Alessandro Cappuccio Moon Knight revival that’s one of the more unpredictable comics out there right now. “Mr. Knight” is trying to get his act together. He’s seeing a therapist. He’s started a sort of night mission to offer Konshu’s protection as it used to be intended. And then the vampires show up. And another avatar of Konshu. (And the subsequent acts only have more curveballs.) This one’s also an entertaining ride.

Defenders: There Are No Rules is the Al Ewing / Javier Rodriguez Defenders revival. This time out, Doctor Strange and company go dimension hopping looking to retrieve the Eternity Mask. Different realities are governed by different laws of physics (or magic), hence the title. Oh, and Galactus is involved. This story plays out on a BIG canvas and for as much of a hot streak as Ewing is on right now, Rodriguez still manages to steal the show… which is to say both writing and art are popping here.

Walt Simonson’s Other Thor

The IDW Black Friday Sale runs through Monday, 11/28.

IDW could have called this a “Best of Sale” and we’d have backed them. Plus, $0.99 for a V.1 and $1.99 for subsequent volumes on everything? What’s the word we’re looking for… CHEAP.

Ragnarok is Walt Simonson’s return to Norse mythology. It is glorious and might just be Walt’s best work… which is saying something. And the old sales charts (back when we had sales charts) suggest a LOT of people were sleeping on this one. Twilight of the Gods has come and gone. The Nine Worlds are reduced to the Dusk Lands and all is not well. Thor is raised from the dead, not altogether successfully, and starts a quest to set things right. Highest recommendation, especially at these prices. Note: V.3 is listed separately from the first two.

Richard Stark’s Parker is the late Darwyn Cooke adapting Donald Westlake’s score-settling thief, Parker. Some of the best crime comics you’ll ever see, as we’ve said before. And these are the best prices we’ve seen for them, if memory serves.

Prices Go Boom

The Best of Boom! Sale runs through Monday, 11/28.

And yes, we have another holiday V.1 for $0.99 and subsequent volumes for $1.99 sale! Cheap!

The centerpiece here is probably Once and Future, the Kieron Gillen / Dan Mora contemporary fantasy adventure about the power of stories manifesting as Merlin returns to raise King Arthur… and Arthur doesn’t care for all these immigrants. It starts out fairly breezy and is starting to get fairly dark by the time V. 4 rolls around. V.5 wraps things up at the end of December, so this is a cheap catchup on a book we’ve enjoyed.

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V and Filipe Andrade chronicles Death’s relationship with the inventor of immortality and is probably the best reviewed book of the sale.

House of Slaughter by James Tynion IV, Tate Brombal, Werther Dell‘Edera and Chris Shehan is a spin-off from Something Is Killing the Children, set in a school run by the Order of monster hunters that Erica Slaughter is butting heads with. Tonally, this is a very different book. It’s more of an angsty CW series set in the same universe.

Sale of Large Sizes

The Image Omnibus & Deluxe Edition Sale runs through Monday, 11/28.

A heads up we hope you heed: Image Deluxe Editions are hardcovers and the discount is based on the HC price. Depending on the sale, it’s frequently cheaper to get the digital edition of the two “regular” collections than a Deluxe Edition containing the equivalent of two regular collections. Keep an eye on what you’re buying.

That said, some of the omnibuses are good deals, so let’s have a look at those and see what they cost per issue, shall we?

Saga Compendium 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples is $23.99 and collects #1-54. That’s less than 45 cents/issue ($0.444/issue). That’s a good deal and Saga’s reputation speaks for itself.

Paper Girls: The Complete Story by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang is $19.99 and collects all 30 issues. That’s a hair under 67 cents/issue ($0.666/issue). Not as cheap as the Saga Compendium, but beats a $0.99 single issue sale. You may have seen the Amazon Prime video adaptation. The comic is better.

The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips isn’t really an omnibus, it’s just the whole 12 issue miniseries in one volume. This one’s a noir murder mystery set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s Brubaker and Phillips. They’re pretty gosh darn consistent, so you probably already know if you’ll like it. We certainly did, but we’re easy marks for those two.

Curse Words: The Hole Damned Thing Omnibus by Charles Soule and Ryan Browne is roughly 30 issues worth for $19.99, so basically the same deal as Paper Girls. This is a dark farce about an evil Wizard named Wizord who’s feuding with some wizards who are more evil and maybe… maybe… he’s open to changing his ways. Another quality piece of entertainment.

Astro City Metrobook V. 1 by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson and Alex Ross is $11.99 for the first 18 issues of the various incarnations of Astro City… which ends up being the same price per issue as Paper Girls and Curse Words. In a nutshell, Astro City is everything good about superheroes distilled into a new universe. Everything will feel a little familiar and the early issues are about capturing the magic of the Silver Age. Astro City is a great palette-cleanser if Event Comics are trying your patience!

Still On Sale

The Marvel Epic Collection Sale runs through Thursday 12/1
The DC Black Friday Sale runs through Monday, 11/28.
The Marvel Monthly Black Panther Sale runs through Monday, 11/28
The DC 90s Rewind Sale runs through Monday, 11/28
The Dark Horse Digital Manga 2022 Sale runs through Monday, 11/26
The Dark Horse Resident Alien Sale runs through Monday, 11/28

In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, Comic-Con 2022 has arrived and the sales came along for the ride. Added to the pile: lots of X-Men, Eisner nods from DC, BOOM!’s wide swath of books and last week’s IDW link got fixed.

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):

Just a heads up – there is a LOT of indie action at the “San Diego Graphic Novel Sales” page. Or full annotations for the bulk of that are in last week’s column.

Brand X

The Marvel X-Men Legacy Sale runs through Thursday, 7/28.

It’s a legacy sale, so it’s the Uncanny X-Men core… although this may shorter list than some of the legacy sales. For instance, X-Men wasn’t part of Heroes Reborn, so no relaunch there.

As is our custom, let’s run through the key series included, first:

Uncanny X-Men ’63-’11 – The original X-Men, the “new” X-Men, Morrison… it’s a long run.
Uncanny X-Men ’11-’12 – The Kieron Gillen era
Uncanny X-Men ’13-’15 – The Brian Bendis / Chris Bachalo era (Battle of the Atom fits in with this run as a crossover)
Uncanny X-Men ’16-’17 – The Cullen Bunn / Greg Land / Ken Lashley era
Uncanny X-Men ’18-’19 – The Mathew Rosenberg era

And you might be asking yourself, “aren’t there usually more than one X-Men title and don’t they cross over a lot?” Yes, that would be a potential issue… pun intended. Not so much with the Epic Collections and the Masterworks as with the later series, and there are some Event collections in the set.

You should know our general advice right now. There’s a slight preference for the value of Epic Collections over Masterworks collections, but it depends on the exact price point and the Epic Collections sometimes have gaps. That still applies here. The wild card with X-Men is that it can get impenetrable with continuity and all the characters floating around. You can’t always just jump in.

So, recommendations with that in mind.

If you’ve never tried the original X-Men, we’d say go with The Sentinels Live Epic Collection. It’s at the very tail end of the original run that the original X-Men run is at its best: a bit of Jim Steranko and then a Roy Thomas / Neal Adams sequence that ended all too quickly.

For the “new” X-Men, we’re cool with the theory that Giant-Sized X-Men #1 / Uncanny X-Men #94 through #200 is one big arc. That’s where we’d start if we were new. The Epic Collections only take you to #153, at which point you need to start cutting in the Masterworks editions with V. 7 through 12.

For an alternate jumping on point, perhaps the Ed Brubaker era (# to # ) which is collected in three volumes starting with Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire.

We assume you already know about the Morrison run.

And if you were looking for the Events that started after #200… well, that’s next.

Did Somebody Say Crossover?

The Marvel X-Men Milestones Sale runs through Monday, 7/25.

And this would be a set of single volume collections of the big “Event” storylines where the various X-titles converge. And maybe look at it in chronological view.

Dark Phoenix is the classic, but perhaps best enjoyed in the context of that #94-200 run we described above. Past that, everyone has their favorite. We might go out on a limb and suggest that Messiah Complex is the best post-Claremont arc, but… opinions vary.

Award Bait

The DC Eisners Sale runs through Monday, 7/25.

This is a tiny, 9 item sale that originally included some single issues that don’t appear to be on sale. No clue what was up with that.

Of the contenders, Batman is the usual suspect, but the Tom Taylor / Bruno Redondo Nightwing is the critical belle of the ball, here.

A bit more under the radar is the Ram V / Mike Perkins Swamp Thing. We’re not so sure that shouldn’t have waited to package the entire story in one volume (V.2 drops in ~3 weeks), but this slight reimaging of the character as a new avatar for The Green emerges is definitely an interesting read.

Return to the Planet of the Comic-Con Sales

The Boom! SDCC Graphic Novel Sale runs through 8/4/22.

This one popped on the SDCC later than the rest, and you know what? There are a few BOOM! titles we’re happy to share the love for.

We Only Find Them When They’re Dead is an absolutely bonkers delight from Al Ewing (who’s on a hot streak) and Simone Di Meo. It starts out as tale of smuggling around a salvage operation, scavenging the body parts of dead gods found floating in space. Then it gets into suppressive governments and cults. We’re not sure precisely where it’s going to end up, but we’re happy to be along for the ride. It appears only V. 1 is on sale.

Once and Future by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora is probably a little higher up on the BOOM! visibility scale. It’s a breezy adventure with a bit of humor and darkness around the edges at times concerning a fellow who’s been drafted into the family monster-hunting business by his grandmother (who isn’t as retired as she should be) and a plot to raise a decidedly unfriendly King Arthur from the grave. A really fun series.

And for a deeper cut that’s coming to the surface because of a Netflix film deal, there’s Irredeemable by Mark Waid, Peter Krause and Diego Barreto. The high concept here is somewhere between “Superman has a psychotic break” and “Superman meets The Bad Seed.” The Plutonian, a sort of Superman-esque character finally snaps and decides he’s in charge. The surviving heroes and villains must try to stay alive long enough to figure out how to stop him. Interestingly, there seem to now be a lot of comparisons to The Boys, which you didn’t really hear when then two books were running. There is an “abuse of superpowers” theme in common, but the two series are nearly tonal opposites. The Boys, particularly the original comic, is slapstick and parody. Irredeemable plays it straight. We’ve always enjoyed it.

How IDW Got Its Link Back

The IDW SDCC Sale runs through Monday, 7/25… and guess what? Comixology/Amazon fixed the link from last week’s error, so now we can see the whole thing.

A buried bargain: $3.49 for Jeff Lemire’s Underwater Welder, a well regarded science fiction character study graphic novel.

$3.99 will get you Bermuda by John Layman and Nick Bradshaw. This fairly recent collection (came out in Feb.) concerns a region of the Atlantic Ocean that collects missing ships and planes. There’s an island in it, inhabited by pirates, dinosaurs and assorted monsters. And a 16 year old girl named Bermuda running roughshod over the lot of them. A little bit of Kamandi, a little bit of Land of the Lost. It’s a really fun book with great art, too. Seems like it flew under the radar.

And for the “classic” option, it’s sometimes hard to find enough praise to heap on Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark’s Parker series of graphic novels. An absolutely brilliant adaptation of the Donald Westlake crime novels about a thief who believes in payback. Highly recommended.