Comixology (at Amazon) Sales: Luke Cage and Iron Fist, Spider-Woman, Umbrella Academy, Black Hammer

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

Posted on September 16, 2022September 16, 2022 by comics_p1pusl

Comixology (at Amazon) Sales: Kieron Gillen’s Marvel Work (Eternals, Loki, X-Men); Original Sin; DC’s 2K Title Drop with Sandman, OMAC and Manhunter; Bloom County; Umbrella Academy

In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, we’ve got discounts on Kieron Gillen’s Marvel work – Eternals / Uncanny X-Men / Journey Into Mystery / etc.; Marvel’s Original Sin Event; another big block of DC collections, including Sandman; IDW cuts the prices on some classic newspaper strip collections; and we couldn’t really have a new season of Umbrella Academy without a sale on the original material, could we?

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):

Journey into Gillen

The Marvel Kieron Gillen Sale runs through Monday, 6/27.

We find it really sad that a “Marvel” Gillen sale does not include our two favorite works of the bunch: Darth Vader and Doctor Aphra. Yes, there will other Star Wars sales, but if you’re talking Gillen, that’s what we’d put at the top of the heap.

So let’s start out with a cleaner recap of the major items in this sale:

The Eternals with Eric Ribić. $0.99 single issues only and the collected edition is NOT on sale for reasons known only to Amazon and/or Marvel.
War Hammer 40,000: Marneus Calgar with Jacen Burrows
Journey Into Mystery (i.e. Loki) with Doug Braithwaite and Richard Elson (among others) – omnibus editions
Uncanny X-Men – omnibus editions
Young Avengers with Jamie McKelvie – omnibus edition
Thor with Billy Tan / Richard Elson / Doug Braithwaite – omnibus edition
Iron Man with Greg Land / Dale Eaglesham / Joe Bennett / Luke Ross

What’s good? This one’s going to be more personal preference than with many sales and to that end, we’d point out that we did read the War Hammer volume and it felt like that’s a book you’ll get a LOT more out of it if you’re a gamer. (But if you’re already into War Hammer, you’ll probably love it.) Past that, Journey Into Mystery is where Gillen really popped onto the Marvel radar, Young Avengers is the familiar team of Gillen/McKelvie and Gillen’s Mr. Sinister in Uncanny X-Men definitely has had influence.

Casting the First Stone

The Marvel Original Sin Sale runs through Monday, 6/27.

We’d probably call this a one book sale – Original Sin is a big Event by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato. Someone’s killed the Watcher, dirty secrets are bubbling up from everyone’s past and… more would get into spoilers. There are a few tie-in volumes also listed, but our recollection is that the tie-in volumes are not really necessary. While this is often the case with Events, it might be even more so here. Proceed with tie-ins only if they’re scratching an itch for you.

When they say “Multiverse,” they mean “Infinity”

The DC Multiverse and Beyond eBooks Sale runs through Monday, 7/4.

This is another entry in the new DC trend of dropping ~2000 collections without much noticeable curation, so you can pick through it at your leisure. Lowest prices are $4.99, but most non-YA doesn’t get below $5.99.

With the Netflix adaptation looming a little over a month away, they’re leading this sale off with Sandman. And it’s certainly a classic series. The question is whether it will dip below $5.99 when the show drops and we don’t have an answer for that. DC’s been holding the line at $5.99 for most of their sales in the last couple months.

Of possible interest from the more recently published volumes (DC does wait awhile before applying discounts):

Jack Kirby’s OMAC: One Man Fighting Corps is listed at $5.99. If you’re not familiar with it, OMAC is a surprisingly subversive dystopian take on a future where billionaires/corporations are running amok. There are superhero trappings, but it’s really a science fiction adventure/satire.

And for something else out of left field in a good way, $5.99 will get Manhunter: The Deluxe Edition. This collects the Detective Comics serial by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson. An absolute classic run, it’s not as mainstream well-known because the Paul Kirk character wasn’t continued in his own title (for obvious reasons). It’s just an excellent stand-alone tale by two legends of the art form.