.Are you tired of reading comics in short, monthly instalments?
Do you yearn for nice, smart books with spines, dustjackets and no ads?
Are you willing to pay ridiculously inflated prices for hardcover reprints of comics you already own in three different editions, just because the page size in the new version is ½” bigger?
Then this is the thread for you!
Vol 6? But, that’s basically what the Mutant Massacre Omnibus is already. Weird editorial decision. I think I draw the line at double dipping Omnibuses.
Finally showed up on Amazon.
HULK: MAESTRO BY PETER DAVID OMNIBUS Hardcover – April 25 2023
Collecting HULK: FUTURE IMPERFECT #1-2, INCREDIBLE HULK (1968) #460-461, CAPTAIN MARVEL (1999) #27-30, SPIDER-MAN 2099 (2014) #9-10, FUTURE IMPERFECT #1-5, MAESTRO #1-5, MAESTRO: WAR AND PAX #1-5, MAESTRO: WORLD WAR M #1-5, EXILES (2001) #79-80, ABOMINATIONS #1-3, and material from HULK: BROKEN WORLDS #1 and SECRET WARS: BATTLEWORLD #4.
and did we know about this?
Snow Angels Library Edition Hardcover – March 7 2023
Jeff Lemire & Jock
Collects Snow Angels Volume 1 and Volume 2 in a deluxe, oversized hardcover edition.
No! But I was certainly hoping for one for Snow Angels. Great find!
Fantastic Four: Full Circle
Finally got hold of this today, having keenly anticipated it for a while now. A brand new slim square hardcover OGN by Alex Ross (kind of similar to the DC Black Label larger format or the old 80s Marvel OGNs), featuring a new Fantastic Four adventure that nestles into the original Stan & Jack continuity.
The first thing to say is that Ross’s art (which isn’t always to my tastes, especially the more static pinup stuff) looks incredible here. There are some great Kirby-influenced designs, slick and detailed linework, and vibrant/psychedelic colour palette choices. It all looks great.
The writing is good, but not quite at the same level – partly I think because it’s consciously a homage to the past and so is a relatively simple adventure story without much depth or anything really unexpected.
However, it does have the strengths of those Kirby era comics in that there are tons of ideas that come thick and fast, and all the sci-fi and fantasy concepts work really well visually.
So it’s well worth a read, just don’t expect anything revolutionary from the writing.
Plus the book just feels like a real quality package overall, down to the lovely endpapers and foldout dustjacket (with a potted origin story for the FF by Ross).
This is one of the better Big Two books that I’ve read lately, and I wonder if it’s partly that there’s a bit more creative freedom and less editorial diktat with Marvel licensing-out their characters like this (the book is published by Abrams Comicarts). I wonder if it’s a route forwards for quality books from them in future.
While they have their flaws, SpeedyHen are offering Newburn Volume 1 for £10.97. Good price for an eight issue trade.
Nice find. I enjoyed this in singles and had been planning to grab the trade.
Dealer Alert
Couple of SpeedyHen preorders went active:
Gideon Falls OHC2 – £23.61
Die OHC – £33.51
Time For Lights Out HC
I’ve been reading this over the last couple of weeks, a collection of Raymond Briggs’ final strips, poems and writing, published before his death and which I had been meaning to read for a while.
It’s very much focused on his feelings at the end of his time: ageing, death and loneliness, interspersed with remembrances of his earlier years and important people in his life.
While the subject matter can be heavy at times, it’s shot through with wit and warmth and an endearingly curmudgeonly take on the world, and as a result it’s both very funny and very moving – I found myself tearful several times while reading it.
It also made me realise how relatively under-represented the viewpoints of the elderly are, and how refreshing it is to hear some no-bullshit, unsentimental but honest reflections on life from someone at the end of it.
While the art is occasionally sketchy or unfinished (some sections towards the end feel like comic scripts without any art at all, while much of the book is plain prose or poetry without any art at all), there’s an ethereal and almost ghostly quality to it that suits the material.
Well worth a read if you’ve ever been a fan, but not something to try and take in all in one sitting.
Dealer Alert
BooksEtc have dropped Batman: One Dark Knight HC down to £14.58 (RRP £25)
And what a thing of beauty it is.
It’s even more huge than I expected. Absolute-sized pages, and look at the size of that spine!
Looking forward to cracking this open.
Hit Me v.1 TPB
I bought this AWA collection on a whim after hearing some good things about it, and I thought it was a pretty good read.
It’s a crime/noir story that’s given a fresh twist by being set against the backdrop of the BDSM sex trade, with a heroine who’s a pain specialist that gets mixed up in a tangled criminal plot.
Both the writing and art are pretty straightforward but tell the story well, and there’s a genuine feeling of edge to some of it but without it ever feeling too exploitative or gratuitous, despite a lot of fairly adult content. I think that’s because it handles all that stuff in a fairly matter-of-fact and honest way, rather than going for the titillating slick Hollywood version.
Overall, reminded me a bit of the recent Gun Honey from Titan in that it’s a fun pulp-y read with a decent female lead and a nice pace to the whole thing, which is entertaining throughout even if it doesn’t altogether avoid some of the clichés that come with this kind of story.
For a five issue trade at under a tenner it’s also pretty good value.
And what a thing of beauty it is.
It’s even more huge than I expected. Absolute-sized pages, and look at the size of that spine!
Looking forward to cracking this open.
That’ll look great next to my two Fear Agent Library Editions 👍🏼
Hit Me v.1 TPB
I bought this AWA collection on a whim after hearing some good things about it, and I thought it was a pretty good read.
I read one of Christa Faust’s prose novels (MONEY SHOT) 10 years ago and really enjoyed her crime-noir sensibilities. I may have to seek this one out, while I’m picking up SEVEN TO ETERNITY.
I read one of Christa Faust’s prose novels (MONEY SHOT) 10 years ago and really enjoyed her crime-noir sensibilities. I may have to seek this one out, while I’m picking up SEVEN TO ETERNITY.
It’s only $9.99 for a five-issue trade, so well worth a punt.
Plus Tokyo Ghost, Low, Black Science, Deadly Class, Death Or Glory….
I’m not a Remender completing, but I do have the Tokyo Ghost and Death Or Glory OHCs and they’re very nice books indeed.
I actually get a lot of Remender’s work in singles, so most it sits in a long box or two in my garage. Or at least I used to until the ending of Black Science soured me on him. I still check out his work, but a lot more cautiously than I did previously. Opena’s art is the main reason I got these few in oversized hardcover.
So long as the price for the big OHC version remains cheaper than buying the paperbacks, I consider it a worthwhile gamble on Remender’s stuff but that might not be so the way things are going.
In other hardback news:
– The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Stories got a LE size edition end of July that I missed.
– There’s a LE sized hardback collection of Mignola’s trio of Mr Higgins stories due December.
Liam Sharp’s Starhenge needs a bit of support for its March 2023 deluxe HC. Preorders are needed.
Blackwell’s have it for £23.75 right now. Jan 2023 might see a few quid cheaper offer from SpeedyHen but, with the way things are with inflation, Blackwell’s offer might end up better than expected.
Still actively waiting for the first volume of Reckless and volumes of Fatale to be available at my local bookstore.
Can you ask them to order them in? They’re well worth reading.
I don’t remember hearing that Fatale reprints were coming. I think Brubaker has said that reprints are very unlikely on the OHCs in general.
Yeah, I don’t recall seeing talk of that. The production costs were already major and it sounds like they are going up.
Talking of costs going up, I’ll be surprised if there isn’t another price rise of US trades due to the kamiKwasi budget tanking the pound.
Talking of costs going up, I’ll be surprised if there isn’t another price rise of US trades due to the kamiKwasi budget tanking the pound.
Yep, seems very likely.
Comic books aren’t the most important things in life, admittedly, and obviously even things like food and basic heating are a worry for some people at the moment. But it is still a bit of a pisser that after the hikes of Brexit and the weakening of the pound overall over the past 15 years, the tories keep making such an expensive hobby even pricier.
(Those early-2000s days where it was more like two dollars to the pound seem like very long ago now.)
Solution: Buy more Cinebook, Titan, Rebellion and Panini trades? I kind of already do.
I’m probably going to but it typically has about a few months wait depending on its availability on their main branch. I do have friend of the devil. So I’m waiting to buy the first Reckless book so I can read it. Still missing a few books for my Brubaker/Philips collection.
Dealer Alert
Batman: Curse of the White Knight OHC now at BooksEtc for £23.75.
Balls. Still, nabbed other bargains via SpeedyHen that more than balance it out.
Yeah for me I think the £50 mark is a bit of a mental barrier. Time was that you could nab all these big books for £40-£45ish but now that they’re approaching £60 the value isn’t there for me.
Finally this is in my hands!
I’ve always enjoyed these Artist Edition giant-sized reprints of original art over the years, but Todd McFarlane’s Spidey has always been a bit of a holy grail for me. And now it’s here, it doesn’t disappoint. There are some fantastic pages in here to pore over.
Got my 3W3M subscriber rewards package today. A lovely oversized paperback collection of most of the first year’s material (sourcebook and comics). Two exclusive signed prints (Hickman, Huddleston, del Mundo). And a metal members only card (to be fair, not sure what the point of this is, but it’s nicely done).
The hardcover version of this book was even more beautiful, but limited to the super expensive subscriber tier. I believe that a follow on printing of the TPB will be released for purchase soonish.
I didn’t know they were going to do physical rewards when I signed up last year, so this was a nice surprise. I was happy that I subscribed anyway, but this was the proverbial icing on the cake.
I finally got around to reading the latest Blacksad – All Fall Down pt 1.
Absolutely gorgeous, as ever. Nice noiry story and being a two parter, it has more room to breathe and build up.
I did find I kept getting pulled out of the story though, by overt references to the species of characters. It’s been a couple of years since I last read any of Blacksad, but I could have sworn the various species were only referred to euphemistically (Blacksad was a “cat” in the slang sense) and used as metaphor and short hand to personality (the white suprematists were all fully white animals, mixed race characters had patches of coloured fur, Weekly “ferrets out” news etc). And the latter is still true here, but then you’ve got multiple instances of characters being straight up called “bat”, “gull”, “gator” etc. It’s feels a bit artless and on the nose. The difference between a story about “real” people who happen to be depicted as animals and something like Zootopia, where they’re all consciously different species.
Curse Words
I have to admit to being ambivalent on this as I found the first of Soule’s original series I read, Letter 44, to start well but reduced over time. It ended OK but that was about it.
Still, just over £30 for a 28 issue, five trades collection, as a standard hardback, is quite the value proposition. It’s aides by Soule’s artistic collaborator, Rysn Browne. I liked God Hates Astronauts. It didn’t draw me back but it was good, with a distinctive sense of style.
The two go together well here. The story combines dimension hopping and time travel and magic and the combination works. It also acts as a deconstruction of the standard hero badass. You know the type, a violent know-it-all who wibs every fight. Sent to Earth to destroy it, Wizord finds himself met with an unexpected opportunity he never saw coming.
What’s notable about this is Soule doesn’t instantly redeem Wizord from his violent, psychopath past. Instead, he’s a flawed character up until the end.
There’s more to it of course, but those pieces work better without revealing them. The only two parts that did not work are the new epilogue issue. That falls pretty flat. The second is how Soule renders Jacques Zacques’ french accent – it’s terrible.
Overall, this was a well paced and executed series that also knew when to stop. In Browne, Soule has an excellent collaborator and I’ll likely give their next series, Eight Billion Genies, a go when the trade comes out next year.
IMMORTAL HULK OMNIBUS Hardcover – July 4 2023 – click for cover
The entirety of Al Ewing’s Hulk masterpiece, called one of the greatest comic books of all time, collected in an omnibus!
COLLECTING: Immortal Hulk (2018) 1-50, Immortal Hulk: The Best Defense (2018) 1, Defenders: The Best Defense (2018) 1, Absolute Carnage: Immortal Hulk (2019) 1, Immortal Hulk (2020) 0, Immortal She-Hulk (2020) 1, King in Black: Immortal Hulk (2020) 1, Immortal Hulk: Time of Monsters (2021) 1 (A story), material from Avengers (2018) 684
Print length 1592 pages
ISBN-10 1302949977
ISBN-13 978-1302949976
I guess I’ll go this route, but that is a big book.
Yep. Same size or possibly a bit bigger than the War of the Realms Omnibus and that was a monster. Practically I tend to go with 1350 as the upper limit for page count.
Actually the numbers are starting to sink in. 1592 pages?
Hellblazer (Ennis) is 1352
Who’s Who vol. 1 is 1320, vol. 2 (Nov. 29th) is 1216
LSH 5 Years later vol. 1 is 1424, vol. 2 is 1328
Those are monsters.
I get it, it’s a better sell for an all-in-one Ennis Hellblazer.
Planetary, Authority, Gotham Central, all under 1000 pages and very nice.
This should really be the target.
LSH 5 Years Later could’ve been 3 volumes instead of 2.
Flip side of that is it may not have happened at all if someone said no to 3.
Have to admit it would be a hard job to decide this stuff. Things have to sell in the end.
One of the biggest I have is the Invisibles omni, and that’s 1536 pages. So this is going to be in that ballpark.
Enjoyed this just as much in TPB as I did in singles.
It all hangs together really nicely, with Zeb Wells providing a solid mix of superhero stuff, crime drama and soap-opera subplots, all with a perfect Peter Parker voice. And JR jr’s art looks great.
Vintage Spidey.
Still buying in monthlies – but I tend to sell on pretty much all my singles these days and rebuy anything I want to keep in trade.
(Singles are a massive faff to store, find, look after etc. so the only ones I tend to have are ones that aren’t collected anywhere.)
I was expecting a trio of old SpeedyHen orders, nabbed with the £5 off code, to expire. Instead they despatched in the last day! On the way I have:
– Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club
– Hellboy: The Bones of Giants
– The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire Volume IV
Also – Dealer Alert
The Out – a new 2000AD story from Abnett and Harrison is at BooksEtc for £12.92
I’ve been keeping a close eye on it.
Turns out Blackwells is a really good indicator of when stuff will become available. They had copies a day or so ago. That was my cue to keep checking BooksEtc for when they had copies.
Meanwhile SpeedyHen’s pricing algorithm has another burp increase on Marvel omnibuses, but it’s not been matched elsewhere so could be a quirk.
SH remain the best for Image paperbacks if you wait until release day. Blackwells can be very good too.
Recent reads:
Farmhand Volume 4
It’s great to have this series back. Hopefully all the way through to its conclusion, though that is where some Image series fall down. (Redneck and Copperhead I’m looking at you.)
This progresses the story quite a bit, especially if Guillory sticks with the final page cliffhanger.
Little Monsters Volume 1
Pary of me says wait for the OHC but the prices are going that might be too high. In any case this is another great book from Lemire-Nguyen.
With a mostly monochrome art style, punctuated by some very careful use of colour, Lemire unfurls a future, horror dystopia with nods to both climate change and covid.
Radiant Black Volume 3
This continues to be one of the best independent superhero books going. It also has a wry take on superheroes, with one villain being a Crypto Bro set-up flogging NFTs!
Newburn Volume 1
It would be easy but totally unfair to say Jacob Phillips had it made for working in comics. If anything the shadow cast by his father probably made it harder for him. What he shows here is that he has his oen style and it is one very suited to crime stories.
At the same time Zdarsky takes the more unusual move of telling mostly complete single issue stories. But each adds to an overall picture and pays off at the end.
For all he’s been cropping up everywhere I haven’t read Zdarsky before. Based on this? I like what he does. It all flows well and I’ll probably check out his other Image work.
Yeah, his Daredevil is good and his Batman run is shaping up quite nicely. I don’t love everything he’s done but when he’s good he’s very solid.
Marvel have just announced a Sigil Omnibus. I literally have no words 
I just saw it on Near Mint Condition’s Facebook page, Ben.
I actually read a lot of CrossGen’s stuff as they originally came out. I was a big fan of most of the creators at the time (Marz, Dixon, Waid, Perez, Pelletier, Guice, even Greg Land before he became so obvious about his photo shopping, …). They were also the first company to really pursue digital as an option. Ground breaking.
But, when they crashed and burned, most of their series just stopped inconclusively.
From what little I read of Sigil it wasn’t particularly captivating. It was one of the core 4 launch books in their universe, and as such had Mark Alessi’s fingerprints on it much more than some of their later books. There’s a reason he had to set up his own comics company in order to publish this stuff. It’s not bad. A high action sci-fi title a la Star Wars. But, it’s not going to blow anyone away either.
So, all in all, I’m a bit flabbergasted that Marvel have chosen to publish a premium high end collected edition of this series. I can’t imagine there’s a market for this out there.
I think a lot of it comes down to personal taste and the nostalgia aspect. I think we all have our guilty pleasures and runs that we have a soft spot for even when we know they’re not objectively great – usually because they hit us just at the right time as young readers.
(For me personally I have the McFarlane adjectiveless Spider-Man omnibus and loads of early-era Spawn HCs on my shelf.)
As we get older the sweet spot for those nostalgia-oriented collections gets later, and we get to the point where they’re collecting stuff that we probably already recognised as not great at the time. But for some people, those Crossgen books will be their sweet spot.
That’s fair. I certainly have a bunch of objectively rubbish (1990’s bollocks, I think I called them) books in my collection purely for nostalgia.
I think a lot of it comes down to personal taste and the nostalgia aspect. I think we all have our guilty pleasures and runs that we have a soft spot for even when we know they’re not objectively great – usually because they hit us just at the right time as young readers.
‘The Golden Age of Comics is 12’ is the quote I always liked (can’t remember who said it, some comics writer on a podcast).
There’s a lot of truth in that, at that age I would pick up just about anything I could get my hands on, from Marvel UK reprints to very spottily distributed US books. A lot of it is not very good but still holds a special place in my affections.
Curt Vile wrote it.
I don’t pick up many of these Marvel Epic Collections but I grabbed this one, as it means that all of Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil run is finally collected in trade!
Feels like there should really be a nice big fat omnibus of this run at some point though. It deserves it.
It’s closer to 3-4 Epics. The entire Nocenti run is #236-#291 (with a couple of non-Nocenti issues sprinkled throughout), so maybe at the very outside of the range of a typical Marvel omnibus.
Although if they’re doing Immortal Hulk in a single volume then they could probably manage this if they really wanted to.
I got Young Justice Book Six today. Huzzah! I’m not going to have chance to read it for a while, but it’s nice to have the end of the series (I’ve not checked, but I assume they have actually included everything to finish it off, although you know DC) and I genuinely didn’t think they were going to. On the other hand though, it’s got a markedly different paper quality to every other volume in the series. Very matte and coarse paper, almost of the type DC used to use in their trades back in the 90 to mid-00s. Hopefully it won’t yellow as much as those ones did.
the Brubaker/Phillips Sleeper Omnibus 2022 reprint is available to order on Speedyhen for £36.70,
Amazon has it for $90, so the Speedyhen offer is a GREAT deal!
Dealer Alert
Superman: Son of Kal-El Volume 2 at BooksEtc for £12.09
https://www.booksetc.co.uk/books/view/-9781779517388
The Out TPB
After hearing multiple recommendations here and elsewhere when this was first coming out in the individual 2000AD progs, I checked out this new collection. And I really enjoyed it – one of the best strips I’ve read from 2000AD in a long while, and one which surprises you with some of the turns it takes.
What starts out as quite a light knockabout yarn ends up delivering some surprisingly emotional and thoughtful moments which hit harder than you might expect.
And the art is really vivid and original and drives the story in a lot of ways, rather than just serving it.
While it’s quite a different type of story, I was reminded of Halo Jones at times by the scope of the book and the way it presents everything from the viewpoint of its lead character as she makes her way through the universe.
A really good read and I’ll look forward to more.
While it’s quite a different type of story, I was reminded of Halo Jones at times by the scope of the book and the way it presents everything from the viewpoint of its lead character as she makes her way through the universe.
Yeah it evokes Halo Jones because we have a female lead in a sci-fi story and the fact that neither are on any real quest, they are just trying to get by day to day.
Both those elements are pretty rare in comics which drives comparison but in all other aspects they are very different.
