Smith's Shorter Sagas

Date Completed: 30 Mar. 2025 Grade: B- The "Blood and Thunder" crossover is something that I remember encountering when I was young and first getting into comics. I never read the whole thing, but I had a couple of the comics which had the distinctive cover images which denoted them as being part of this long epic crossover. I decided that I would try to find all of the issues that belong to the crossover before reading it. Of course, this never happened, so while I was familiar with the event, this is my first time reading it. I was honestly a little surprised with how much this volume went back to the well of earlier Thor issues. The "Blood and Thunder" event even went back to what I thought was one of the more ridiculous parts of the Lee/Kirby era, which was the idea of "Warrior Madness" which Thor (supposedly) contracts. As such, Thor was actually the villain for most of the event, which instead focused on the Infinity Watch trying to stop him. After t...

Completed: 29 Mar. 2025 Grade: B- I've decided Kirby games are the right thing to play during the Spring time. Probably because of the pastel coloring and its association with Easter, but also because this is a tough time of the school year, and so an easier and relatively mindless game is welcomed. Kirby Star Allies was a fun little adventure which had the typical Kirby abilities, copied by swallowing enemies, and a silly progression to epic proportions. The gimmick for this outing was the ability to turn enemies into allies, have them fight alongside, and then combine powers together. The power combining was interesting, but sometimes difficult to trigger, and was usually only helpful with a power which emulated a weapon (such as the sword or cutter abilities), which encouraged me to favor those powers over elemental powers (Such as fire or freezing). I wish I had played through some of the other Kirby games before getting to this one. While I have played some, Star Allies felt l...

Date Completed: 17 Mar. 2025 Grade: C A few caveats before I begin. Firstly, I did not intend on reading this Omnibus at two different times. However, as I was reading through it, I noticed that it essentially collected four trade paperbacks that Dynamite had published separately, and as I was nearing the end of the second of those two TPBs, I was getting a little bored. Having learned from previous experience, that if I get too bored I might fall off this push to read, I decided to just split this in two, and read the second half at the end of my next rotation. My second caveat is that I wasn't planning on reading the Red Sonja books. I've been trying to prevent myself from expanding too far away from the Marvel Epic lines until I read through a bit more (and lord knows there are other books I'd like to try... but discipline is needed!). However, as I was reading through the classic Conan books, there was a crossover with Red Sonja's own title that I enjoyed, and the R...

Date Completed: 8 Mar. 2025 Grade: D+ I was genuinely looking forward to this collection, but was sorely disappointed. It contained a lot of early Iron Man and Avengers issues which can be found in other Epics. This in itself isn’t a problem, but the stories felt disjointed when just taking the Black Widow issues or even parts of issues. She did not seem to have a cohesive narrative, unlike the Hulk volume 1 that did a similar thing. I thought things would improve when the Widow did have a solo title as part of Amazing Adventures, but even this was a slog. Instead of leaning in to what makes her an interesting character (a Soviet spy who defected to America) they opted to try to make her a small community fighter, all while trying to also portray her as a rich jet setting playgirl (with no jets or international travel in sight…). At least the art was quite good, and there is some fun comparisons to the original drawings and inks as part of the extras.

I’ve decided to start writing a little diary of the Marvel Epic Collections that I have read. I have been doing this for the video games I have played for about two years now, and have come to realize that I enjoy the little reminders. Unfortunately, when I started reading the Epics in December of 2023, I actively chose not to keep any records. The reason dates back to why I was hesitant to start with the Epic Collections in the first place. In the mid-late 2000s, I was studying for my degree in History in England. I have long been a Marvel fan, and was collecting many of the monthly books, but just couldn’t find an easy way to keep up in the UK since there aren’t as many Comic Book shops there as in the U.S. So, I started buying the Essentials Collections off of Amazon. As an Historian, I always liked how the Marvel Universe had this sense of connectivity and chronology to it, and as I read through the Essentials I kept track of the order the books should be read chronologically, bas...