Smith's Shorter Sagas

Date Completed: 26 June, 2025 Grade: A- This volume collects Amazing Spider-Man #361-3, 378-80, Web of Spider-Man #101-3, Spider-Man #35-7, Spectacular Spider-Mn #201-3, and material from Spider-Man Unlimited #1-2, and Amazing Spider-Man Annual #28. In terms of content, this is nearly identical to Amazing Spider-Man Epic vol. 25 because they both carry the Maximum Carnage Storyline. This is also why I chose to read the Carnage line now, because I plan on reading the Spider-Man line after finishing the Fantastic Four line (which I will be starting after this line), and I wanted to give some space between this symbiote stuff and the Spider-Man comics. I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of this volume when I started reading it. The main story is Maximum Carnage, which I bought and read as the issues came out; which was tough to keep up with for a Middle Schooler. I remember at the time thinking this was one of the greatest events in Comics, but I also remember the success of the stor...

Date Completed: 24 June, 2025 Grade: B While these are meant to be kids books, this is a fun little volume, and a quick read. I’m not the biggest fan of Star Wars, but I remember watching the Ewoks cartoon show as a kid. I can remember little of that show (and have intentionally not gone back to watch it so it doesn’t take away from my impressions of this book), but as far as I can tell, the comics are original stories, and not retellings from the cartoon. I say this because I distinctly remember a stone that had a light and a dark side that was being fought over by the Ewoks and the witch Mogray which is never depicted here; even though the character Mogray does show up. The art for Ewoks is surprising detailed for a kids book. The backgrounds build an interesting world, and there is a judicious use of characters breaking the panels in an interesting way. The stories are rather generic and often rely on some magic spell to solve problems, but they’re fun and harmless, and usually have...

Date Completed: 20 June, 2025 Grade: C This is a fairly strange volume, and little of it actually feels like it was meant to be Thor’s story. The main story, and what is the subject of the title, is the Eternals Saga, but frankly this feels like an attempt to pull together Kirby’s work from the canceled Eternals comic into a more cohesive narrative, while at the same time bringing the Eternals into the Marvel Universe. I’m glad I read the Eternals Complete Collection before I read this, because otherwise I think I would have been very lost while reading this volume, and likewise would have thought less of it.  I would encourage anyone to read Kirby’s Eternals just for the art alone, but from reading that I got the impression that Jack Kirby, in addition to being an amazing artist, had fantastically unique ideas, but he fumbled to maintain a coherent plot. I also suspect that while Kirby can be given credit for inventing a lot of the Marvel Universe, he needed Stan Lee to basically ...

Date Completed: 14 June, 2025 Grade: B- This volume collects The Giant-Man portions of Tales to Astonish #60-69, Power Man #24-25, Black Goliath #1-5, Champions #11-13, Marvel Premiere #47-48, and a back-up story from Iron Man #44. Covering so many different books makes this appear to be another hodgepodge Epic volume on the surface. However, it actually breaks down easily into four different parts which chronicle some major changes for the Ant-Man and Giant-Man characters. Part I are the Tales to Astonish issues. I've always had a soft spot for these shorter stories and the Marvel comics that put two heroes together in one book. I do think it is a little weird that these last issues were not in the first volume, since Marvel had crammed them all into a single volume for the Essentials line. Perhaps splitting them up is due to the extra cost of having them in color and trying to keep these volumes at a semi-reasonable price. Anyway, this issues are fine, but honestly a little borin...

Date Completed: 9 June, 2025 Grade: C+ This was a weird one. This volume collects Journey into Mystery  #503-13, & -1; Valkyrie #1; and Hercules and the Heart of Chaos #1-3. I generally like Tom DeFalco's work, and I enjoyed the concept of this volume, but it felt a little stretched out. The basic premise of the Journey into Mystery issues is that following the Worldengine storyline from the previous volume , and the death of Thor from the Onslaught event, the Asgardians had become mortals and placed on Earth without any knowledge of their godhood. Red Norvell (Odin's back-up Thor) attempts to find and reassemble the gods. So given where Marvel was at the time, post-Onslaught, this is an interesting and intriguing idea. I think the problem for me was that the Asgardians were in their mortal guises for so much of the run, again with no knowledge of their true background, that their being together and fighting against the main villain just felt forced. It was also weird that...

Date Completed: 7 June, 2025 Grade: A I remember when I first saw an ad for the CrossGen Universe comics. It was in an issue of Knights of the Dinner Table , and it was a comic strip of the characters from KODT discussing the premise of the sigil and shared universe (known as the Sigilverse). I thought it sounded stupid. One of the things I loved about Marvel was its shared universe, but it felt like that was something which grew organically into being; but this CrossGen thing felt forced. At the time I was working at a Barnes and Noble, and so I began seeing some of the trade paperbacks come out, and I was impressed with the artwork and the colors. I eventually decided to give the book Sojourn a chance because I had read good things about it, and Greg Land seemed to be the hottest penciler in the industry (if the accusations of his simply tracing were widely made at this point, I was unaware). Boy was I impressed. So, I decided to try another CrossGen book. I don't remember what t...

Date Completed: 3 June 2025 Grade: B+ This was a treat. I was a little worried after the last volume of Thor that this would be more excessively 90s in tone. A frankly it is in a way, but in a fresh new way. The volume begins with a four-part story by Warren Ellis that keeps Thor grounded on Earth, but still maintains elements of Norse mythology in the background (a threat to the world tree Yggdrasil). The art by Mike Deodato Jr. is showing that bridge that occurred in the 90s between classic comics and the more modern age we are in now, with bigger, unusual panels, and a greater detail (without the oddities of proportion that were the trademarks of Liefeld and McFarlane in the 90s). Sure, Thor has a chest the size of Manhattan and hair reminiscent of Medusa (both the mythological character and the Marvel Inhuman...), but it was over the top in a fun way. I think seeing the "Computer Color" credit given to Malibu (the once-publisher was bought my Marvel in 1994) also provide...

Date Completed: 1 June, 2025 Grade: A- I was very worried this was going to be another Black Widow volume 1 situation. Hawkeye as a character started as a villain for Iron Man, and eventually joined the Avengers, which is where most of his character development occurred. But a volume about Hawkeye surely couldn't be just a bunch of Avengers reprints, and yet these issues couldn't be ignored either. I was very pleased to see that rather than the short mish-mosh of parts of books (like in Black Widow), this volume contained whole stories, and for those early Avengers issues, kept only issues which led to major character developments. There are the occasional weird one-shot issues (like Marvel Tales #100) which are necessary for completing Hawkeye's non-Avengers appearances, but those are fine. It does seem that the goal was to include stories necessary for the Hawkeye mini-series of 1983, and to this point, the volume also contains stories which are specific to the character...

Date Completed: 26 May, 2025 Grade: C+ Taking a break after the first half of this Omnibus then returning was the right call. The stories to start the second half were fun and interesting again, but as I posted in the first half of the volume, it just started to get a little boring. It was interesting to see a little change up in art with John Buscema and his brother Sal coming on to the book for a short time. Something still seems off about the colors, and while I appreciate having the cover gallery at the end, I would much rather have had the covers at the start of each issue. I’m not sure I can add anything else, as this was more of the same. Maybe just slightly more enjoyable.

Date Completed: 17 May, 2025 Grade: C- Whoof. This is it: the 90s. This volume had so many of the hallmarks: drawn out, convoluted story lines, overblown and disproportionate artwork, and ridiculous costume changes. I guess it's missing the big guns and pouches, but otherwise it sure felt like a book from the mid 90s. I never read Thor in the 90s (by 1994-95 which this volume covers, I think I was on my comics hiatus initiated by the Clone Saga). And while I appreciated Roy Thomas trying to keep these stories rooted in Thor's past, the High Evolutionary story-line seemed the least interesting thing to pull from. Not only that, trying to wedge in the God Pack (The High Evolutionary's newest human creation) as a replacement for Asgard just kept feeling forced. It was almost a reprieve to have the final issue of the volume be a DeFalco and Frenz story wrapping up Thunderstrike's storyline, even though Thunderstrike was not really involved in this volume (but hopefully he w...

Completed: 28 Apr. 2025 Grade: A Boy was I excited to play this again. I only just figured out how to emulate MAME/arcade games, and my first choice was to play this game. I have fond memories of playing the X-Men arcade game on a local cabinet in the 90s, and it was defiantly one of the better games available. It still holds up. The music is great, the action is great, the special moves are fun, the dialogue is cheesy in broken English, and it just filled me with nostalgia. My only complaint is that the emulation isn't perfect, with some sound breaks occasionally, but I can live with that. There were a few unfairly tough sections, but that's the norm for these games where they are trying to get players to spend quarters. While I'm excited to try emulating other arcade games, I'm sure I will be playing through this one a couple more times just to defamiliarize myself with the different characters and their abilities. (And speaking of characters, these were the X-Men cha...

 Date Completed: 27 Apr., 2025 Grade: B- Daredevil is probably the last Marvel Superhero who originated in the Silver Age whose early books I haven't yet read (Captain America kinda fit this mold too until I started this chronological reading of the Epic Collections). I had read Daredevil comics before, and even the occasional silver age book (I bought a few when I was young), but Daredevil was always one of those comics that I wanted to read, and just never got around to it. It was interesting to see how he was treated in the volume: the early issues referencing Spider-Man seemed like Stan Lee really wanted to duplicate the same success he had with Spidey for Daredevil. However, Daredevil lacked a wide supporting cast and his own villains. Besides Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, there really wasn't any other characters in Daredevil's private life (outside his father who dies in the first issue). Stan seemed to recycle a lot of Spider-Man's supervillains to fight Daredevil...

Date Completed: 10 Apr., 2025 Grade: B- This is quite the improvement from he first volume. The highlight for me would be Marvel Fanfare #10-13. This seemed more like the classic spy story I expected from Black Widow and didn't get from the first volume. The Daredevil/Black Widow: Abattoir graphic novel was also good, with some great artwork. The other stories ranged from okay to bad, that mostly suffer because this is mostly a collection of one shots, with some random elements added to the Widow's background with little continuity. I did appreciate the one-page introduction which fills in the Black Widow's story from her stint in Daredevil and the Champions, but in a way I'm sad these didn't make it into their own collection. I guess the Daredevil issues can be found in the Daredevil epics, and it suggests that there will be a Champions epic at some point.

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...

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...