Tag: Batman Day

Comixology (at Amazon) Sales: Batman Day! Plus, West Coast Avengers, Ms. Marvel, Killadelphia, Lazarus

In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, it’s Batman Day and most of the line is discounted. Plus, West Coast Avengers (and the rest of the sundry titles), Ms. Marvel, and a fresh batch of Image titles on sale.

Where did the New Releases and Sale pages go?

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

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

The Dark Day Returns?

Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The Winning Card  Batman: Venom   Batman: Year One

The DC Batman Day Sale runs through Monday, 9/23.

And this is to say most, not quite all, of the Batman material is discounted.

Let’s break down some of the highlights by series/volume.

Your classic / pre-New 52 material is largely going to be in:

Now… you sorta need to browse both, because with how the two titles started crossing over from the 80s on up, you’re never quite sure which title a collection/story arc/Event will be filed under. And yes, we do like the 80s collections of Caped Crusader and Dark Knight Detective for $4.99. And yes, Knightfall, No Man’s Land, and the like are all in there.

Some more pre-New 52 ongoing titles:

  • Batman: Shadow of the Bat – Alan Grant’s title, w/Norm Breyfogle, early on. (Get more of them in Dark Knight Detective/Caped Crusader)
  • Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight – standalone arcs by different creative teams, but consistently good
  • Batman: Streets of Gotham – Paul Dini’s in-continuity series w/Dustin Nguyen
  • The Brave & The Bold – Batman team-ups. Bob Haney, Neal Adams and Jim Aparo were notable creators here. Haney/Aparo was the team on a LOT of comics. (Now if we could get a Nemesis collection…)

A couple one-offs of note:

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns   Trinity

New 52 and forward, your main titles are:

  • Batman (’11-’16) – The Scott Snyder/Greg Capullo run
  • Batman (’16-current) – starts with the Tom King era and the discounts straight through to Zdarsky’s last release (not for pre-release, though).
    • Save a couple bucks on the Tom King run with the “Deluxe” editions
  • Detective Comics (’11-’16) – originally Tony Daniels (how many printings did his first issue have?)
  • Detective Comics (’16-current) – Starts out with James Tynion’s first (and we’d say better) Batman run.

Some shorter runs of note in the New 52 era:

  • Batman ’89 – Sam Hamm / Joe Quinones; The screenwriter of Tim Burton’s Batman films continues that continuity
  • Batman: Universe (’19) – Brian Bendis and Nick Derington go against the current trend and deliver and light and fun Batman romp across the DCU that has a certain old school The Brave & the Bold vibe to it… but with more snark. Recommended. $3.99
  • Batman: The Adventures Continue – The Animated Series brain trust of Alan Burnett & Paul Dini continue where the cartoon left off with Ty Templeton on art. 3 volumes @$3.99
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The Winning Card – Tom King and Mitch Gerads tell a Joker tale
  • Batman: The Detective – Tom Taylor (was this his Detective Comics audition?) and Andy Kubert take Batman to Europe where his past rears its head and some actual detection is performed. $3.99

Batman Universe   Batman: The Adventures Continue   Batman: The Detective

And above the $3.99 level?

Tales of the Batman: Steve Englehart – Englehart’s Detective run with Marshall Rogers and Walt Simonson is one of the “definitive runs” of all-time and in a contender for best run. This has the sequel runs, plus the Aquaman (with some Batman) sequel to “The Laughing Fish” with Trevor Von Eeden. 452 pages for $8.99

Batman: Killing Time – Tom King and David Marquez get their noir on with Batman following the trail of a heist gone bad as his rogues gallery double-cross each other. We read this recently and liked it a lot. $4.99

Batman: Tales of the Demon – Denny O’Neil / Neal Adams / Don Newton. This would be a collection of the original Ra’s al Ghul. Which is to say, the more famous original arc in the early ’70s and when O’Neil revisited the character a few years later in DC Special and the dollar-sized run of Detective. Ideally, we’d like to see a lower price than $8.99 for this page count, but its a good collection with one of the key villains in the Bat-mythos.

Tales of the Batman: Steve Englehart   Batman: Killing Time   Batman: Tales of the Demon

Prefer the 90s Event era where the Batman family of books crossed over?  Most of those collections are $3.99 – $5.99. Here’s a cheat sheet for that (we have a soft spot for No Man’s Land):

Plenty more here and worth a weekend browse.

The Other Avengers(es)

Avengers West Coast  Avengers West Coast  Savage Avengers

The Marvel Avengers West Coast & Beyond Sale run through Monday, 9/23.

That sale name is a nice way of saying “all the Avengers titles, except the main one.” It just happens the main spin-off title everyone thinks about is West Cost Avengers / Avengers West Coast. (I mean even DC moved to the West Coast. It’s a thing.)

Let’s run down the highlights of the rest of it:

  • All-New, All-Different Avengers ’15-’16 – Mark Waid / Adam Kubert / Mahmud Asrar
  • Dark Avengers ’09-13 – Brian Bendis / Mike Deodato, then Jeff Parker/ Declan Shalvey; When Norman Osborn was running a fake Avengers squad during Dark Reign
  • Mighty Avengers ’07-10 – Brian Bendis / Dan Slott / Frank Cho / Koi Pham
  • Mighty Avengers ’13-14 – Al Ewing / Greg Land; Where Al Ewing starts some of the Blue Marvel sub-plots
  • New Avengers ’04-’12; Brian Bendis and So. Many. Artists.; It’s easier to get all the Bendis New Avengers (including relaunches) in the “Complete Collection” format
  • New Avengers ’13 -’15 – Jonathan Hickman / Steve Epting / Mike Deodato / Simone Bianchi / and friends; Warning – you only get 1/2 of Hickman’s saga with this format
  • New Avengers ’15-’16 – Al Ewing / Gerardo Sandoval; Sunspot’s Avengers Idea Mechanics (and Squirrel Girl)
  • Savage Avengers ’19-’22; Gerry Duggan / Mike Deodato / Patrick Zircher; Think of this as Conan forming the Defenders to hunt down Kulan Gath in the modern day… quite entertaining, as it happens
  • Savage Avengers ’22-’23 –  David Pepose / Carlo Magno; relaunched for a new creative team
  • Secret Avengers ’10 – ’12 – Initially Ed Brubaker / Mike Deodato; The Avengers’ black ops squad
  • Secret Avengers ’13-14 – Nick Spencer / Luke Ross
  • Secret Avengers ’14-’15 – Ales Kot / Michael Walsh
  • Uncanny Avengers ’12-’14 – Rick Remender / John Cassaday / Daniel Acuna
  • Uncanny Avengers ’15 – ’17 – Gerry Duggan / Ryan Stegman
  • Uncanny Avengers: The Resistance ’23 – Gerry Duggan / Javier Garron
  • West Coast Avengers ’18-’19 – Kelly Thompson / Stefano Casseli; More of a Hawk-guy & Kate Bishop series than traditional WCA.
  • Young Avengers ’05 – ’06 – Allan Heinberg / Jim Cheung
  • Young Avengers ’13-’14 – Kieron Gillen / Jamie McKelvie

What’s good? We’re partial to the original Englehart / Milgrim West Cost Avengers and we don’t think there’s been a sale on this since that series filled out in Epic Collections? There’s a case to be made for the Byrne run, but that one is a lightning rod for strong opinions.

We also thought the Dan Slott Mighty Avengers run was a fun slice of “traditional” Avengers in the middle of the Bendis “New Avengers” era.

The real under the radar one here is the Gerry Duggan Savage Avengers run. If you’ve had an itch for some classic Defenders, this (of all things) might scratch it. It’s offbeat, fun and the sequence where Conan humiliates/shames Doctor Doom while having dinner with him has to be experienced to be believed.

Kamala Sale

Ms. Marvel  Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant

The  Ms. Marvel Sale runs through Monday 11/20.

Thank goodness they’re not calling this “The Marvel Ms. Marvel Sale!” This would be Ms. Marvel as in Kamala Khan, not the current Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers. Is there a movie coming out? Hmm…  Let’s break this down by volume, since there have been relaunches.

  • Ms. Marvel ’14-15 – The original run with G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona as the primary artist
  • Ms. Marvel ’15-’19 – How silly is this relaunch? The collected edition number doesn’t even reset! It’s still Wilson and Alphona, although the artist rotate a bit as it goes on.
  • Magnificent Ms. Marvel ’91-’21 – Relaunched after Wilson’s departure, this is written by Saladin Ahmed with Minkyu Jung and Joey Vazquez as the lead artists
  • Ms. Marvel: Beyond the Limit – The recent mini-series by Samira Ahmed and Andrés Genolet.
  • Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant – Iman Vellani / Sabir Pirzada / Carlos Gomez; Yes, that’s right, the actress who plays Ms. Marvel is co-writing this with the show’s supervising producer

Recommendations? We thought Ms. Marvel was at its best early in the run, before it got too integrated into the Marvel universe, but that’s just us.  Definitely start with Wilson’s run, though.  It made quite the mainstream splash.

The Marvel “Maybe” Sales

Venom  Dead X-Men  X-Force

The trend continues. New releases at lower than expected price points and discounted pre-orders. Is this the new normal? We’re not sure, but let’s run them down.

Dropping This Week

Pre-Order for Next Week

A Pocket Full of Posies?

Kill or Be Killed  Killadelphia  Lazarus

The Image All Falls Down Sale runs through Monday, 9/30.

No, we’re not sure where they got the name either, we’re just glad they’re back having sales again. This is another small, vaguely alphabetical slice of titles.

A few things we’ve enjoyed enough to put at the top of the list:

  • Kane – Paul Grist; A largely under the radar (and quirky) crime series from the UK. Originally from Dancing Elephant Press, no less!
  • Kill or Be Killed – Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips; Is he nuts or possessed? Either way, a vigilante is in an ever-deepening amount of trouble with the Russian mob. Top form for Brubaker & Phillips, just don’t ask us what’s up with the pricing on the back half of the series
  • Killadelphia – Rodney Barnes / Jason Shawn Alexander; This one’s a particular favorite. A cop who grew up in Philly returns for his father’s funeral and discovers he’s at ground zero of a vampire invasion. One with… let’s call it a sense of history
  • Lazarus – Greg Rucka / Michael Lark; 20 minutes into the future, the world is run by corporations and the families that own those corporations are feuding. The genetically engineered bodyguard/warlord of one of these families is rapidly becoming unsatisfied with the status quo. Some of the early predictions of this series are starting to be a bit uncomfortable…

All top of the line stuff!

Also of possible interest:

  • Happy! – Grant Morrison / Darick Robertson; the basis for the TV show a few years back
  • Local Man – Tim Seely / Tony Fleecs; A noir that’s also a sendup of 90s anti-hero comics as a failed superhero slinks back to the small town he grew up in
  • M.O.M.: Mother of Monsters – Emilia Clarke / Marguerite Bennett / Leila Leiz; The Game of Thrones actress tries her hand at comics

Unannounced Sales

Mob Psycho 1000 BarbaricThe Hunger and the Dusk

We have an unannounced Dark Horse sale on Mob Psycho 100 by ONE.

Also with discounts:

  • Barbaric – Michael Moreci / Nathan C. Gooden
    • V.3 is listed separately because of course it is
  • The Hunger & The Dusk – G. Willow Wilson / Chris Wildgoose (still $1.99)

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Comixology Sales (at Amazon): Breaking Down the Batman Day Sale

In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, we make a special mid-week appearance to break down the Batman Day Sale.

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):

Bat-Day

The  Batman Day Sale runs through Monday, 9/26.

We understand some people were having trouble getting into the full sale, and we sure haven’t been able to get at it on the desktop version of the site. No worries, we found the link  for the full sale. Since there have been some complaints about that, we’re popping in a little earlier to get Batman sorted out and then we’ll be back at the usual time for everything else.

We’re not wild about there being zero sorting options (we’ll update the link if we find another), but it gets roughly alphabetical after a little scrolling. First the collected editions, then the single issues follow.

As is our custom, we’ll start out with the highlights by series, so you can sort through a bit more efficiently, but be warned – there are plenty of minor/stray volumes that didn’t make the highlights

Collected Editions

Single Issues (the ones that aren’t all in collected editions and the older ones are all $0.99/issue)

So what’s good here? It’s Batman, so you can pick your flavor across the decades and zero in on that. Now, preferences aside, a lot of the less recent collections are $3.99, which is pretty low for DC these days.

We’d recommend having a browse through Legends of the Dark Knight, particularly the single issues, most of which haven’t been collected.  With a few notable exceptions where it crosses over with a line-wide event, these are all self-contained story arcs. Teams are assembled for the individual story and the quality is pretty high throughout.

We also like the Batman: The Caped Crusader and Batman: The Dark Knight Detective reprint series that collect the mid-80s Batman and Detective runs (and are getting into the 90s). We particularly like the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle run that bounces between those books, before ending in Shadow of the Bat. We’ve been reading that in the background for the last couple years and it’s a good time.

We also like $5.99 for the two volumes of the Greg Rucka / Shawn Martinbrough / Rich Burchett Batman: New Gotham. A good run with a unique look.

And for something odd and obscure?  Batman Special #1, “The Player on the Other Side” wherein Mike W. Barr and Michael Golden (remember him?) introduce Batman’s opposite number, the original Wraith.

Batman - Prey   Batman: The Caped Crusader   Batman: The Dark Knight Detective

Batman: New Gotham   Batman Special

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Comixology Sales: Batman Day, Iron Man, Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks and Don Rosa

This week in Comixology Sales, it’s Batman Day and there’s a whole lot of Batman floating around, Marvel has a big run of Iron Man on sale and if you like Disney, especially Carl Barks and Don Rosa Uncle Scrooge, that’s at a discount, too.

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

Batman Day

The DC Batman Day Sale runs through Monday, 9/20 and it comes in three parts: Graphic Novels, Single Issues I and Single Issues II.  Yes, that means a couple thousand single issues, including some oddities like Batman Family and the usually excellent – and mostly uncollected: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight  (the original run, not the later digital-first edition).  Oddly enough, no Detective Comics single issues.

Batman Family   Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight

For collected editions, well… it’s mostly all there, from the current Tynion run (through Joker War) all the way back.  You can easily pick your own flavor of Batman, but we’d point out a couple things…

Legends of the Dark Knight: Norm Breyfogle V. 1 is a nice thick volume containing the beginning of Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle run. Early enough the John Wagner was involved. You get the debuts of The Ventriloquist and The Ratcatcher, a Clayface reunion and a tale of The Demon, among other things.  Strong collection.

If you’d like something a little lighter on the wallet, while it’s included in the larger Archie Goodwin collection, Batman: Night Cries by Goodwin and Scott Hampton is a mere $1.99 for the standalone graphic novel.

Legends of the Dark Knight Norm Breyfogle   Batman: Night Cries

Not the Ozzy Version

The Marvel Iron Man: Massive Golden Avenger Sale runs through Sunday, 9/19.

This one is a real jumbled mess to browse, so we’re going to break this down by series.  The rule of thumb is that Epic Collections tend to be slightly better values than the Masterworks, but pick your format.  Masterworks are released in order, Epics are… a little eclectic in their releases.

Iron Man’s story starts in Tales of Suspense. Call us heretics, but we don’t think Shellhead really soars until Archie Goodwin shows up at the end of this run and takes Tony into the solo title.  That would be By Force of Arms if you go Epic or Masterworks V. 4.

So then the long running Iron Man series is one of eras. The opening run with Archie Goodwin is pure gold. While it’s not bad after Goodwin, it next takes a bit leap with David Michelinie and Bob Layton turn up.  Both runs, really.  The first run with John Romita, Jr. brings the classic “Demon in a Bottle” and the later run with Mark Bright brings “Armor Wars.” You can’t lose when those two are on Iron Man.  And, honestly, the Denny O’Neil/(mostly) Luke Mc Donnell run in between the Michelinie/Layton runs is under-rated.  The “Iron Monger” final arc ending in #200 is a good one that Hollywood embraced.

Iron Man: The Man Who Killed Tony Stark

The next superlative run was dubbed Iron Man: Heroes Reborn. This is Kurt Busiek and Sean Chen. For inexplicable reasons, only about 1/2 of the series has been collected, but you can get all that has been in one volume. (Sorry Kurt, you can protest all you want, but your run is a highlight.)

Iron Man: Heroes Reborn

And the final entry on the highlights list is the Matt Fraction/Salvador Larroca run. This run gets special recognition for the “World’s Most Wanted” arc. When Dark Reign’s “non-event” event dropped, Fraction put the story arc on pause and delivered a KILLER self-contained epic about Tony Stark on the run.  And then popped back to what he was planning on doing a year later. Great run.  You can save a little money by getting the omnibus edition that collects the first 3 volumes.

Iron Man

*The first volume of the current Christopher Cantwell/Cafu Iron Man is $2.99. We’re enjoying it, but we’re not ready to put it on the wall before the first arc is over.  😉

Iron Man: Big Iron

If It Walks Like a Duck…

The Fantagraphics Disney Sale runs through Thursday, 9/23.

And with Disney, we’d point you to the Duck masters.  Carl Barks and Don Rosa. They rule the roost.

Uncle Scrooge   The Don Rosa Library

Still on Sale

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