Naomi Archives - Comics.Cheap

In this week’s Comixology sales: Deadpool breaks out some omnibus editions almost as wide as his mouth, Marvel highlights its eclectic Team-Ups, the Maestro gets discounted, Naomi goes on sale to celebrate the TV review and Fantagraphics has a deep bench.

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Team-Ups Assemble

The Marvel Team-Ups Sale runs through Sunday, 1/6. (Amazon link)

This is actually a grouping of a variety of team up titles. We’ll ignore the Masterworks that we really hope you picked up a few weeks ago when they were 99-cents and look at some other, odder things.

We read Super-Villains Unite: The Complete Super-Villain Team-Up back when it was Essential Super-Villain Team-Up. We were surprised how much fun it was. Until you get to the final arc, this is essentially a Sub-Mariner/Doctor Doom tale where Namor flips between hero and anti-hero and the two are constantly trying to manipulate and/or backstab each other. That extended arc ends up crossing over memorably with Avengers. There were a lot of hands involved with this one, but Steve Englehart, Bill Mantlo and Jim Shooter are prominent. Artists range wildly and include Herb Trimpe, Keith Giffen and George Perez (for the Avengers issues). When Namor exits, Doom takes over and then things get darker with the Red Skull. All-in-all, a good example of the 70s Marvel style.

And sticking with obscure, do you remember the ’04-’06 run of Marvel Team-Up? That was one of Robert Kirkman’s titles when he spent a couple years at Marvel. The primary artists for the run would be Scott Kolins, followed by Paco Medina. The oddest thing about this run would be in V. 3 where Invincible (with Cory Walker on art) comes visiting from the Image/Kirkman-verse!

Grumpy Old Hulks

The Marvel Maestro Sale runs through Sunday, 1/16. (Amazon link)

That would be Maestro, as in the Hulk’s despotic future self… in certain timelines.

You could go slim with the original (and classic) Future Imperfect by Peter David and George Perez. [Note: Hulk: The End has the same contents, just a different cover] You could also go with The Incredible Hulk Epic Collection: Future Imperfect, which has the series in the context of the ongoing Hulk title of the time (Gary Frank era of the PAD run). Either one will introduce you to the character.

The most recent entries for the character are Maestro: Symphony in a Gama Key by PAD & German Peralta and Maestro: War & Pax by PAD and Javier Pina. These are tales of the Maestro arriving in that future hellscape and ascending to power. We read these a few months back and gobbled them up as a sort of dark and twisted flavor of bubblegum.

Not the Dirty Harry Film

The Marvel Deadpool Legacy Sale runs through Thursday, 1/20. (Amazon link)

Your value buy here is probably the double-sized Deadpool by Joe Kelly, The Complete Collection. You can get 2 volumes of that before cutting back over to Deadpool Classics.

Others would say you want Deadpool by Posehn and Duggan, in which case we caution you that a single omnibus edition is almost half the price of a thinner “regular” collection, so omnibi are the way to go here!

CW Comix & Stories

The “DC on TV Sale: Naomi Sale” runs through Monday, 1/17. (Amazon link)

No, we’re not going to grammar check that sale name… but, as you may have heard, Naomi made a quick leap to TV.

Naomi: Season One is the initial comic by Brian Bendis, David Walker and Jamal Campbell. It’s a good thing “season” has been interchangeable with “miniseries” for a few years or we’d think this was a “developed for TV” thing from the get-go. 😉

We’d call it a riff on the Superman legend as a teen explores her emerging superpowers and her mysterious origins.

Stripping

The Fantagraphics Massive Sale runs through Sunday, 1/20. (Amazon Link)

It seems like Fantagraphics is starting to have sales just a tiny bit more regularly, but it’s not like they’ve gone monthly. This is a pretty wide selection… and really, idiosyncratic content is one of their strengths, so we’re going to focus in a little and look at their lineup of comics strips.

Barnaby by Crockett Johnson (yes, the Harold and the Purple Crayon guy… this is before that) is a strip about a boy and his fairy godfather. Popular with the literary set of the late 40s, this is a fantasy strip with a sense of the absurd and quick to float a sly reference in. Johnson is a master of mood and creating his own peculiar atmosphere.

Walt Kelly’s Pogo was an innovator in the social and political satire field. You can draw a fairly straight line between it and Bloom County. All sorts of shenanigans go on the swamp and all sorts of critters would really like to be in charge…

It’s not the first thing you necessarily think of for the character, but Mickey Mouse was an adventure strip in the 1930s. Floyd Gottfredson was the cartoonist putting Mickey through is paces and if you were wondering where The Phantom Blot came from, he came from the comic strip.