Secret Invasion Archives

In this week’s Comixology (at Amazon) sales, Marvel discounts Secret Invasion, Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four. DC has a second Flash sale and Dark Horse slashes prices on Lone Wolf & Cub.

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 Flash Sequel

The DC Flash Multiverse Sale runs through Monday, 7/3.

Yes, it’s a sequel… to last week’s Flash sale. (And a lot of the same comics are still on sale). Go back to the last column for a look at some of the Flash comics on sale and we’ll focus on Multiversal goodness here. For example…

Multiversity by Grant Morrison, Ivan Reis, Frank Quitely and Jim Lee (among others) is just about as multiverse as a person can get. That would be Morrison creating new and fun worlds from whole cloth and conducting and interdimensional tour of sorts. Your basic triumph of imagination and fun. Plus, it’s a 450 page volume.

Justice League of America: The Nail – The Complete Collection by Alan Davis. A nail gives Ma and Pa Kent a flat tire and they don’t find Kal-El’s rocket. Thus, the Justice League forms in a world without Superman and it’s a less trusting world. A masterwork from Davis. This collects The Nail and the sequel Another Nail.

And for something off the radar – Freedom Fighters: Rise of a Nation by Robert Venditti, Eddy Barrows and Bruno Redondo. This one pretty much shocked us when we read it. A modern, and darker, telling of the traditional Earth X setup. On world where the Germany won WWII and crushed the remaining resistance in a Dallas book depository in 1963, a team of Freedom Fighters reform in the image of the fallen and seek out Uncle Sam to lead them against their Nazi oppressors. Much closer in tone to The Man in the High Castle than the original. And yes, its a spin-off from Multiversity.

Plenty more to look at in this sale, should you have some time to browse.

Is It Still a Secret?

The Marvel Secret Invasion Sale runs through Monday, 7/10.

Why yes, there’s a streaming series coming out. And yes, that’s a longer sale than usual.

This is about the Skrulls invading Earth, assuming identities, embedding themselves and trying to take over.

We’re honestly not sure why Marvel hasn’t come up with a series of omnibuses to better collect this Event. Secret Invasion was a very carefully coordinated series that crossed over into most of the line and was also partially told in flashback. You’d get a little further in plot and then some of the sundry titles would reveal what really happened that you didn’t yet know about. We’re not even sure how official the official reading order is. (Has Bendis ever posted one? He’d be the one to ask.)

The spine of the Event is the Secret Invasion miniseries by Brian Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu.

The next layer of Secret Invasion is the Bendis-penned Avengers titles where a lot of things get fleshed out and you discover how things got to where they did:

Mighty Avengers V. 3 –Bendis/Alex Maleev/Khoi Pham/John Romita, Jr.
Mighty Avengers V. 4 – Bendis/Pham/Stefano Caselli
New Avengers V. 8 – Bendis/Michael Gaydos/David Mack/Jim Cheung/Billy Tan
New Avengers V. 9 – Bendis/Gaydos/Cheung/Tan

Now from there, you spread out closer to the characters you’re interested in. For something clear out of left field, we’d recommend the Secret Invasion: Captain Marvel collection by Brian Reed and Lee Weeks. The original Mar-Vell returns as the Invasion begins and he’s not quite sure how he got there. It’s a bigger part of the over-all story than you might be expecting going in.

Ultimate Sale III – Now With More Mutants

The Marvel Ultimate X-Men and FF Sale runs through Monday, 6/26.

We told you this was coming, didn’t we?

Since The Maker is the instigator of the upcoming Jonathan Hickman / Bryan Hitch Ultimate Invasion, that makes the original Ultimate Fantastic Four a little more central to the Marvel experience doesn’t it? We’re talk two runs:

Ultimate Fantastic Four – the original series
Ultimate FF – Joshua Hale Fialkov (Author) , Mario Guevara

The original Ultimate Fantastic Four had Brian Bendis, Warren Ellis, Mark Millar and Mike Carey (yes, The Girl With All the Gifts M.R. Carey) tagging off on writer duties. The artist rotation includes Adam Kubert, Stuart Immonen, Jae Lee, Greg Land, Pasqual Ferry, Mark Brooks and Tyler Kirkham. And a bit of trivia for you: Marvel Zombies? It’s an Ultimate Fantastic Four spin-off. Check out V.3 of the omnibuses. That’s where it all begins.

Over on the mutant side of the street, the spread looks like this:

Ultimate X-Men – the original run
Ultimate Comics X-Men – the second run
Ultimate Comics Wolverine: Legacies – Cullen Bunn / David Messina

The original Ultimate X-Men run has a very interesting writer rotation. Mark Millar begins and ends it. In between are runs by Bryan K. Vaughan (Saga / Y – The Last Man) and Robert Kirkman (Walking Dead). The artist rotation includes Adam Kubert, Andy Kubert, Chris Bachalo, David Finch, Brandon Peterson, Stuart Immonen, Tom Raney and Salvador Larocca… among others.

Ultimate Comics X-Men was written first by Nick Spencer and later Brian Wood. Artists included Paco Medina, Carlo Barberi, Mahmud Asrar and Alvaro Martinez.

The Baby Cart Assassin

The Dark Horse Lone Wolf & Cub Sale runs through Monday, 7/3.

As we type this, the sale is currently one of those “Nega-Bands” sales. Amazon has assigned it to the same URL as the Avatar sale and if you reload a few times, it will alternate between the sales like Rick Jones and Mar-Vell switching places in the Negative Zone. Amazon, in their infinite smoothness, does this more often than you’d think.

Since this is a single title sale, we’re linking directly to the title page, which should hopefully prevent confusion.

Where were we? Right.

Lone Wolf & Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima is one of the most respected manga out there and likely the greatest samurai manga of all time. No hyperbole.

When the Shogun’s executioner is framed for treason and his household slaughtered, Itto Ogami flees with his one year old son and becomes an assassin for hire, biding his time as he plans revenge on the clan that tried to ruin him.

There’s a lot of revenge served cold in this series. It’s pretty bloody and not for kids, but very, very good. Also $2.99/volume, so cheap.

Still On Sale

The VIZ Beastars and Beast Complex Sale runs through Tuesday, 6/27
The Kodansha Grads In Love Sale runs through Monday, 7/3
The Dark Horse Avatar Sale runs through Monday, 6/26
The Viz Summer Reading Sale runs through Friday, 6/30
The Zenescope Character Spotlight Sale runs through Saturday, 6/24

Hulk Smash Prices

Here are the Tower of Cheap, we’re huge fans of the Al Ewing / (mostly) Joe Bennett Immortal Hulk run. It’s a horror-flavored Hulk that takes the multiple personality disorder version of the character to new depths and it really works. The first 8 collected editions are on sale for $2.99. Highly recommended.

There’s a lot on sale for the original Incredible Hulk series (Comixology lumps the real original series with the second series). Pick your poison between Masterworks editions or Epic Collections (Epic is a better value, but those jump around a little). If you’re interested in the Peter David run, this is how it works right now. There’s an Epic Collection that collects the Byrne run and the Al Milgrom run that leads up to PAD’s run. There are 8 volumes of the Peter David “Visionaries” series and then it switches over to Epic Collections for #397 on. No overlap, they just haven’t converted the Visionaries to Epic Collections yet. (One presumes this will eventually happen, but it is what it is.) The 3 volumes of Bill Mantlo Hulk are in between Masterworks and Epic, in terms of page count.

Plenty to browse for this one.

Not So Secret Now…

Secret Invasion is a challenging story to read in collected editions. Parts of it are told in flashbacks. It jumps from title to title. Marvel hasn’t always been consistent about a recommended reading order, either. The Secret Invasion mini-series is the spine. If you want the full story, pretty much anything with Avengers in the title, especially written by Bendis, will be key. The Captain Marvel collection is also relevant in ways that are not immediate apparent.

And By “Something,” We Mean Monsters…

Yes, Tynion seems to be having himself a moment. His BOOM! backlist is on sale here. We can happily recommend Something Is Killing the Children by Tynion and Werther Dell’Edera, an urban fantasy monster hunter tale. It’s getting to be a bit of a bandwagon with the speculators jumping on the print issues, but everyone once in a while, the bandwagon is for a good title.

So Much For Serialization

Yes, Image has been doing more OGNs in recent years and this is well worth a browse. Highlights? Not a problem.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are a pretty darn reliable pairing, but Pulp is a high water mark for them. A writer of pulp westerns in ’30s NYC finds himself with declining prospects, a nest of Nazi spies and the ghosts of the past. Oh, it’s a crime thriller, but it’s a very philosophical one where the meditations only serve to enhance the mayhem.

Dracula, Motherf**ker! by Alex de Campi and Erica Henderson is an absolute delight. It’s a 70s exploitation style take on the Dracula mythos. It’s 1974 Los Angeles and Dracula’s brides are out for revenge, following the tropes of that sort of film. Henderson shows us a KILLER new side and it’s a true showcase for her. We just wish there was more of it, the pace accelerates a quick read. A really fun book for horror fans who crossover with 70s cinema and/or Tarantino.

And for something clear out of left field, Last of the Independents has returned. This Matt Fraction/Kieron Dwyer crime story actually predates Criminal and we were pleasantly surprised that it returned to print (or digital in this case). Keeping in the theme here, this is also a love letter to 70s cinema, but more crime flicks than the exploitation/revenge genres. A bank heist goes terribly wrong and our antiheroes find that someone’s come looking for them. It’s all in the execution.