As we were telling you yesterday, Amazon has all their digital Marvel comics & graphic novels on sale this weekend for 50% off (as long as they came out before 8/26/18). We gave a few ideas for what might be interesting yesterday, but today we’re going to go on a little bit deeper of a dive. Not necessarily obscure, but things that perhaps aren’t pushed quite as heavily in the sales these days.
Let’s start out with Untold Tales of Spider-Man. This in an out of print, almost forgotten gem from the mid-90s. Kurt Busiek and Pat Olliffe were the primary creators on this series that takes place during Peter Parker’s high school days. Good, accessible material you can only get as single issues. Amusingly, these are on sale for 99¢, which was the cover price when it was coming out.
Richard K. Morgan is probably best known for his Takeshi Kovacs novels, which are adapted at Netflix under the series name of Altered Carbon. You might not have realized he did a couple Black Widow mini-series for Marvel around the time the Kovacs trilogy was wrapping up. Homecoming has Goran Parlov and Bill Sienkiewicz on art. The Things They Say About Her has art by Sean Phillips and Bill Sienkiewicz. You can’t say they skimped on the art for this pair of espionage/black ops forward tales. Be sure to read Homecoming first.
The Twelve byJ. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston is a bit of an oddity because it started out to critical acclaim and then had an extended (to put it mildly) break before it finished. The premise is that a group of 1940s mystery men have a mission go wrong and wake up in the modern day. They’re not initially sure what’s happened and someone is trying to kill them. Some of the Watchmen comparisons were probably a little over-stated, but it’s a very solid mystery and character piece that isn’t talked about so often anymore.
With Thanos being in the movies, the Jim Starlin Silver Surfer run has been pushed quite a bit for the last year or so. That Silver Surfer title started with a run by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers that really got the Cosmic ball rolling. The whole run isn’t available, but #1-14 are in Silver Surfer Epic Collection: Freedom.
While the early issues of Excalibur get on sale frequently in the form of Epic Collections, I slightly prefer the run where Alan Davis returns to handle the title solo. There’s no Epic Collection for this one, just the Alan Davis Visionaries volumes 1, 2, and 3.
So, remember that Busiek guy we started out with? For awhile there, he was one of Marvel’s main workhorses and we don’t talk about his runs as often as we used to. When “Heroes Return” (aka Marvel stopped outsourcing some of their main titles to Image), Busiek started a really good run on Avengers with some top flight artistic talent. Initially George Perez. That’s listed under the reprint title Avengers Assemble. Be warned, Amazon throws some subsequent volumes in under that link. You just want Avengers Assembled V.1-5. I don’t recommend the Geoff Johns or Chuck Austen Avengers runs.
As this was going on, Busiek, Roger Stern and Carlos Pacheo were also doing Avengers Forever, a Kang time travel adventure on an epic scale.
Those are just a few less obvious things you might be interested in. You can do quite a bit of browsing, since almost the entire catalog is on sale.
Those Black Widow minis are really good. Had no idea about Parlov on the first one because I read it before I began appreciating Parlov on Punisher MAX. Cool, more reason to like.
I’ll be reading those early Silvies for the first time soon, thanks to the Epic collection.
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