Got 6 omni’s delivered today! £300 pound for those so pretty good deal overall! (Got the MGS deluxe for 130 a little while ago too! Whale caught, yay!💛)
Hopefully when my course calms down a bit I’ll have time to crack em open!

I started collecting on my 30th birthday in May, discovered a penchant for securing deals on OOPs I missed and unfortunately I went on a spree finding all my whales sadly... what do ya'll the community recommend for some strong additions??

I have to finish collecting the latter of Wolverine, Blood Hunt, and hopefully a re-print of Messiah Trilogy WITH the David Finch cover 🙏 Thank you all, I'm indebted to you!

I read the first 5 issues a few weeks ago and had to have the run. TPBs for this are equally as rare and expensive. I have to imagine the print run on these is small. This has been fun. Vol 5 is generally around $250-300, if you can find it. I'm fine with having 1-4 for now lol. Opinions on this run?

I have been vigilant trying to get Carnage Omnibus at a good price below $200 for a long time. Finally got it for $175. The 3rd book I paid over MSRP for. The first was JMS Omnibus. 1.

Always been a HUGE Mark Bagley fan and I love this cover so so much. So happy!!

I am out of space

It seems like I've been waiting forever for the Bronze Age book. It's amazing how light it is. Batwoman was something I wanted to own in omni form and the new printing was a good enough reason to get it. The Ram V Bat omni is a complete blind buy. Hopefully I enjoy it.

With the next masterworks finishing the series, I picked up Tomb of Dracula omni volume 1 and the masterworks that come after it.

So I watched and enjoyed FX's Legion years after I stopped buying comics. I never read any Legion comics outside of Legionquest and an omni focused on seems interesting. I searched the sub (yes, some of us can do this) and someone suggested reading Sins of the Father and Lost Legions before getting into Legacy. Dividing He Stands seemed like a "good guy" Xavier story and I haven't read many of those since the 90s

The Deadpool Epic has my favorite DD comic (the Spidey crossover) and Funaticals had it for cheap so I snatched up a copy.

Now, as always, my biggest problem is deciding what to read next...

So I got into this hobby and collecting from 2023-2024. I absolutely love marvel and it’s what I exclusively collect. I took a break from the hobby and stopped keeping up with releases, until recently I’ve gotten back into it and I have a newfound hatred for how much marvel keeps out of print. I’m looking at omnis I could buy for 60 dollars going for 200, and it just doesn’t make sense. Looking at my own collection almost everything has gone up in value, which is crazy because these are books. They are meant to be read, why is something like miller’s daredevil not evergreen, why is my copy of moon knight by Jed Mackey going for like 250 on eBay. And why are books like new X-men still not in print. Meanwhile dc I can just go and buy no matter what. I love marvel, I want to collect marvel and lend my favorite stories to my friends, but it’s hard to pick and choose what to collect when everything is either out of print and overpriced on the secondhand market, or having to choose which available book I want this month before everything good gets cycled out for avengers volume 7 or whatever. That’s it have a nice day.

It's a big fella. Light as a feather, though. My first omnibus with the new paper stock. So happy DC are finally putting this era out again

Fun little story:

I'm getting back into comic collecting, and I'm taking a hard swing towards omnis and compendiums, starting with JSA Compendium One.

When it arrived, I opened up the first page and... I could barely read the text - I could definitely see it and make out the words, but I was straining. That's when I remember that I have astigmatism, a condition I didn't fully understand until I realised how it impacting my ability to read older comics.

See, astigmatism is a condition where the lens of the eye is warped, warping your vision along with it.

This impacts your vision in a lot of different ways, but most relevant to comics is lines. Astigmatism causes lines to appear thinner than they otherwise would, so thick lines appear thin, and thin lines even thinner that cause the text to flicker and blur.

You can already see how this would impact the joys of reading.

I don't have as many issues with newer books, as they do their text digitally. The lines are thicker, smoother and just easier to make out, but older books with hand written text that borderline abuse italics? Yeah, I think there's a reason I didn't get into comics until the mid-2000s and always struggled going back to older books.

Not to mention, a book page being a three dimensional plane that warps and folds makes the problem even worse, as the distortion changes depending on the angle the text is being read at.

I've also got a connective tissue disorder, so I'm often shifting and moving my position to remain comfortable, which means reading the book from multiple, slightly different angles.

I'd tried glasses in the past, but they were a bit too inconvenient for what I was gaining, given my eyesight was perfectly functional beyond the mild astigmatism. "Mild" is relative, however, and clearly the strain I was experiencing while trying to read was anything but "mild", which told me it was time...

I needed, at bare minimum, reading glasses.

So, no joke, I took the giant brick of a Compendium into the optometrist and we tried all sorts of different lenses using the comic as the reference. We also did the eye charts and everything, but the glasses were specifically being chosen around whether I could see Hawkman's pecs with the absolute clarity that they deserve! 🫡🫡 Oh, and the text. We definitely focused hard on text too...

--

Long story short, this resurgence in my comic passion has encouraged me to finally get some dedicated reading glasses and helped me to properly understand my visual impairment in a way I didn't before.

And by extension, this is also encouraging me to take my eyesight more seriously, as I want to enjoy these stories for years to come...

Hopefully it gives a small insight into each collected edition.

Natural/ambient lighting was used but due to gutter loss it’s harder to capture the omni’s early pages, whereas the absolute lays over beautifully.

In order:
1. Absolute / Omni
2. Absolute
3. Omni
4. Absolute / Omni
5. Absolute
6. Omni
7. Absolute
8. Omni

Title’s basically it. I’m not really even a fan of Atom outside of this run, but man… I love this run. I love how atom is written here and the art itphenomenal. It’s a shame that there’s absolutely ZERO collected editions of this run. Like what the hell??? Anyone have any thoughts?

I went to my preferred LCS recently to pickup Beneath the Trees for spooky season, and found a copy the first Wonder Woman by George Perez omnibus on a shelf. I had previously been perusing online for it, but it has pretty much sold out with only highly marked up secondhand market copies.

I got discouraged from the idea of collecting omnis from that early disappointment, but then I saw it there in the flesh, and it was meant to be. I guess this is the beginning of whatever I have unleashed upon myself, and Wonder Woman is the first pickup.

A grab from my lcs. Never read it but the art grabbed me so I figured it was worth a read at cover price. What’s everyone’s thoughts on it? The book covers issues 1-12 by Mark Millar.

Had 3 new Omnis show up this week that I'm very excited to get in to! Animal Man and Gl by Venditti came from a PBC sale a bit ago and I just got infinite Crisis on Amazon for a reallyyyyy good deal.

I'll probably read animal man first because I really like Morrison based on what I've read of theirs and I hear a lot of good things about it.

A bit nervous for the Venditti Omni because I see a lot of controversy around it and I know some people dislike it (maybe an understatement) but I love Green Lantern so I want to read it all!

Super excited for infinite crisis too because I've had the 4 trade paperbacks of 52 sitting on my shelf for a bit waiting until I could pick this one up. Should be a good ride!

While I wait for the last few Fantastic Four Epics to complete my run, decided to add the adventures of The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing to my collection!

IT WONT FIT!

FUCK THIS SHELF!!!

Outside of Ultimate Spider-Man, what are some of your favorite modern day Spider-Man omnibus (or story arcs) you would recommend?

Include the writer & artist with your recommendation so I can checkout some of their other work as well!