Guide to Marvel Fresh Start Era (early access for ALL Patrons!) (Patreon)

Sometimes it takes a long time for a plan to come to fruition. 

Case and point: tonight's guide, which is less of a guide than a directory page ... and which has been in the works for well over a year!

Marvel Fresh Start Era (2018 - Present) - The Definitive Guide 

Log in to CK to access this page. Because this is not one of my typical full-scale collecting guides, I am making it available early to all patrons! Leave a comment if you do not have access to your CK login (or if your login will not allow you to access this page) and I'm happy to help.

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This Marvel Fresh Start page covers every series announced so far for Fresh Start, including ongoing series that are continuing into the era. For each series, it lists the launching creative team, explains where it is continuing from, and links to the guide that contains the full reading order details.

The plan for this page began in December of 2016. At that time, I was working on the massive DC New 52 and DC Rebirth guides to debut for Patreons early in this campaign. 

It made so much sense to see an entire era of comic books summarized in one page ... so why hadn't I done that for Marvel!?

The answer to the question has to do with the transgressive nature of those two guides. I have a "double jeopardy" house rule on CK where I try my utmost to avoid detailing how to collect issues of a certain series in more than one place. If I do, that means I'll have to update more than one place as new collections come out over the years - doubling my work load.

However, when I launched the DC section of the site, there were literally no other DC Guides, so I had no choice but to detail the full collection information of every series on the New 52 and Rebirth pages.

I was definitely not going to take that approach for Marvel - it would be the death of me! However, the alternative was for a Marvel Era page to link to the corresponding guide page for every series in the era. I've got pretty strong coverage of Marvel's bibliography, but not quite that strong!

Thus, began my journey to catch up my comic guides with the present day of Marvel. That involved not only several new guides, but breaking up existing guides that covered multiple characters and changing section structures so I could link into each one at a consistent spot for each era.

It also meant catching up on reading Marvel, so I could explain the continuity of the post-Secret Wars Marvel Universe. I've read over 1400 issues of Marvel comics in the last 16 months!

This era guide is just the first in a series - I'm already putting the finishing touches on Marvel Legacy, plus working on launching new character guides to support era pages for All-New All-Different, Marvel Now, Heroic Age, and more. 

Eventually, Crushing Comics will cover every Marvel series and issue from the beginning of the Silver Age through the present day!

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What's up next for comic guides? In addition to wrapping up the guide to Marvel Legacy, I've been round-robin-ing my way around the next 10 character guides. All 10 of them are already through the "figure out the chronology" phase (the difficult part) and into the "make it readable and add links" stages (the time-consuming part).

As always, I value your feedback - both on this new guide and in general. Don't hesitate to comment to let me know your thoughts.