Be warned: Here there be bitching...

…bitching about, of all things, trade paperback collections. Well, hardcover collections as well, but it’s the same thing. There’s also blatant linkage to my Amazon store, but you don’t have to click on anything, do you?

As you may have noted, I’ve been dropping books left, right and center recently. Some I’m done with completely, some I’ll be picking up in trades.

I’ve now dropped pretty much all the X-books – but there are some that I’m going to pick up in trades; X-Force and New Mutants being two of them. I dropped both these titles (and X-Men Legacy) just before Necrosha hit them, figuring that there’d be a nice big juicy hardcover at some point – and there is!

Look, here it is -

It contains the X-Necrosha one-shot, X-Force #21-25, New Mutants #6-8 and X-Men Legacy #231-233. Maybe the Gathering one-shot, but it isn’t listed on the website. Whatever, that’s what I was looking for – great!

Only…wait, no. Not so great.

Because as I also want to pick up X-Force and New Mutants in trades from now on, I’m going to have to do some double purchases.

Take New Mutants. The first arc and its epilogue issue – #1-5 – are collected in one handy volume:

The big X-Necrosha hc picks up #6-8, so that works. The thing is, the second volume of New Mutants picks up #6-11 plus the New Mutants story from the X-Necrosha one-shot:

Which means #6-8 are printed in two collections. Not the end of the world, but irritating.

But wait, it gets better. I also liked the idea of picking up the Siege: Dark Wolverine/New Mutants collection…

…mainly for the Daken story – but that book also contains New Mutants #11. Of course, I could pick up the Siege trade and the X-Necrosha trade and forget about the New Mutants trade – but then that leaves me missing #9-10 of the series. Aaaargh.

Then there’s X-Force. I’m sticking my issues on ebay and plunking for the nice big collection of the first eleven issues:

Nice. But now I’m thinking about the next few issues. It’s only a few issues until Messiah War – so maybe I’ll just pick up that trade and assume that the next big hardcover collection of the book will skip on by that, the way that the individual collections of the book did. That makes sense, right?

But…the collected X-Force Necrosha trade includes #20, a book conspicuously absent from that big X-Necrosha collection, so what if the next hardcover X-Force will skip that? You can drive yourself crazy with this!

See, Marvel, I want to buy your trades. I want to buy the nice big hardcover collections of storylines you put out – but you just don’t make it easy, do you?