Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

comic books

Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!

Crushing On: Penny Arcade

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Tycho & Gabe, hard at work.

I was a big webcomics fan in the late 90s, but all of the comics I followed have gone the way of the dodo.

Well, all except for one: Penny Arcade, launched in 1998 and going stronger than ever – now they have their own merchandise, semi-annual & bi-coastal gaming convention, web TV show (which is pretty riveting), and multi-million dollar children’s charity.

The slight irony inherent in my subscription to PA is that it’s primarily known as a gaming web comic, and I am not much of a gamer. It also makes jokes about gamer-adjacent media, the terror of being an adult, fruit fucking, and the current state of the world, as well as presenting some  general inanity,

Despite not entirely getting all of the jokes, I have been a dedicated fan since the very start – since I was a teenager! That’s partially due to my adoration of  Jerry Holkins AKA Tycho’s razor-sharp incredibly-verbose wit (and his long-form writing), and partially for how Mike Krahulik AKA Gabe”s art ranges from animated James Bond sexy to completely ridiculous (frequently in the same strip).

It’s also due to those times when they hit an existential issue out of the park, like this strip from last week:

Click the comic to view it at full-size on the PA website.

One of my first acts as a homeowner was to take what little discretionary income I had left and buy every collected edition in the PA store, both to have them on my shelf and as a monetary thank you to Tycho and Gabe for years of laughter.

I wrote a note to that effect with my order and with no prompting T&G signed my copy of The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition with the inscription, “Happy Housening!”.

I love them.

But I Regress, pt. 7

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60s X-Men

Last time I decided to catch up on X-Men comic books only to discover that nowhere on the entire internet existed a definitive guide to collecting X-Men as trade paperbacks.

I decided to write it myself.

I am not exaggerating when I say the undertaking was harder than my Senior Project in college. No reference books, just sparse ISBN numbers and internet hearsay.

Finding a starting point was like grabbing a toe-hold in quicksand – there have been dozens of X-Men titles accounting for thousands of issues, and my intimate knowledge of them ended almost fifteen years ago.

80s X-Men

I started chipping away every night. First I plotted out Uncanny X-Men from issue #1 to present, puzzling together the different means of buying it in book form. Black and white Essentials, premium color Masterworks, dozens of crossover collections, and more regular volumes of the post-2000 books (but, mostly out of print!)

Then I moved to adjectiveless X-Men. Excalibur. X-Factor. X-Force. Oh god, was I really going to try to summarize Wolverine?

As I made progress on my guide I started to get excited about stories I had missed out on. How did Wolverine get his adamantium back? How did Emma Frost wind up as Cyclop’s lover? Where had Rogue been all this time, and how come she can touch people now? Who were X-23 and Daken?

90s X-Men

I had resolved to E that I would get something delivered to the new house every day for the first few weeks we lived there – even if it was something small. I just wanted to relish living somewhere where I could get packages delivered for the first time in my life.

So I hatched a plan. A schedule. Through assembling my guide I had my own library of links to all of the TPBs ever printed with the word X-Men on them. Not only that, but now I knew where on the internet they were the cheapest. I could get through entire runs in book form for under $1.65 an issue … sometimes way under.

Two hundred dollar would buy me into years of missed comics continuity. A few months hiatus from going out to lunch and buying new CDs could catch me up on over a decade of X-Men.

00s X-Men

Well, as we learned from my dalliance with City of Heroes, restraint has never been my strong suit. Three months after my first trio of books were delivered to my new doorstep I have every X-TPB – both in and out of print, from 1996 forward, with barely an exception.

Four months into our new house and I’ve gone from responsible adult all the way back to my teenage levels of geeky obsession. MikeyIl even convinced me to buy Starcraft II, but it was boring – I hate spending time in someone else’s sandbox.

The comics are different than both City of Heroes and Starcraft. I’m not writing fan-fic or putting time into someone else’s universe. I got something I love – the world of comic book continuity – and I found an outlet for it I can own – my best-on-the-net guide to collecting X-Men comic books as trade paperbacks.

How do I know it’s the best on the net? Because I used it to buy every damn book there is, will be, or was before, and no one else’s guide helped me do that.

That’s the difference between high school geek me and present day regression to geekdom: with my own house and CK, now I have my own set of sandboxes to play in.

I like it this way.

But I Regress, pt. 6

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We’ve reached the penultimate chapter of regression to full-on thirteen-year-old, only with my own house and a much higher credit limit. Last time I tracked my geekdom from a manageable low tide to being reignited thanks to a visit to Brave New Worlds comic shop.

Get ready – we are about to dive deep into comic book nerdness.

Scarlet Witch losing her tenuous grip on reality - and on her face.

I thirstily devoured my newly Civil War trade paperback – loving the more-grounded, less-spandexed take on the comic book world. But where were my X-Men? Unlike the video game Civil War I had just played – complete with Cyclops and Jean Grey – here the X-Men were nowhere to be found.

A little internet sleuthing revealed the X-Men were largely holed-up at the mansion during the civil war, recovering from the worldwide reduction of mutants from thousands to a mere 198 thanks to M-Day.

M-what?

M-day was the result of House of M, when an unhinged Scarlet Witch commanded “No More Mutants” after she was forcibly evicted from her pleasant alternate reality where Magneto ruled a mutant-centric Earth.

Um, okay? Sure. Meanwhile, Jean Grey was in my video game, so was she back to life?

Emma & Jean ... not exactly fast friends.

Apparently not – Grant Morrison killed her both Jean and Magneto in 2003 during his run of New X-Men, the same one that cemented Emma Frost as an actual X-Man. Except, now Magneto was an X-Man too and Marvel was hinting at a Phoenix return with their new character Hope Summers – a pint-sized mutant Messiah who was the only new mutant born post-M-day. Hope was an infant then, but was promptly whisked away to the future by Cable to protect her from a murderous Bishop, who was sure she was a sign of coming apocalypse (little “a,” not big “A”), and now she was about to return as a not-so-tiny teen that looks a lot like Ms. Grey.

What? WHAT?

I spent the weekend surfing comic sites, trying to make some sense of the convoluted comic history that occurred since I gave up in 1996.

I was about to move into a new house where I could actually have packages delivered, so maybe I’d catch up on a few comic books. Maybe just Uncanny X-Men? From issue #1 to where my collection started, and then to present day. Surely Marvel’s flagship title was entirely collected in trade paperbacks, easy to obtain from my friend Amazon.

Right?

Emma Frost and Hope Summers. Like a car crash, this is so disturbing that I can't seem to look away.

And, hey, even if there were some holes to fill with single issues, surely there was some straightforward guide to X-Men trade paperbacks that I could refer to somewhere on the internet.

Nope.

Nowehere. On. The. Entire. Internet. Try to wrap your head around that. The vast expanse of internet replete with its hard-core complement of geeks was devoid of a definitive guide to X-Men trade paperbacks.

Oh, I searched. I had forty-seven tabs open in my browser, trying to make sense of a tangle of Essential X-Men and Marvel Masterworks and Omnibuses and Premiere Editions. I found an out-of-date continuity site, the patchwork archive of Uncanny X-Men dot net, litanies of lists on Wikipedia, and a slew of lists on eBay and Amazon.

Lots of pieces, but no whole: a single, comprehensive website that tracked every X-Men comic from issue #1 to issue whatever. A guide to collecting X-Men comics as an adult. A logical, sequential explanation of how to catch up in TPBs instead of unwieldy, expensive single issues.

It simply didn’t exist. So, of course, I had to build it.

And I did – in less than two months! You can check out my guide to collecting X-Men now, but to hear how it came together, and how I came to own ten years worth of X-Men TPBs in a fortieth of the time, you have to tune in to one more installment!

But I Regress, pt. 5

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Last time I exposed my Behind the Music Monitor lost year-and-a-half, during which my free time was entirely composed of playing City of Heroes while drinking Grey Goose martinis.

This is the official version of Risk, as far as I’m concerned. It takes a relatively undynamic game of war and turns it into free range Stratego.

I shirked City of Heroes and plunged that same amount of time into being a musician, and within one year I joined an acappella group, wrote new songs, rebooted CK on WordPress, and nudged Arcati Crisis towards becoming a real band.

That was 2006. My geekdom laid low for the next four years. Sure, I got addicted to Battlestar Galactica, but sci-fi tv and movies have always been a shared domain of E and I (one of the many factors rendering her as “best wife ever”).

Otherwise, I just played a few tournaments of Lord of the Rings Risk against myself (don’t judge, I was an only child) and idly kept pace with Joss Whedon’s scripting run on Astonishing X-Men.

I have been convinced since day one that there is some secret drug-taking component to Katamari that would render the King of All Cosmos sensible. 

I even bought a Playstation 2, ostensibly to Dance Dance Revolution my way to fitness like Elise’s brother, but instead mostly played Katamari Damacy, and later X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance – both a safe comics fix so long as they were closed-loop RPGs and not MMORPGS like City of Heroes

Or so I thought.

We put in an offer on our house on May 5 and that weekend we were pretty stressed – I stressed myself sick by Monday. Grumpy and home alone, I ordered Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 to have something to new bash between haggling with our sellers.

The beginning of the end of my responsible adulthood…

MUA2 tells a pretty darn accurate story of Marvel’s 2006 Civil War saga, wherein Iron Man and Captain America got into a major spat over whether all heroes should be registered with the government. Their brotherly quarrel spills out into the entire Marvel Universe, resulting in some major changes to the status quo.

Or, at least, that’s what Wikipedia told me.

A few weeks later it was May 21st, the night before Gina, Wes and I planned to jump out of a plane. I was stressed-sick again, but dragged myself out to a happy hour for a co-worker, and wound up rambling down to MikeyIl’s Movement & Motion: One Night Art Show @ Brave New Worlds.

A comic book shop.

It had been a long time since I had been in one, and everything was foreign. Why was Wolverine on the cover of X-Force? What was Blackest Night?

Since nothing made sense, nothing was tempting. I wanted to support Brave New Worlds with some business, so I decided to pick up a trade paperback – a graphic novel collecting a run of several single comic books.

At a loss for what I’d be able to jump in on cold, I grabbed the most familiar thing – Civil War, and the accompanying tie-in with Ms. Marvel, an old favorite (I was amazed she had her own title!).

This was the beginning of the end … a four-month re-emergence of focused geekdom that in some respects would make my lost year of City of Heroes look like a serious addiction to gummy bears.

I’ll tell you about it next time, but suffice to say it has a lot to do with my Guide to Collecting X-Men TPBs, which – not coincidentally – was born on May 22nd.

But I Regress, pt. 4

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In my last installment I had given up pretty much all elements of boyish whimsy in favor of being REALLY SERIOUS about college, music, and dating, not always in that order.

Then came graduation. Or at least the specter of graduation on the horizon. I was zeroing in on a something-cum-laude diploma, my relationship with E was going well, and I was no longer maxing out my credit card to keep up with my new CD acquisitions.

In short, the pressure was off.

I let a little bit of whimsy back in to my life. When my mother bought a house I brought all my old comic books to my college apartment, slipping highlights to Erika and Gina under their doors. On a whim E and I bought Warcraft III, but our addiction was elastic – it never waylaid an assignment.

Then came what I refer to as my lost year. Actually, it was a year and a half. No, not the Behind the Music period with the evil girlfriend and all the vodka. (I’ve already blogged about that enough.)

I should have been so lucky. Nope, this time it was all me. Me, and City of Heroes.

Having drawn my comic collection back close to my bosom, I had gotten to wondering what was up with all of my former favorite heroes. In reading about their recent histories I also caught up with other industry news.

In my reading I kept catching rumors about a game that would totally immerse you in a comic-book world. I never retained the name. Whenever E and I would hit a mall I’d snoop around for said game, but I never saw it.

Then, smack in the middle of completing my Senior Project, I found myself reading an article about City of Heroes.

This was it – the superhero game. It was completely non-denominational – not Marvel or DC, but a continuity-free universe to plan your own hero in.

It was a long weekend at the end of April, and I decided to download the game client for a trial. It would be a way to let off steam between bouts with my Senior Project. I created some characters, including my sardonic superhero version of Rabi.

The incomparable Cassandra Lewis in action.

The next thing I remember is Autumn of 2005.

Okay, not really. Well, sort of really. I mean, I recall the rest of 2004 and most of 2005. I finished my Senior Project, graduated, moved in with Elise, and got a job. We moved into our house on Greenwich street and had a big party.

I just don’t recall anything else.

City of Heroes wasn’t a video game – it was liking living inside of a comic book. That’s what I always wanted – way back from my original comic book days when I was writing my Crisis Team novella on the bus.

I was playing it semi-professionally – like, 7.5 hours a day on the clock, double on weekends. I didn’t socialize. I didn’t write very many songs. Essentially, I worked, dated E, and played the game. THAT WAS IT.

I was known for showing up at 6pm on the dot with a martini in hand. My main character, the Rabi-derived Cassandra Lewis, was well-known to higher level folks on my server. I was a numbers guru, with lists and spreadsheets calculating damage and detailing game badges. I was a captain in my super-group. My under-bill consisted of dozens of other characters who – in my mind – all knew each other.

I even started talking about the game at work – a sure sign of deep, intractable addiction. In fact, on my lunch breaks I had begun penning a novella to tie all my characters together in a single sweeping narrative.

It all ground to a halt in the fall of 2005. The CoH staff made a big change to how they calculated data, and I realized that all of my spreadsheets and characters and stories didn’t really belong to me.

I was doing exactly the thing i swore never to do again when I started Crushing Krisis – write within someone else’s continuity, someone else’s editorial control. Quite suddenly my heroic bubble burst. I wrote a calm letter to the head game designer thanking him for 18-months of fun and went back to writing songs.

Thus came the second dark-age of my geekdom, which was spoiled this June by Mikeyil.

Tune in Thursday for the next installment in my saga. In the meantime, have you seen my Guide to Collecting X-Men Comics as Trade Paperbacks? That’s what started us down this whole geeky rabbit-hole of memory.