Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

essays

Personal essays from Krisis on everything from parenting to immigrant life to driving, and much more.

New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth (to end my Indie Comics Month!)

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It’s time to bring the first ever Crushing Comics Indie Comics Month to a close! This month I’ve already added 15 new guides to the Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics. This final guide of the month is for one of my favorite series, one that changed what I expected from comics (and, in a way, what I wanted from life). It also arrives exactly when I always wanted it to – to mark the 30th Anniversary of the debut of this title! I’m incredibly happy to share with everyone my Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth.

Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth

I never planned to have an Indie Comic Month on Crushing Krisis.

My original plan was to begin the expansion of my Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics for my birthday back in September. I always like to spend a little me-time on a special project as a celebration of a new year of life. 2022 marked the 30th anniversary of the launch of Image Comics, and as of September I would have had to launch five guides to get caught up with celebrating the individual series anniversaries that had already passed. Then, I could roll out more Image Comics guides at a pace of one or two per month as new anniversaries arrived, plus expand to other, more-recent indie books I love.

Then, just as I was starting to build the initial Image guides, life happened… in the worst possible way.The Maxx: Maxximized (2013) #17

I’ve largely lived a charmed existence with comparatively few low points along the way. I’ve lost one dear friend and had to preside over one excruciating layoff, but beyond that there’s just not that much hardship or tragedy in my adult life. Being a kid sucked by comparison – starting in poverty and detouring through bullying before I met my BFF Gina and the rest of a tribe of people who allowed me to finally, gradually become myself.

I picked up my first issue of The Maxx shortly before I met Gina, two years before it hit MTV as an animated show. It was weird and somewhat hard to follow, but I liked it. It was telling a deeper, more mature story than most of the other comics I was buying every month – certainly more than any of the other Image launch books. Who was this muscular purple man with his weird buck-toothed mask? What was the secret of mysterious Outback he roamed?

I loved the comic, but I also loved the letters pages and back matter. I always loved that sort of thing back then. I was the kid who read the TV Guide from cover to cover every week, who endlessly re-organized my GI Joe file cards, and who devoured every letters page. I think I liked them partly because some of the letters were from other kids like me, who obsessed over the small details of storytelling. At that point in my life I hadn’t met that many of those.

The Maxx had more than a letters page – it had a pen pals directory. A directory I was never allowed to take advantage of, per my mother’s ruling. I first wrote about that back in 2006 – long before I was back to collecting comics, and highlighted it again in the series of posts that I wrote to launch my first X-Men guides back in 2010. It was a formative point in my life. In a way, my burning desire to meet the people who listed their addresses on that page is what spurred me to convert my comics budget into a dial-up internet budget back in 1996. I wanted to reach out to a wider world to find more kindred spirits.

That 2006 post begins with this line:

Even before I had the internet I was always interested in connecting to people who I could understand on some intrinsic level.

When we decided to move to New Zealand, it never occurred to me just how many of those intrinsic connections I was giving up by leaving Philadelphia. I never though that it would be not only difficult to build new ones in New Zealand, but seemingly impossible. [Read more…] about New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth (to end my Indie Comics Month!)

one thing leads to another

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Sometimes getting older feels a lot like the old lady who swallowed a fly. One thing leads to another. One minor inconvenience that you might not have even noticed in your youth quickly cascades into bigger and bigger problems until your entire life is a wreck.

That’s not just my pessimism at play! I’m actually hot off of a few miserable months after just such a bit of bad luck.

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

The bad luck involved our sectional couch. It was destined to happen. The day I met the couch, I turned to E and said, “I’m going to hurt myself on one of its legs. I just know it.”

The legs are set exactly at the corners of the couch rather than in from the edge, and since they are metal they’re surprisingly thin – enough so that your foot could catch on them rather than impacting and sliding off in one direction or the other.

Of course, it came to pass. I was walking across the room for no particular reason and slammed my foot directly in the middle of the couch’s leg, toe-first.

It was more than a stubbed toe. It was a collapsing onto the ground after, seeing stars for an hour, ice-packs all night sort of impact.

It felt exactly the same as when I fractured middle finger just before COVID struck, another one of these inconveniences that put the whammy on my life and my plans for months on end. Something felt internally wrong in my foot.

I visited a doctor first thing the next day. He shrugged at me. “Maybe it’s chipped,” he said. I pleaded for a X-Ray, but he said that even if it was broken, it wasn’t in a way that would require a cast or splint. He thought giving me a boot would be overkill. I’d just have to not walk it off.

Easier said than done. [Read more…] about one thing leads to another

The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

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This week everyone is talking about Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s not for a good reason.

Last week, a revision to the longstanding D&D “Open Gaming License” leaked. I’ve written about the OGL before, but in short it’s the persistent legal agreement that allows independent creators to use the core rules and concepts of D&D to create their own 3rd party material. While that ostensibly exists for people who want to sell their own 3rd-party D&D supplements, it also acts as a safety net for anyone homebrewing their own content.

Many outlets have written at length about the newly-drafted version of the OGL – i09 reporter Linda Codega broke the story at Gizmodo last week. The draft institutes a number of restrictions, including tightening the ability to distribute digital content, enforcing royalty-sharing on big earners, and instituting some potentially-invasive rights to reproduce creator content.

Understandably, both creators and players are in an uproar – after all, every D&D player is also a co-creator of their campaign’s story! Even if they never intend to publish or profit from their storytelling contributions, there’s a pervasive feeling of “this affects all of us” solidarity from the D&D community.

Another reliable leak mentioned that D&D owners Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and Hasbro would be looking at digital DNDBeyond subscription cancellations as an early metric of the community’s response to the OGL changes. A leak coming from within the DNDBeyond team makes a lot of sense. WotC and Hasbro bought DNDBeyond last April from Fandom for $146 million dollars. The DNDBeyond team don’t have a long-term allegiance to the Hasbro corporate overlords and they are watching the stellar good will they’ve amassed as a community platform being quickly eroded by this decision.

As the DNDBeyond team may have feared (but also secretly wished for), this new leak immediately lead to a cascade of hundreds of players posting proof of their subscription cancellations on DNDBeyond forums and on Twitter.

I was one of those players.

Tomorrow is my bi-weekly D&D date with my best friends from the states and I am currently the Dungeon Master of our campaign. That means today ought to be spent finalizing maps and building out potential encounters for my custom campaign that has taken a hard left turn from the official campaign in Storm King’s Thunder.

Instead, I’m spending the day wondering if it’s worth putting in the effort to tell stories in a fictional world that is just another capitalist playground. [Read more…] about The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

the customer is always angry (in America)

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After half a decade of living in New Zealand I can finally see how abnormal it is to assume that the customer is always right, and that they always have a right to get angry about it.

As an American can claim you are immune to these expectations and behaviors. I promise you’ve engaged in them hundreds of minor times. That’s true even if you are someone who is often on the receiving end of that same rage. As with many things in America, the cruelty is baked into the system.

Your dish came out a little bit wrong at the restaurant? Rage and ask for a discount. Service on your car didn’t quite repair the problem? Rage and demand an immediate fix. You received an online shopping order with an incorrect or slightly-dinged product? Unleash your fury and require free return shipping.

Some people manage to make these demands without demeaning the person who has to accommodate them, but just as often we assume that absorbing our accumulated fury is part of the job. If someone wants to be able to afford health care they have to be willing to soak up an amount of capitalist vengeance.

That’s American life. It’s part of the sickening caricature that “American Exceptionalism” has become, where everyone is encouraged to be their own plucky protagonist expecting perfection at all times. It’s the land of the Karens.

For most of my life I didn’t think too hard about this. In fact, my viciousness as a consumer always seemed like a fun feature of my perfectionist personality rather than a major bug. I was infamous amongst my friends and colleagues for causing a scene and storming out of retail situations gone wrong. I learned it by watching the adults in my own life as a kid. I wasn’t trying to be specifically cruel to any employees. I just needed to get exactly what I thought I was paying for (even when that wasn’t what I actually ordered or was ever offered).

It never seemed abnormal to me in part because my own clients demanded the same level of perfection from me all of the time. I built up a thousand little defenses and extra processes to deliver things flawlessly every time, as many Americans do, and so I expected perfection from everyone else.

Becoming a people manager changed that. The first time one of my direct reports got yelled at – I mean, really screamed at – by a client radically altered my approach in a way that being yelled at myself never did. I understood how ridiculous I had always been. I “fired” several clients for the misery they caused my team not being worth their subscription fee.

Yet, if someone made similar demands with a smile, we kept them around.

I adopted the same personal approach. No more cruelty, no more storming out. Yet, my demand for perfection didn’t change. I would complain sweetly, kindly, patiently, and with many compliments to the manager of the person I was speaking to… but, I’d still get my way in the end.

Our move to New Zealand turned my last vestiges of twisted American Exceptionalism on its head. [Read more…] about the customer is always angry (in America)

on Doing The Thing

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A lot of parenting is storytelling about your own life.

Kids are endlessly curious about who you are and how you got to be that way. Or, at least, my kid is.

She also sometimes needs to be reminded that the seemingly all-knowing parental units she trusts to answer her questions and organize her life didn’t emerge from the sea on a clam shell, fully-formed.

Recently, this has resulted in a lot of storytelling about how I got to be the me shows knows. A lot of that relied on me doing the thing.

“Doing the thing” is how I think about anything that I self-started without a nudge from adults or mentors in my own life. It’s personal entrepreneurship. Pure hustle. Unfiltered desire.

That’s how I got started performing on stage. No one encouraged me to audition for my first play. No one coached me on my monologue for my first audition. I wanted that for myself so just did the thing.

That’s how I became a musician. I begged for months for a guitar, which resulted in my receiving the cheapest, barely-tunable acoustic guitar that could be had. I had a few initial lessons. Then I did the thing. I taught myself “Ziggy Stardust.” I wrote my own songs. I put on concerts to an audience of no one in my living room.

That’s how I started this blog! No one ever asked me to do it or taught me how. I signed up for Blogger.com one day in August of 2000 and did the thing. I learned PHP because I didn’t like how Blogger organized its archives.

I could go on self-mythologizing, but CK picks things up from there. I got my minor in music, became an a cappella arranger and singer, a band leader, a comic guide curator, and made the jump to working in tech, among many other things no one else ever encouraged me to do.

I don’t deny that I relied on privilege to get into some of those situations, or that I had the support of peers once I starting doing the things. I had a stable enough home life that I could focus on wanting to be a performer. Family members bought me that first guitar and the computer I launched this blog with. Gina was there at that first theatre audition. Sara taught me to read sheet music over the phone the summer of 1998.

There were also a lot of things I wanted to do that I just couldn’t figure out how to start on my own. There are things I wanted to do that required cooperation or support that never materialized. But those undone things are distant memories. My history is written by the me who succeeded, not the me who failed.

Eventually “doing the thing” became about jump-starting new things with friends, like organizing Lyndzapalooza with Lindsay and starting a cover band with Ashley. E and I moving to New Zealand was yet another example of doing the thing.

As I’ve recounted some of these things to the kid, I’ve been amazed by my past self. I would leap blindly into a new endeavor with the full belief that I could figure it out if I tried hard enough.

Having that unflinching self-belief is a privilege.

But doing the thing – sticking with all these things for all these years – is all my own.