Cullen Bunn

This Week in X: Excalibur Returns (sort of) in X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue climaxes, and more!

January 12, 2018 by krisis

It’s the second week of new comics in 2018, and that means a whole new batch of X-Men comics books to help you catch up with!

This week brings five books with it – mid-arc issues of the two Ed Brisson old guy books in Cable #153 and Old Man Logan #33, the middle installment of Matthew Rosenberg’s Phoenix Resurrection, a climatic turn of events in Cullen Bunn’s X-Men: Blue #19, and an adorable pair of standalone stories in X-Men: Gold Annual #1.

None of these books are a must-read, but it’s nice to read a week of X-Men that’s solid across the board… well, except for one book, as you’ll hear in just a minute.

Don’t feel like reading right? You can watch the video version of This Week in X! This is not the same material as the full post below, although some of my opinions in the video overlap with the post.

Love the video? Love this post? Please let me know, because “This Week In X” is a pilot right now – there is no guarantee I’ll continue it past the end of this month unless folks are clamoring for more! [Read more…] about This Week in X: Excalibur Returns (sort of) in X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue climaxes, and more!

Back Issue Review: Alan Moore’s The Courtyard, Captain Canuck, Dark Ark, & more!

January 7, 2018 by krisis

Welcome to a pilot of a new series of comic book posts on Crushing Krisis – Back Issue Review!

If I tried to complete my quest to read 2018 comic issues in 2018 purely by keeping up with new releases, I’d have to read 39 new comics every week!

Since my pull list isn’t quite that deep, I pad out my new release reading (and my playing catch-up to get current with new releases) with a healthy amount of back back issue reading, both from my own ridiculously deep collection and in browsing for digital deals.

Here’s the rundown of the back-issues I’ve read this week and reviewed below:

Alan Moore’s The Courtyard (2003) #1-2
Aquaman (2016) #1-6
Avengers/Champions: Worlds Collide (Avengers #672-674 & Champions #13-15)
Captain Canuck (2015) #1-2
Captain Marvel (2016) #6-10
Civil War II (2016) – The Oath
Dark Ark (2017) #1-4
Freelance (2017) #1
Grimm Fairy Tales: Return to Wonderland (2007) #0-3
Judas (2018) #1
Monstro Mechanica (2017) #1
Port of Earth (2017) #1-2
Realmwalkers (2017) #1-3
Silk (2016) #14
Spencer & Locke (2017) #1-4
The Skeptics (2016) #1-4
Toil and Trouble (2015) #1

Interested in what I have to say about other random pulls? Leave a comment about a series you’d love to see me dig into in the coming weeks. Given the scope of my collection, you might be surprised to learn I already own a copy! [Read more…] about Back Issue Review: Alan Moore’s The Courtyard, Captain Canuck, Dark Ark, & more!

20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015

April 28, 2017 by krisis

Each year, a mysterious and intrepid comic book fan known only as Tigereyes reaches out to some of the biggest collected editions communities on the web to ask them a single question: What are the top 10 Marvel Omnibuses you’d most like to buy?

Thus, the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot was born.

While we only get to see the top 50 or so results of the survey each year, based on the number of voters it’s entirely possible that there are over ten times that many omnibuses nominated by voters. The long tail of the survey would make not only for interesting analysis, but terrific rainy-day reading.

To help inspire that long tail as well as your own rainy day reads, I’m covering dozens of Marvel runs that would make for terrific omnibuses. For the past four days I highlighted every potential missing X-Men omnibus from 1963 to 2015. Now, I’m going to stroll backwards through time to look at the rest of Marvel, starting with their newest comic runs released from 2012 to present.

The fact that these books aren’t currently omnibuses (and may never be) doesn’t have to stop you from sampling them – even if you’ve never read a comic before in your life! Each one is a terrific self-contained comic experience that can be enjoyed without any crossovers or companion series.

You can either pick up existing collections as outlined by Crushing Comics’s Guide to Collecting Marvel Comic Books, or just sign up for Marvel Unlimited, a Netflix-for-comics where 100% of the issues from today’s post are available to read on any device.

Comic Book Review: X-Men Blue #1 by Bunn, Molina, Buffagni, Milla, & Caramagna – Nostalgia reigns supreme in this dull debut

April 12, 2017 by krisis

Nostalgia is a tricky thing.

When we’re young, nostalgia allows us to unlock something secret and cool that we missed out on. I remember being so excited about flare-legged jeans and crazy-patterned polyester shirts in the mid-90s when the late 60s and early 70s were cool again.

They spoke to me because I felt like a kid out of time. I was more interested in actually picking out clothing than ever before. And, that hippy-influenced fashion let me into my own interpretation of glam rock tinged with goth, full of vinyl, flowy black shirts, and body glitter.

I’m not sure that anyone who lived through those fashions the first time was as eager as I was to see their return. Nostalgia is different when we’re older. Some elements might recall warm, fuzzy, pleasant feelings of youth, but we don’t get to pick and choose what our collective culture decides to recycle. Other throwbacks bombard us with the awful trends and noise we winced and tried to avoid back in the day.

For every transformative piece of nostalgia that is filled with a fresh inspiration, there are a hundred old things re-inflated like ancient hot-air balloons. These husks totter up into the the cultural horizon for a second flight, tattered and looming over our shoulders. They crowd out the sky for the young and old alike, strangling new ideas. Sometimes it feels like they even blot out the sun. X-Men_Blue_2017_0001

Nostalgia can be dangerous to the young and old alike. It can crowd the horizon of new art, of fresh fashion and music. And, if you’re not careful, it becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop, constantly comforting you with copies of copies of copies of something that once made you feel something – or, worse, something that made other people feel a feeling that you’re eager to capture for your own.

Nostalgia is a tricky, dangerous thing. If you’re not careful, it can suffocate you.

X-Men Blue (2017) #1

Written by Cullen Bunn with line art by Jorge Molina (A-story) and Matteo Buffagni (B-story) with color art by Matt Milla and lettering by VC’s Joe Caramagna. Primary cover by Arthur Adams and Peter Steigerwald.

CK Says: Skip it!

X-Men Blue #1 is part of Marvel’s relaunch of its full line of mutant books, but this one is not like the others. Rather than inject new life into a battered franchise, it seeks to hook readers through nostalgia for a group of tired characters that weren’t even that great the first time around.

(And, that’s before we get to the crushingly stupid back-up story.)

On the surface, X-Men Blue is a zippy, one-shot “high adventure on the high seas” story with a recognizable team of the five original X-Men tackling some familiar foes. That surface level is going to play out fine for a lot of readers. It will push some nostalgia buttons for some and “access to nostalgia” buttons for others.

Both sets of readers might be forgetting that these original mutants have never been the most interesting team. What was so special about them back in the 1960s (and in many flashbacks to the period) was using these every-teen archetypes to uncover a world filled with vivid villains paired with disarmingly plain everyday discrimination.

Why invite them to the present day, aside from nostalgia? It was the handiwork of Beast in 2013 to try to show Cyclops how far he had strayed from when they were as wide-eyed teens. That’s a great idea for a single story, but editorially no one seems sure why the characters are still around other than the fact that a few thousand people keep buying their book.

Author Cullen Bunn has little to say on the topic in this first issue. He’s been his best at Marvel writing Magneto for the past few years, but X-Men Blue doesn’t yet have the morally gray allure of those stories (though, it would be a brilliant way to re-contextualize these characters). [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: X-Men Blue #1 by Bunn, Molina, Buffagni, Milla, & Caramagna – Nostalgia reigns supreme in this dull debut

Review: Magneto, Vol. 3: Shadow Games

August 29, 2015 by krisis

It took 20 years from Magneto to go from his first titled comic to his own ongoing series!

There are certain Marvel characters that you probably assume have had at least one ongoing series after four or five decades, but they can sometimes surprise you. As an example, Black Widow didn’t get her first ongoing series until 2010 despite being around since the 60s.

Magneto falls into that category for me. When his series was announced as “his first ongoing title” at the end of 2013, I did a double-take – fifty years and no ongoing? Yet, my comic collection tells me it’s true: the Master of Magnetism has had a handful of mini-series and one-shots, including his first – a beautiful, foil-covered affair that I have in mint condition somewhere in my attic.

Once that surprise wore off, cynicism wore in. Author Cullen Bunn has been hit and miss with me on his Marvel work, and his hits have been female-driven stories in The Fearless and Fearless Defenders. What could he bring to a Magneto whose motivation and powers were both feeling a little watered down from him playing second string to a resurgent, insurgent Cyclops for the past few years? Would this simply be a movie-fervor cash in with a hunky Fassbender style Magneto staring moodily off into the distance and pulling out people’s fillings?

Yesterday I caught up with the third volume of his edition…

Magneto, Vol. 3 – Shadow Games

Collecting Magneto (2014) #13-17. Written by Cullen Bunn with artists Javi Fernandez and Gabriel Hernandez Walta and color artists Jordie Bellaire and Dan Brown.

#140char review: .@cullenbunn’s Magneto v3 is must-read! A distinct un-@Marvel rhythm & deep story roots give Mags motivation. Herald of good to come on UXM.

CK Says: Buy it!

This is a chilling, down-tempo masterpiece of anti-heroic deconstruction. The only time I was tempted to put it down is to think about it before I turned another page! Cullen Bunn is making Magneto more fearsome and more human than ever, and it’s a compelling read.

The cleaner of Fernandez’s art in the first issue are a welcome site as the focus is on the mysterious Briar, wherein Bunn plays a Morrison-like game of building a sub-culture around villainy. If there were super-villains in your world, wouldn’t you be scouring flea markets for DVDs of their greatest destructions after the footage was pulled from YouTube as supporting terrorism? Would people be proud of their scars or angry? This is one of those perfect issues that implies those questions without every verbalizing them, and which deepens the suddenly quite-fascinating mystery of Magneto’s mysterious human benefactor.

Afterwards, Walta continues to lend a weariness to Magneto’s chapters with his sketchy lines portraying a certain rough-edged weariness, which Jordie Bellaire has long-since perfected a color pallet to accompany. Here we see Magneto turn on SHIELD after cooperating with them briefly in Uncanny X-Men. What follows is more interesting. Magneto is re-building some semblance of society on Genosha out of a lingering guilt that he’s let his species down. How to even choose the occasion of his deepest regret? Was it the slaughter just perpetrated by The Red Skull on the island? Or perhaps the genocide of millions of mutants in Morrison’s E is for Extinction. Or, were his failures manifest much earlier – during his first overt strike on US missiles during his original encounter with the X-Men and in his guilt for surviving the Holocaust? Some Nazi and Holocaust imagery here is truly nightmarish, but only once does it feel present purely for shock value.

What’s so fascinating is that all of our flawed protagonist’s decisions feel right – it’s what you might choose in the position of a beleaguered former super-villain, right down to the shocking final choice he makes to resolve the volume.

Bunn’s dissection of Magneto’s extended history feels inspired by James Robinson, who carefully disassembles all things Golden and Silver aged to construct his stories. Maybe Bunn was capable of this all along and never had a character with a rich enough tapestry of stories to draw from. Either way, against all odds Bunn has made Magneto both a nuanced character and a must-read series. If you’re not already excited for him to helm the next volume of Uncanny X-Men headlined by Magneto, then you absolutely must read this book!

What came before: Magneto, Vol. 1 – Infamous >> Magneto, Vol. 2 – Reversals