Gerry Duggan

Elect your favorite mutant with Marvel’s annual X-Men Vote! #xmenvote

January 31, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

For the third year running, Marvel Comics is offering fans a chance to elect one member of their flagship X-Men squad with their X-Men Vote campaign and polling site at marvel.com/xmenvote!

The electoral chaos of X-Men Vote began in 2021 with the announcement of the inaugural Hellfire Gala and, with it, the launch of a new flagship X-Men team penned by Gerry Duggan. It would be anchored by mainstays and fan favorites like Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Rogue, but fans could chose the final member in an expression of direct democracy.

(According to Duggan, the vote is totally unrigged by Marvel and he truly plans potential subplots for every character in the election)

There’s no superhero comics fanbase more obsessive than X-fans. X-Twitter immediately exploded with campaigning, trending X-Men around the world and driving up the votes. We wound up with Polaris on the team from that initial vote, pulling her out of Leah Williams’ X-Factor. Then, in 2022, Firestar topped the vote, pulling her out of… well, mostly out of disuse, if we’re being honest.

This year’s X-Men Vote has a list of six selections with a clear disparity between the media darlings, the fan faves, and the dark horses. Who are our six potential X-Men, and what are some of the best runs to catch up on their comics history?

Keep reading for a deep dive! And, let me know your favorite issues and runs with these characters in the comments below.

New for Patrons: Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne

January 30, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

My newest guide for Patreon supporters of Crushing Krisis is for one of the longest-running women of Marvel. In fact, while researching this guide I realized she may be the first Silver Age female Marvel hero to merit her own series of solo anthology stories! She’s also the first woman with a lengthy stint as a team leader at Marvel. All of that makes it absolutely wild that she has never had her own solo series until this month!!! Find all of those Marvel milestone moments y brand new Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne!

Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne

I won’t lie – getting this Guide to Wasp done was a battle, even though I got a very early start on it!

That’s because Janet van Dyne has appeared in a staggering 1,296 Marvel comics as of this month, which includes 1,295 comics that were not her own comic.

Building a guide for a character who has mostly appeared in their own series is always more straight-forward than building one for a perennial team member and guest star – even if that character has many series like Wolverine. That’s because their series established their prevailing narrative. Even if Wolverine made three times as many guest appearances in a period compared to his number of solo issues, it will be the solo issues that establish his character arc at that time.

Janet van Dyne has never had that privilege. For a character who is about to celebrate her 60th anniversary, her major character moments are relatively few and far between. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Wasp, Janet van Dyne

Updated: Guide to Cable

January 15, 2023 by krisis 2 Comments

It’s time for another update to a long-standing X-Guide! It’s another guide where I re-wrote every word and rebuilt every link from scratch to make it clearer than every before how to follow the story of one of the most-complicated X-Characters. Welcome to my all-new, all-different Guide to Cable!

Guide to Cable

This Guide to Cable didn’t exist when I first launched Crushing Comics back in 2010.

At the time, Cable’s 1993 series wasn’t particularly well-collected and his 2008 series was just wrapping up, so the bulk of his collected editions were actually from the run of Cable & Deadpool from 2004 to 2008. At the time Deadpool hadn’t been associated with the X-Men for well over a decade (this was just before Uncanny X-Force was announced!), but he had several well-collected series to his name.

Faced with a decision between an under-collected X-Character and well-collected non-X-Character, it made sense to package the pair of them together thanks to their shared series and intertwined origins. Thus, the Guide to Cable & Deadpool was born. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Cable

New for Patrons: Red She-Hulk AKA Harpy

August 22, 2022 by krisis Leave a Comment

I’m back today with a highly-specific guide for “pledgeonaut” Patrons of CK. This one also spun out of last week’s update to my Guide to She-Hulk, because it’s also a Guide to She-Hulk! No, not that She-Hulk, the other She-Hulk – it’s a Guide to Red She-Hulk!

Be warned: Even though the guide itself is careful not to spoil details of Red She-Hulk’s secret identity while covering pre-reveal issues, I’m talking about it openly in this post.

Honestly, it was only a secret for nine months 12 years ago! But, I think it was a fun secret executed well, so I try not to ruin it for people who might be coming to the run for the first time.

Marvel was going through an interesting period from 2005-2012 where at first they were revitalizing lines and characters purely out of the business instinct to stay alive, but then they started adjusting them even more due to the popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

To me, this began with the period of Bendis launching New Avengers through the death of Captain America at the end of Civil War, with House of M sandwiched between them. Despite Marvel using the “All-New, All-Different” tagline since the Bronze Age, this was the first time in a while that the main 616-Marvel Universe felt like a truly new and different place.

(A lot of that was down to the sales and popularity pressure from the Ultimate Universe, which at that point was threatening to subsume the main one.)

One result of that period was character lines that felt larger than they used to. Marvel’s major Silver Age characters feel encouraged to reinvent their casts and build their own huge events. That was certainly true for Hulk, which went from a Marvel also-ran to one of their hottest titles on the strength of Greg Pak’s “Planet Hulk” storyline, which spun into the line-wide “World War Hulk” event.

In the wake of that, Pak and Jeph Loeb had more leeway than ever to expand the scope of Hulk comics. Suddenly, there were a lot of Hulks and Gamma-powered characters. We had Bruce Banner as Hulk, Jennifer Walters as She-Hulk, Doc Samson, Rick Jones as A-Bomb, the newly-birthed Skaar, and even Lyra – Hulk’s daughter from a potential future!

(Spoilers begin here.) [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Red She-Hulk AKA Harpy

Marauders (2019) #16: Kate Pryde’s revenge against Sebastian Shaw! | This Week in X

December 10, 2020 by krisis

It’s This Week in X for Marauders (2019) #16, released 9 December 2020!

Marauders (2019) #16 finds Sebastian Shaw reaping what he has sowed from four specifically aggrieved parties – and you’ll never guess who exacts the worst revenge!

This issue is one long beatdown (or, if you were as amused by it as we were, a slaptstick routine), but the individual beats said a lot about identity, friendship, loyalty, reparations, and revenge.

Join Peter, Tyler, and Fariha’s specially-nominated guest New Mutant, Harry, for this epic discussion.