Grant Morrison

Updated: Guide to Doom Patrol

March 27, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Today I have an update to my guide to DC’s strangest team of all, my Guide to Doom Patrol – to celebrate this week’s release of the team’s new series with Unstoppable Doom Patrol #1 written by Dennis Culver with line art by Chris Burnham, color art by Brian Reber, and letters by Pat Brosseau.

Guide to Doom Patrol

This guide was originally launched with the support of Patrons of CK back in 2020. There has only been one major development in Doom Patron collected editions sine then, but it was a big one! Last year saw the release of a Doom Patrol by Rachel Pollack Omnibus (2022 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1779515346). This collects the beloved run that ended the 1987 Vertigo series for the first time – meaning the entire series is now collected in three omnibus editions!

In addition to adding the Pollack Omnibus, the Guide to Doom Patrol now includes digital links both to buy Doom Patrol single issues and collections and to read if you subscribe to DC Universe Infinite!

This is my first update to a DC guide since starting my lengthy mission to bring all of Crushing Comics completely up to date for 2023! While my regular weekly updates will continue to focus on X-Men for the next few weeks, you can look forward to more DC Guide updates in the next few months – including one key DC team guide being made available to all readers! Make sure you stay tuned to the CK homepage so you never miss a guide update or other comic news.

Updated: Guide to New X-Men by Grant Morrison

March 10, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

I’m taking a brief breather from my Indie Comics Month today to continue my weekly series of X-Men guide updates! After last week’s update to my Guide to Uncanny X-Men in the 00s, it’s time to take a look at its sibling title and what might be the most-definitive X-Men run after Chris Claremont’s in my Guide to New X-Men & X-Men Vol. 2 the 00s (AKA Guide to New X-Men by Grant Morrison).

Guide to New X-Men & X-Men Vol. 2 the 00s.
AKA Guide to New X-Men by Grant Morrison

There are two pieces of major collected edition news in this Guide to New X-Men update!

First, there is a new fifth printing of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men Omnibus out in just a few months! This is one Marvel’s most-reprinted omnibuses, which after years out of print is now as close to “evergreen” as any single run at Marvel Comics.

Second, Marvel finally finished their “Complete Collection” reprint sequence of this material last year with their X-Men by Peter Milligan: Blood of Apocalypse, which is effectively “X-Men by Peter Milligan Vol. 2.” The first collection included the volume number in the title, so it’s puzzling that this one does not.

The printing of this collection not only concludes Marvel’s reprint of this period, but finally makes one of the hardest-to-find and most-expensive original X-Men trade paperback collections obsolete!

The original Blood of Apocalypse collection was murderous to find 13 years ago when I started collecting, and it hasn’t gotten any easier since then. At the time it was one of the few collections I had to finally break down and pay over cover price to acquire. I just don’t think that many of them were printed relative to the print runs of collections on either side.

That doesn’t mean I only added two collections to this guide! I added much more detail to the New X-Men section, including breaking the pair of paperback printings into separate sub-sections. I clarified the recollection coverage of the Austen and Milligan period, including how issue #165 is orphaned in a Complete Collection of mostly Uncanny X-Men. I explicitly placed of the two annuals in this run in reading order. And, finally, I added digital purchase links and Marvel Unlimited reading links to bring this guide in line with the new Crushing Comics guides.

That means all of my X-Men team book guides are now up-to-date through 2008! However, there are still several more pages to update to cover the intervening 15 years of titles between there and the present day – plus, several solo guides to update as well. Make sure to keep an eye on the CK homepage each week for my newest guide updates.

New for Patrons: Guide to WildCATs (& WildStorm Events!)

March 8, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

I’m back with another Indie Comics Month guide for all Patrons of CK! This is the guide that was the first itch I had to create indie comics guides more than six years ago when I first launched mu Patreon campaign! At the time, I couldn’t believe that anyone would spend time on a guide page for an Image launch title from 1992 whose comics continuity was dead in the water. Now it has a hot new book to its name in the main DC Universe! That’s right, it’s time for a guide to Image’s fourth flagship title, the co-flagship of Jim Lee’s WildStorm imprint that later joined him at DC Comics. It’s a brand new Guide to WildCATs.

Guide to WildCATs
This guide is now available to all readers thanks to the wild ongoing support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

(Bonus: I also launched a quick Guide to WildStorm Events with every line-wide event in reading order.)

I know this material well, not only because I loved WildCATs back in the 90s, but because I was in the middle of putting together a complete run of WildCATs for binding when we moved to New Zealand! I have personally hunted down every issue in this guide without the help of a guide. This is a page that held absolutely no surprises for me.

That’s not the case for WildCATs itself, which I think is a book that would surprise a lot of people if they read beyond the famous first thirteen issues by Jim Lee. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to WildCATs (& WildStorm Events!)

Patron’s Choice: Guide to Emma Frost, The White Queen

February 7, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Today I’m here with a Patron’s Choice guide for all Patrons of CK that I originally intended to launch back in September, before life got in the way. I always love a deep dive into an X-Men character’s history, and after reading 40+ years and over 1,200 issues of this queen of the X-Men franchise I love her even more than before! I’m happy to share the February 2023 Patron’s Choice: Guide to Emma Frost, The White Queen!

Guide to Emma Frost, The White Queen

This Emma Frost Guide was unique for me to put together in a way few other guides will ever be.

That’s because I knew Emma Frost as a villain – or, at least, an antagonist – from my initial comic reading years that ended in 1996. But, at the time I never had access to all of her exploits beyond the Dark Phoenix Saga since back issues were so pricey. I more knew her by reputation – and, of course, from fighting her in the classic X-Men arcade game!

Later, I knew about her as an X-Men from my return to reading Astonishing X-Men in the 00s before diving full-time back into X-Men in 2010 starting from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. But, I remained ignorant of anything that happened with her in the five years from 1996 to 2005.

That meant my White Queen knowledge was sort of a figure-eight-shaped, with a pair of big holes in the 80s and the latter half of the 90s. And, those are two periods that were huge for Emma Frost!

New for Patrons: Guide to Doom Patrol

June 14, 2020 by krisis

I’m taking a brief break from the world of Lanterns to publish a team guide for Pledgeonaut-level Patrons and up that will be helpful to many readers (and TV viewers) later this month…

Doom Patrol – The Definitive Guide

Doom Patrol is sometimes referred to as DC’s analog for The X-Men, but really it’s a uniquely perfect example of DC’s peculiar revolving door of publishing continuity.

They began as a Silver Age team at the same time as the X-Men, introduced in the sci-fi pulp anthology My Greatest Adventure in 1963 before spinning off into their own title later that year.

While Doom Patrol’s “The Chief” was an Xavier-like figure, their members are much closer to a take on the Fantastic Four. Team anchor Robotman is as orange and inhuman as The Thing after losing his physical body in a car crash. The radioactive Negative Man shares his origin with the F4, and Elasti-Girl is like Mr. Fantastic’s powers in Sue Storm’s spot as the token female.

The original lineup was rounded out by Beast Boy, the wild young member analogous to Human Torch. He’d later be stole by Teen Titans and become a breakout star in his own right.

Like The X-Men, Doom Patrol didn’t quite have the sales to make it out of the Silver Age and into the Bronze. Their ongoing title was canceled in 1969 with the seeming death of the entire team.

It took nearly a decade before Robotman was resurrected and paired with a new trio of teammates. They made only a handful of appearances, but Robotman (and the memory of the original team) was kept alive by Beast Boy as star of the massively popular Teen Titans.

Doom Patrol returned in Post-Crisis DC in 1987, as part of the trend of DC reviving forgotten Silver and Bronze age concepts (along with Animal Man and Suicide Squad).

While the initial run by Paul Kupperberg is often ignored, it’s delightfully solid mid-80s comics – as good as the many supporting X-books springing up around that same time.

Everything changed in 1989 when Grant Morrison took over, in the middle of an increasingly-bizarre run of Animal Man. If his Animal Man flirted with the fringes of DC’s heroic universe, Doom Patrol broke through those borders entirely. It became a lasting hallmark of the intellectual side of 90s comics, and one of the most popular works in Morrison’s lengthy bibliography.

(A following run by Rachel Pollack isn’t as well-known, but is much loved by longtime fans. It’s notable for being one of the first mainstream comics to include a transgender featured character – Coagula.)

It’s after the Vertigo run ends that things get interesting.

That’s because DC tries three different times to integrate Doom Patrol back into their mainstream heroic universe. All three iterations have their own successes and failures, and they all lasted almost exactly two years. Notably, in 2004 John Byrne tried to erase the entire past continuity of the team, which was then fixed by Infinite Crisis (which resolved many continuity tangles that had accumulated since Zero Hour).

A misguided Doom Patrol revival in New 52’s Justice League was much worse, restoring the Silver Age cast but again trying to wipe the slate clean of their continuity, more necessary than ever as Beast Boy was now considered a permanent fixture of the Titans franchise.

As with many titles outside of the tight core of Justice League and popular solo heroes, it felt like Doom Patrol’s rich Silver Age and Vertigo history would never again be acknowledged. While DC’s Rebirth relaunch in 2016 was wildly popular with fans, its slightly tweaked continuity still left out dozens upon dozens of major Post-Crisis heroes whose history was still in question after Flashpoint.

Then, Young Animal arrived.

Young Animal was an alternative imprint chaired by My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, who had become a popular indie comics author by way of his Umbrella Academy for Dark Horse. Way was tasked with finding a different wavelength for DC’s continuity in the midst of Rebirth. Way curated a team of authors to re-envision old heroes like Shade and Cave Carson, but he kept the jewel of the line for himself: Doom Patrol.

The ensuing series is something truly all-new, and all-different. It’s not just heroic, nor is it trying to recapture Vertigo’s magic. This Doom Patrol a vibrant tangle of familiar characters and new ideas. It’s not a continuation of Vertigo Doom Patrol – or any other prior version – but it is a worthy successor. And, it was positioned perfectly to take advantage of the altogether strange 2019 TV adaption of the team for DC Universe!

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