Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Image Comics

New for Patrons: Guide to Shadowhawk by Jim Valentino

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I’m back with more of my Indie Comics Month with another new guide for all Patrons of CK! This guide is for perhaps the least popular of the Image flagship titles, but the one with perhaps the most straight-forward, self-contained, and satisfying runs of them all. It’s all explained in my Guide to ShadowHawk by Jim Valentino!

Guide to ShadowHawk by Jim Valentino

ShadowHawk was the only one of the Image launch books that I did not dabble in back in the early 90s, which means the character has always been a mystery to me – as were his serially-numbered 90s mini-series and what seemed like repeated returns from the dead.

I’m not sure I can explain why, other than that Jim Valentino was the least explosive of the Image Comics founders and launch artists at the time. I knew Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, & Rob Liefeld from X-Men, and had at least seen Todd McFarlane on Spider-Man and Erik Larsen on Spidey and Hulk. However, Valentino mostly kept to his Guardians of the Galaxy (1990), which was set millennia into the future of Marvel Comics. With no crossovers into my beloved X-line, I hardly knew who Jim Valentino was.

Also, Valentino’s ShadowHawk simply wasn’t my style of hero. He looked like a shiny, armored Batman or a direct Darkkawk knockoff, roaming the dark alleyways of NYC. Even with a set of shiny Wolverine claws, he never seemed that interesting to me.

(Little did I know he was actually an indie version of totally different character I’d eventually come to love: Moon Knight!)

What I did know about ShadowHawk, likely thanks to regularly reading Wizard Magazine, is that he was HIV-positive. I was keenly aware of the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the early 90s. A debate over whether AIDS was a “plague” sent by god to punish sinners is what caused my permanent fracture with my Christian faith, and by the time of the reveal in ShadowHawk I was being certified as a peer sex educator.

I never knew anything more about ShadowHawk. Was he gay? Was he a future star of the musical RENT? Having that knowledge divorced from any other details of the character made his seemingly repeated death and return seem like it was in mildy-bad taste to me. I never knew the full story of ShadowHawk being HIV-positive, the numbering of his series, and his many incarnations until I researched this guide!

First, here’s the story, in Valentino’s own words from the back matter of Return of ShadowHawk (2004) #1: [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Shadowhawk by Jim Valentino

New for Patrons: Guide to Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen

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“Indie Comics Month” on Crushing Krisis continues! Today, my focus is back on the original Image Comics flagship titles that began launching in 1992. Last week I debuted a Guide to Youngblood and made a massive update to my Guide to Spawn. Today, I’m back with a guide for all Patrons of CK for the third of Image’s original ongoing titles – and one of the longest-running indie comics! That’s right, it’s Erik Larsen’s green-skinned, head-finned cop with amnesia in my brand new Guide to Savage Dragon!

Guide to Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen

Guide to Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen

Savage Dragon was my least favorite of all the Image Comics launch titles back in 1992, which has less to do with the character of Savage Dragon and more to do with the fact that I wasn’t familiar with Eric Larsen from my brief time of hoovering up X-Men comics the way I was with Lee, Liefeld, and Silvestri – nor did he have cool, mysterious powers like Spawn or Shadowhawk.

With 30 years of hindsight, I can see that Erik Larsen launched the most unique and sustainable character out of all of the Image flagships – and that Larsen proved himself to be one of the most-consistent Image founders alongside Todd McFarlane. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Savage Dragon by Erik Larsen

Updated: Guide to Spawn by Todd McFarlane

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I’m back today to continue my Indie Comic Month run through the original titles from the 1992 launch of Image Comics. As it turns out, I already had a guide for this title, which I launched in 2019. However, a lot of things can change in just a few years, and this title’s 30th anniversary in 2022 opened up a whole new universe of comics and collections. It’s time for a major update to my Guide to Spawn by Todd McFarlane!

Guide to Spawn by Todd McFarlane

When I first created this Guide to Spawn back in October 2019, Spawn seemed like it was in “Legacy Mode” with no signs of change on the horizon. Little did I realize that had begun to change the very month I published the guide!

To me,”Legacy Mode” is when a longstanding comic is only publishing more issues because it has a core of fans that will keep buying them. There’s no extra effort being put into marketing it beyond that existing core of fans. The stories start to feel repetitive and insular. And, there’s no efforts being made to collect or re-collect older issues of the title – since the assumption is that all of the fans already own all of the collections!

That described Spawn as it existed prior to October 2019, but not after. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Spawn by Todd McFarlane

New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to Youngblood (to kick off my Indie Comics Month!)

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Welcome to the kickoff of “Indie Comics Month” at Crushing Krisis! I’ll be expanding the Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics all month long, and I can’t have an Indie Comics guide without covering some Image Comics. I meant to kick that off last year for their 30th anniversary, but what could be more in the spirit of early Image comic books than running a few months behind schedule? Today I’m covering the first Image ongoing comic. Yes, it’s Rob Liefeld’s X-adjacent squad of X-Treme government heroes in my Guide to Youngblood!

Guide to Youngblood

To celebrate the start of my Indie Comics month, this new Guide to Youngblood is immediately available for all CK readers thanks to the X-Tremely Awesome support of Patrons of CK! For as little as $1 a month you can help to support the costs of maintaining and expanding the 200+ comic guides of Crushing Comics, plus get early access to guides like this one (and every X-adjacent guide).

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Krisis, did we really need a guide to Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood? Wasn’t there some other indie comic you could’ve started with?”

The answers to those questions are yes and no, respectively – but, maybe not for the reasons you think. [Read more…] about New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to Youngblood (to kick off my Indie Comics Month!)