Kieron Gillen

New For Patrons: Guide to Loki

July 7, 2022 by krisis

Today I have the final guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis to support my Guide to Thor, The Odinson as part of my month-long countdown to Thor: Love & Thunder. Because, if we have a guide to Thor (and Mighty Thor), we also need a…

Guide to Loki

This Guide to Loki represents the first time I have ever tackled building a guide to a fully-fledged villain. That means I was dealing with a character who was never an ongoing star of a run nor a member of a team for over forty years of his existence and many hundreds of appearances… of which I planned to read every single one.

What I realized very early in my reading is that Loki is no Magneto or Doctor Doom.

What I mean by that is that Loki never truly developed as a character from the Silver to the Bronze Age the way Marvel’s other two massively popular villains did. Magneto’s villainy was repetitive in the Silver Age, but once Chris Claremont took him over in the late 70s he began an extended arc of character development that stretched across decades. And, while many of Doctor Doom’s plots are similar, over the years he grew from a recurring antagonist to the mastermind behind some of Marvel’s most signature stories – including a pair of Secret Wars!

Loki was never that. At least, not from his debut in Journey Into Mystery (1952) #85 in 1962 to the fall of Asgard in Thor (1998) #84-85 in 2004. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: Guide to Loki

New For Patrons: Guide to Beta Ray Bill

June 30, 2022 by krisis

Today I am thrilled to share another guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis to support my Guide to Thor, The Odinson as part of my countdown to Thor: Love & Thunder. This guide is for one of Thor’s most-dedicated allies, who was the first character other than Odinson himself to consistently wield Mjölnir in the comics. Of course, I’m talking about…

Guide to Beta Ray Bill

Beta Ray Bill is one of those comic characters who has confounded me while seeming very, very cool.

That’s because I’ve never read the sublimely legendary Walt Simonson run on Thor in full. Yes, yes, I know, how could I, how dare I, etc. In my defense, I used to own the omnibus, but I’m not a fan of the updated modern colors – so, when Marvel announced their Epic Collections in 2014 I decided I’d simply hold out to read it in Epic.

Here we are almost a decade later and I’m still holding out, so it was time to remedy the situation and read his origins (and every other issue he has every appeared in) for this Beta Ray Bill guide.

Even having read a fair amount of his appearances before this point, I had questions. First of all, why is he a walking horse-person who is dressed like Thor? What is going on with his golden hammer? And, why do I keep hearing that he is a cyborg? [Read more…] about New For Patrons: Guide to Beta Ray Bill

It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

June 7, 2022 by krisis

DIE is a brilliant comic book about role-playing from Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles.

DIE is also a brilliant storytelling role-playing game (RPG) from Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook and Decard.

This takes some explaining.

The thing you need to know right now is that if you want a deluxe physical copy of the RPG you have only three more days to Kickstart it, and if you want a deluxe physical copy of the entire comic run you can pre-order it right now (including pre-ordering from your local comic shop – yes, it’s already time to pre-order November hardcovers).

Okay, now on to the explaining!

DIE is one of the most-fascinating indie comic books of the past few years, both in concept and execution. The comic has already come and gone – it ran for 20 self-contained issues from December 2018 to September 2021 in four tight 5-issue arcs with no fluff.

(Mild first-issue spoilers lie ahead.)

The story started something like Stranger Things: 25th Anniversary Reunion.

A group of friends used to play role-playing games together in high school, but it ended with their sudden, inexplicable disappearance – and just-as-sudden reappearance years later, minus one member of their party and with a bevy of physical and psychological scars.

Where were they? They’ve never uttered a word about it to each other or anyone else and went on with their lives. Some of them were successful, some started families, while others could never shake their trauma and subsequent guilt.

On the anniversary of their disappearance they receive an unsettling reminder of their shared experience and they cannot help but be sucked back into something they know is much more serious and deadly than any game.

There are plenty of “real world people are transported into fantasy” stories out there, but DIE had a special, undeniable magic to it.

Central to that were the real world characters – five wounded adults, some of whom had spent their lives trying to be completely different than their game characters while others chased after becoming more like their fictional selves. They each had relatable stories about loss, addiction, identity, and disability, and those themes were amplified by the fantastical world around them.

As the story progressed, it became clear that this was a fantasy story with a very specific structure. In fact, the structure was so well-formed we could refer to it as a set of rules.

That’s because Kieron Gillen, in all of his wild genius, not only scripted a 20-issue comic story, but also the complete ruleset of the role-playing game the characters were playing in the story. [Read more…] about It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

X-Men, The Age of Krakoa (2019 – 2024) – The Definitive Collecting Guide

Updated Feb 17, 2025. The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting X-Men Age of Krakoa, including X-Men flagship titles by Jonathan Hickman, Gerry Duggan, Kieron Gillen, & Al Ewing, in comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated February 2025 with titles scheduled for release through September 2025.

Comics mega-star Jonathan Hickman took over the X-Men franchise as both a writer and “Head of X” in July 2019, and since then nothing has been the same.

That’s not the only reason 2019 was a historic year for the X-Men. As a film media property, the rights to X-Men returned to the Marvel fold when Disney acquired FOX in March of 2019.

Certainly, this change to the licensing of Marvel’s Merry Mutants had an effect on the potential for massive comic plots to return to the somewhat languishing X-line. By many accounts, Hickman and his massive pitch for a massive shift in status quo for the X-Men had been around for some time in the X-Office during All-New All Different Marvel and RessurXion.

Even knowing a major change was coming to the X-line couldn’t prepare readers for what Jonathan Hickman had in store. He launched his era with a pair of intertwined mini-series – House of X and Powers of X, widely abbreviated as HOX and POX or HOXPOX – both filled with major bombshells of plot. Hickman revised the history of several characters in a major way that will forever color re-reads of classic material, and he used that change to set up an utterly shocking set of present day circumstances for the mutant race.

From the conclusion of HOXPOX, Marvel launched an initial line of six ongoing comics – a flagship X-Men title from Hickman, and five supporting books.

Marauders by Gerry Duggan was the most integrated with elements introduced by HOXPOX. Excalibur by Tini Howard used a newly-available character to spin new continuity about mutant magic. New Mutants by both Hickman and Ed Brisson examined the younger generation of mutants as evangelists to stray members of the mutant race. X-Force by Benjamin Percy looked at the security of the new world of mutants, both internally and externally. Fallen Angels by Bryan Edward Hill was the one fizzled launch book – it tried to integrate Kwannon into the new status quo, but stumbled along the way.

After the initial wave of books, early 2020 brought a new wave of ongoings and mini-series – as well as a replacement for the canceled Fallen Angels with Hellions by Zeb Wells following Kwannon’s continuing adventures. Notable, X-Factor by Leah Williams addressed one of the core concepts of Hickman’s new status quo for mutants.

Marvel Comics, along with most other publishers, paused their physical releases starting in late March of 2020 due to the global pandemic. This pushed back the first major event of the Hickman era to begin in September. X of Swords was a massive 22-part direct crossover through all of the ongoing books in the line pulled together plot threads from Hickman’s flagship as well as Howard’s Excalibur. It addressed virtually no plots outside of that, though it would certainly have an effect on all of the books coming out of the event.

After X of Swords, a third wave of new books launched in late 2020 and 2021, including one directly out of the event – Al Ewing’s S.W.O.R.D.. That wave of books largely concluded at the end of 2021 alongside the end of Hickman’s time on Krakoa with Inferno (2021).

Then, after a poorly-received band-aid event (X Lives/Deaths of Wolverine) to give the line time to reorient without Hickman, 2022 saw the launch of additional flagships in Kieron Gillen’s Immortal X-Men (focused on the Quiet Council) and Al Ewing’s X-Men Red (focused on Storm on Mars). Just a few months into both titles, they converged for the tightly-coordinated linewide Avengers / X-Men / Eternals: Judgment Day event, which was more than 50% written by Gillen on his own!

The line continued its three-flagship era into 2023, adding a number of five-issue limited series alongside the long-running Ben Percy titles of X-Force (2019) and Wolverine (2020). Then, halfway through 2023, the Hellfire Gala significantly altered the line and sent it into the “Fall of X” – again spawning a number of short-running limited series. After the first six months of Fall of X, the line moved on to its six month finale with the tightly-coordinated Fall of the House of X / Rise of the Powers of X.