Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Legion of Super-Heroes

Guide to Legion of Super-Heroes – now available to the public!

by Leave a Comment

I’m happy to announce that my Guide to Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH) is now available to all CK readers as part of the Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting DC Comics! This guide covers ever Eternals series and every major Eternals character!

This Guide to Legion of Super-Heroes was originally launched back in June thanks to the ongoing support of the legion of outstanding Patrons of CK. It is newly updated with EVERY Legion title and EVERY Legion collection EVER published, plus links to buy them all physically and digitally or read them online at DC Universe Infinite.

Guide to Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH)

If you’ve never read Legion of Super-Heroes before, here’s the briefest crash-course through their history that I can manage (with apologies to Legion super-fans):

(Longtime Legion fans, please forgive me.) [Read more…] about Guide to Legion of Super-Heroes – now available to the public!

Anatomy of a Comic Book Guide (and a comic book collection)

by Leave a Comment

Finally slaying the ancient dragon that was my Guide to Legion of Super-Heroes inspired me to keep track of all of the many steps and processes it takes to put together a new comic book guide.

I think more people making more great guides to consuming comics (and other media!) makes the internet better for all fans. I love Omar’s Near Mint Condition video Reading Orders, How To Love Comics’s guide to reading your first comic, ComicsXF Primers, and ComicReleases solicits roundsups. All of them overlap with what I’m doing a little bit, but they’re all helping people find the comics they might love, which is why I started doing this in the first place.

Below I’ve listed my process for putting together a comic guide, which is also how I build a personal reading list or new comic collection! When I get interested in a new character, author, or title for the first time, my approach is almost identical to guide-building, even if I don’t plan on making a guide.

Throughout the list, I used my well-established Excalibur Guide and my new Patrons-only Legion of Super-Heroes Guides as examples. I tried to share some interesting behind-the-scenes nuggets along the way for all of you process wonks.

Feel free to use this guidance to help you put together your own handy guides, whether that’s for personal use or on a website. I certainly have some “secret sauce” and proprietary tools that help me make my guides so definitive, but anyone could work through this checklist to figure out a comics property from top to bottom. It takes me anywhere from 4 to 30 hours, depending on the complexity of the character or title I’m researching.

Here’s the breakdown of my steps.

  1. Create a list of series or volumes
  2. Decide on scope
  3. Organize (but don’t over-sort)
  4. Research your series list (this will include narrowing and expanding)
  5. Compile a collected editions list
  6. Assemble the stuff
  7. Conduct a clean-up pass
  8. Consider the meta-data
  9. Enjoy! (No, really! Make a plan for enjoying this hard work.)
  10. Schedule your first check-up

Now, let’s dig in! [Read more…] about Anatomy of a Comic Book Guide (and a comic book collection)

New for Patrons: Legion of Super-Heroes Guide

by

I’m back with a guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis that has been thwarting my efforts to complete it for over two years! Well, I’m happy to report that today I have finally defeated… The Definitive Legion of Super-Heroes Guide!

[Note: This guide is now live for ALL readers of Crushing Krisis thanks to the support of my Patrons!]

I first started drafting this Legion of Super-Heroes guide in 2019 when news broke that Brian Bendis would be reviving the Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH) franchise for the Rebirth era.

I quickly realized I was in over my head. I might be an X-Men X-Pert, but when it comes to the 30th and 31st Centuries of DC Comics continuity I am a complete neophyte. I quickly pinged several Legion mega-fans, who gave me wonderful advice. In fact, in one instance I actually hired one of them to help me with an outline of the many different eras of LOSH because I was so overwhelmed!

And then… life happened. I changed jobs. We moved houses. ComicBookDB went down. I got a new job. The pandemic began. I got a new computer. I changed jobs again. I built my new solicits database. The pandemic finally reached NZ in full force. Comixology died an ignominious death.

Through each of those changes, I kept pecking away at the Legion guide in my spare moments. Was it really as complicated as I was making it out to be? Actually, it seemed like every time I worked on it, it just got more complicated and even longer!

Finally, over the past two months I began to wrangle it into a discernible shape. And, having spent many hours and thousands of words on The Legion of Super-Heroes, I am now going to summarize the entire franchise for you as simply as someone who has only read about 20 LOSH comics can… [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Legion of Super-Heroes Guide

Legion of Super-Heroes – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH), Legionnaires, & Legion Lost comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated August 2022 with titles scheduled for release through December 2022.

DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH) are a far-future team assembled from the best and brightest young heroes from many different planets, each with their own unique powers and physiology. Think of it as a cross between the Teen Titans and the Green Lantern Corps.

We usually think of DC comics as arranged by their publishing era, like Silver, Bronze, Post-Crisis, or New 52, which also tend to come with a continuity reboot (or, at least, a light reshuffle). Legion of Super-Heroes is different. LOSH fans do think about their heroes in terms of continuity reboots, but those do not line up DC’s publishing eras. LOSH is considered to be rebooted whenever their future continuity is radically changed such that not all new LOSH stories line up with prior ones.

Sometimes this happens right in the middle of series!

You can read and enjoy any LOSH story or series on its own, but to understand how certain stories rely on each other and where you can follow a specific group of LOSH characters, it makes sense to think in terms of reboots.

For many DC heroes, the first examples of this come with the Silver Age, or immediately after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Yet, the original LOSH) stories extend from the Silver Age through the Bronze Age and past Crisis on Infinite Earths. While they did have a slight pivot after Crisis in 1989 with “Five Years Later,” it was still within the same era of storytelling.

LOSH’s first major inflection point comes with Zero Hour in 2004, which begins what fans refer to generically as “Reboot” continuity.

Then, DC rebooted LOSH continuity prior to Infinite Crisis. This is known to LOSH fans as “Threeboot” era. Characters are sometimes referred to as “New Earth” versions.

However, there is a fourth reboot tucked into 2009 called “Retroboot” that kicks off with the Lightning Saga crossover. It’s called Retroboot because Geoff Johns retroactively inserted his version of the team back into the original continuity just after Crisis on Infinite Earths before handing the team to their author from that period, Paul Levitz. While the rest of DC reboots significantly after Flashpoint in New 52, LOSH continued their “Retroboot” era.

And, finally, Brian Bendis launched a familiar-but-new rebooted LOSH after Doomsday Clock and the explosion of the Source Wall in 2019 as a home for his newly aged-up Jon Kent.

This page exists thanks to research and consultation from @Atmageth!

[Read more…] about Legion of Super-Heroes – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

DC New 52 Review: Legion of Super-Heroes #1

by

In my opinion, the entire endeavor of writing for and reading comic books is about continuity. The comics that appeal to me the most are the ones with the longest continuity. That’s part of why I love X-Men and avoid DC – X-Men refers back to 1963, while DC restarts or erases whenever they hit a tangle.

Given my predilection for continuity, I’m almost universally disinterested in alternate timelines and possible futures. What’s the point if it has nothing to do with the other thousands of comics I’ve read?

Legion of Superheroes presents an interesting wrinkle to my rule. Yes, it takes place in the 31st Century with increasinly less frequent interactions with Superman and Superboy, but it has been around for hundreds of issues – it has its own far-flung future continuity. However, in a wrinkle to the wrinkle, since Legion’s 1958 introduction this is the fifth version of the team.

Sounds way too convoluted. But, more importantly, is it any good?

Legion of Superheroes #1

Written by Paul Levitz, art by Francis Portela

Rating: 2.5 of 5 – Okay

In a Line: “You sure this isn’t a training mission?”

#140char Review: Legion of Superheroes #1 tosses readers in the deep end of 31st Century. Enjoyable, but overload for new readers w/ too few emotional beats.

CK Says: Consider it.

Legion of Superheroes #1 plunges forward with careless glee, its only concession to new readers being a set of attractively designed introductory captions explaining the homeworlds and powers of the many, many heroes we meet.

The story on the ground doesn’t need too much more introduction. Chameleon Boy leads a team to infiltrate a militarized planet that broke contact with the outside world. Levitz offhandedly gives the idea that all Legionnaires are well-publicized, which helps establish quite a few facts about the intergalactic heroes and the culture they operate in. Otherwise, their infiltration mission is fairly rote until they hit an obstacle at the end of the issue.

It’s the B-plot back at the ranch that drags. We meet a slew of people tossing around references that make no sense at all. While introducing tons of heroes on panel helps set the scope of the book and probably delights longtime readers, it was overload for me – especially because many of them barely had a line.

It’s all par for the course for a book with a big cast steeped in continuity, but Levitz makes the critical mistake of tying all of our emotional beats to knowing what the characters are talking about. We aren’t given any reason to care about anyone just based on their action in the present.

From there I quickly turned off to this issue. It’s a rare case where I would have rather watched brawl with less running commentary, as Francis Portela’s art is bold and sure throughout. He makes this set of strangers out to be iconic heroes, but I can’t find a reason to care about any of them. (I was slightly put off by a close-to-verbatim ripoff of X-Men’s Thunderbird/Warpath, but who knows – maybe this costume came first?)

It’s a shame Legion verges on unintelligible for new readers like me, because I think there is a lot to enjoy in this re-debut. This issue could have presented more of a primer on what the Legion is and the purpose they serve in the 31st Century. Without that, I doubt it will attract many new fans.