New Comic Book Guide

New For Patrons: Watchmen – The Definitive Collecting Guide

November 3, 2017 by krisis

Today I launched a somewhat unusual guide directly to Patrons of Crushing Krisis – Watchmen: The Definitive Collecting Guide.

“But, Peter,” you might say, “Watchmen is only 12 issues long. How does that warrant an entire guide?

I’m so glad you asked. This guide does more than break out the many ways the original Watchmen series is collected. It also has information about the genesis of the Watchmen characters. It explains the differences between the three different cuts of the film, including one that incorporates the Tales of the Black Freighter material. It covers DC’s 2012 return to the Watchemen with Before Watchmen.

Much like my Complete Guide to Batman by Grant Morrison, this page is something I’ve always sought on the internet but never quite found. I look forward to adding more to it as the upcoming Doomsday Clock event as it unfurls.

This guide will become available to the general public in a few weeks to coincide with the release of the first issue of Doomsday Clock. Want it before then? Patrons get early access to every guide, including extended access to special Patrons’ Choice guides like Scarlet Witch.

May The Force Be With You (on your bookshelf): The Guide to Star Wars Comics & Canon

May 4, 2017 by krisis

While I’m seeing the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie in the theatre tonight I couldn’t let that be my only celebration of space on Star Wars day, so I spent all last month cooking up something special for you: The Guide to Star Wars Comics, Films, Canon Stories, & Legends Comics

Yes, you read that right. This is not just a guide to Marvel’s comics from 2015 forward. The guide includes all of Marvel’s current Star Wars comics, a complete Star Wars canon viewing/reading order broken up by film era, and a chronology of the old Expanded Universe comics – now known as “Star Wars Legends” and collected in Epic Collections and Omnibuses.

I know I’ll never approach being the biggest or most well-informed Star Wars geek on the internet, despite my enduring love for the franchise. I wanted to create a guide for other geeks like me – who love the movies and want to branch out to novels or comics, but don’t need an exhaustive encyclopedic list of the placement of every event and magazine short story.

Also, I’ve had a ton of recent conversations with other parents who wanted to show their young children Star Wars stories and had no idea there were young readers versions and Little Golden Books corresponding to every film in the series. That’s why every film page lists ALL of the major adaptions, including YA novelizations and read-along books/CD sets.

However, the biggest undertaking in the guide was the page for “Star Wars Legends.” With the help of CBR forum all-star Taral, I not only got the Marvel Epics in the right order, but mapped exactly what issues are still to come in each Epic line, plus listed where they appear in Dark Horse’s paperback omnibuses.

Taral is a walking Star Wars encyclopedia – I couldn’t have figured this out without his aid! He just started a new blog about comics, and he’s setting out to re-read ALL of the Star Wars Legends comics. He’s only two posts in so far, so please leave him comments letting him know you’re excited for him to continue:

I hope this guide can help you find the exact Star Wars stories you’re most interested in reading!

May the Force be with you!

New Comic Guide: DC Elseworlds and Alternate Earths

April 25, 2017 by krisis

I’m back with the second of three guides in my “Universal Theme.” Last week, I shared my expansive guide to all of DC’s Events. Now, it’s time to explore other earths with The Complete Guide to DC Elseworlds, Infinite Earths, & Alternate Realities.

This guide offers a comprehensive look at all of DC’s alternate continuity stories and characters. That’s not only Elseworlds, but Earth One and Earth 2, inter-company crossovers with Marvel and Dark Horse, and the video game worlds of Arkham and Injustice. In the future, It will grow to include TV and Film tie-ins.

I haven’t been entirely sure I’m actually making even as late as two weeks ago, but now that I’ve made it I’m happy I did. Truthfully, I should have made the Marvel equivalent of this page years ago, because I’m constantly encountering out-of-continuity Marvel series with nowhere in my current guide line-up to stash them.

This guide started as two different pages. One page was for DC Elseworlds titles, of which there are many. And another for DC’s major Alternate Earths, where I could stash things like the Earth One graphic novels and the New 52 Era Earth 2 series.

As I continued to rough out other guides I kept finding new material that fit well onto both pages – DC inter-company crossovers could go on Elseworlds, and collections of classic DC Earth Two stories belonged on Alternate Earths.

After a number of debates about which material belonged on which page (e.g., “Where should cohesive alternate realities like Injustice go?”) I realized I was actually working on a single, massive page for all of DC’s tales outside of their main reality.

In my push to finish this guide I realized it’s the sort of guide that can never really be finished. That’s because there will always be more random out-of-continuity tales to track down that I will continue to discover as I work on further DC guides.

I thought this guide was boggling to assemble but… well, wait until you see what I have in store for you next Thursday. It’s not DC, and it’s not… quite… Marvel.

You’ll see soon enough.

Batwoman: The female, feminist, lesbian Caped Crusader you need to be reading

March 22, 2017 by krisis

Today I’m bringing you a guide to one of my favorite characters introduced in the past decade – Batwoman!

If you’ve never heard of Batwoman, don’t worry – I hadn’t either when I first picked up a comic she starred in back in 2011. I’m going to explain everything you need to know.

Batwoman: A Thoroughly Modern Bat-Hero

I was initially intrigued by Batwoman because of her bold visual design – the v-shaped slash of red hair centered about her black mask and chalk-white skin.

I had no idea she was much more interesting for two other reasons.

First, Batwoman is a rare female hero who shares a title with Batman as her male counterpart but has never been his “girl” (Supergirl, Spider-Girl), or a secondary “Ms” or “She” version (Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk).

Batwoman’s wealth and training rivals Bruce Wayne’s, as does a traumatic loss in her youth. That makes her a similarly aloof adult when she’s out of the mask, complete with a complex history of romantic entanglements.

The woman behind the mask, Kate Kane, is an out lesbian who was discharged from the Army in the Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell era. As you can imagine, that experience also informs her decision to become a costumed crime fighter.

Second, this modern Batwoman was truly a brand new character when she debuted in 2006. There’s no lengthy history or different character versions to understand.

In fact, she has been used sparingly enough that you can easily buy all of her appearances and read them in just a week or two, and she has a brand new series that just started last week! [Read more…] about Batwoman: The female, feminist, lesbian Caped Crusader you need to be reading

Conan The Barbarian: Marvel’s Most Well-Collected Hero (really!)

March 15, 2017 by krisis

Today I bring you a first for Crushing Comics – a guide to a licensed character who has lived with two different publishers over the course of his nearly 5o-year comics career: The Definitive Conan Comics Collecting Guide and Reading Order!

In fact, I’d say that Conan might be Marvel’s best-collected hero of all time – better than X-Men and Spider-Man! More on that, below.

I’ve always been fascinated with Conan, starting from catching scenes from Arnold’s 1982 film on my parent’s TV as a kid and a tattered old copy of Conan The Barbarian #62 I somehow inherited straight through my first attempt at penning new releases posts in 2015.

It was in researching that post that I became obsessed with how deep Conan’s reprinted archives were – Dark Horse had issued dozens of paperbacks covering his entire primary run at Marvel as well collections covering over 100 issues in the new Dark Horse continuity.

Possibly my first comic book ever! I still have the tattered copy in my attic as a keepsake.

As I said then, “[N]ow I kind of want to read Conan. This is how it happens.” I’m a sucker for long runs, and an even bigger sucker for coherent collected shelves.

While I’ve managed to avoid the siren call of collecting these dozens of books, I couldn’t resist trying to untangle the various releases.

Marvel held Conan license from 1970 to 2000 and produced several distinct continuities of Conan in that period – including 23 years of Barbarian (the majority written by Roy Thomas) plus a magazine called The Savage Sword of Conan and King Conan, a title with stories of the more mature hero.

Marvel rebooted Conan in 1994 before Dark Horse acquired the rights (which included rights to reprint Marvel’s stories!). Then, in 2003, Dark Horse launched their own Conan continuity, originally written by Kurt Busiek and hewing very closely to the original Robert E. Howard stories.

Dark Horse’s Conan has run through s sequence of titles ranging from 12 to 50 issues in length, starting with plain old Conan, followed by Conan The Cimmerian – even though that’s actually a befitting title for an initial volume considering it’s how Robert E. Howard originally described him:

Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

Between the two publishers, they’ve printed over 850 original Conan comics across multiple continuities and timelines – which definitely merits some guidance when it comes to collecting, especially seeing as some volumes have nearly the same names as each other! And so my Guide to Conan was born.

Just how collected are those Conan issues? Would you believe over 90% of them are available in a modern collected edition from 2003 and forward? Keep reading to learn how it breaks down.