Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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New for Patrons: Legion of Super-Heroes Guide

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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

New for Patrons: Spider-Ham Guide!

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I’m so happy to be getting my Crushing Comics guides back on track, and to kick that off I have a brief guide for a sentimental favorite to offer to all CK Patrons!
Spider-Ham on the cover of Spider-Man Annual 2019 #1

Long before I was a regular comic reader, I had a meager stack of comics from newsstands and spinner racks that sat on a slim bookshelf in my closet.

One was an old Conan comic from my father. Another was a random issue of Captain America.

The third was Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham (1985) #6.

Peter Porker The Spectacular Spider-Ham (1983) #6

Possibly my first ever comic book?

I don’t know why I had it. I think people in my family assumed I would really love Spider-Man because I shared his name, but at the time (and, to this day) I was much more interested in Wonder Woman.

That one issue (which I still have!) meant I’ve always had a soft, nostalgic spot for Peter Porker. I never expected he would appear in a comic again other than as a one-off joke about the silly excesses of the 80s… until Spider-Verse.

Spider-Verse brought almost every iteration of every spider-character ever back into play for a brief, somewhat-bloody event, which included this Spider-turned-Super-Pig from Earth-8311.

Spider-Ham survived the carnage (not THE Carnage – lower-case carnage) of the event, befriended Spider-Gwen, Spider-Gwen become a hit, and the event inspired one of the most successful and awarded animated movies of all time.

The rest is (recent) history!

This might lead you to wonder: are there many Spider-Ham comic books to read? Are they anything like the zany version of the character who was cartoony even for a cartoon in Into The Spider-Verse.

Well… that depends.

[Read more…] about New for Patrons: Spider-Ham Guide!

New for Patrons: Guide to Doom Patrol

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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!

Current Exclusives For Crushing Cadets ($1/month): 20 Guides!

DC Guides: Batman – Index of Ongoing Titles, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: Hal Jordan, Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner, Omega Men

Marvel Guides: Alpha Flight, Blade, Captain Britain, Dazzler, Domino, Dracula, Elsa Bloodstone, Legion, Marvel Era: Marvel Legacy, Sabretooth, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Weapon X, X-Man – Nate Grey

Current Exclusives For Pledgeonauts ($1.99+/month): 48 Guides!

DC Guides: Animal Man, Aquaman, Books of Magic, Catwoman, Batman – Index of Ongoing Titles, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Doom Patrol, Flash, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: Hal Jordan, Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner, Harley Quinn, Houses & Horrors, Justice League, Lucifer, Mister Miracle, Nightwing, Omega Men , Outsiders, Suicide Squad, Swamp Thing

Marvel Guides: Alpha Flight, Ant-Man & Giant-Man, Captain Britain, Champions, Darkhawk, Blade, Dazzler, Domino, Dracula, Elsa Bloodstone, Falcon, Gwenpool, Legion, Marvel Era: Marvel Legacy, Moon Boy / Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur, Ms. Marvel: Kamala Khan, Power Pack, Sabretooth, Scarlet Witch, Sentry, Silk, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Venom, Vision, Weapon X, X-Man – Nate Grey

Indie & Licensed Comics: None right now

This Has Been “Blog of Tomorrow,” A Patreon Launch Event

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What a month!

patreon-wideThis is the final post of my “Blog of Tomorrow” event, where I blogged as if it was my full-time job for the entire month of November. The event celebrated the launch of a Patreon campaign to offset the costs of running CrushingKrisis.

I enjoy both dreaming up big, seemingly insane projects and participating in big, seemingly undoable events. That’s how I got myself into things like recording a song an hour for Blogathon, volunteering with Blame Drew’s Cancer, and participating in National Novel Writing Month.

I knew that launching a Patreon for CK had to be accompanied by one of those big, insane, undoable things. Thus, the content overload this month. Seriously, it was an epic, unwarranted amount of content. Writing it may have been the single most difficult thing I’ve achieved in life. There were points where I just hated words. And comic books. I definitely spent some time hating comic books.

I also proved to myself that I really do have the energy, inspiration, and focus to create the kinds of content I’ve wanted to feature on CK for so many years. All I’ve ever lacked was time.

All of November’s content was written between October 12th and this very moment, with the exception of the skeleton of the Ultimate Comics Guide, which I started researching in September, and Friday Fiction, which was originally written over the past six years and edited for this month. Since linking and editing takes time, I’m still including them both in the wordcount. 

That content totals 133,746 words, or about one adult-lengthed paperback book. That was split between 109,944 words in 92 posts (including this one) and 23,802 words in 4 new pages.

While 92 posts could maintain daily posts on CK for an entire quarter, an average month of CK content is historically only a little over 10,000 words, which means this month contained the effective content of an entire average year of Crushing Krisis.

This month represents 6.33% of CK’s total word count in .5% of its lifetime, 2% of its 16 years of posts, and 3.45% of its total pages.

The material took 182 hours to write, edit, and illustrate with media. Had I done it all in a single month, it would have required 42.5hr work weeks.

Spread across the days since October 12th it represented 25.5hr work weeks. That doesn’t include time I spent on any of the content on Patreon itself, time spent on social media posts to promote CK, or time spent setting up and playing the streaming concerts. And, aside from calling in Mother of Krisis for a day and a half of relief over the course of the month, I spent all of that time doing my typical amount of parenting.

So, to answer my own question: yes, I really could turn CK into a full-time endeavor. In fact, I’d be happy to, if if that’s what my Patrons wanted – but, that’s has never been the goal of this month.

If you’ve found this month entertaining, or interesting, or useful, please consider contributing to my campaign.

If you have a suggestion for a pledge goal content reward or a pledge level reward that would make you want to pledge, please comment to let me know.

Thank you!

Crushing Krisis: Blog of Tomorrow (a Patreon launch event)

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Behind-the-Scenes at the Patreon Introduction Video

Behind-the-Scenes at the Patreon Introduction Video

patreon-squareWelcome to a very special month of Crushing Krisis, which I have dubbed “Blog of Tomorrow”!

Why is it so special? I’m glad you asked!

I am marking my ten-year anniversary of using WordPress with the launch of a Patreon campaign. Patreon allows readers to become Patrons who cover the costs of running CK.

Rather than tempt you to pledge your support with promises of future content you can only imagine (and that I might not be able to produce), I’m bringing you the real thing – along with the 16 years of blog posts and comprehensive Marvel Collecting Guides you already love.

For the next 30 days you’ll get a future vision of what I think CK could be a year from now with your regular support and interaction, and with my full non-parenting attention on blogging. It’s something I’ve never had the opportunity to do before. My hope is that if you love it, you’ll become a Patron to help me make this a reality for CK.

Here’s a glimpse of the content you’ll read on CK this month:

I want you to feel the need check Crushing Krisis every single day the way you would all your other favorite websites. The difference is that I’m doing this all on my own without other contributors, artists, editors, or advertising dollars. And, while posting won’t remain at this insane intensity come December, it will still feature regular content just like what I’m producing this month.

Here’s my pitch video from Patreon, where I’ll be making another series of almost-daily posts to explore behind-the-scenes details of running a 16-yr-old blog.

At the end of the month, commenters, mailing list subscribers, and Patrons will help me decide what future content to focus on first. We’ll unlock new and regular features as the pledge total rises.

Want Wonder Woman and Maurice Sendak readalongs instead of Image and Dr. Seuss? Want more original music and less music essays? Wish I’d talk more about movies? I’ll be asking you at the end of the month.

Read on for more of the backstory on this unprecedented month of content. [Read more…] about Crushing Krisis: Blog of Tomorrow (a Patreon launch event)