Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Power Pack

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis was actually the guide that caused me to start the avalanche of smaller guides to fill in the gaps in my Marvel Legacy era page! It’s for a group of characters who have always been curiously X-Men adjacent, despite definitely not being mutants…

Power Pack – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Power Pack’s long-running association with the X-Men is down to their creator, Louise Simonson.

Simonson was coming off years as an editor, and heading into several years of writing X-Factor and, later, a portion of New Mutants. Not only that, but she frequently pulled Power Pack into the X-Men’s 1980s line events – they tied in to Mutant Massacre (where they faced Sabreooth), Fall of the Mutants, and Inferno!

That’s the only tie the four siblings of the Power family had to Marvel’s mutants. They got their powers not through their genes, but in the style of Green Lantern – via an alien who was part of an intergalactic struggle dying at their feet on Earth.

Power Pack was one of the only Marvel titles to be explicitly in-continuity and purposefully written with early grade readers in mind. That made them popular both with kids and adults in the 80s, but it left them without an audience in the 90s as comics shifted towards teens and speculators. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack

New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger (and an explanation of who they are)

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I’m happy to share The Definitive Cloak & Dagger Collecting Guide and Reading Order! It includes every Cloak & Dagger appearance ever published – both together and apart – with notes on trade-reading order and the importance of guest appearances.

Cloak_and_Dagger_Vol_4_1_TextlessI know what most of your reactions will be – “Who the hell are Cloak & Dagger?” They’re not exactly Marvel’s most-prominent characters and they haven’t had an ongoing series to call their own since the 1990s, but they happen to be Marvel’s most-recent property to garner an order for a television season – on ABC’s Freeform network.

Bright-eyed readers may have seen this guide already, but as of today the guide is officially out of its beta-release phase and ready to help you collect Marvel’s pair of would-be-mutants who recently garnered an order for a TV show!

This is one in a series of new and revised collection pages I’ll be highlighting; last week I covered Doctor Strange, and you can already see several of the others in action in Crushing Comics.

Who are Cloak & Dagger?

The short answer is that they were writer Bill Mantlo’s insertion into Spider-Man of a pair of teens whose lives were altered by the prevalence of street drugs in blighted, early-80s NYC. They adopted the powers of darkness and light and briefly took on a life of their own for the next decade.

Marvel was having a bit of a younger-character resurgence in the early 80s, with Chris Claremont spinning New Mutants off of X-Men and Louise Simonson launching Power Pack. Cloak & Dagger were conceived just prior to those two moves but offered a terrific contrast to them both. They were more rough-around the edges than either team, and lacking in the scholastic environment of Xavier’s school and the familial love of Power Pack. (They would make guest appearances in both series.)

Cloak & Dagger first spun off into a 1983 mini-series after their Spider-Man debut, and then into a 1985 ongoing title that was released bi-monthly. In 1987, they were relaunched into Strange Tales, Vol. 2, a monthly title they split with Doctor Strange.

Then there was the little matter of mutant hysteria. [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger (and an explanation of who they are)