Thanos

New for Patrons: Guide to Drax the Destroyer

March 23, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

I’m back with the fourth in my impromptu mid-month run of guides to green heroes for all Patrons of CK. Did I have any inkling this grouping of four guides would all debut back-to-back, or that they would overlap with Saint Patrick’s day in the process? I wish I could say it was all intentional, but it certainly was not! This hero is the oldest of all the green heroes I’ve covered in the past week, he’s as deadly as Gamora, and he’s even had more transformations than those famous mutant turtles. It’s my new Guide to Drax the Destroyer!

Guide to Drax the Destroyer

Part of the fun of putting together my definitive guides and reading orders is that I get a new understanding of a character’s progression.

In the case of Drax, I’ve seen all of his appearances before, but I’ve never reviewed them all sequentially to understand the major plot cadences that have caused his character to change over the years – sometimes radically. Of all of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Drax is the team member who has had the most distinct eras in his comic history.

What’s so interesting about Drax and his eras is how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has mined each one for a minor detail of his character. While his film incarnation often feels the farthest from the comics out of all of the guardians, really he is equally close to each of his disparate eras from the 1970s through present day.

Gamora – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Star-Lord, Peter Quill – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Marvel’s Star-Lord, Peter Quill, in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2023 with titles scheduled for release through July 2023.

Star-Lord is a Marvel character who has multiple versions and multiple origins, and what can sometimes seem like multiple personalities thanks to a tug-of-war between his comic stories and his happy-go-lucky Marvel Cinematic Universe persona.

Star-Lord was originally a pulp sci-fi character whose feature ran across a handful of Marvel magazines and anthology titles in the 1970s, as penned by his creator Steve Englehart (as well as Chris Claremont).

None of the worlds or characters he interacted with closely corresponded with Marvel’s version of space at that time. And, a close reading of his comics show that his taking on his heroic name occurred in our future (but his past) in 1990. That seemed to confirm he was not meant to coexist with the Marvel Universe of the 1970s. That character was completely forgotten throughout the 80s and 90s, and was relaunched with a different character taking on the title in a 1996 mini-series.

That pair of Star-Lords are now known as The Star-Lords of Earth-791. How did they wind up excommunicated from Marvel’s mainstream continuity? That’s down to his film success and Brian Bendis,

In March 2005, Keith Giffen & Ron Lim introduced an old, grizzled, partly-cybernetic man named Peter Quill into their Thanos ongoing series. Quill had an unnamed off-panel history with Thanos and was imprisoned for life after a galactic defense gone wrong resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. That explained why he refused to acknowledge anyone else calling him Star-Lord.

Peter Quill was freed from his sentence by Gladiator of the Imperial Guard and next turned up as the second-in-command to Richard Rider as the last Nova in the 2007 Annihilation event. This was the same cynical, cybernetic Peter Quill. He was promoted to a title star in a mini-series that lead into the next cosmic event, Annihilation Conquest. Quill’s cybernetic implants were removed and he assembled a team readers and film fans will recognize as an early iteration of Guardians of the Galaxy. The team’s roster and name would be formalized coming out of the event and leading into the Guardians ongoing series in 2008.

As Peter resumed the title of Star-Lord, authors Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning slightly softened his personality and youthened him, but he was still the battle-scarred veteran of the Annihilation events. Abnett & Lanning ended their run on the character with his disappearance at the end of The Thanos Imperative.

Throughout all of those stories, the unspoken implication was that our present-day Marvel-616 Peter Quill was in fact the same as Englehart’s future version, meaning that he (or, perhaps, his father) had traveled back in time from those original 1970s stories.

That slate was wiped clean by Brian Bendis in 2012. Bendis brought Quill back as the leader of the Guardians with no explanation in his Avengers Assemble series, a tie-in the impending Avengers film as well as a stealth reboot of a Guardians team that would perfectly match their impending film incarnation. Bendis continued that continuity-wipe with the point-one issue of the new Guardians ongoing, in which he completely revised Peter Quill’s origins to be based definitively on the Marvel-616 Earth (in a story that would be somewhat echoed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe).

Although all of the Annihilation stories were still in continuity, Bendis’s version of Peter Quill was younger and funnier – though he still wasn’t quite the silly, somewhat-bumbling version we’d meet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As the MCU version of Star-Lord became a hit with the public, Bendis leaned into exploring his parentage and his connection to the planet Spartax while solo runs by Sam Humphries and Chip Zdarsky detailed his romance with Kitty Pryde and his solo adventures. Further Guardians books by Gerry Duggan and Donny Cates hewed closely to the Bendis template of the character.

It was Al Ewing in his 2020-21 Guardians of the Galaxy run who truly transformed Peter Quill’s character to align his present-day version and his comic origins, as well as exploring his devotion to Richard Rider and Gamora. Finally, by the end of Ewing’s run, it felt as though we had a Star-Lord who made sense as the combat-hardened Annihilation veteran as well as the happy-go-lucky Bendis-era Guardians. [Read more…] about Star-Lord, Peter Quill – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

New for Patrons: Guide to Adam Warlock

February 27, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Today I’m here with a new guide for all Patrons of CK that has been secretly part of another guide for close to a decade! Of course, it’s not really helpful to new readers to have a whole character’s guide stealthily tucked away somewhere they might never look. That’s why I just went on a deep dive through the 56 year comic history of a major Marvel character who at first was only known by his pronouns. Now his golden skin is about to hit the silver screen. That’s right, I’m talking about “Him,” whose comic history is covered under his better-known name in my Guide to Adam Warlock!

Guide to Adam Warlock
This guide is now available to all readers thanks to the supernatural support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

I’d hazard a guess that the vast majority of CK readers have no idea that every Adam Warlock appearance from his 1967 debut through 2017 is summarized in my Guide to Guardians of the Galaxy.

Guess what? I had totally forgotten about that, too! I truly thought the Guardians guide only covered the movie team as individuals. Imagine my surprise when I checked a collection on it recently to discover that it also encompassed Adam Warlock, since he was one of the initial cast members of the now-classic Abnett & Lanning 2008 run that set the stage for the team to appear in the MCU.

All of that Warlock material still exists for public perusal in the Guardians Guide. However, aside from the obscurity of knowing where to find that information on the site, I also saw an opportunity to explain things in a much clearer way in a dedicated Guide to Adam Warlock. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Adam Warlock

The Eternals – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Marvel’s The Eternals – including members like Ikaris, Giglamesh, Makkari, Sersi, Sprite, & Thena – in comic books and omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated July 2022 with titles scheduled for release through February 2023.

The Eternals are one of the defining creations of Jack Kirby’s mid-1970s return to Marvel Comics, though relatively few modern readers have had the chance to appreciate them prior to their film debut in 2021 compared to his other cosmic creations like The Inhumans and DC’s The New Gods.

The core cast of roughly a dozen named Eternals (though there are as many as 100) have tended to stay confined to their own handful of series during over 45 years of their publishing history, with just a handful of guest appearances or exceptions.

The main exception is Sersi, who join the cast of the Avengers in the 1990s for over fifty issues, and is well-known to heroes like Captain America and Iron Man.

(A secondary exception is Gilgamesh, who was an Avenger for just a handful of issues before Sersi replaced him. A more remote connection are descendants of Titan, among them Thanos and Starfox, who are Eternals by relation but are not part of the primary cast of The Eternals comic.)

In Marvel continuity, the Eternals are a long-lived splinter-race of humanity created by visiting Celestials during Earth’s pre-history – alongside their sibling race, The Deviants. The Eternals function as both heralds-of and caretakers-for the Celestials on Earth. They often interact with or inspire humanity’s mythology – the Eternal Ikaris, in some tellings, is the father of the mythological Icarus. They also police themselves, abiding by the rule of the group and sharing knowledge by forming a collective “Uni-Mind.”

Jack Kirby had a massive, cosmic story to tell with his cast of Eternals starting in 1976, though many of the plots of his series were left dangling after its cancellation in 1978, to be resumed in 1979 in Thor’s “Celestial Saga.” Shortly afterward, Mark Gruenwald and Peter Gillis significantly expanded their origins via a series of in-continuity back-ups in What If – explaining their earliest Celestial origins and forging a connection between the Eternals and fellow Kirby creations The Inhumans.

Past that, the Eternals have appeared largely only when their series is revived, or when a character is explaining Celestial history. They return in 1985 for a 12-issue revival by Gillis and Walt Simonson, in 1991 for an OGN, in 2000 for a one-shot trying to give them some X-Men shine by connecting them to Apocalypse, and again in a heavyweight 2006 revival by Neil Gaiman (and continued in a 2008 series). Even Sersi returned to relative obscurity after her run on Avengers.

In 2018, Jason Aaron’s opening arc of Avengers (2018) saw the team facing off against a fleet of invading Celestials, and the entire earth- bound Eternal race was collateral damage – he killed them all, mostly off-panel! However, this would prove to be a set-up for Kieron Gillen to relaunch the title with a clean slate at the start of 2021 as part of the run-up to the Eternals film. [Read more…] about The Eternals – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order