krisis

Krisis has been creating Crushing Krisis since 2000, writing songs since 1996, and reading comics since 1991. He is a Customer Success and Digital Brand Strategy executive, serial organizer, parent, and feminist, among other things. Based in Philly through 2017, he now resides in Wellington, NZ.

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 5 – Draguation Speeches: recap & power ranking!

June 11, 2022 by krisis

Welcome to my recap of the fifth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – Draguation Speeches, a challenge that mashes up comedy with inspiration and a touch of personal branding.

This is a fascinating challenge because there is nothing quintessentially “drag” about it, yet it is perfectly representative of the direction of the show in 2022.

Drag Race constantly finds new peaks of cultural influence, and with that higher profile all of its contestants have a higher profile than ever before.

Drag Race winners used to compete to score a club tour sponsored by Absolut Vodka.

Now, winning queens are getting the opportunity to appear on stage at the Emmy awards, walk the runway for Fenty and other fashion brands, and attend the Met Gala. Peppermint, the only Season 9 finalist to not yet have her own crown, just hosted the GLAAD Awards!

Of this cast of winners, five host ongoing podcasts (Jinkx hosts two!), Raja has hosted Fashion Photo RuView for almost a decade, Viv has anchored several Netflix YouTube shows, Monét had her own talk show, Jinkx has written and produced multiple one- and two-woman shows, and Shea has appeared in multiple features in Vogue – among many other appearances and accolades.

That’s the genius of this challenge. Draguation Speeches are not about a skill critical to the foundations of your drag, but the skill of translating your drag into different contexts. A drag queen should be giving a commencement speech! A show that started as an (even-more) queer spin on Project Runway is now a public-facing finishing school that turns former bar queens and Instagram influencers into in-demand LGBTQAI+ spokespeople.

If no Drag Race queen has been invited to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address, it’s only a matter of time.

(Actually, Sasha Velour delivered a commencement address to The Center for Cartoon Studies’ class of 2020!)

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Drag Race challenge without the added requirement of making Ru laugh! Which queens manage to be both inspiring and hilarious? As it turns out, Ru and I are split on the decision. Read on to find out about our disagreement. Plus, at the end of the recap I’ll update my Episode 4 power rankings to show where the queens stand after another week of Legendary Legend badges. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 5 – Draguation Speeches: recap & power ranking!

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

June 10, 2022 by krisis

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.

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

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

(un/)settled

June 9, 2022 by krisis

Last week I threw away some expired prescriptions from at least a decade ago.

I know what you’re thinking. “Krisis will really blog about anything to keep up these regular posts. Maybe we’ll get a YouTube show reviewing the contents of every trash can in the house.”

Honestly, I wouldn’t rule it out. But, I promise, this trip to the trash can was particularly significant!

When we bought a house back in 2010, in many ways my life entered “accumulation mode.” I never had that much space to fill before, or a space that felt so permanent. After an entire life spent in rentals, I finally felt like I could have and do stuff. I’m not just talking about my comic collection! Having a house also lead to me fronting a full band, learning to play bass, writing a book, and making a huge career pivot.

In short: I felt settled. That extended to more than my stuff. It came with a feeling of psychological safety.

Image by tookapic from Pixabay

Then, almost exactly five years ago, we packed that entire life into a shipping container. We had fewer than 90 days to go from committing to our move to hopping on the first of three flights en route to New Zealand, so the packing wasn’t very discerning. All of the comics, musical gear, kitchen appliances, and expired medication got boxed up regardless of if we’d ever want to see them again in New Zealand.

Even though we’ve long since unpacked all the essentials, in some ways I’ve been living out of boxes for the past half decade. Heck, I needed an almost 90-episode web show to motivate me to unpack all of my collected editions! It’s not unusual for E to send me on a scavenger hunt through the garage for something we haven’t seen since leaving America.

This set me back to a mindset of everything in life being temporary. Having to move again in 2019 when I finally felt at home in our first rental in NZ made things even worse and it was compounded by our deportation scare in early 2020.

I was back to being unsettled.

If feeling settled came with a warm, tingly feeling of safety, feeling unsettled again introduced a constant, low-level of buzzing anxiety in the back of my brain.

I still bought stuff and did new things, but it felt unsteady. Imagine cooking a big meal while wearing roller skates. Would you whisk and chop as confidently? Would you clean up as you cooked? Would it be easy to lift a heavy pan into a hot oven? Or, would you do everything more slowly, with less certainty and more mess.

That’s how being unsettled feels to me now that I know there’s an alternative – slow, uncertain, and messy.

Here’s the thing I’ve slowly accepted about the rollerskate-cooking that is my ongoing immigrant life: forcing yourself to be physically settled helps with feeling mentally settled, and the opposite is true as well.

Sometimes that’s buying a new shelf to improve the clutter. Others it means inviting friends over for dinner, because that is a thing we can do.

And, sometimes that means unearthing a box full of expired prescriptions I haven’t dealt with since 2012 and tossing them all in the trash.

New for Patrons: Legion of Super-Heroes Guide

June 8, 2022 by krisis

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

It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

June 7, 2022 by krisis

DIE is a brilliant comic book about role-playing from Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles.

DIE is also a brilliant storytelling role-playing game (RPG) from Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook and Decard.

This takes some explaining.

The thing you need to know right now is that if you want a deluxe physical copy of the RPG you have only three more days to Kickstart it, and if you want a deluxe physical copy of the entire comic run you can pre-order it right now (including pre-ordering from your local comic shop – yes, it’s already time to pre-order November hardcovers).

Okay, now on to the explaining!

DIE is one of the most-fascinating indie comic books of the past few years, both in concept and execution. The comic has already come and gone – it ran for 20 self-contained issues from December 2018 to September 2021 in four tight 5-issue arcs with no fluff.

(Mild first-issue spoilers lie ahead.)

The story started something like Stranger Things: 25th Anniversary Reunion.

A group of friends used to play role-playing games together in high school, but it ended with their sudden, inexplicable disappearance – and just-as-sudden reappearance years later, minus one member of their party and with a bevy of physical and psychological scars.

Where were they? They’ve never uttered a word about it to each other or anyone else and went on with their lives. Some of them were successful, some started families, while others could never shake their trauma and subsequent guilt.

On the anniversary of their disappearance they receive an unsettling reminder of their shared experience and they cannot help but be sucked back into something they know is much more serious and deadly than any game.

There are plenty of “real world people are transported into fantasy” stories out there, but DIE had a special, undeniable magic to it.

Central to that were the real world characters – five wounded adults, some of whom had spent their lives trying to be completely different than their game characters while others chased after becoming more like their fictional selves. They each had relatable stories about loss, addiction, identity, and disability, and those themes were amplified by the fantastical world around them.

As the story progressed, it became clear that this was a fantasy story with a very specific structure. In fact, the structure was so well-formed we could refer to it as a set of rules.

That’s because Kieron Gillen, in all of his wild genius, not only scripted a 20-issue comic story, but also the complete ruleset of the role-playing game the characters were playing in the story. [Read more…] about It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!