Crushing Krisis

A Surprise Farewell to Prime Minister Ardern

January 19, 2023 by krisis

I was head down all day today burning through work work and comic guide work without loading a single website or social network, which allowed for the comparatively occurrence of E sharing breaking news with me (rather than the other way around).

“Have you seen the news?” she asked as we all sat around the table after finishing dinner. Her tone of voice was portentous.

My mind raced. We don’t follows news on sports or royals, nor are we all that mindful of celebrities and influences. E certainly wasn’t bringing me any fresh developments from the world of drag or the Marvel United Kickstarter.

I loaded the Washington Post homepage, fearing the worst – more gun violence in the states, or a bad political development. There was nothing apparent “above the fold.”

“No, what am I looking for?”

I saw it just as she said it. It was the next story that appeared as I started scrolling down the page:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigns ahead of election

(For my American readers: the simplest explanation of a Prime Minister is that they work a lot like the Speaker of the House. The party or parties who control the government nominate one of their own who was elected as a regular representative to be the head of their party, which also makes them the head of government. The people have no control whatsoever – which, come to think of it, isn’t such a bad thing.)

I have mixed feelings on this news. [Read more…] about A Surprise Farewell to Prime Minister Ardern

CMON’s Marvel United returns to Kickstarter with Marvel United: Multiverse!

January 18, 2023 by krisis

I feel like a kid at Christmas today, even if it will be an unbearable year of waiting before I can open my present. That’s because board game publisher CMON is back on Kickstarter with a third wave of their delightful Marvel United game – and this time, it’s multiversal! Their new campaign is for Marvel United: Multiverse!

Marvel United is a cooperative game where you play as one or more heroes fighting an iconic Marvel Villain who takes automated turns based on a sinister Master Plan deck. The fight extends to six familiar Marvel locations drawn from a pool of dozens, and each one contains a threat and a number of innocent bystanders and annoying henchmen.

On your turn, your hero plays a card to “the timeline” that contains one or more action symbols that let you fight, move, or save the day. But, you’re not alone – you also get to re-use the symbols from the card of the hero whose turn was before yours. Together, you write the story of your fight to save the world – or maybe just New York City – from your foe’s villainous plot.

I passed on the original Marvel United campaign because I wasn’t attracted to the Chibi-style hero art. Plus, it was heavily focused on the MCU and was completely devoid of mutants. We don’t support anti-mutant discrimination in this household! However, when a campaign entirely comprised of X-Men loomed in 2021 I picked up the core game at retail to see what it was all about and immediately became hooked. It’s a fun solo game, since you don’t need an opponent. The hero mechanic is incredibly simple, but it can lead to intriguing puzzles as you try to plan the perfect combos of actions across multiple turns while staying out of the way of a rampaging villain.

If I had one complaint about the game, it’s that the heroes all felt a bit same-y. Each of them had a deck of twelve cards with different balances of symbols, but for most heroes only three of them were “special moves” that did something unique. After my first two plays, I fired up a spreadsheet and a started to define “Special ability” and “Combo Move” for each hero so they felt more persistently powerful.

For example, here is what I drafted for Black Widow: [Read more…] about CMON’s Marvel United returns to Kickstarter with Marvel United: Multiverse!

mall-based time travel

January 17, 2023 by krisis

Yesterday, the kid and I made nearly a full day excursion to the Queensgate Mall to buy clothes and various other supplies for the upcoming new school year.

There are many things about New Zealand that delightfully feel retro to me. For example, it’s exceedingly common to see cars with all manner of advertising wraps on them for local businesses that clearly proclaim a phone number but no internet URL.

Nowhere else in New Zealand is that feeling magnified more than in a shopping mall. By the time we left the states malls had either begun to wither and die, or had becoming echo chambers filled with only the biggest brand outlets – each one a copy and paste of the next. The surviving malls feel like they lost their identities. There weren’t any weird little stores like the ones I remembered from my youth – before you could find anything you could imagine on Amazon and have it shipped to your doorstep in under 48 hours.

Walking into a mall here transports me back to my 1990s youth. I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s not just the absence of Amazon. New Zealand has startling few of the kind of “we sell everything” big box retailers that altered the American shopping landscape before Amazon’s ubiquity.

Are you old enough to remember when Circuit City started carrying $13-dollar CDs, but then Best Buy swooped in with more floor space and more electronics and $12-dollar CDs? Or when going to your local Clover, Sears, and K-Mart got superseded by going to even bigger Targets and Wal-Marts, which added things like furniture, groceries, and automotive sections?

Do you also remember how their side effect was killing off not only downmarket shops, but upmarket department stories? Or when massive category retailer warehouses like Bed Bath and Beyond started popping up as shopping destinations of their own?

Those types big stores really don’t exist in New Zealand – those apex predator brands whose entire raison d’etre is to choke out the local market. Or, at least, I think they are confined to Auckland or Christchurch, because Wellington does not have them. The only big-box-ish, category-spanning store we have here is The Warehouse, which feels a lot like early American versions of Target – right down to their signature color red. [Read more…] about mall-based time travel

Crushing On: Caught In The Act by Courtney Act (2022)

January 16, 2023 by krisis

I can both love and loathe celebrity auto-biographies, but I definitely loved Caught in the Act.

I can love them because they are a glimpse at the inner life of someone whose art I’ve spent years – sometimes decades! – consuming. They can add fresh context to work that I already appreciate.

I can loathe them because they are often more artifice than reality. Prose is just another method of performance. Sometimes you wind up with a few shocking revelations or debaucherous anecdotes, but that doesn’t meant you’ve gotten any closer to truly knowing the author.

(I should know – I’ve been doing it for nearly 22 years now.)

No, I’m not talking obliquely about Prince Harry’s new bestseller, Spare. The first physical, non-graphic-novel book I read this year is Caught in the Act, a memoir in three parts by Courtney Act – contestant on Australian Idol Season 1, finalist on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6, winner of Britain’s Celebrity Big Brother Series 21, and finalist twice-over on Australia’s Dancing With The Stars.

That’s quite a resume. I first glimpsed Courtney in her “Meet The Queens” interview for Drag Race in 2014 and I was instantly transfixed. I had seen drag queens before and I understood they were often men dressed in exaggerated versions of feminity, but Courtney looked more like a glamorous pop star.

Little did I know how right I was, but also how much that dichotomy often plagued Courtney. (She is credited both as Courtney Act and as Shane Jenek on the book’s cover and is comfortable with either he/him or she/her pronouns.)

The three acts of Caught in the Act are Courtney’s childhood in suburban Australia, her coming out of the closet and into the Sydney drag scene, and her international stardom (and ensuing relationships). I found each portion fascinating, but I think the one that affected me the most (and most unexpectedly) was the portion of the book about Courtney’s childhood.

Courtney and I virtually the same age, separated by only a few months. Even though we grew up across the globe from each other in different cultures, we were exposed to much of the same pop culture. Courtney talks about Madonna and the X-Men, which is shockingly familiar to me. She also talks about years of suffering in silent confusion as she tried to work out why some things in life were “boy things” and some were “girl things.” That felt familiar too.

Early in the book, she says:

I wish there’d been honest and frank conversations going on as well as visible queer people in the world and on TV. I can’t begin to explain what a significant difference that would have made, or what a difference increased visibility since then has made for queer kids today. Growing up in a world of queer invisibility was so isolating. The strange part is I didn’t know I was isolated – I didn’t know I was learning shame, or to hid who I was for safety: it came instinctively for survival. Every now and again I wonder if I’ve retrofitted shame where it didn’t exist. Then I remember: shame is a deposit made for a future debt, and it accumulates over time with compound interest.

That idea that we can’t tell if our adult shame is the same as our childhood shame bowled me over. I stopped and stared in shock at that page for a long while. I’ve never read someone so clearly explaining why the process of coming out can be so long and slow, even when surrounded by an entirely supportive environment. Courtney captures the emotions of childhood, but adds the the adult lens of someone who is on the forefront of conversations about gender all around the world.

What shocked me most about Caught in the Act wasn’t Courtney’s backwards tumble into fame, her drug use, or her sexual encounters. No, the most-revealing aspect of this book is just how long it took her to come to terms with her own gender identity. [Read more…] about Crushing On: Caught In The Act by Courtney Act (2022)

Updated: Guide to Cable

January 15, 2023 by krisis

It’s time for another update to a long-standing X-Guide! It’s another guide where I re-wrote every word and rebuilt every link from scratch to make it clearer than every before how to follow the story of one of the most-complicated X-Characters. Welcome to my all-new, all-different Guide to Cable!

Guide to Cable

This Guide to Cable didn’t exist when I first launched Crushing Comics back in 2010.

At the time, Cable’s 1993 series wasn’t particularly well-collected and his 2008 series was just wrapping up, so the bulk of his collected editions were actually from the run of Cable & Deadpool from 2004 to 2008. At the time Deadpool hadn’t been associated with the X-Men for well over a decade (this was just before Uncanny X-Force was announced!), but he had several well-collected series to his name.

Faced with a decision between an under-collected X-Character and well-collected non-X-Character, it made sense to package the pair of them together thanks to their shared series and intertwined origins. Thus, the Guide to Cable & Deadpool was born. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Cable