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New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Falcon (and, sometimes, Captain America), Sam Wilson

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis  is for a character who has only 12 solo comic issues to his name, but a rich 50-year history as a hero both on the worldwide stage and in his own Harlem community…

Falcon, Sam Wilson – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I knew exactly what I was getting into with this guide. Sam Wilson is a Marvel character who has been around for 50 years and has spent the vast majority of that time as a supporting player. I could easily work out his continuity order, but there was no shortcut to explaining his many stories other than just reviewing the comics.

Unlike some of my other solo hero projects this year, I was eager to dive in and better understand Falcon’s lengthy Marvel history.

That has a lot to do with my reaction to Wilson in the role of Captain America, which he served from 2014 to 2017.

I was slow to catch up with the initial run of Rick Remender stories of Sam as Cap prior to Secret Wars. I had literally never read a Falcon comic outside of his scant Avengers appearances and his co-star turn in Captain America following the death of Steve Rogers.

This was the guy who talked to birds, right? Why would I be interested in reading him as Marvel’s greatest hero?

It only took a few issues of Remender’s run to change my mind. He quickly became my Captain America, and that made me want to understand everything that brought him to that point.

Sam Wilson’s story begins in 1969, when he was introduced as just the second major black Marvel hero, on the heels of Black Panther in 1966. If Black Panther joining the Avengers in 1968 was progressive, Sam Wilson sharing the title of Captain America’s ongoing comic in 1971 was revolutionary. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Falcon (and, sometimes, Captain America), Sam Wilson

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Aquaman

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Today’s guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis gets me one step closer to covering DC’s pantheon of most well-established heroes, although this hero in particular has suffered many indignities over the years both in comics and in the court of public opinion…

Aquaman – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been carefully dancing around addressing DC’s Golden Age in guides for a while now. Honestly, wrestling with Earth 2 and Earth 1 versions of Wonder Woman and Flash took the fight out of me, as did tracking all of the many anthology appearances of Green Arrow. It has been a relief to work on DC guides with titles set almost entirely in the Post-Crisis era, like Nightwing and Catwoman.

(Yes, I know I could just choose to skip the Golden Age portion of characters’ histories, but then I wouldn’t be creating the most-definitive character guides on the internet, would I?)

Despite the looming Golden Age challenge, I knew it was time to knock out the next of DC’s major Justice League heroes, and with Aquaman’s movie out next month he was the obvious choice over Green Lantern (oof, so many of them) or Superman (it’s still too scary to think about how I’ll organize that one).

As it turns out, Aquaman was the perfect DC character to ease me back into tracking Golden and Silver Age appearances.

Maybe that’s because he’s never been all that popular? That has always come as a shock to me, as a child of the 80s who knew Aquaman as an A-List cast member in DC Super Friends. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Aquaman

Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis (The Phoenix Era)

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This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:

The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis

This era covers every X-Men story starting with Giant Size X-Men #1 in 1975 through “Days of Future Past” in Uncanny X-Men #141-142 in 1981. That includes every back-up from Classic X-Men.

The guide allows you to read every X-Men story from the period perfect continuity order, but also presents a simplified version of that order so you can enjoy bigger chunks of the most important stories without inserting every minor guest appearance.

This was a fun reading order to revise for a few different reasons. [Read more…] about Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis (The Phoenix Era)

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Suicide Squad – from Silver Age to Present Day!

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Today’s guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis seemed like it would be a straight-forward team guide, but I wasn’t accounting for how unique each iteration of this death-defying squadron tends to be…

Suicide Squad – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Suicide Squad wasn’t always a team of villains serving a compulsory stint as reluctant heroes.

The title has its origins in the Silver Age with a pair of paramilitary mad science tales in The Brave and the Bold and Star Spangled War Stories (which, by the way, means that Suicide Squad actually predates the Justice League by a few months).

That Squadron X was a wildly different team than the modern version lead by Amanda Waller. The two were cleverly linked in the wake of Legends, the first post-Crisis DC event. Legends served as the introduction to Waller and her team of ne’er-do-wells, most of whom were incredibly obscure villains. Captain Boomerang was probably the most widely-known of the original cast, at the time!

Of course, now we associate Suicide Squad as much with Amanda Waller and those once-obscure villains like Boomerang, Deadshot, and Enchantress as we do with Harley Quinn. That was all the work of the New 52 iteration of the team in 2011 and the 2016 film version. Harley’s addition to the Squad makes for an odd fit at points, but it’s the version that hit cinemas so it’s like to be a permanent change. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Suicide Squad – from Silver Age to Present Day!

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Domino – star of Deadpool 2!

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Today’s new guide started for Patrons of Crushing Krisis as a quick’n’dirty way to cover a new X-Men title but turned into one of the most thorough single character guides I’ve created…

Domino – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Domino is a character I’ve always loved. Sure, she started out as part of an influx of X-TREME characters (and extreme T&A) in Liefeld’s X-Force launch, but Domino is the rare 90s comics babe who has become much more than that while maintaining agency in her depictions as a sexy, sexualized character.

Domino has all the skill of Deadpool and all the leadership ability of Cable. She’s funny, self-deprecating, and self-interested. She has a thing for big hunks of men and has no hesitance about making her affections known. She lead X-Force as a knowledgable friend rather than a commanding parent, and it shows in her continuing relationships with characters like Boom Boom and Warpath. She’s a complex, damaged character whose trauma never entirely defines her.

That makes Domino a treat whenever she appears, as she has in all but one iteration of “X-Force” – making her the team’s most-consistent cast member!

In reading her new ongoing series from Gail Simone, I realized that I’ve missed out on a lot of Domino’s major development; I stopped reading comics in the 90s before the “Road Trip” era of X-Force and her pair of limited series. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Domino – star of Deadpool 2!

Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)

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This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:

The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men 

One of the biggest factors in CK’s popularity exploding in the early 2010’s was the X-Men Reading Order I debuted back in 2012.

It emerged from a moment of frustration, as all of my best projects tend to. This time, my ire was focused on the fact that no one had produced an actually readable chronological guide to reading X-Men. Existing guides were either simply ordered by release date or ridiculously complex lists that broke down every single-panel flashback.

None of them were comprehensive of every book, nor were they appropriate for the Trade Era of collected editions.

Despite being a major feature of CK, I can’t say I’ve ever been proud of the presentation of the Reading Order. A lot of the pages have a certain “git’er’done” quality to them that was a hallmark of CK’s early expansion that I’ve never had the time to improve.

Honestly, they always makes me think of the scrawlings of a Serial Killer, like the notebooks upon notebooks in Se7en. That’s what it looked like to figure out – I had giant rolls of paper unspooled across the floor with scribbles and crossouts and loop-de-loop arrows on them. [Read more…] about Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)