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.

Drag Race Philippines Season 1 Episode 1 – Mabu-Heeey! Review & Power Ranking

August 20, 2022 by krisis

Mabuhay! Welcome to my review and power rankings of the debut episode of Drag Race Philippines Season 1 – Mabu-Heeey!

This episode was utterly packed with content: entrance looks, a Dragna superhero photo shoot challenge, a Totally Exciting Talent Extravaganza, and a runway based around the Terno – the Philippines national dress.

That gives us more to discuss in this episode than we get in a typical Ball challenge, and this is with all twelve queens!

That’s a lot to put queens through in the first episode of a regular season. However, it also served to effectively stratify the cast, giving them plenty of opportunities to show their quality across different situations – and, leading to a relatively obvious and fair first elimination.

There’s not much else to say before we get down to ranking all of these queens through each of the four hurdles of the episode, which definitely shifted things from my speculative Pre-Season ranking. Even though the show premiered two episodes at once, I am 100% spoiler-free on the second episode as of this writing! I’ll be back with that second ranking early in the week.

If you want to watch Drag Race Philippines outside of the Philippines and Canada you can sign up for WowPresentsPlus to watch the many worldwide Drag Race franchises for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. (Note that if you’re in the home country of a franchise you will need to use a VPN to “visit” another country to see that content.)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best Filipino drag queen win! [Read more…] about Drag Race Philippines Season 1 Episode 1 – Mabu-Heeey! Review & Power Ranking

Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 Episode 6 – Cosmetic Queens: Review & Power Ranking

August 19, 2022 by krisis

Welcome to my review and power rankings of the sixth episode of Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 – Cosmetic Queens, a combination make-up and branding challenge.

Every season of Drag Race comes with some form of branding challenge, but it’s rare that queens are given a make-up maxi-challenge outside of making over someone else. While they have to dress themselves up for different roles in Rusicals and Snatch Game, I feel like there’s an unspoken rule that a queen’s beat is a queen’s beat. Outside of critiques aimed at improvement, the show isn’t looking to change that.

This challenge wasn’t looking to change how the queens do their make-up, but it came with some restrictions. Each queen chose a palette of six signature colors to craft a product, an accompanying face of make-up for a marketing photo, and a 20-second commercial to sell the product.

This is more relevant than ever with make-up products from drag queens turning into big business around the world. In America, Season 8’s Kim Chi recently expanded her make-up line into CVS stores around the country! Even for queens who aren’t going to start their own business, the ability to quickly assemble a pitch for a potential brand collab is an essential skill for all Drag Race graduates.

That yielded a wide range of results from the queens. Some of them were more focused on comedy than sales, while others were obsessed with creating a personal story. The queens who did the best in the challenge were uniformly the ones who didn’t do anything all that different with their make-up, but who also didn’t forget to sell the make-up.

(Also, I have to point out that co-host Traci Melchor had a sudden breakthrough in this episode! Typically, Traci sounds very scripted, to the point of being stilted. This week but she was an outstanding director who helped queens realize their vision. She gave so many good tips about how to position themselves, how to work the camera, and how to deliver lines. Her status as a veteran TV presenter really shone through. And, she was genuinely emotional during the runway segment. Let’s not forget: hosts and presenters are people, too! I think it’s exciting to see Traci level up in her Drag Race skills just as watching Brooke’s looseness as a host this season has been a real joy.)

The challenge gave us an unsurprising elimination, even if it was a queen who wasn’t at the bottom of my ranks last week, plus one meteoric rise of a queen gunning for a spot in the finals. Do we actually have our final three locked in? Perhaps…

If you want to watch Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 outside of Canada and the UK you can sign up for WowPresentsPlus to watch the many worldwide Drag Race franchises for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. (Note that if you’re in the US you will need to use a VPN to “visit” another country to see the US Franchise.)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best Queen (of the North) win!

New for Patrons: Guide to Hellcat, Patsy Walker

August 18, 2022 by krisis

Working on last week’s Guide to Black Cat and this week’s update to my Guide to She-Hulk drew my attention to Marvel’s other major feline heroine, who has been a diva along with Felicia Hardy and a BFF to Jennifer Walters. That’s right – today’s new guide for “Pledgeonaut” Patrons of CK is an issue-by-issue Guide to Hellcat, Patsy Walker!

Hellcat is actually one of Marvel’s longest-running characters! Her civilian alter-ego Patsy Walker debuted in the Golden Age as one of the stars of Marvel’s burgeoning line of teen and romance comics. While most people assume those books petered out by the time the Silver Age began with Fantastic Four in 1961, Patsy’s titles kept on running – one of them as late as 1967!

Yet, in that time she was never a hero – just a regular teenage girl who liked to hang out with her best friend Hedy.

(And, actually, if we’re being specific, those comics are not actually Patsy’s earlier continuity, but a fictionalized version of it that existed as in-universe comic books in the Marvel 616 as written by Patsy’s mother!) [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Hellcat, Patsy Walker

Drag Race Philippines Season 1 – Pre-Season “Meet The Queens” Power Rankings

August 17, 2022 by krisis

Welcome to my Pre-Season Power Rankings of the queens of Drag Race Philippines Season 1!

Even though I watch every franchise of Drag Race no matter the language, I’ve shied away from recapping or ranking international editions of the show in the past.

My hesitance is for the very reason RuPaul makes a wobbly host of Drag Race Down Under! (Sorry, Ru, but it’s true.) Even if I had someone to explain every linguistic and pop culture reference to me live through an earpiece, there are so many nuances that are lost in cross-cultural communication.

That not only includes nuances lost to translation and idiomatic expressions, but also different fashion and beauty sensibilities across cultures. What might seem like an uneven silhouette or an off-trend brow in one country might be the standard of beauty in another.

This has been part of the internal struggle of the many non-English language Drag Race franchises, as they try to apply American drag standards set by Ru on the flagship for runways, lip syncs, and comedy performances to their local queens.

I think of all of the franchises, it has been Drag Race Thailand that has achieved this the most authentically. Part of that is because they don’t try to make the show look or sound like the American version, even while having queens do things like play Snatch Game and Lip Sync For Their Life. By contrast, Drag Race Holland often feels as though they are trying to be the most-seamless brand extension possible – including judging queens on the American drag rubric, even while they are putting nationalistic pride on display.

While I’ve always been aware of this, I think watching Drag Race France – where I understood some of the language, idioms, and culture – really drove it home the differences for me. That is because I finally had the opportunity to understand them in context thanks to speaking just enough French and being just enough of a Francophile. After seeing that and writing about that franchise for the past few months, I feel a little more comfortable in finding a way to write about the international franchises without forcing my own anglocentric opinions on how the queens ought to look and act.

(This is especially true when it comes to interpreting personalities! I’ve certainly learned that lesson in New Zealand, where even in another English-speaking culture my personality comes off completely differently than it does in the states.)

This is now my fifth Drag Race pre-season ranking of the year, and it is by far the hardest one I’ve done so far. So many of these queens strike me as strong contenders with few flaws in sight. I’m not sure a single one of these predictions will hold up in the long run – but, it’s still fun to make them! Sound off in the comments below – do you agree with my ranking, or do I have it totally out of order?

As a reminder, these pre-season power rankings are entirely based on each queen’s “Meet The Queens” interview segment as well as a quick browse of their social media. It’s not a judgment of their abilities or their worth as artists. It’s a guess at how well they will perform on the show based on my first impression of their drag.

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen win! [Read more…] about Drag Race Philippines Season 1 – Pre-Season “Meet The Queens” Power Rankings

Updated: Guide to She-Hulk

August 16, 2022 by krisis

Are you read to go green? I’ve completely overhauled my Guide to She-Hulk to mark this week’s debut of the new Marvel Cinematic Universe series, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, on Disney +.

She-Hulk stars the mega-talented Tatiana Maslany as Marvel’s Jennifer Walters, a mild-mannered attorney pulled into the heroic life of her Avenger cousin Bruce Banner … or, at least, that’s the story we know from the comics. And if you don’t know the story yet, don’t worry – I’ve got you covered with a guide that includes every She-Hulk series, every appearance, and links to find collected editions, buy digital versions, and read online with Marvel Unlimited.

Guide to She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters

My Guide to She-Hulk will always hold a special place in my heart and memory, because it is one of the first two guides I completed after leaving my tech start-up job in 2016 to be a stay-at-home parent.

At the time, the kid didn’t spend a single second of time looking at screens, so my only downtime from wake-up to goodnight were her mid-day naps. In overhauling this guide, I saw so many places in it where I remembered, “yep, that’s when she woke up,” or other such toddler-motivated interruptions from my guide-making.

As weird and as confusing as a time as that was in my life, it was also a time where I value every single second and every memory. I have so many photos and videos of our adventures, and my She-Hulk Guide is like the negative space of that – one of the few things I was doing in the time I had to myself.

While the guide has always been complete and completely definitive, there were many half-finished thoughts throughout, and I never had the time to refine the the structure and table-of-contents to my typical level of perfectionist completion.

That’s no longer the case. I’ve completely changed my approach to presenting Jennifer Walters’ many series and guest-starring turns, plus added a “Where To Start Reading” section and highlighted the quickest ways to build a She-Hulk shelf in oversize hardcover or paperback.

Some Marvel characters find a niche early on and stick to it. Others grow through a single, continuous arc.

She-Hulk’s progression has been more about evolving with the idea of what being a “powerful woman” means to the broader pop culture in any given publishing era. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to She-Hulk