Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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 4 – Fairytale Justice: recap & power ranking!

by

Welcome to my recap of the fourth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – Fairytale Justice, an improv acting challenge!

I have done improv in college classes and as a warm-up for rehearsals, but I’ve never officially performed improv for an audience. That still gives me a lot more exposure to improv than average TV viewer. I’d guess that the vast majority of people’s experience with improv comedy comes from watching Whose Line Is It Anyway? and having heard of the rule of “Yes, and…”

Broadly, the idea of “yes and” means that you accept what others in your scene have said as reality and then you add to it.

That might be the primary rule of improv, but it’s not a rule in the sense that people who haven’t done improv often expect it to be. It doesn’t mean that you must always say “yes, and..,”, that your character can never disagree with another character, or that the story can never contradict itself. It also doesn’t mean that everything in improv has to be done without a plan or with no preparation.

“Yes and” is simply a guideline for productive collaboration. It’s a means of always moving forward instead of pausing to correct or edit, even if that means you move forward into conflict. Any good conversation you’ve ever had involved an amount of “yes and.” So have most of your successful group projects. Even working from an agenda in a meeting requires an amount of “yes and”!

As it turns out, life is largely a game of improv.

RuPaul emphasizes improvisation on Drag Race because improv is foundational to not only his idea of comedy, but his entire career. Ru loves the idea of “volleying” – being able to trade an escalating series barbs live with another player. That quick wit has been a huge part of what has made him an enduring icon in entertainment. He picked that up from a wide array of silly 60s, 70s, and 80s influences like Laugh-In, The Sonny & Cher Show, comedians on gameshows like Match Game, and late night hosts like Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers.

Not all Drag Race contestants fully grasp this idea of “yes and,” let alone how to use it to play for laughs. That has resulted in many uneven improv moments over more than two dozen seasons of the show’s many franchises. Yet, in this episode, we saw two of the best ever examples of “yes and” in Drag Race history!

Do you know which two queens I mean? Keep reading to find out in my full recap of “Fairytale Justice.” Plus, at the end of the recap I’ll update my Episode 3 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 4 – Fairytale Justice: recap & power ranking!

My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline

by

Gather round, folks, because I bring you a tale that begins on the very precipice of the pandemic, extends through a year of extreme burnout, and involves a fantastical land full of dragons, dungeons, and indecisive half-elves.

Picture it: February 2020, AKA the last normal month on Earth. We were all reading COVID-19 articles with a sense of bemusement that grew into dread as they crept from the international news section forward to the front page, but most of our lives hadn’t been changed by it at all.

Three big things happened in my life in February 2020. First, I started what seemed like it was my dream job (spoilers: it was not).

Second, I started playing D&D remotely with my college friends back on the East Coast.

And, third, we were almost deported!

Of these three events, it seemed like starting the D&D campaign with friends would prove to be the least significant. It was the 18th anniversary of when we assembled to play together in college. That campaign ran for just a few months, but it gained an appropriately mythical status in our collective hindsight. When our beloved friend Dante passed away in 2014 we reformed for a one-off night, but none of us ever expected to play together again – certainly not with me halfway around the world!

During a catch-up with Lindsay about my new gig, she mentioned that some of the old gang would be assembling physically for a new campaign. We joked about how funny it would be to have me projected on a screen playing remotely – imagine that! But, the more we joked about it, the more the idea took hold. After making arrangements with our longtime DM, I appeared in that first session live from New Zealand!

I cleared off a desk in our spare bedroom, still packed with boxes from our recent move, and pointed it out the window so I could enjoy the sunny day while I played with friends who were up past midnight back in the US. It was ridiculous fun. We had forgotten all the rules and were all playing newly-invented characters and classes we had never played before. I inadvertently vaporized an entire alleyway of assailants with my first Thunderwave. Even though the session was meant to be a one-off, we agreed to reconvene two weeks later.

Two days later, the New Zealand government informed us we were 40 days away from deportation.

(This is too big a story to explain in full here, but in short: The NZ government told us repeatedly in writing that we absolutely should not renew our visas while we waited on a decision on our residency application. When we (as a pair assiduous rule-followers) did not renew our visas while waiting on said decision, the Ministry promptly informed us that our visas had expired, we were in the country illegally, we had to quit our jobs, and we should make plans to depart immediately.)

The weeks that followed our deportation notice were one of the most stressful periods I’ve experienced in my entire life. We lived every day wondering if we should put our newly-moved-into household into storage and look for a place to stay back in the states even as a global pandemic began unfolding. It was one of the many times in our lives as recent immigrants when we realized how powerless we were and how arbitrary the rules of borders and residency are in every country around the world.

Truly, I don’t know if I would’ve had the emotional fortitude to survive our tense process of getting emergency visas without the fresh connection with my best friends from the states and the knowledge that I’d see them all again in two weeks. We played that second session with all of us remote from each other as the early days of the pandemic reached into all of our cities. I certainly had a thrilling story to share in our “what’s been going on with you in the past two weeks!”

Then, between our second and third session, New Zealand began its first two-month COVID lockdown. That meant no leaving the house, other than for groceries, gas, banking, medical care, or a short walk around the neighborhood.

Even if the states wasn’t in an official lockdown, all of my party members were similarly shut in their houses. It was the perfect opportunity for us to set a regular date to play – none of us were going anywhere! Each session before playing we would catch up, sharing our stories of hunting for scarce groceries or finding the perfect pattern for sewing masks.

As our initial campaign drew to a close, I asked if I could take a turn at being Dungeon Master for a session or two while our regular DM prepped his next adventure. I had always been fascinated by DM-ing as a mash-up of carefully planned math and improvisational storytelling, but I never had the guts to try to convince people to play with me as a first-time DM. [Read more…] about My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline

New for Patrons: Spider-Ham Guide!

by

I’m so happy to be getting my Crushing Comics guides back on track, and to kick that off I have a brief guide for a sentimental favorite to offer to all CK Patrons!
Spider-Ham on the cover of Spider-Man Annual 2019 #1

Long before I was a regular comic reader, I had a meager stack of comics from newsstands and spinner racks that sat on a slim bookshelf in my closet.

One was an old Conan comic from my father. Another was a random issue of Captain America.

The third was Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham (1985) #6.

Peter Porker The Spectacular Spider-Ham (1983) #6

Possibly my first ever comic book?

I don’t know why I had it. I think people in my family assumed I would really love Spider-Man because I shared his name, but at the time (and, to this day) I was much more interested in Wonder Woman.

That one issue (which I still have!) meant I’ve always had a soft, nostalgic spot for Peter Porker. I never expected he would appear in a comic again other than as a one-off joke about the silly excesses of the 80s… until Spider-Verse.

Spider-Verse brought almost every iteration of every spider-character ever back into play for a brief, somewhat-bloody event, which included this Spider-turned-Super-Pig from Earth-8311.

Spider-Ham survived the carnage (not THE Carnage – lower-case carnage) of the event, befriended Spider-Gwen, Spider-Gwen become a hit, and the event inspired one of the most successful and awarded animated movies of all time.

The rest is (recent) history!

This might lead you to wonder: are there many Spider-Ham comic books to read? Are they anything like the zany version of the character who was cartoony even for a cartoon in Into The Spider-Verse.

Well… that depends.

[Read more…] about New for Patrons: Spider-Ham Guide!

Crushing On: Crispy Baked Falafel (in the style of Philly’s Mama’s Vegetarian)

by

There were seemingly endless choices for lunch when I worked in Center City Philadelphia, but my long-standing favorite of nearly two decades was heading to the now-shuttered Mama’s Vegetarian for a falafel platter.

I’ve had many, many falafel balls from dozens of other places since then, but nothing has ever been quite the same for me. To me, Mama’s was how all falafels were meant to taste.

As I have grown in my culinary powers over the course of the pandemic, I have conquered several dishes previously far out of my grasp to prepare.

That lead me to ask: Could I create a falafel just as good at home?

At first, it seemed like the major challenge would not be perfecting flavor, but the actual cooking.

You see, I have a confession to make: I hate frying. It’s not a health concern so much as I don’t even like most fried foods (at my advanced age). As a result, I have developed neither the technique nor the patience for the mess of popping and splattering that comes with frying.

I forgot to take any photos of my lovely trays of falafels straight out of the oven because this is not a damn recipe blog, but I did design this alluring sample plate for you while making lunch for the kid today.

Luckily, here in New Zealand nearly every oven comes equipped with a “fan bake” mode, which effectively makes them just-slightly-larger air fryers. (Ovens here are tiny compared to US ovens.) If you brush something with some oil it usually crisps up quite nicely, so I have been fearless in converting fried things to fan-baked things.

Except… falafel is different, as I learned in my first attempt. Their uncooked texture could be described as “several hundred grains of sand who claim to have never met before.” To me, they seemed highly reliant on hitting some hot oil to give them a crispy exterior shell to hold them together.

That meant I not only had to screen recipes for flavor, but also adjust them for baking consistency. I tried a recipe from my typical healthy go-to Cookie & Kate, but it was too bland (rare for her!). Downshiftology’s recipe got me closer, but they were coming out too crunchy. The Guardian’s version tasted right, but the consistency wasn’t solid enough for baking.

After several rounds of test-kitchen-ing from their trio of recipes, I’ve landed on crispy baked falafel that – to me – tastes just like Mama’s without any of the fuss of frying.

Does that make my baked falafel authentic? Er… look, my approach to non-Italian cooking is the same to my approach to Italian cooking, which is: you can’t really make it offensive unless it tastes bad or you use the wrong kind of cheese.

More specifically: First, we don’t like cilantro in this house, so that’s a big departure from nearly every recipe. Second, falafel recipes all subtly disagree on the spices to include, with some recommending lemon zest while others use dill and cayenne pepper and some insist on cardamom. Finally, some of my adjustments I made were for baking stability versus frying.

All I can promise is that they authentically taste like my memory of Mama’s. [Read more…] about Crushing On: Crispy Baked Falafel (in the style of Philly’s Mama’s Vegetarian)

Krisis on Near Mint Condition, Mapping Scarlet Witch!

by

Earlier Tonight I was incredibly excited to re-unite with my “Map My X” compatriots Ødfel and Ryley as well as Near Mint Condition host Omar to dig into mapping a theoretical Scarlet Witch omnibus!

If you’ve never seen one of our “Map My X” streams before, here’s what you need to know: it is a game of fantasy omnibus mapping.

All four of us enter with sometimes wildly different potential maps of 30-60 issues worth of material to cram into a single Marvel Omnibus with a maximum page count in the 1600-page range. Then we haggle for two hours between the four of us and our live commenters over what’s in, what’s out, and what awesome cover should grace the front of the book.

And, if Marvel eventually gets around to printing it, we get to see just how right we were – like when we perfectly hit the mark with our New Mutants, Vol. 2 mapping!

Here’s our incredibly deep diving into the Scarlet Witch Reading Order from her debut in 1964 through the early 1990s (plus, a glimpse at the state of my totally rock-and-roll mane of curls, a frequent topic in the comments section):

The final mapping we all agreed to in the video was:

Scarlet Witch Classic Omnibus, collecting Uncanny X-Men #4-5 (and material from 6-7 & 11), Strange Tales #128, Avengers (1963) #16, 76, 128, 185-187, 234 (and material from #181-182), Giant-Size Avengers #1 & 4, Vision & Scarlet Witch (1982) 1-4, Marvel Team-Up #125 (2nd story), Marvel Fanfare #6 & 58 (2nd story), Marvel Two-in-One #66, Doctor Strange (1974) #60, Vision & Scarlet Witch (1985) #1-12, West Coast Avengers #2 & 42-45 (and material from 46), Marvel Super-Heroes (1999) #10 (1st story), Solo Avengers (1987) #5 (2nd story), Marvel Comics Presents (1988) #60-63 (3rd story), Avengers West Coast #47-57 & 60-62 (and material from 58-59), Darkhold: Pages from the Book of Sins (1992) #3-7, and Scarlet Witch (1994) #1-4 (plus extras from the Vision & The Scarlet Witch – The Saga Of Wanda And Vision 2021 trade paperback).

However, that was NOT the mapping I walked in with! I felt the book should include more classic material and cut off after Avengers West Coast #62, to be followed up with a The Avengers & Scarlet Witch volume to collect the remainder of West Coast.

Here was the map I walked into the show planning to pitch:

Scarlet Witch Classic Omnibus, Uncanny X-Men (1963) #4-7 & 11 (and material from 53), Strange Tales (1951) #128, Avengers (1963) #16-18, 22, 25, 75-76, 128, 181-182, 185-187, 234, & 312 (and material from 47-49), Giant-Size Avengers (1974) #1 & 4, Marvel Two-In-One (1974) #66, Vision & Scarlet Witch (1982) #1-4, Marvel Team-Up (1972) #125 (2nd story) & #129-130, Marvel Fanfare (1982) #6 & 58 (2nd story), Power-Man & Iron Fist (1978) #102, Doctor Strange (1974) #60, Vision & Scarlet Witch Vol. 2 (1985) #1-12, West Coast Avengers Vol. 2 (1985) #2 & 42-45 (and material from 46), Marvel Super-Heroes Vol. 3 (1990) #10 (1st story), Solo Avengers (1987) #5 (2nd story), Marvel Comics Presents (1988) #60-63 (3rd story), and Avengers West Coast (1989) #47-57 & 60-62 (and material from 58-59).

What’s the difference? Aside from the slightly earlier cut-off, I was planning to include a lot more material to form a more complete Scarlet Witch Reading Order!

I erred on the side of including more of Scarlet Witch’s Silver Age material, both to establish her leaving the Brotherhood, and to show some of her key early adventures with the Avengers, including all of their major Magneto encounters.

I also felt it was worth including a Team-Up two-parter with Vision from #129-130, as well as a Wanda-focused issue of Power-Man & Iron Fist. And, finally, I had less of a problem with double-dipping all of “Vision Quest” and “Darker Than Scarlet” from the Avengers by John Byrne omnibus, since they are her signature stories.

Want to work through your own Scarlet Witch mapping? Check out my previously patrons-only Definitive Guide to The Scarlet Witch to find a complete Scarlet Witch Reading Order of all of her appearances from the Silver Age through 2018!