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 Power Rankings, S09E06 – “Snatch Game”

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Every mysterious new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race comes with one hotly anticipated standard episode: Snatch Game!

Based on the 60s TV gameshow Match Game, RuPaul introduced his version of the game in Season 2 and it’s been back every season since (save for All Stars 1, which substituted a similar celebrity impersonator take on Laugh In).

Snatch Game has two simple rules – transform into a celebrity, and make them funny. It’s a make-or break live improv challenge that tends to elevate certain queens from the rest of the pack for the remainder of the season and create quotes that fans will call back to for years.

Last night’s episode delivered another callback to past seasons – a redux of Season 8’s “Night of a Thousand Madonnas” runway theme, which served up four different kimono looks based on the “Nothing Really Matters” video and Drowned World Tour.

With 11 queens in the race already forewarned to avoid the kimono could we avoid duplicates entirely? I don’t know, but I hope this runway becomes a fixture of every season just like Snatch Game. And girls, you betta watch out, because there is no one that knows their Madonna better than your author – except for maybe Michelle Visage … and we’ve both been served with cease and desists by Madge.

The combination of Snatch and Madonna was last seen in 2000, with Miss M lending “Lucky Star” to the soundtrack of her then-husband Guy Ritchie’s film. In the 2017 edition, it catapulted a new queen to the top of the rank after last week, plus shuffled a pair of queens at the bottom.

Who’s that girl? Let’s find out!

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20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015

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Each year, a mysterious and intrepid comic book fan known only as Tigereyes reaches out to some of the biggest collected editions communities on the web to ask them a single question: What are the top 10 Marvel Omnibuses you’d most like to buy?

Thus, the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot was born.

While we only get to see the top 50 or so results of the survey each year, based on the number of voters it’s entirely possible that there are over ten times that many omnibuses nominated by voters. The long tail of the survey would make not only for interesting analysis, but terrific rainy-day reading.

To help inspire that long tail as well as your own rainy day reads, I’m covering dozens of Marvel runs that would make for terrific omnibuses. For the past four days I highlighted every potential missing X-Men omnibus from 1963 to 2015. Now, I’m going to stroll backwards through time to look at the rest of Marvel, starting with their newest comic runs released from 2012 to present.

The fact that these books aren’t currently omnibuses (and may never be) doesn’t have to stop you from sampling them – even if you’ve never read a comic before in your life! Each one is a terrific self-contained comic experience that can be enjoyed without any crossovers or companion series.

You can either pick up existing collections as outlined by Crushing Comics’s Guide to Collecting Marvel Comic Books, or just sign up for Marvel Unlimited, a Netflix-for-comics where 100% of the issues from today’s post are available to read on any device.

[Read more…] about 20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015

Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)

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This is the end, my friends! The last in a series of four posts covering how Marvel could cover every X-Men comic book in omnibus volumes.

This post covers every X-Men series from Messiah Complex to the end of Marvel Now in an effort to give you maximum ideas for the The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot, where you vote for the comic runs you’d most like to see in an oversized format. Monday I covered all of X-Men from 1963 to 1991, Tuesday I reviewed 1991 to 2001, and yesterday I broke down 2001 to 2008.

With 21 more omnibuses from Messiah Complex to AvX and another 10 from Marvel Now, this edition brings our grand total of potential X-Men volumes to 113 possible omnibuses – which begs the question: How many of these could we possibly see in our lifetimes before books become completely obsolete and comics are downloaded directly into our brains?

At Marvel’s current rate of only a handful of X-Men omnibuses a year, it’s never going to happen.

Yet, with most Marvel omnibuses selling between 1,000 and 2,500 units in their first week, it makes me wonder how many of these books we could see if Marvel abandoned the outdated Direct Market model for determining their pre-order volume and sell-through.

Picture this – in October 2017 Marvel partners with Kickstarter plus one of the big online comic book sellers as a distributor to introduce the new “X-Men Omnibus Club: Year 1.” [Read more…] about Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 4: 2008 to 2015)

Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 3: 2001 to 2008)

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I’m back with a third installment of the ultimate X-Men omnibus mapping, finding a way to squeeze just about every issue of X-titles into a cohesive bookshelf of handy omnibus volumes.

Okay, they’re not actually all that handy. Most of them could probably be wielded as a deadly weapon.

Today’s era begins with Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men starting on #114 in 2001 and ends with the final issue of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, which is the last thing that happens to any X-Men prior to Messiah Complex. Of course, there are a lot of other series contained in that material – you’ll immediately note that neither of those historic runs address a single issue of Uncanny X-Men!

Every one of those issues is covered in this post. Why? To give you ideas for the The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot, where you vote for the comic runs you’d most like to see in an oversized format. Monday I covered all of X-Men from 1963 to 1991, and yesterday I covered 1991 to 2001.

There are 25 potential omnibus volumes in this material! Many of their contents are high debatable, but that’s part of the fun – collected edition mapping is a contentious pastime. Heck, I don’t even agree with how Marvel does things half of the time! If you have a correction or disagreement don’t hold back – sound off in the comments below.

Now, prepare to be fully educated in the seedy underbelly of this period of all-star X-Men writers, including some books I am sure you never knew existed unless you are a superfreak of a walking Encyclopedia-X like I am.

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Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 2: 1991 to 2001)

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X-Men is one of the most popular comics franchises in history, and in the 90s it rode the crest of the speculator wave to over half a dozen ongoing series and at least twice that many crossover events.

However, when it comes to coverage in oversize editions, you’d think that those crossover events were all there was to X-Men in the 1990s. That’s not the case, and there are hundreds of issues outside of those events that haven’t seen oversize collection – including many that have never been reprinted.

Every one of those issues is covered in this post. Why? To give you ideas for the The Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot, where you vote for the comic runs you’d most like to see in an oversized format. Yesterday I covered all of X-Men from 1963 to 1991 and how it could be collected by omnibus volumes, and tomorrow I’ll be back to cover the Morrison and Whedon era of X-Men.

There are 28 potential omnibus volumes in this material! Collected Edition mapping is a trivial pursuit (in both senses of the phrase) that is up to a lot of personal interpretation, so if you have a correction or disagreement don’t hold back – sound off in the comments below!

I think of this era as everything from X-Men #1 and Uncanny X-Men #281 in 1991 through the end of Onslaught and continuing to the beginning of Grant Morrison’s take on the X-Men in 2001. We’ve already got a number of omnibus-sized oversize hardcovers clustered at the beginning of this era, but after Age of Apocalypse things get spotty across all of the titles.

Are you ready? (I’m not sure that you could possibly be ready.)

[Read more…] about Oversize X-Men: A map of every existing omnibus, plus what’s missing (Part 2: 1991 to 2001)