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.

a breath of fresh air

by

I woke up this morning feeling warm and comfortable after staying up until 4am editing the last of my work from November’s “Blog of Tomorrow.”

Not like sweaty and sick warm. More like waking up with the sun beating down on you through a window warm. Except, our bedroom windows are blanketed in blackout curtains. It wasn’t the sun.

Maybe the warmth and comfort was the feeling of a job well done?

No, E informed me, it was actually the feeling of our boiler completely ceasing its communication with our thermostat overnight and deciding to heat the inside of the house to 78° Fahrenheit. It just so happens that my side of the bed is an arm’s reach away from the radiator, so I was probably considerably warmer than 78° by the time I awoke.

(For reference, with the heat off for over 12hrs right now it is a comfortably cool 66° inside while it’s more like 40° outside.)

I was alarmed by this information, but not surprised. I am not a science denier, but as far as I am concerned the thermostat is a work of sorcery. I don’t understand how a little box with mercury in it on the dining room wall (which we replaced with a digital touch screen version) could possible dictate the actions of the boiler in the basement. The internet tells me such a thing was possible as far back as the 18th century.

In response, I will again refer you to: work of sorcery.

After some tinkering and turning the boiler on and off we determined that the problem was somewhere between it and the thermostat. E had to leave for work and, as we’ve established, I am not the handy person in this relationship, so our agreed-upon strategy to avoid manually turning the boiler on and off all day was that I would let the heat pump up to a slightly too-warm level and then coast on that through the evening.

Of course, a house-wide “too warm” equates to “nearing spontaneous combustion” when standing next to a radiator working overtime.

As a result of this plan, at one point earlier today I found myself sitting in our front hall (which contains a radiator) in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms staring out of our open door while EV drew on our walk with chalk just eight feet away, bundled up for Autumn.

It only lasted for a few minutes, but it was one of those memories. There was just something about the picture compared with the inherent comedy of our heating situation.

(We also watched the second half of The Wiz today, which made EV cry and make the saddest face I’ve ever seen on a human being. More on that later, maybe.)

I swear, I did not sabotage our thermostat purely to create this analogy, but today on CK feels a lot like our front hall. On one side I have a month so full of content that it would constitute a quarter or a year depending on how you measure, and on the other side I have a vast expanse of open air.

I’m going to take a couple of days to relax and begin to cook up what comes next for CK. Rest assured, you’re safe from multiple posts a day for the time being. I’ll also be reshuffling some of the daily themes (e.g., no live streams this month, while I get some gear repaired), but before I do that I’ll be back tomorrow to finish up Issue #1 of my novel, Krisis.

This Has Been “Blog of Tomorrow,” A Patreon Launch Event

by

What a month!

patreon-wideThis is the final post of my “Blog of Tomorrow” event, where I blogged as if it was my full-time job for the entire month of November. The event celebrated the launch of a Patreon campaign to offset the costs of running CrushingKrisis.

I enjoy both dreaming up big, seemingly insane projects and participating in big, seemingly undoable events. That’s how I got myself into things like recording a song an hour for Blogathon, volunteering with Blame Drew’s Cancer, and participating in National Novel Writing Month.

I knew that launching a Patreon for CK had to be accompanied by one of those big, insane, undoable things. Thus, the content overload this month. Seriously, it was an epic, unwarranted amount of content. Writing it may have been the single most difficult thing I’ve achieved in life. There were points where I just hated words. And comic books. I definitely spent some time hating comic books.

I also proved to myself that I really do have the energy, inspiration, and focus to create the kinds of content I’ve wanted to feature on CK for so many years. All I’ve ever lacked was time.

All of November’s content was written between October 12th and this very moment, with the exception of the skeleton of the Ultimate Comics Guide, which I started researching in September, and Friday Fiction, which was originally written over the past six years and edited for this month. Since linking and editing takes time, I’m still including them both in the wordcount. 

That content totals 133,746 words, or about one adult-lengthed paperback book. That was split between 109,944 words in 92 posts (including this one) and 23,802 words in 4 new pages.

While 92 posts could maintain daily posts on CK for an entire quarter, an average month of CK content is historically only a little over 10,000 words, which means this month contained the effective content of an entire average year of Crushing Krisis.

This month represents 6.33% of CK’s total word count in .5% of its lifetime, 2% of its 16 years of posts, and 3.45% of its total pages.

The material took 182 hours to write, edit, and illustrate with media. Had I done it all in a single month, it would have required 42.5hr work weeks.

Spread across the days since October 12th it represented 25.5hr work weeks. That doesn’t include time I spent on any of the content on Patreon itself, time spent on social media posts to promote CK, or time spent setting up and playing the streaming concerts. And, aside from calling in Mother of Krisis for a day and a half of relief over the course of the month, I spent all of that time doing my typical amount of parenting.

So, to answer my own question: yes, I really could turn CK into a full-time endeavor. In fact, I’d be happy to, if if that’s what my Patrons wanted – but, that’s has never been the goal of this month.

If you’ve found this month entertaining, or interesting, or useful, please consider contributing to my campaign.

If you have a suggestion for a pledge goal content reward or a pledge level reward that would make you want to pledge, please comment to let me know.

Thank you!

35-for-35: 2016 – “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday

by

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This is actually a post about the 36th song from 35 years of my life.

I’ve never understood how “Best of the Year” lists can come out in December. There’s a whole extra month of things that might be the best! There’s more year – more context – that hasn’t happened yet!

The lists should come out in January. I blame Christmas. Some might say I have declared a war on it.

I think “Best of Year” lists should come out in the following January, or maybe even March or April. Who can even know the shape of the year without a little time and hindsight? How many of these 35 songs would I have chosen right at the end their years rather than after? In many cases, I hadn’t even heard them year.

I don’t know what hindsight will tell me about 2016. It was tempting to pick “Blackstar” or “Lazarus” as a reminder of those brief first 10 days of 2016 when it seemed everything was possible before the sad, awful mess of this year set in. Maybe in hindsight one of those will be my song of 2016.

For now, my pick is a song from just two weeks later. Actually, it was the first thing I heard other than David Bowie after his death. The song is “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday, a moniker for one of the many projects of Philly singer-songwriter Katie Barbato.

It also happens to be EV’s favorite song of the year.

This will forever go down as the first song I discovered and loved at exactly the same time as EV. She was sitting at our dining room table the first time I played it from my laptop, and as she requested Dirty Holiday’s Nobody’s Sober EP again and again it grew to be our favorite song amongst a strong crop.

There’s something about how the song picks up from a bluesy, acoustic strum to something larger .The arrangement and production is a perfect fit for this tune. In particular, I’d describe those organ parts as “lurid” – so swirling and colorful that there is almost something prickly and sinister about them, lending a different meaning to Barbato’s tossed off “da dut da” above them.

One Wednesday over the summer I brought EV to the Academy of Natural Sciences to see the dinosaurs for the first time. However, in documenting the story on the blog this summer, I skipped my favorite part.

EV and I reached the intersection of 19th street and Walnut, where 19th is interrupted by Rittenhouse Square. As we crossed from the west side to the east, we very literally bumped into Katie Barbato and her husband Matt. We hugged hello, and then I leaned down to introduce EV.

“EV, this is Miss Katie.” Then, it dawned on me that EV knew exactly who Miss Katie was. “EV, it’s Katie Barbato.”

Here is an artist’s rendering of EV’s face in that moment:

steven-universe-star-eyes

Katie, Matt, and I chatted about Katie’s record and my purple hair for a few minutes while EV hid behind my legs in awe. There we were in the middle of Center City, and her papa was talking to A ROCK STAR FROM THE IPOD. She did not say a single word to Katie or Matt, but as soon as we said our goodbyes the only thing she could talk about for the rest of the day was, “Did you know that I met Katie Barbato?”

Requests for “Mountains” saw an uptick after that, which I didn’t even think was possible.

You can buy the entire Nobody’s Sober EP at BandCamp for $4. It is five songs long and each song is way better than a dollar, so that is a steal.

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildStorm Rising

by

It’s the grand finale of my daily read of the first three years of WildStorm Comics – WildStorm Rising!

WildStorm Rising is the first direct crossover between any WildStorm books. Just like here at CK the WildStorm crew doesn’t do anything halfway – their first crossover hits every one of their eight ongoing titles, adding a prologue and a pair of bookends for wildstorm_rising_tpb11 total issues:

  • Team 7: Operation Hell #1
  • WildStorm Rising #1
  • WildC.A.T.s #20
  • Union (1995) #4
  • Gen 13 (1995) #2
  • Grifter #1
  • Deathblow #16
  • Wetworks #8
  • Backlash #8
  • StormWatch #22
  • WildStorm Rising #2

The crossover is really only meaningful to a trio of them – dual flagships WildCATS and Stormwatch, and the debut of Grifter. Everyone else is merely a bystander in the culmination of a year-long plot launched in Stormwatch to alter the struggling status quo in WildCATs.

There are pros and cons to any linewide crossover, and WildStorm Rising is no exception.

On the pro side, the event manages to accomplish something that few Marvel crossovers could manage back in the 90s (and still can’t today): Each chapter worked well as an issue of its own book advancing some of its own themes. That’s true despite the fact that many books weren’t written by their typical authors and many of them continued directly to the next title in the crossover sequence.

Plus, we really do get a new status quo for several books, none more so than WildCATs!

On the con side, WildStorm Rising squanders Defile’s long-running infiltration of Stormwatch in favor of him chasing a McGuffin of power discovered in Team 7: Objective Hell. Many of the pillars of plot that support this crossover were built from Defiles machinations, so it feels like a massive cheat to see his master plot lose steam just as WildCATs and Stormwatch come to blows. He almost literally says, “Screw my plans that have been built up in Stormwatch since issue #6, now I’m going to focus on this other thing.”

stormwatch_v1_022-textlessEven worse, in a hairpin final turn of plot it turns out the McGuffin has no real meaning. It was merely a red herring to bring back a fan favorite character squandered too early in the life of the line!

What is this amazing McGuffin? It’s both a key and a symbol. It’s about the balance of power in the ruling class of Daemonites. When they arrived on Earth in a space ship chasing the Kherubim, there was a natural division of power between politics, military, and (sort of) transportation. A representative of each held a key to the ship that also signified their unquestionable ruling power. All three would need to align their keys to activate interstellar navigation technology so none could shift the balance of power too far towards government, military might, or (one would imagine) commerce and colonization.

The transportation key was lost in the ship’s crash, which left the political and military arms of the Daemonites stuck in a two-party struggle for planetary power for 2,000 years with no means to escape. Now, the two pieces of the lost key have showed up in possession of a rogue Daemonite and a member of Team 7. Both sides of the Daemonites are racing to collect the pieces while the assembled might of our heroes try to defend them (while resolving their inter-squad squabbles).

Is WildStorm Rising worth a read? As a self-contained event it’s nothing special. However, if you plan to read any other WildStorm books from 1995-1997 – like Grifter’s solo series or Alan Moore’s WildCats – it’s a good primer. (It’s far back enough from Ellis’s takeover on Stormwatch to be irrelevant there.)

The rest of this post is split into two sections. The first reviews each issue of the crossover (w/links to purchase) with relatively few comments on plot. The second second offers a plot recap of each issue so you can fill in the gaps of your read if you don’t own every issue.

Want to read the entire thing in one go? All of the material aside from the prologue is collected in a single TPB (Amazon / eBay).

wildstorm_rising_002-full-cover

[Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildStorm Rising