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.

Marvel announces Monsters Unleashed series from superstar team

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This post is not about the X-Men. I really thought it was going to be. Instead, it’s about Monsters Unleashed.

Marvel unveiled a string of five nearly identical teasers in the past few days. Each teaser shared an anonymous acronym (“MU” is frequently used to mean “Marvel Universe” or “Marvel Unlimited”), and all the same information save for a differing headline artist.

2016-bunn-mu_12016-bunn-mu_22016-bunn-mu_3 2016-bunn-mu_42016-bunn-mu_5


It seemed that – unless Marvel planned on pulling a fast on on us – the teasers certainly were X-Men related. [Read more…] about Marvel announces Monsters Unleashed series from superstar team

A Bendis Avengers Reading Order

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I’m excited to unveil my first non-X-Men comprehensive reading order: Avengers Reading Order – The Bendis Years (2004 – 2012)

The guide includes the story-by-story or “trade reading order” of all the Avengers team titles from Brian Bendis taking over Avengers with issue #500 in 2004 to the end of his run on the 2010 volumes of Avengers and New Avengers in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012. That’s over 350 individual issues from more than a dozen titles. In most cases, I explain the placement of each story and offer special notes for reading.

Head to the guide right now, or read on for more background on the period and how I assembled this Avengers resource.

BNAvgV01 - 0001rian Bendis completed the modernization of the Avengers begun by Kurt Busiek in 1998, taking them from a quaint card-carrying club of do-gooders to the Marvel’s Justice League. If Busiek helped to centralize and modernize a team that had lost its core in the mid-90s, Bendis made them Marvel’s ubiquitous, movie-ready flagship.

After his introduction of new members like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, and Dr. Strange, it became completely normal for any Marvel hero to be drafted into the team if it served a story. The period also expanded the team franchise from its previous all-time high of two books in the late 80s to a minimum of four.

It also tangled with a crazy line-up of line-wide events, rivaling 90s X-Men for the amount of interruptions of its plot – to the point that the interruptions became the plot, and standalone arcs were mere breaks in the action.

I am historically not a major Avengers reader. In my backlog of 90s floppies I have a decent run of 300s-era Avengers, but it’s mostly owing to Steve Epting’s amazing covers rather than being particularly allegiant to the series.

My early collected edition bookshelf reflected that, with just a few Avengers books marking major Scarlet Witch stories. (Just like Marvel and Fox, I consider her to be as much an X-Men character as an Avengers one.)

That changed in 2012. We were surging towards Avengers vs. X-Men, which came with rumors of Brian Bendis taking over the X-Men books. I foolishly thought knowing something about The Avengers’ recent history would help me be less depressed about the shoe-horning of Avengers into a rightfully X-Men story or Bendis likely derailing all of their awesome plotlines.

I browsed through New Avengers collected editions trying to decide what to sample, and I realized I could not make heads or tails of them. There were two different New Avengers runs with similar numbering and a set books with similar titles and covers that had wildly different contents! [Read more…] about A Bendis Avengers Reading Order

the unglamorous life

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I am writing this missive to you from a park bench at a playground, purple and pink hair half up in a messy bun, wearing a too-large Lisa Loeb t-shirt with an unidentifiable stain on the breast, a pair of gym shorts, and a pair of sunglasses dangling from a strap on my neck so I can see the screen.

I have gone “full dad,” as they say. No, this post will not be illustrated by any photos. Whatever you are imagining is bad enough.

There was a time when I had rules about leaving the house. The dress code was strict. I had a “t-shirts permitted in public” drawer that was kept untainted by over-large band shirts I wear to bum around the house. Dress pants or jeans were the only acceptable bottoms; I would only show my bare legs in a casual setting if the temperature was over 90°. Athletic wear? Only for actual instances of exercise. And certainly not any low rise socks that show my ankles. Offensive.

Hair was to be either spectacularly curly or wrapped up in a bandana. Facial scruff had an allowable limit As for a sunglasses strap … just no.

As dress codes go, I think it was stricter than a school’s but maybe not as hardcore as a religion’s. (I do make frequent exceptions to fetch our mail in my underwear, after all).

Well, it took three years, but toddler wrangling has worn me down. All the time I used to spend on choosing and preening is now spent dressing a toddler, making sure she has juice and a head band and a snack and a change of clothes, and maybe making sure her shoes are on the right feet if time allows.

Me? Again, I’ll point out that I willingly left the house in GYM SHORTS. Yet, I also carry a 20lb bag of toddler accessories including our own toilet paper in case we find the TP on our adventures to be unsatisfactory.

(Philly TP report: Philly Zoo, thumbs down. Longwood Garden, thumbs up!)

I think a large part of it has to do with the weather. Heat wears me down. After serving four years in inescapable heat as a summer camp counselor, I spent the next half of my life scurrying for cover (or a pool) on every hot day. I want none of it – not the sweat, not the sunscreen, not the bugs. I don’t have room in my brain to process all of those annoyances.

(I can’t even tell you a time prior to this summer I willingly wore sunscreen not for the purpose of going to a pool or on a long walk. Maybe Bonnaroo? And, if you recall, I was asking to be airlifted out of that by the second day.)

I knew when I made the choice to stay home that one of the biggest challenges would be keeping things interesting in the hot weather. My mandate to create great memories aside, a toddler’s manic wiggles don’t miraculously evaporate in the heat and humidity any more than they do in the frigid cold.

And apparently my coping mechanism is “not giving a fuck.”

Music Monday: “All The Rage” – Allie X

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You may recall that I was a huge fan of Violet Chachki’s aethsetic on last year’s seventh season of Drag Race, so whenever she tweets about a fashion or art influence I’m generally all ears. When I clicked through this tweet, I was expecting to learn a little about Helmut Newton, not get absolutely slayed by an amazing pop song.

Quite suddenly, I was introduced to the pop genius of Allie X on her new single, “All The Rage.”

“All The Rage” is slightly squalling and I might not have made it through the full length had it just streamed without a visual. That would have have been a mistake. Luckily, this weirdly transfixing low-budget video held my attention long enough to hear just how many hooks are tucked away in the electronic cacophony of synthesizers.

I bought it approximately 15 seconds after the video ended.

There are so many jagged little bits of lyrics and melody. It starts with a wickedly catchy repeated refrain that jumps an octave on the word “up” while descending just a second on “down / out.” I didn’t automatically catch the intervals on first listen, but the machine-gun delivery paired with the up/down device is an immediate earworm. I was singing it back before the song was over – always a good sign.

allie-x-violet-chachki-all-the-rage-stillThen, the pre-chorus uses a clever and very Gaga-esque trope of starting mid-word, then repeating the word and rhyming it. You have to be careful not overuse these sort of tricky dropped sound devices, but here’s it just enough.

-jected, I was rejected
I wasn’t good enough to be elected
Lava, it was like lava
Moving through my body like fire
-jected, I was rejected
I wasn’t good enough to be elected

Then, the core is pure shout-along pop in the mold of Icona Pop. The underlying sound never rely changes, but each section of the song is transformed by the vocal. Coming out of the chorus, the top of the second verse is in the highest, purest tone Allie X summons the entire time. The contrast is great.

It’s pretty rare for me to get blind-sided by an artist who already has an album out – her debut, CollXtion I – so I cannot believe this will be from her sophomore effort – especially when Idolator intros this song by saying, “Allie X has quietly put together one of the most consistent bodies of work of any new pop artist over the last couple years.”

Sign me up!

Fandom, sources, subjective truth, and the Lee/Kirby X-Men Omnibus variant cover

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I won’t bury the lede: the variant edition of the Stan Lee / Jack Kirby classic X-Men Omnibus, Vol. 1 is the Kirby cover.

X-Men Omnibus Vol. 1 by Lee Kirby variant kirby classic cover

This is the variant cover. Don’t trust me – read the third section of this post for proof.

By the way, that was the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It’s turns out it’s not 42 – it’s that the X-Men Omnibus, Vol. 1 direct market variant is the Kirby cover.

How and why I’m making a blog post to answer that question is more interesting than the question or the answer.

When it comes to fandom on the internet, it’s assumed that everyone is working from the same primary source – the material they’re all fanning over.

Since everyone is consuming the same thing, deliberate misinformation would be obvious. Thus, information doesn’t tend to be questioned as it spreads across hundreds of blogs, wikis, lyric sites, comic databases, etc – and, none of those sites ever state their sources, because the source is assumed to be the actual material.

There is a problem with that assumption. Sometimes the source is the material, but sometimes it’s just the whisper down the lane from other secondary sources. Sometimes the source is the material, but it’s being interpreted incorrectly.

There is a lot of room for error without any malicious intent to spread disinformation, and without even the tacit citations of Wikipedia you’ll ever know the providence of the information you’re consuming. Due to ouroboros-like nature of the internet, one slight discrepancy introduced into the system will make the rounds, continuing a feedback loop until a little piece of misinformation swells to prohibitive truth – determining the outcome of arguments and dictating the sale price for rare memorabilia.

Fans like to pretend they’re experts, but a lot of times they’re just another parroting back the feedback. I’ve encountered three examples in the past week, and even with my pseudo-scholarly approach to being a fan I managed to be the parrot one time.

What happens when one of these pieces of information actually matters and the echo chamber is the only possible source? You don’t have to look far to find out – it happens every day. News networks pick up parody articles as truth! People cite statistics that aren’t real! The AP makes up tons of stuff and people take it at face value because, you know, AP. And those are journalists.

It makes me worry that as we put more of our consciousnesses and knowledge into the vast matrix of the internet, the concept of “truth” is becoming increasingly subjective.

Fair warning: the first section of below uses a sometimes derogatory word for vagina twice in the context of quotes about the lyrics to a song. We should not be afraid of words, only what people mean by them. Say it sometime. [Read more…] about Fandom, sources, subjective truth, and the Lee/Kirby X-Men Omnibus variant cover