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.

high rise lunch

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Not too much to say today, except our winning RJRetreat team enjoyed a victors’ lunch at one of my fav lunch spots, XIX at the Bellvue.

Why is it a fav? Aside from the view, the weird echo-chamber created by their domed ceiling, and the consistently good (and appropriately-portioned) prix fixe entrees, there’s that dessert bar…

Dessert at XIX 2015-08-31 13.01.46

(This particular outing also involved a supermarket-sweep style last-minute run to Banana Republic for respectable-looking clothes, because I made this big deal to my team (who had never been to XIX for lunch before) to “dress well” and then I showed up to work in a t-shirt and baggy jeans and got super-self-conscious which resulted in a 10:40am wardrobe change and a new pair of gray stretch jeans, mmmmm.)

swimming myself sore

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This week I was sore from our 30-hour summer camp at least through Wednesday, with maybe some isolated twinges extending into Thursday.

What amazes me is that the soreness almost certainly didn’t come from sports. My team only drew volleyball and kickball in our round robin (which we won) (which means I won) (at sports) (soak that in for a moment), and neither of those involves the kind of physical exertion I’d expect to leave me unable to take the stairs the next day. Or, you know, sit up straight or get out of bed.

No, the soreness was surely 75% swimming, 10% tennis court yoga, and maybe  10% lumpy plastic camp mattress and 5% sports. I don’t know, how much soreness comes from setting my all-time single day sportsball scoring record against people my own age?

I guess the answer is 5%. Now, back to the swimming.

There’s something entrancing about an outdoor pool on a hot day. I cannot resist diving in headfirst, depth allowing. There’s something about that moment of flight followed by my face breaking the plane of the water. Honestly, I lost count of how many dives and full 360 flips I did into the pool, but it had to be upwards of 50. Add to that a few half-laps, treading water, and pulling myself out, and it was hours of constant, full-body exercise.

And boy was I feeling it on Monday. And Tuesday. Et cetera.

(That, in turn made me think of conducting deep-end swim tests for the six-year-olds when I was a camp counselor. (I cannot believe I’ve never told this story on CK, I reference it constantly.)

Every year I managed to pull swim lessons for my bunk in the first or second spot of the morning, when it was still a wee bit too chilly to really love the pool – and, when you’re only standing up to your thighs in water next to a bunch of 1st graders you really notice that. Thus, I was all over any sort of deeper water swimming or coaching.

In this particular instance, each kid had to dive in and spend an entire minute treading water unassisted. Of course, that meant I had to spend about fifteen minutes treading water and also helping the kids if they didn’t pass with flying colors. Thatwas the only time I recall being sore purely from swimming as a teenager.

The moral of the story is: damn, was I in shape during camp when I couldn’t really manage being anorexic thanks to all the exercise and unlimited mac’n’cheese)

Even through my soreness this week, I was like, “Whoa, that was an awesome workout, how am I going to get that much exercise without waking up in the ass-crack of dawn to swim laps?” That’s the sort of pain-response you gain from being a suburban lump over 30 and also from yoga, which are relatively synonymous.

And then I remembered: we were invited to a pool party this weekend!

Granted, the pool party was primarily a backyard housewarming barbecue for our friends Jem & Jan’s gorgeous new house and probably wouldn’t involve any super-intense Big Splash Competitions, but more pool meant potential awesome full-body workout and potentially more subsequent soreness!

The complicating factor (or abetting, depending on how you look at it in light of my story above) was that I’d be in-pool with EV who – despite loving her swim lessons to death – isn’t exactly buoyant all on her own. Into the pool we went, and I merrily swam that toddler around in circles, helped her paddle through the deep end, and towed her on a float. We only had a single scare, when she lunged off of the float to grab a ball and I caught her by the ankle to prevent her going face-first into the drink. We took that as a clear sign that she was exhausted and not entirely thinking clearly, and so E retreated with EV to solid ground.

Meanwhile, I just kept diving in, swimming a lap, pulling myself out, and diving in again.

“Uh, Peter, you’re swimming pretty hard,” either Jack or Jake observed (if you get them both in the same place their sarcastic commentary can elide), probably with cocktail in hand.

Then I had to explain the whole summer camp last weekend thing, and then the whole summer camp back in the day thing, and then I kept swimming and diving.

I’m not quite so sore today as I was all this week, but I’m pretty satisfied with myself for putting in the effort. Jem made sure I got a “Swim Club Member” button before I left her house, but unless I just start showing up at their house every weekend to tread water for an hour between dives I think I might have to relent and get re-acquainted with ass-crack-hour swimming at the local Y to get my full-body soreness fix.

(Terrible alternate title of this post: “sore, sore good.”)

Review: Magneto, Vol. 3: Shadow Games

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It took 20 years from Magneto to go from his first titled comic to his own ongoing series!

It took 20 years from Magneto to go from his first titled comic to his own ongoing series!

There are certain Marvel characters that you probably assume have had at least one ongoing series after four or five decades, but they can sometimes surprise you. As an example, Black Widow didn’t get her first ongoing series until 2010 despite being around since the 60s.

Magneto falls into that category for me. When his series was announced as “his first ongoing title” at the end of 2013, I did a double-take – fifty years and no ongoing? Yet, my comic collection tells me it’s true: the Master of Magnetism has had a handful of mini-series and one-shots, including his first – a beautiful, foil-covered affair that I have in mint condition somewhere in my attic.

Once that surprise wore off, cynicism wore in. Author Cullen Bunn has been hit and miss with me on his Marvel work, and his hits have been female-driven stories in The Fearless and Fearless Defenders. What could he bring to a Magneto whose motivation and powers were both feeling a little watered down from him playing second string to a resurgent, insurgent Cyclops for the past few years? Would this simply be a movie-fervor cash in with a hunky Fassbender style Magneto staring moodily off into the distance and pulling out people’s fillings?

Yesterday I caught up with the third volume of his edition…

Magneto, Vol. 3 – Shadow Games 45star Amazon Logo

Collecting Magneto (2014) #13-17. Written by Cullen Bunn with artists Javi Fernandez and Gabriel Hernandez Walta and color artists Jordie Bellaire and Dan Brown.

#140char review: .@cullenbunn’s Magneto v3 is must-read! A distinct un-@Marvel rhythm & deep story roots give Mags motivation. Herald of good to come on UXM.

CK Says: Buy it!

Magneto-2014-Vol03This is a chilling, down-tempo masterpiece of anti-heroic deconstruction. The only time I was tempted to put it down is to think about it before I turned another page! Cullen Bunn is making Magneto more fearsome and more human than ever, and it’s a compelling read.

The cleaner of Fernandez’s art in the first issue are a welcome site as the focus is on the mysterious Briar, wherein Bunn plays a Morrison-like game of building a sub-culture around villainy. If there were super-villains in your world, wouldn’t you be scouring flea markets for DVDs of their greatest destructions after the footage was pulled from YouTube as supporting terrorism? Would people be proud of their scars or angry? This is one of those perfect issues that implies those questions without every verbalizing them, and which deepens the suddenly quite-fascinating mystery of Magneto’s mysterious human benefactor.

Afterwards, Walta continues to lend a weariness to Magneto’s chapters with his sketchy lines portraying a certain rough-edged weariness, which Jordie Bellaire has long-since perfected a color pallet to accompany. Here we see Magneto turn on SHIELD after cooperating with them briefly in Uncanny X-Men. What follows is more interesting. Magneto is re-building some semblance of society on Genosha out of a lingering guilt that he’s let his species down. How to even choose the occasion of his deepest regret? Was it the slaughter just perpetrated by The Red Skull on the island? Or perhaps the genocide of millions of mutants in Morrison’s E is for Extinction. Or, were his failures manifest much earlier – during his first overt strike on US missiles during his original encounter with the X-Men and in his guilt for surviving the Holocaust? Some Nazi and Holocaust imagery here is truly nightmarish, but only once does it feel present purely for shock value.

What’s so fascinating is that all of our flawed protagonist’s decisions feel right – it’s what you might choose in the position of a beleaguered former super-villain, right down to the shocking final choice he makes to resolve the volume.

Bunn’s dissection of Magneto’s extended history feels inspired by James Robinson, who carefully disassembles all things Golden and Silver aged to construct his stories. Maybe Bunn was capable of this all along and never had a character with a rich enough tapestry of stories to draw from. Either way, against all odds Bunn has made Magneto both a nuanced character and a must-read series. If you’re not already excited for him to helm the next volume of Uncanny X-Men headlined by Magneto, then you absolutely must read this book!

What came before: Magneto, Vol. 1 – Infamous 30star >> Magneto, Vol. 2 – Reversals 40star

What comes next: Magneto, Vol. 4 – Last Days >> Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 4 (begins in November!)

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Friday Night Horror

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2015-08-28 21.44.19It’s Friday night, and while we have to get up tomorrow at the same time we do every day because that’s how toddlers work, we’re still throwing caution to the wind and starting a game of Eldritch Horror after 9:30, which guarantees we’ll be up past midnight.

A few months ago E and I vowed to take one “non-screen night” a week where after EV was asleep we’d put down our laptops and turn off our Netflix binging to do something together. Except, the first few weeks were… well, a bit awkward. We don’t really like crafting or cooking together. Playing music could wake EV. I proposed a book club, but we were unable to come to agreement on what to read.

The answer was obvious: games. If we had more two-player games, we could turn no-screen into a game night. This especially appealed to me as an only-child with a mom who was mostly into very literal games like Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. There’s a whole world of fantastical board games I’ve never had the chance to play! As I was beginning to press the game option with E, one of my favorite comic authors – Kieron Gillen – posted an Instagram shot of him playing Cyclades. My interest was piqued, and after researching it on BoardGameGeek I decided it was up my alley.

BoardGameGeek is the sort of website I can disappear into, never to return – combining thoughtful reviews with thorough data and user forums. Cyclades was every bit as beautiful and ingenious as I could have hoped, like a weird blend of Risk, Catan, and Jason & The Argonauts – and, I set out to find more games I might like just as much. I immediately purchased its exceptional expansions, Hades and Titans. Then we had a board game gold-rush weekend where we acquired Jaipur (2p, genius), The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (awful and fiddly), Kemet (brutal and satisfying), and Eldritch Horror.

I had read the warnings about the Cthulhu-infused Eldritch Horror. Complicated, involved to set-up, sometimes crushingly difficult – it sounded like a game I might like, but I wasn’t so sure about E.

I needn’t have worried. E could not resist a globe-spanning pre-WWII story of sealing away Lovecraftian horrors before they could destroy the world – especially in the form of a cooperative game full of powerful female characters. It took her watching just one game of my solo play to volunteer.

Fast forward a month: we have all three expansions, plus many accoutrement like special dice, card sleeves, and box organizers, and we are just getting back to it after taking a break after a week-solid sprint against the Ancient Ones. Tonight we’re facing Syzygy. Wish us luck! Perhaps if we survive I’ll come back with a more proper review.

Why female comic characters matter (to a baby)

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If we were to look at the pie chart of activities of my life (which would still be a terrible use of a pie chart because even when looking at proportional representation out of 100% it’s harder to compare the relative sizes of things in that format – death to pie charts) it would be obvious that comic book reading takes up a not-insignificant amount of my time.

If we are in a room with this comic book EV needs to run to it and bring it back to me to page through. Spidey who is a girl AND is in a rock band? Is there any better thing in the multi-verse?

If we are in a room with this comic book EV needs to run to it and bring it back to me to page through. Spidey who is a girl AND is in a rock band? Is there any better thing in the multi-verse?

That meant that EV had a lot of comic books read to her from as soon as she could be propped up to semi-sit-up on her own. Yet, even when she didn’t even have the means to escape from my reading, her attention span wouldn’t necessarily last an entire issue, let alone a whole trade paperback. That changed quite suddenly when I read her Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Avengers Assemble: The Forgeries of Jealousy last summer, a story primarily staring Spider-Girl at its center. EV sat transfixed by the whole thing. She let me read the entire book to her multiple times in one sitting.

I didn’t think too much of it – I just love reading DeConnick’s dialog, so maybe that did the trick, which also explained EV staying put in the fall for Captain Marvel, Volume 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More. The realization didn’t hit me until I read her the critically acclaimed, newly-Hugo-winning Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1 (and to E, who lingered in the room, feigning not paying attention but actually listening quite closely).

That baby would sit still to read books with female heroines.

I tested my theory. Spider-Man? A few pages. Hulk? No interest. Thor? Barely a glance. Storm? Entire issues. The lady version of Thor? Glued to the pages. Spider-Gwen? She picks it up every time we walk up to the attic. Hell, one of her first few dozens words was “Lumberjanes” so she could request the comic of the same name (which I dislike; maybe more on that later).

Tonight we read the first few issues of Ryan North’s delightful Squirrel Girl (recommended highly for kids!) while EV spent the entire time hanging off of me and giggling with glee.

What’s interesting about those books is that they include varying amounts of action and extremely distinct artwork, but they are each about more than a superhero who happens to have breasts. They feature women being women. I don’t mean doing “girl” things. I mean as heroes, their women are distinct in their voices, actions, hopes, and fears from male characters. They could not simply be gender-swapped.

The exercise lead me to look through EVs other books with a critical eye. Most protagonist characters in baby books default to male – the female is almost always the mother! And do you know how many books we have that feature a father in something other than a vestigial, dismissal role? Only a handful I can think of – Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Gaiman’s delightful Fortunately, The Milk, the classic Make Way For Ducklings, and my favorite, Maurice Sendak’s Pierre. However, of those, three of the protagonists are male and three have mothers as the primary female.

In case you are ever wondering – representation matters. Even a baby who cannot say a single word will tune in to media with a character she identifies with more readily than one she doesn’t. I didn’t have to run a very length or scientific experiment to figure it out. When we’re asking to see Black Widow on Avengers merchandise or wondering if we could see Miles Morales – a black, latino Spider-Man – onscreen, it’s not just because we like those characters or are demanding diversity for diversity’s sake.

We want the next generation of real life superheroes to see themselves in the media we allow them to consume.

(Little does EV realize that I have every issue of Wonder Woman from 1975 to present sitting in the attic, waiting to be read to her.)

(I’m also excited to capitalize on her Spider-Lady Love when Silk hits TPB later this year, since she is a rarely-represent female asian hero that’s not the sex-bomb yellow-face routine of Psylocke.)