Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

comic books

Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s The Sentry

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What started as a quickie guide to a character with just 26 issues to their name turned into a massive research project, which yielded a brand new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis…

The Sentry – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

This guide covers every Sentry appearance, from his debut in 2000 through his return in Marvel Legacy.

Not only does it cover every appearance, it also summarizes all of his guest appearances, so you can know if they are critical or just a cameo.

I gained a whole new appreciation for Sentry from working on this page. I’m not usually a big fan of major retcons, and that includes retconned characters. However, Paul Jenkins created a perfectly flawed Marvel Superman in his retroactive insertion of The Sentry into Marvel’s Silver Age – and he came with the perfect excuse for why we’ve all forgotten them.

Then, Brian Bendis made Sentry’s flaws one of the major themes of his run on Avengers. Those flaws aren’t just of a single character, but representative of how the moral purity of Silver Age heroes decays in the modern age. In his inflexible pursuit of rightness, Bendis’s Sentry sides with registration in Civil War, joins Norman Osborn’s Dark Avengers, and eventually implodes into his darkness.

In a way, I feel like I wasted my initial read of Bendis’s Avengers because I wasn’t already familiar with The Sentry when I started!

It’s not a coincidence that a Sentry guide helps me to plug a hole in the new Marvel Fresh Start era page. If you want to predict my next few Marvel guides, it’s as easy as thinking about the gaps of my coverage of ongoing series in Fresh Start, Legacy, All-New All-Different, and Marvel Now.

Want access to this guide today? It’s available, along over a dozen other exclusive guides, in exchange for covering $1.99 a month of CK’s hosting expenses.

New for Patrons: Guide to Marvel Fresh Start Era

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Sometimes it takes a long time for a plan to come to fruition.

Case and point: tonight’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis, which is less of a guide than a directory page … and which has been in the works for well over a year (even though it’s a guide for something that has just been announced)!

Marvel Fresh Start Era (2018 – Present) – The Definitive Guide

This Marvel Fresh Start page covers every series announced so far for Fresh Start, including ongoing series that are continuing into the era. For each series, it lists the launching creative team, explains where it is continuing from, and links to the guide that contains the full reading order details.

The plan for this page began in December of 2016. At that time, I was working on the massive DC New 52 and DC Rebirth guides to debut for Patreons early in this campaign.

It made so much sense to see an entire era of comic books summarized in one page … so why hadn’t I done that for Marvel!?

The answer to the question has to do with the transgressive nature of those two guides. I have a “double jeopardy” house rule on CK where I try my utmost to avoid detailing how to collect issues of a certain series in more than one place. If I do, that means I’ll have to update more than one place as new collections come out over the years – doubling my work load.

However, when I launched the DC section of the site, there were literally no other DC Guides, so I had no choice but to detail the full collection information of every series on the New 52 and Rebirth pages.

I was definitely not going to take that approach for Marvel – it would be the death of me! However, the alternative was for a Marvel Era page to link to the corresponding guide page for every series in the era. I’ve got pretty strong coverage of Marvel’s bibliography, but not quite that strong!

Thus, began my journey to catch up my comic guides with the present day of Marvel. That involved not only several new guides, but breaking up existing guides that covered multiple characters and changing section structures so I could link into each one at a consistent spot for each era.

It also meant catching up on reading Marvel, so I could explain the continuity of the post-Secret Wars Marvel Universe. I’ve read over 1400 issues of Marvel comics in the last 16 months!

This era guide is just the first in a series – I’m already putting the finishing touches on Marvel Legacy, plus working on launching new character guides to support era pages for All-New All-Different, Marvel Now, Heroic Age, and more.

Eventually, Crushing Comics will cover every Marvel series and issue from the beginning of the Silver Age through the present day!

Want access to this guide today? This is guide is available to all Patrons of Crushing Krisis, regardless of their level of support. Join the campaign by pledging as little as $1 a month to support a site that can help you fall in love with and follow thousands of your favorite comic books.

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Teen Titans, Titans, and Young Justice

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I’m back after a few busy months both online and off with the first of a few new comic guides to thank Patrons of Crushing Krisis for their continued support…

Teen Titans, Titans, & Young Justice – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

This guide covers every in-continuity Teen Titans series, from their first appearance in The Brave and The Bold (1955) #54 and 60 in 1964 to the two titles currently running in Rebirth.

This guide was nowhere near next on my list, but two things changed that. First, I reached Teen Titans and Titans in my DC Rebirth reading. I felt like I didn’t understand who any of the characters were or where they came from. As is my wont, as I read the comics and researched the characters, I sketched in some guide details. Within a few hours I realized I had a solid skeleton for a a complex guide.

Second, earlier this week I polled my friends at The Omnibus Collector’s™ Comic Swap and Community and they overwhelmingly voted that this should be the next guide I tackle!

Want access to this guide today? It’s available, along over a dozen other exclusive guides, in exchange for covering $1.99 a month of CK’s hosting expenses.

Titans, Teen Titans, & Young Justice – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 19, 2025! The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Teen Titans, Titans, & Young Justice comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through November 2025.

In 1965 the Silver Age of comics was in full swing, with all of DC’s iconic heroes starring in their own titles as well as in the the Justice League.

One element that DC generally lacked at the time was the youthful energy of Marvel’s Silver Age titles, which included hip young heroes like Spider-Man and The X-Men alongside more iconic DC analogs like The Avengers or Thor. It wasn’t that they lacked for young characters. It seemed the every DC hero had a teen version of sidekick. They  hadn’t been assembled all in one place.Teen Titans by George Perez

That changed with The Brave and The Bold (1955) #54 in 1964, which combined Golden Age creation Robin (Dick Grayson) with the more recently-made sidekicks of Kid Flash (Wally West), and Aqualad. Their next appearance in issue #60 added a formalized version of Wonder Girl (Donna Troy) and gave the group a name – “The Teen Titans.”

After just one more anthology series appearance (in Showcase (1956) #59), the Teen Titans graduated into their own title in 1966. While many other teen heroes appeared, only one became a more permanent member – Speedy, Green Arrow’s sidekick. The team-up was revived in 1973 and then shuttered in 1978 as the heroes felt they were growing too old to be “teens.”

Marv Wolfman and George Pérez reawakened the franchise in 1980. In an astounding act of creation, they introduced team mainstays Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven in a preview story in DC Comics Presents (1978) #26, where they also reintroduced Beast Boy as “Changeling.”

Wolfman and Pérez would become synonymous with the Teen Titans for the next decade in the same way Chris Claremont was with the X-Men, who the Titans rivaled in popularity. Along the way the co-writers introduced Slade Wilson as Deathstroke and changed Dick Grayson to Nightwing. Their characters made it through Crisis on Infinite Earths relatively unscathed as DC chose not to rock the boat of their most-popular team franchise. [Read more…] about Titans, Teen Titans, & Young Justice – The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order