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 Guides to Sabretooth and Weapon X

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Today’s new guides for Patrons of Crushing Krisis covers an X-Men character (and often-villain) with long and sometimes convoluted history, as well as the program he’s frequently associated with…

Sabretooth, Victor Creed – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide 

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Weapon X & Weapon Plus – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide 

When I started filling in the gaps in my X-Men collection in 2010, I realized that there was a lot of Sabretooth comics and a lot I didn’t know about Victor Creed.

I fondly recalled his X-Men debut in Mutant Massacre, I was around for his brief rehabilitation before Onslaught, and I was reading him in a modern team-up with the X-Men at the start of Mike Carey’s run, but I was missing a lot of connective tissue in between. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guides to Sabretooth and Weapon X

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s X-Man, Nate Grey

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis covers an unusual X-Men character, a copy of another character who went one to helm one of the longest-running X-Men solo series before disappearing into the aether (literally) for nearly a decade…

X-Man, Nate Grey – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: yes, this is really a guide for one 80-issue ongoing and fewer than 50 additional appearances by a character who went forgotten for a decade, and then for another half decade after a brief return.

That’s it! And, yet, X-Man AKA Nate Grey is about to make a major comeback to the world of X-Men, so it was time he got his own guide.

He debuted as part of “Age of Apocalypse” in 1995, and it’s important to remember that this event was quite specifically not an alternate reality at the time. It was the only version of Marvel’s reality that existed in the present day thanks to Legion going back in time to murder his father, Charles Xavier, rather than his target Magneto. (Oops!)

Nate Grey was a critical figure in the Age of Apocalypse – a version of Cable unravaged by time and the TO virus. While our Cable relied on his tactical skill and his leverage over the timestream to thwart his enemies, Nate Grey only needed Cable’s heritage of raw, uninhibited mutant power – the kind that Mr. Sinister had spent years trying to realize in our original timeline.

Age of Apocalypse was well-received and marvelous fun to read at the time. The idea of four of its characters and one of its titles persisting into Marvel-616 continuity was thrill! Of course, it made the most sense for that title to be X-Man, the most unique and singular of all the converted books.

However, there was the question of what to do with Nate Grey. In the Age of Apocalypse he was the most-powerful rebel, but in 616 Marvel he had nothing to rebel against. There was no narrative to welcome Nate Grey to the main Marvel timeline.  [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s X-Man, Nate Grey