Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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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 Falcon (and, sometimes, Captain America), Sam Wilson

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis is for a character who has only 12 solo comic issues to his name, but a rich 50-year history as a hero both on the worldwide stage and in his own Harlem community…

Falcon, Sam Wilson – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I knew exactly what I was getting into with this guide. Sam Wilson is a Marvel character who has been around for 50 years and has spent the vast majority of that time as a supporting player. I could easily work out his continuity order, but there was no shortcut to explaining his many stories other than just reviewing the comics.

Unlike some of my other solo hero projects this year, I was eager to dive in and better understand Falcon’s lengthy Marvel history.

That has a lot to do with my reaction to Wilson in the role of Captain America, which he served from 2014 to 2017.

I was slow to catch up with the initial run of Rick Remender stories of Sam as Cap prior to Secret Wars. I had literally never read a Falcon comic outside of his scant Avengers appearances and his co-star turn in Captain America following the death of Steve Rogers.

This was the guy who talked to birds, right? Why would I be interested in reading him as Marvel’s greatest hero?

It only took a few issues of Remender’s run to change my mind. He quickly became my Captain America, and that made me want to understand everything that brought him to that point.

Sam Wilson’s story begins in 1969, when he was introduced as just the second major black Marvel hero, on the heels of Black Panther in 1966. If Black Panther joining the Avengers in 1968 was progressive, Sam Wilson sharing the title of Captain America’s ongoing comic in 1971 was revolutionary. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Falcon (and, sometimes, Captain America), Sam Wilson

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Aquaman

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Today’s guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis gets me one step closer to covering DC’s pantheon of most well-established heroes, although this hero in particular has suffered many indignities over the years both in comics and in the court of public opinion…

Aquaman – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been carefully dancing around addressing DC’s Golden Age in guides for a while now. Honestly, wrestling with Earth 2 and Earth 1 versions of Wonder Woman and Flash took the fight out of me, as did tracking all of the many anthology appearances of Green Arrow. It has been a relief to work on DC guides with titles set almost entirely in the Post-Crisis era, like Nightwing and Catwoman.

(Yes, I know I could just choose to skip the Golden Age portion of characters’ histories, but then I wouldn’t be creating the most-definitive character guides on the internet, would I?)

Despite the looming Golden Age challenge, I knew it was time to knock out the next of DC’s major Justice League heroes, and with Aquaman’s movie out next month he was the obvious choice over Green Lantern (oof, so many of them) or Superman (it’s still too scary to think about how I’ll organize that one).

As it turns out, Aquaman was the perfect DC character to ease me back into tracking Golden and Silver Age appearances.

Maybe that’s because he’s never been all that popular? That has always come as a shock to me, as a child of the 80s who knew Aquaman as an A-List cast member in DC Super Friends. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Aquaman