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Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!
Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)
This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:
The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men
One of the biggest factors in CK’s popularity exploding in the early 2010’s was the X-Men Reading Order I debuted back in 2012.
It emerged from a moment of frustration, as all of my best projects tend to. This time, my ire was focused on the fact that no one had produced an actually readable chronological guide to reading X-Men. Existing guides were either simply ordered by release date or ridiculously complex lists that broke down every single-panel flashback.
None of them were comprehensive of every book, nor were they appropriate for the Trade Era of collected editions.
Despite being a major feature of CK, I can’t say I’ve ever been proud of the presentation of the Reading Order. A lot of the pages have a certain “git’er’done” quality to them that was a hallmark of CK’s early expansion that I’ve never had the time to improve.
Honestly, they always makes me think of the scrawlings of a Serial Killer, like the notebooks upon notebooks in Se7en. That’s what it looked like to figure out – I had giant rolls of paper unspooled across the floor with scribbles and crossouts and loop-de-loop arrows on them. [Read more…] about Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)
New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Vision
Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis is long overdue – 17 months overdue, to be precise, since it was the last guide you all voted for in a Patrons’ Choice Poll just a few weeks before my entire life got flipped turned upside down…
Vision – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
Despite anchoring five significant limited series spanning from 1982 to 2017, Vision has spent the majority of his publishing life as a team character in Avengers beginning in 1968.
In that sense, he is one of the most quintessential anchoring Avengers, because he’s never really appeared elsewhere! Plus, what character could be more of a core Avenger than an android created by Ultron (himself the creation of Hank Pym) based on the brain waves of Wonder Man and who falls in love with Scarlet Witch!? [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Vision
Vision – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order
New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack
Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis was actually the guide that caused me to start the avalanche of smaller guides to fill in the gaps in my Marvel Legacy era page! It’s for a group of characters who have always been curiously X-Men adjacent, despite definitely not being mutants…
Power Pack – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
Power Pack’s long-running association with the X-Men is down to their creator, Louise Simonson.
Simonson was coming off years as an editor, and heading into several years of writing X-Factor and, later, a portion of New Mutants. Not only that, but she frequently pulled Power Pack into the X-Men’s 1980s line events – they tied in to Mutant Massacre (where they faced Sabreooth), Fall of the Mutants, and Inferno!
That’s the only tie the four siblings of the Power family had to Marvel’s mutants. They got their powers not through their genes, but in the style of Green Lantern – via an alien who was part of an intergalactic struggle dying at their feet on Earth.
Power Pack was one of the only Marvel titles to be explicitly in-continuity and purposefully written with early grade readers in mind. That made them popular both with kids and adults in the 80s, but it left them without an audience in the 90s as comics shifted towards teens and speculators. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack