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 Dazzler!

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Let’s be honest – while I have the excuse of creating this guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis to fill in one more missing link on the Fresh Start era page (for her new one-shot, out tomorrow!), we all knew I did it just because I love…

Dazzler – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

I’ve always loved Dazzler, purely because she was the Madonna of the Marvel Universe back when I was originally a reader (and a Madonna fan) back in the early 90s. However, her run on Uncanny X-Men by Claremont was much too expensive for me to buy as back issues (and, for some reason I never sought out her 1980 series as a lot at a convention).

As with all of my guides for individual heroes who have not anchored their own titles for long, putting this page together was punishing. It would be easy to simply link to Dazzler’s solo stories, or even to list all of her guest appearances in order.

Of course, I had to do more than that. I browsed nearly every Dazzler appearance outside of her solo series to figure out which were the most important! [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Dazzler!

New for Patrons: Guide to Marvel Legacy Era

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Here’s part two of my one-two punch of Marvel Era guides for Patrons of Crushing Krisis, and oh my goodness was this one a lot more complicated than the first!

Marvel Legacy Era (2017 – 2018) – The Definitive Guide

This Marvel Legacy page covers every series that was released during Marvel Legacy, a brief six-month period of Marvel continuity that followed the ending of Secret Empire.

For each series, it lists the launching creative team, explains where it continued from and where it will continue to, and links to the guide that contains the full reading order details.

Marvel Legacy was a peculiar period. Unlike most Marvel Eras, it didn’t include the launch of many new series. In fact, that was it’s selling point: stability. Less new stuff, fewer events, and a general refocus on some of the classic elements and heroes that make Marvel awesome. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Marvel Legacy Era

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.