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!

Batwoman Book Club, Week 4 of 4: Detective Comics #934-940 & 948-948 + Batwoman (2017) Rebirth & #1-6

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Welcome to the final week of Batwoman Book Club!

Today we discuss the newest appearances of Batwoman – her run in DC Rebirth’s Detective Comics and the subsequent second volume of her solo series. This embed is the first of two parts of our Week 4 discussion – each video ends with a link to the next part.

Want to catch up with the reading assignments? Here’s our full schedule for the month – visit the Guide to Batwoman to learn how to collect these issues.

The Epic X-Men (Re-)Read: New Mutants (1983) #26-28 – The origin of Legion! (Ep002)

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It’s the second episode of our entirely out-of-order dive into my 50-year collection of X-Men comics, and today we’re leaping to a character who has become a multi-media sensation in the past year: David Haller – Legion.

Legion’s debut in New Mutants (1983) #26-28 is a brief arc filled with thematic content that still resonates strongly in the modern day. See the Guide to New Mutants & Young X-Men for collection information.

Is the David Haller of this story recognizable to viewers of FX’s Legion? Do these comics still hold up today? And, does Claremont leave the series doing right by his cast of indomitable-willed woman? Watch this mega-sized episode and find out!

This Week In X: Cable #155 and X-Men Gold #24 (plus, this week’s collected editions)

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It’s the twelfth week of new comics in 2018, and This Week in X has a historically short list of X-Men comics to cover – just two new issues!

This week, I cover:

  • Cable #155, a stunning return-to-form for Cable that seems to fundamentally understand his character (and his relationship with Hope)
  • X-Men: Gold #24, the continuing story of the Gold team trapped in prison while Bobby leads the new main squad.

Learn more about how each of those series reached their current issues and if I recommend picking them up – plus, get the details on the new X-Men Collected Editions out this week, including the queerly-titled X-Men Blue, Vol. 0.

Crushing Comics: The Unwrapping – End Credits

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My five-month collected editions unwrapping odyssey (which is really part of a larger eight-month packing to move around the world odyssey) has finally come to a close!

To celebrate the end of this first Crushing Comics video series, I present to you my final bookshelf – or, at least, the process of getting there. Plus, I get to do something I’ve wanted to do my entire life – create a set of scrolling end credits (complete with a soundtrack thanks to Arcati Crisis) to thank everyone who supported me as I created this series!

Crushing Comics S01E085 – Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon, John Cassaday, & Laura Martin

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In today’s episode I unwrap my final omnibus, which (as many of you have likely surmised through a process of elimination) is Astonishing X-Men. I use this famously self-contained, blockbuster run as an opportunity to muse on getting back into comics and the surprisingly limited scope of the comic book market.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 85 features the Astonishing X-Men Omnibus, covered in the Guide to Astonishing & Amazing X-Men.

(Yes, I skipped posting Episode 84 – it was just a episode prompting folks to guess the final omnibus.)