comic books

Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!

Iron Fist – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading-order on collecting Iron Fist comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated September 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

Danny Rand, The Immortal Iron Fist

Danny Rand – The Iron Fist – was introduced in 1974 as a whitewashing of the kung fu craze. Marvel already had a secret agent Bruce Lee clone in Shangi-Chi starring in Master of Kung Fu and a corresponding magazine in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, but it was ultimately a genre magazine – but Marvel was all about super heroes, and Iron Fist fit the bill perfectly.

After a short-lived solo series introducing his powers and mythology, Rand joined Luke Cage in to form a duo of unlikely urban heroes for hire in Power Man and Iron Fist in 1978.

The juxtaposition of the wealthy Rand and the streetwise Cage made for memorable interactions, even if some of their adventures were forgettable. The result is one of Marvel’s most-remarkable and enduring partnerships.

That series ended in 1985 and Danny Rand stayed gone for an impressive seven years before resurfacing in the 90s for a brief stint.

It wasn’t until the 2000s, and the onset of creators who grew up with those first two 1970s volumes, that Iron Fist became a major headlining hero in his own right, joining the Avengers and starring in an Eisner-Award-winning solo title.

Since then, Iron Fist has become a much more regular feature of Marvel’s publishing line up, with a string of shorter-lived series in Marvel Now and All-New All-Different Marvel – including a return of Power Man and Iron Fist.
[Read more…] about Iron Fist – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Review: Magneto, Vol. 3: Shadow Games

August 29, 2015 by krisis

It took 20 years from Magneto to go from his first titled comic to his own ongoing series!

There are certain Marvel characters that you probably assume have had at least one ongoing series after four or five decades, but they can sometimes surprise you. As an example, Black Widow didn’t get her first ongoing series until 2010 despite being around since the 60s.

Magneto falls into that category for me. When his series was announced as “his first ongoing title” at the end of 2013, I did a double-take – fifty years and no ongoing? Yet, my comic collection tells me it’s true: the Master of Magnetism has had a handful of mini-series and one-shots, including his first – a beautiful, foil-covered affair that I have in mint condition somewhere in my attic.

Once that surprise wore off, cynicism wore in. Author Cullen Bunn has been hit and miss with me on his Marvel work, and his hits have been female-driven stories in The Fearless and Fearless Defenders. What could he bring to a Magneto whose motivation and powers were both feeling a little watered down from him playing second string to a resurgent, insurgent Cyclops for the past few years? Would this simply be a movie-fervor cash in with a hunky Fassbender style Magneto staring moodily off into the distance and pulling out people’s fillings?

Yesterday I caught up with the third volume of his edition…

Magneto, Vol. 3 – Shadow Games

Collecting Magneto (2014) #13-17. Written by Cullen Bunn with artists Javi Fernandez and Gabriel Hernandez Walta and color artists Jordie Bellaire and Dan Brown.

#140char review: .@cullenbunn’s Magneto v3 is must-read! A distinct un-@Marvel rhythm & deep story roots give Mags motivation. Herald of good to come on UXM.

CK Says: Buy it!

This is a chilling, down-tempo masterpiece of anti-heroic deconstruction. The only time I was tempted to put it down is to think about it before I turned another page! Cullen Bunn is making Magneto more fearsome and more human than ever, and it’s a compelling read.

The cleaner of Fernandez’s art in the first issue are a welcome site as the focus is on the mysterious Briar, wherein Bunn plays a Morrison-like game of building a sub-culture around villainy. If there were super-villains in your world, wouldn’t you be scouring flea markets for DVDs of their greatest destructions after the footage was pulled from YouTube as supporting terrorism? Would people be proud of their scars or angry? This is one of those perfect issues that implies those questions without every verbalizing them, and which deepens the suddenly quite-fascinating mystery of Magneto’s mysterious human benefactor.

Afterwards, Walta continues to lend a weariness to Magneto’s chapters with his sketchy lines portraying a certain rough-edged weariness, which Jordie Bellaire has long-since perfected a color pallet to accompany. Here we see Magneto turn on SHIELD after cooperating with them briefly in Uncanny X-Men. What follows is more interesting. Magneto is re-building some semblance of society on Genosha out of a lingering guilt that he’s let his species down. How to even choose the occasion of his deepest regret? Was it the slaughter just perpetrated by The Red Skull on the island? Or perhaps the genocide of millions of mutants in Morrison’s E is for Extinction. Or, were his failures manifest much earlier – during his first overt strike on US missiles during his original encounter with the X-Men and in his guilt for surviving the Holocaust? Some Nazi and Holocaust imagery here is truly nightmarish, but only once does it feel present purely for shock value.

What’s so fascinating is that all of our flawed protagonist’s decisions feel right – it’s what you might choose in the position of a beleaguered former super-villain, right down to the shocking final choice he makes to resolve the volume.

Bunn’s dissection of Magneto’s extended history feels inspired by James Robinson, who carefully disassembles all things Golden and Silver aged to construct his stories. Maybe Bunn was capable of this all along and never had a character with a rich enough tapestry of stories to draw from. Either way, against all odds Bunn has made Magneto both a nuanced character and a must-read series. If you’re not already excited for him to helm the next volume of Uncanny X-Men headlined by Magneto, then you absolutely must read this book!

What came before: Magneto, Vol. 1 – Infamous >> Magneto, Vol. 2 – Reversals

What comes next: Magneto, Vol. 4 – Last Days >> Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 4 (begins in November!)

You might also like:

Hawkeye, Vol. 1: My Life as a Weapon (indie feel, flat-colored art)
Astonishing X-Men Volume 12: Unmasked (same artist, character-motivated)

Why female comic characters matter (to a baby)

August 27, 2015 by krisis

If we were to look at the pie chart of activities of my life (which would still be a terrible use of a pie chart because even when looking at proportional representation out of 100% it’s harder to compare the relative sizes of things in that format – death to pie charts) it would be obvious that comic book reading takes up a not-insignificant amount of my time.

If we are in a room with this comic book EV needs to run to it and bring it back to me to page through. Spidey who is a girl AND is in a rock band? Is there any better thing in the multi-verse?

That meant that EV had a lot of comic books read to her from as soon as she could be propped up to semi-sit-up on her own. Yet, even when she didn’t even have the means to escape from my reading, her attention span wouldn’t necessarily last an entire issue, let alone a whole trade paperback. That changed quite suddenly when I read her Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Avengers Assemble: The Forgeries of Jealousy last summer, a story primarily staring Spider-Girl at its center. EV sat transfixed by the whole thing. She let me read the entire book to her multiple times in one sitting.

I didn’t think too much of it – I just love reading DeConnick’s dialog, so maybe that did the trick, which also explained EV staying put in the fall for Captain Marvel, Volume 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More. The realization didn’t hit me until I read her the critically acclaimed, newly-Hugo-winning Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1 (and to E, who lingered in the room, feigning not paying attention but actually listening quite closely).

That baby would sit still to read books with female heroines.

I tested my theory. Spider-Man? A few pages. Hulk? No interest. Thor? Barely a glance. Storm? Entire issues. The lady version of Thor? Glued to the pages. Spider-Gwen? She picks it up every time we walk up to the attic. Hell, one of her first few dozens words was “Lumberjanes” so she could request the comic of the same name (which I dislike; maybe more on that later).

Tonight we read the first few issues of Ryan North’s delightful Squirrel Girl (recommended highly for kids!) while EV spent the entire time hanging off of me and giggling with glee.

What’s interesting about those books is that they include varying amounts of action and extremely distinct artwork, but they are each about more than a superhero who happens to have breasts. They feature women being women. I don’t mean doing “girl” things. I mean as heroes, their women are distinct in their voices, actions, hopes, and fears from male characters. They could not simply be gender-swapped.

The exercise lead me to look through EVs other books with a critical eye. Most protagonist characters in baby books default to male – the female is almost always the mother! And do you know how many books we have that feature a father in something other than a vestigial, dismissal role? Only a handful I can think of – Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Gaiman’s delightful Fortunately, The Milk, the classic Make Way For Ducklings, and my favorite, Maurice Sendak’s Pierre. However, of those, three of the protagonists are male and three have mothers as the primary female.

In case you are ever wondering – representation matters. Even a baby who cannot say a single word will tune in to media with a character she identifies with more readily than one she doesn’t. I didn’t have to run a very length or scientific experiment to figure it out. When we’re asking to see Black Widow on Avengers merchandise or wondering if we could see Miles Morales – a black, latino Spider-Man – onscreen, it’s not just because we like those characters or are demanding diversity for diversity’s sake.

We want the next generation of real life superheroes to see themselves in the media we allow them to consume.

(Little does EV realize that I have every issue of Wonder Woman from 1975 to present sitting in the attic, waiting to be read to her.)

(I’m also excited to capitalize on her Spider-Lady Love when Silk hits TPB later this year, since she is a rarely-represent female asian hero that’s not the sex-bomb yellow-face routine of Psylocke.)

Giant-Sized Surprise

May 18, 2015 by krisis

I recently mentioned in passing to a new colleague that I am a walking X-Men encyclopedia, and he replied he had some valuable X-Men comics. “Maybe a #1?” he said.

I was like, “uh, sure, great.” He’s younger than me, so I thought he might be referring to the 90s relaunch with Jim Lee, copies of which are valued in the low triple-digits … of cents.

Lo and behold, today he walks in with a pristine copy of Giant-Sized X-Men from 1974. It’s just in a normal, cheap mylar bag. Perfectly square spine with a tiny nick on the bottom corner and a white cover. He says, “don’t you want to flip through it?” I was like, “Don’t let me touch that! My hands are not clean enough! I am not qualified to handle a book that valuable!”

Eventually, I gingerly paged through. The pages were yellowed, but with crystal clear colors. I was transfixed by the separation of the yellow of Cyclops’s visor against the blue of his costume. It was beautiful. My hands were shaking a little bit as I put it back in the bag.

I was afraid to sit and read it despite his invitation to do so. I would never read it multiple times! I would never leave it lying open as I recapped it for a message board post or blog. My obsession with it was as an artifact, not a story-delivery-mechanism.

It made me marvel about the state of collected editions, and about this community. When I started collecting almost 25 years ago, I never had any hope of reading those early Uncanny X-Men issues. They were completely inaccessible. I had my Milestone reprint of Giant-Sized X-Men and my prized possessions – a middle-grade set of the original Dark Phoenix Saga my father bought for me at a comic convention. The reprints in “Classic X-Men” aside, I had no hope of reading UXM #94 or #108 or any of those other landmark early Claremont issues.

Yet, here we are today, gamely reading not only the first issues of our storied favorites, but the second, fifth, thirteenth, and twenty-ninth issues. We’re sampling runs of comics that aren’t our favorites in trade or hardcover for the price of one key back issue. Sure, we might wish for them in a different format or have to hunt them across the internet, but today our $100 buys us 30 or more issues of those classic comics, when even at my first convention it might not have yielded a single, low-grade copy of Giant-Size X-Men. And, a new generation of readers has unlimited access to many of these classics on Marvel’s app!

This is certainly the golden age not for comic book collectors but for readers, and I’m very happy to be here for it.

Originally published at the Comic Book Resources forum.

Ghost Rider – Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Marvel’s Ghost Rider – Johnny Blaze, Danny Ketch, Robbie Reyes, and more – in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated September 2024 with titles scheduled for release through April 2025.

Ghost Rider is the rare classic Marvel hero whose name is just a title given to a skull-headed, vengeance-seeking rider (or sometimes driver) possessed by a demonic spirit. Over the years, at least five Marvel characters have carried the title, as well as several spirits. [Read more…] about Ghost Rider – Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide