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But I Regress, pt. 3

September 29, 2010 by krisis

Warning: This image actually has nothing to do with the rest of this post. It just makes me giggle.

Holy continuity, Batman! Do you remember where I left off over a month ago?

In short, I had to give up my monthly comic book addiction to fuel my constant need to be online, which brought with it Real-Time Strategy games like Warcraft & Starcraft. Static characters on a page couldn’t hold a candle to tiny sprites with their own hit points and attributes.

Oh, Sega Dreamcast. We had such good times. I will remember you. Will you remember me? Don’t let your life pass you by. Weep not for the memories.

Then idle gamer-me met college. With unlimited bandwidth and nearly unlimited time, Freshman year Peter kept playing Starcraft solo, but added shooters like Unreal and Rogue Spear to his repertoire, playing with his (okay, enough: my) roommate Kenny and the gang from Shafted.org. I got addicted to in-browser games, particularly the deeply strategic Archmage.

I even got into console gaming, playing endless rounds of Madden 2k on Kenny’s Dreamcast.

Yeah, I’m old.

Actually, our college D&D sessions represented a major milestone for me - I RPed a male character!

Then the utopia of free time, free games, and free T1 internet came to an abrupt halt. Sophomore year found me working to pay for my apartment and with a single meager line of dial-up and a teeny 13-inch television with no console. It also found me starting a blog and finally scraping together the money for a nicer guitar.

The result? The Peter who dug comic books and video games evaporated completely long before I turned 21. Elise never met him, aside from a weekly night of Dungeons & Dragons and some in-browser gaming.

Any attention and cash I had left to spare after class and E went to my burgeoning collection of songs – both by other people and by me – and concert tickets, when I could afford them.

I really thought geek-Peter was completely dead and gone. That is, until graduation…

To find out how that happened next, you… well, you don’t have to do anything. I need to write at least two more entries of this transcribed oral history of geekdom. And, hey, let’s not forget that the impetus of this entire thing was my best-in-class Guide to Collecting X-Men Comics as Trade Paperbacks. As of today I am officially caught up to 2010 in X-Continuity!

10 days, 3 bands, 1 brain

August 17, 2010 by krisis

It is 10 days until Crushing Krisis’s 10th birthday and I am having an editorial calendar failure. And a brain failure.

Really it’s kind of an overarching not being able to do anything except nap and read comic books failure, which as failures go is not such a bad one. It’s way better than the “so overstressed I can feel the ulcers growing” brand of failure I was experiencing two weeks ago.

Actually, I think the napping and the comic books had a lot to do with escaping that particular pit of despair. Napping, comic books, little purple pills, and not drinking a gallon of lemonade every single day.

Meanwhile, in news related to the brain failure, I have discovered that being in three separate musical acts each with their own set of unique arrangements is the functional limit of my brain capacity. The wherewithal to recall all of those songs seems to have jettisoned my ability to return phone calls or schedule home repairs.

I am now off book on seventeen bass arrangements for Filmstar. As long as someone yells out what key we’re in at the start of the song I am fine, except for the one song that only makes sense if I pretend we are playing a David Bowie song. Like, if we begin and I’m like, “Oh, it’s a Filmstar song,” then I am a hot mess and play about two correct notes. But, if I instead say, “This is the secret, unreleased B-Side to ‘Suffragette City,’” then I’m fine.

Meanwhile, as Arcati Crisis Gina and I are working on two new songs, which – per our modus operandi – are completely different in every possible way from anything we’ve done before. One is an acoustic dance song from me equally influenced by Gaga and Heart, which I just previewed on our Facebook page.

(The other is a Gina tune which could be referred to as “Message In a Bottle from an American Girl in Russia,” but is actually called the much more succinct “American Mikaela.” It’s chorus hook is so destructively catchy that I have successfully lobbied to sing it three times as much as Gina originally planned.)

There’s also the musical artist that is me, who I can sometimes forget about in all of the commotion between the other two and commuting to my actual, fully-paid, highly-beloved full time occupation. He’s rehearsing to support Mieka Pauley this weekend at our house concert shindig, where he is rumored to debut a brand new Madonna cover (and, when you rumor something to yourself, it’s pretty sad if it doesn’t come true, so I need to get on that).

Meanwhile, ten years minus ten days ago I was sitting in a dorm room with a broken collar bone, registered for a year of music courses totally outside of my major and wondering if I would have anywhere to live in a month.

Ten years. Wow. What were you doing ten years ago today?

Wolverine, Logan – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Dec 22, 2024! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading order on collecting Wolverine via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Collecting X-Men: A Definitive Guide. Last updated December 2024 with titles scheduled for release through July 2025.

Collecting Wolverine

Wolverine is second only to Spider-Man in sheer quantity of stories told about a single character in the modern Marvel Universe. Collecting his every appearance is a close-to impossible task.

That can make it hard to be a fan who wants to read about your favorite 5’3″ Canucklehead without picking up expensive back issues. Luckily, those comics have been collected into dozens of softcover graphic novels, called “trade paperbacks.”

This guide lists three types of Wolverine collections – ongoing series, limited series where he is a title or starring character, and significant story-arcs. It is split into several sections and eras: [Read more…] about Wolverine, Logan – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

But I Regress, pt. 2

August 11, 2010 by krisis

Where were we? Oh, I was telling you about how with the responsibility of owning a home I have suddenly regressed to being a teenager.

Last time I detailed my overwhelming love for comic books, and how it was vanquished by the great expanse of the internet.

To this day I marvel at how mercenary I was about my decision. When it came down to $40 a month on comics or on internet access I phoned up the comic store and canceled my orders without a second thought.

How could I?

Comics were a world I could dive into and experience alone, but the internet was a world I could lose myself in along with millions of other people.

To put it in today’s terms, comics weren’t social.

I wanted them to be. I’d skulk at the comic shop … beg my mother to let me find a pen pal at the back of The Maxx. I would read the letters page in X-Men and imagine being able to talk all day with people as obsessed with the characters as I was.

The internet had all of that, available 24/7. Within days I was on a Dungeons & Dragons listserve and in a Final Fantasy fanfic club. After years of being a pretty insular only child, I found out I had things in common with people. Lots of things!

And, while building my first website became a top priority, so did Warcraft II.

I have never been much of a PC gamer, so was completely unfamiliar with the concept of real-time strategy war games. When my friend Lucas made me download the WCII demo over my 14.4k modem I was floored – it was like Risk crossed with Dungeons & Dragons, but with none of the plastic pieces or dice rolls.

(I was the kind of kid that, when bored, would set up elaborate six-person games of Risk between my GI Joes and play each side against each other for hours. Actually, I still do that a few times a year with my LOTR Risk, just sans the GI Joes.)

(My wife finds this fascinating)

All it took was one modem game of Warcraft II on the single demo map and I was hooked. I had an army of orcs to do my bidding, and friends to trade taunts with all night. And sea turtles!

I had no interest in quick, decisive battles. When we both bought the full game I’d make maps packed with endless gold mines so we could entrench and battle for hours on end.

Much as my comic obsession stayed mostly contained to X-Men, my RTS urge was isolated to Blizzard games. Even after buying my first guitar put the whammy on many of my other adolescent hobbies (say goodbye, fanfic!), I remained a devoted late-night WCII addict.

The addiction was made worse senior year when one of my friends slipped me their extra copy of Starcraft. It was Warcraft . . . in space!

I think that – and how it relates to my current predicament – is a story for next time.

The impetus for this whole tale is my recently-launched Guide to Collecting X-Men in TPBs, which is meant to aid former adolescent addicts such as myself in catching up on what they’ve missed.

But I Regress, pt. 1

August 3, 2010 by krisis

With the launch of my monster definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels, I have officially become a fifteen year-old.

Allow me to explain. Or, to begin to, as I’m sure this is a multiple-post-spanning story (just as that website feature was a multiple-month spanning obsession to research).

A few months ago Philly-local social media mover/shaker/sandwich-connoisseur @MikeyIl threw a series of events for the Ford #FiestaMovement. One of them was an all-local art show, featuring work by my partner-in-fame Britt Miller, as well as Eddidit and others.

Being Britt’s unpaid intern / personal assistant / life coach and a faithful supporter of friends and local artists, I got my ass there – even though the event was smack in the middle of negotiating the price of our house with our Realtor over the phone.

(Literally. Drunk friends: “What are you doing?” Me, to phone: “Hold on a second.” Me, to friends: “Oh, I just got another few thousand dollars knocked off the price of our house.” Drunk friends: “Wowwww.”)

Where was that fateful art show held?

Brave New Worlds. A comic book shop.

Here at Crushing Krisis I haven’t ever fully explained my addiction to comic books, c. 11/1991 – 4/1996.

X-Men #24, one of my favorite comic covers.

It was a brief but tumultuous affair. Comic books combine my love of serial narrative with an OCD urge to make meticulous, alphabetical lists. They created a 10-year-old who would do anything to earn $40 a month to pick up every book bearing the image of Wonder Woman or an X-Man.

(Seriously, I’m surprised I wasn’t peddling coke for my neighbor. It’s a good thing my guitar habit didn’t get to drug-running levels of expense until after college, when I was salaried.)

For only collecting for four-and-a-half years, my comic collection is prodigious. Not only did I collect new issues weekly, but in the pre-spreadsheet days the adolescent OCD Godzilla in my soul – a mere tadpole, at the time – compiled lists of back issues by hand… lists twenty and thirty pages long, complete with estimated budgets and timelines for purchase. Every few months my father engaged my whim, and I checked off line after line.

I was hardcore. The guys at the comic store treated me like I was twice my age (now ironic) because I was so on top of my shit with my pull lists and my back issue pricing and my discussions of the Magneto’s morality and if the ends truly justified the means.

Then came the internet. AOL dial-up cost by the hour, and I was hooked on it within minutes of my first sign-in in January of 1996. Four months later my wallet issued an ultimatum: limit my internet usage, or jettison my comic addiction – now complicated by Marvel’s 90s’ decadence of holographic covers and limited series.

The real decider was probably a demo of Warcraft II, a living digital board of Risk I could play over and over again with my friends over my 14.4 baud modem.

I dropped the comics and never looked back.

Until last month.

(To be continued! In the meantime, if you’re a closet x-fan who wouldn’t know a pull list from their elbow, check out definitive guide to collecting X-Men comic books as graphic novels – the easiest (and cheapest) way to be an adult comic book fan.)