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

Review: Butterfly by Amel, Bennett, Fuso, & Simeone

June 2, 2016 by krisis

I’ve always loved the risk/reward of a blind buy.

I’m not talking about buying a new appliance sight unseen here. I’m talking about more subjectively judged products, like music you’ve never heard or heard of or a dish of unfamiliar food of which the only detail you are only certain it is not poison.

If we always seek out what we know and have been recommended, how can we ever be surprised? Some of my favorite albums came from picking something up purely because of a band’s name or their photo, and the vast majority of my indie comic collection came from trying something without knowing a thing about it other than the aesthetics of a cover image or a few lines of promotional copy.

(How sure can you be about art until you consume it, anyway? Did that dance about architecture really tell you how great the building would be?)

That’s nearly all I had to go by on Butterfly. I had read scripter Marguerite Bennett as a co-author with a major favorite, Kieron Gillen, but that didn’t speak much for her on her own. The cover image is stark – the shape of an olive butterfly on a black background formed by the silhouettes of dozens of guns.

There was something about it that made me want to own it.

Butterfly

Collects Butterfly #1-4. Story by Arash Amel, script by Marguerite Bennett, illustrated by Antonio Fuso and Stefano Simeone with colors by Adam Guzowski, lettering by Steve Wands.

#140char review: Butterfly: an icy spy tale that doesn’t bother to wash the blood from its hands. A less touchy Alias or a less fanciful Mind MGMT. Just okay

CK Says: Consider it.

Butterfly is not at all as delicate as its namesake. That goes for both the book on the whole and the main character, for whom its an alias.

We’re dropped into a mission already in progress with Rebecca Faulkner AKA Butterfly, and from the get she seems like more of a chameleon than a butterfly. She seamlessly slides into character for a dead drop and is just as facile in her initial exfiltration. However, when she discovers her routine contacts have all been disconnected she is forced to rely on a failsafe that puts her on a path to intersect her retired spy of a father, long since disappeared from her life. [Read more…] about Review: Butterfly by Amel, Bennett, Fuso, & Simeone

Review: Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic, by Kot, Taylor, Loughridge, Cowles, & Muller

June 1, 2016 by krisis

I’m an increasing supporter of the idea of True Fans as Subscribed Patrons, a mass of individuals who band together to sponsor the work of an artist they trust rather than simply buying it after the fact.

That’s not only because of services like Kickstarter and Patreon taking root, but because it reflects how I actually consume art. Once I’ve decided your work speaks to me, I want it all. Don’t make me keep an eye on release calendars. Don’t let a middleman get a share of my dollar. Take my money whenever you’re feeling the artistic feels and I’ll gladly accept what you deliver as often as you’d like to deliver it.

The beauty (and, let it be said, gratification) of that concept has a single point of failure: editing. Artists who are free to deliver directly to their benefactors run the risk of no longer performing the “Will it float on its own?” evaluation of their artwork. That could lead to unbidden creativity, it could result in fan-pandering, or we could wind up with some half-baked dreck.

Which brings me to author Ales Kot. This is a guy whose brain I’d love to be permanently jacked into based on what I’ve read from him so far. Even if there have been a few duds along the way, the hits are very big hits with me. I’ve exchanged niceties with him on Twitter here and there and a huge part of me simply wants to say, “Look, would you like my $100-a-year up front, because I’m doubtlessly going to buy every damn thing you do.”

He’s doing the utter opposite of that – publishing his creator-owned work through Image, where there is little in the way of advances or guaranteed sales. Every issue he releases is in pure sink or swim mode; every new project must find its own fans until he has an army of auto-buyers like me.

Right now he’s swinging for the fences on every release. I get the impression he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic.

Collects Wolf #1-4. Written by Ales Kot with art by Matt Taylor, color art by Lee Loughridge, lettering by Clayton Cowles, and design by Tom Muller.

#140char review: Wolf, v1: pure comics magic. @ales_kot knows the perfect amount of things not to say on the page. I re-read it one second after finishing.

CK Says: Buy it!

Wolf is a powerful work of low fantasy, casting supernatural elements like vampires, ghostly winds, and a tentacle-faced man alongside the stars on Mulholland Drive and the streetwalkers on La Brea Boulevard in Los Angeles. Kot and his collaborators have conjured a bit of true magic with this ouroboros of a tale that forced me to pick it up for a re-read just seconds after I finished.

The book opens with a gut-punch image of a man on fire. Not a superhero or an immolator, but a burning man on a stroll rendered all in reds and oranges. This is Antoine Wolfe, an immortal weary of life who’d prefer not to be set on fire as much as he’d like to stay out of both spooky plots and police investigations – and, especially anything that synchronizes all of those things together.

This is not his story and we’re left in relative darkness about his history and the exact nature of his powers. All we know is that he’s the kind of death-proof, magical guy you hire to look into things that require looking into in a Los Angeles that borders directly on Hell. (Kot is vague on whether that’s figurative, literal, or both.) He’s also a magnet for supernatural trouble, whether that’s his half-Lovecraftian buddy who is late on rent or a strangely-calm teenager in the midst of a murder investigation with an X-Files sort of twist. [Read more…] about Review: Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic, by Kot, Taylor, Loughridge, Cowles, & Muller

Luke Cage, Power Man – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 11, 2025! The definitive Power Man – Luke Cage – comic books issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through June 2025.

Collecting Luke Cage

Luke Cage emerged from Marvel’s early-70s habit of stealing themes from pop culture – in this case, the emergence of Blaxploitation films. That made him only the second prominent black hero at Marvel, after Black Panther – who had become a staple in The Avengers.

Cage’s story could have easily come to an end with the waning of the 70s, but Marvel made an unusual move in 1978 – they introduced the similarly fad-based character Iron Fist into Cage’s title, rechristening it “Power Man & Iron Fist.”

A street-smart man with unbreakable skin and a billionaire’s son who mastered a secret martial art. This memorable odd-couple pairing lead to another eight years of an ongoing series, until 1986 when Marvel ended several long-running 70s books at the end of Secret Wars II. Afterwards, Luke Cage was basically put into mothballs, and when he was taken out he didn’t prove a hit on his own – his 1992 self-titled series lasted only 20 issues.

Despite numerous guest-appearances and a brief Heroes for Hire run during Marvel’s late-90s struggle, it was one man who brought Cage back to prominence despite never writing him in a solo title: Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis introduced Luke Cage as a foil and on-again/off-again flame to Jessica Jones in Alias, linking the characters from that point forward (and using them both in his Daredevil run). Then, he plucked Cage from relative obscurity to join New Avengers alongside surefire sellers Spider-Man and Wolverine.

Ever since then, Luke Cage went from occasional guest-star to one of the most prominent heroes in the Marvel Universe, though he occasionally takes a break to change a few diapers. Like Hawkeye before him, he serves as an anchor and mascot for Avengers teams and as a mentor for reformed criminals the Thunderbolts. He also has a habit of popping up in any Iron Fist title.

In the wake of his smash Netflix series released at the end of 2016, Luke’s profile at Marvel was as high as ever – with him appearing in his own title, as well as Jessica Jones and a re-branded Defenders team. [Read more…] about Luke Cage, Power Man – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Punisher – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 22, 2025! The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and trade reading order for Marvel’s Punisher, Frank Castle comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through June 2025.

Collecting Punisher

Pun00 - 0001 promo Few characters chart the changing trends of the Marvel Universe as well as Frank Castle, The Punisher.

Punisher was initially introduced in 1974 as a vigilante foil to the rule-abiding Spider-Man. Punisher was a former marine who felt that any killer deserved death themselves, and that he would mete it out regardless of the progress of the justice system. Of course, Spider-Man did not remain in his sights for long, but Punisher was a quandary for the wallcrawler – was this man a hero he could team up with or a villain he had to stop?

The question was consistent with Marvel’s mid-70s output, which had begun to diversify its heroes and ask more challenging questions of them. However, that was the only space the Punisher could hold at the time – being a challenging question. There was no room for him as a star.

One of his prominent early-80s appearances was in Frank Miller’s Daredevil, who at the time was himself seen as a boundary-pushing vigilante. However, by contrast to the Punisher, his actions still seemed heroic. While he sometimes acted as a judge and even a jury, he never cast himself as an executioner.

By the mid-80s, violent heroes were on the rise at Marvel, and Punisher finally earned his own mini-series in 1986. That was quickly followed by one ongoing series, then two, then three – plus a regular flow of graphic novels and seasonal specials. By the height of his popularity and of comic speculation in 1992-93, Marvel releasing nearly as many pages of Punisher as they were Spider-Man. Yet, the later 90s were not kind to Frank Castle. The entire Marvel line had shifted towards the more extreme as well as massive game-changing gimmicks. Punisher’s edgy relaunch in 1995 (literally branded as part of the “Over the Edge” line) didn’t fare as well, and a pivot to having him be a supernatural avenger is one of the most reviled comic stories of the late 1990s. It seemed that Punisher had finally become irrelevant.

Frank Castle’s great savior was Marvel’s movement toward realism in the early 2000s, which was partially aligned with the leather-clad heroes in Fox’s first X-Men film. The Punisher drafted off this movement with “Welcome Back Frank,” which found Castle more grounded than ever in the hands of Preacher creators Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. This gritty no-superheroes take on Punisher grew so popular that it spun off into it’s own out-of-continuity Punisher MAX series, which finally felt like the right format for the violent hero. He still had a role to serve in the main Marvel Universe, acting as a major instigator in the landmark Civil War, which mirrored Punisher’s own origin with heroes taking the law into their own hands.

Punisher now represents less of a shocking thread of violence and more the chance for Marvel to publish a comic in a different genre from its capes and spandex fare. Rick Remender found a way to make Frank Castle both more horrific and more lighthearted (if you can imagine), while Greg Rucka turned him into a on-the-streets mob book that could withstand an occasional intersection with Spider-Man. He even joined a team for the first time with the 2013 reinvention of Thunderbolts.

Punisher spawned a pair of films in 2004 and 2008, but he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2016 with Netflix’s Daredevil. With his exposure to the wider (and voracious) Marvel viewing public, he will likely remain a prominent feature in Marvel’s publishing line. [Read more…] about Punisher – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Hawkeye – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive Hawkeye – Clint Barton and Kate Bishop – issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for comic books, omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated September 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

If there is a single character outside of the holy-trinity of Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor who is most associated with The Avengers, it’s Clint Barton as Hawkeye.

Hawkeye began as an early Iron Man villain in Tales of Suspense and so it comes as a surprise to the team in the classic Avengers #16 when he breaks into their Mansion with a request to join (he’s soon followed by fellow former villains Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver).

Despite his unlikely initiation, Hawkeye has one of the longest tenures of any character in the Avengers – and has maybe quit and been kicked out the most of any character, too. He is often represented as the core of what the Avengers are and as a conscience for the team.

In 2005, with Clint out of the picture, a young woman named Kate Bishop took up the mantle of Hawkeye. Kate is nearly the opposite of Clint – she grew up rich and privileged, while he literally joined the circus as a child.

However, their shared grit, marksmanship, and moral compass finally brought them together as partners in Matt Fractions’ remarkable 2012 Hawkeye ongoing.

From there on out, they share the codename. [Read more…] about Hawkeye – Collecting Guide and Reading Order