Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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

New for Patrons: Guide to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IDW Continuity

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My Indie Comics Month of March marches onward with another new guide for Pledgeonaut Patron supporters of CK! On Monday I debuted a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to Mirage Studios Continuity, which ended with the sale of the TMNT intellectual property to Viacom. However, that wasn’t the end of TMNT – really, it was more like the beginning! That’s because Viacom licensed the Turtles to IDW, who has maintained one of the best shared universes of continuity in all of comics. Read it all in my new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to IDW Continuity!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to IDW Continuity

Guide to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IDW Continuity

Before I get into any background on this guide, one VERY IMPORTANT note: you can read the entire first decade of IDW continuity for free if you subscribe to Amazon’s Comixology Unlimited. Every digital purchase link in this guide leads to a Comixology page on Amazon where, if you subscribe, you can “borrow” the book for free with one click on desktop, mobile, or your Kindle.

I highly recommend subscribing for a month and binging a ton of Turtles, because that’s just how I fell in love with IDW’s absolutely incredible TMNT continuity.

I had never read a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics before 2019. I mostly knew the Turtles from their classic cartoons, videogames, and toys. As a comics fan, I was dimly aware of them having a lengthy history as a black-and-white indie comic in the 1980s (as covered in my Mirage Studios guide), but I had never read a single panel of their comic.

That changed in November 2019, when I stayed home from a weekend camping trip and spent a fully day dedicated to checking out comics I had never read before. At 10:04 AM I opened my first issue of IDW’s TMNT continuity and immediately fell in love.

[Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IDW Continuity

New for Patrons: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to Mirage Studios Continuity

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I’m back to kick off a new week of my Indie Comics Month with a massive new guide for Pledgeonaut Patron supporters of CK. I couldn’t possibly focus on modern independent comics for an entire month without focusing on the comic that started as a humble black-and-white zine and turned into a massive licensing juggernaut whose name is known to nearly every child in America from the 1990s to the present day. Welcome to the first of my guides to those green heroes in a half-shell: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to Mirage Studios Continuity!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to Mirage Studios Continuity

I’ve tackled a few massive guides so far in 2023, but none of them have been a full-on research project full of careful citations like my first Turtles guide!

That is because TMNT’s pre-2010 continuity is a tricky thing. The characters spawned many, many, many comics in their first 26 years of life. However, of those many stories, there is a single spine of storytelling that was consistent throughout their entire life.

We can call that spine of stories “Mirage Studios Continuity” because it begins with Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird’s first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1984) #1 and continues through Laird’s final issues for Mirage on his TMNT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2001) series after he sold the intellectual property rights to his creations to Viacom in 2009 (having bought out Eastman’s share of the rights over the course of the prior decade).

Laird laid out a singular view of what Turtles stories he considered to be in-continuity in his view as the Turtle’s storyteller in chief. That included his own issues of the 1984 series (as well as four solo one-shots and a “Tales” seven-issue limited series) and a brief 1993 relaunch. He later extended his definition to include a 2004 Tales of the TMNT volume filling in stories in his continuity.

(He’d retract his extension in 2014, but that was hindsight talking – the 2004 series was always meant to be fully in continuity, even if Laird decided later he didn’t like all of it.)

For their part, current license-holder IDW has stuck closely to Laird’s definition when collecting the classic material that spawned the TMNT empire. Laird-penned material from the 1984 series (and those supporting 11 issues) has been collected into a pair of deluxe reprints – one in color, the other in black and white. Non-Laird issues from the series have been less collected, in less-prestigious formats, with a handful of gaps.

The Mirage Studios Continuity includes one major wrinkle: Erik Larsen. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to Mirage Studios Continuity

Updated: Guide to X-Men Legacy

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This week’s X-Men guide update includes some of my favorite runs of all time, because they each had keen single-character focus that mined past continuity to allow characters to grow and change. It’s my Guide to X-Men Legacy.

Guide to X-Men Legacy

Guide to X-Men Legacy

X-Men Legacy was Mike Carey’s reinvention of X-Men (1991) in the wake of “Messiah Complex” in 2008. He made the bold move of jettisoning a fan-favorite team lead by Rogue to refocus the book entirely on Professor Xavier. It was one of the few times in X-Men history Xavier was truly the lead character in an X-Men book – the other being Claremont’s short-lived Excalibur (2004).

After a year of focusing on Xavier, Carey pivoted his focus back to Rogue. Rogue had been a lead character many times over, even anchoring a pair of mini-series and an ongoing title. However, no one had ever before dug so deeply into her character and her powers as Carey. In giving Rogue a respite from the idea of her powers as a curse, he was able to unify the many aspects of her personality we had seen (and loved) over the years – as revolutionary, rebel, leader, lover, and mentor.

Simon Spurrier did something similar on his 2012-2014 run of X-Men Legacy, except he was working with a character with barely any history at all! Professor Xaver’s son Legion had only ever figured heavily into a handful of past comic arcs – his introduction in Claremont’s New Mutants, the final 30 issues of Claremont’s run, LegionQuest as a lead-in to Age of Apocalypse, and Zeb Wells’ recent run on New Mutants. Yet, Spurrier treated him similarly to how Carey dealt with Rogue – digging into why his powers and his life had always been so fractured, and what his humanity looked like beneath that.

I wish this Guide to X-Men Legacy update included new collected editions, especially of Carey’s incredible run on Rogue. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen new collections containing any Legacy issues since the 2018 reprint of Spurrier’s run, aside from a few issues recollected in last year’s Avengers vs. X-Men omnibus. That doesn’t mean there was nothing to update! I added links to buy and read the entire run digitally, clarified the contents of several collections, and slightly tweaked the recommended reading oder.

With Marvel just wrapping up the reprints of the 2001-2012 era of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men (1991) last year it feels like the time is right to recollect X-Men Legacy (2008), which has never been collected beyond its original hardcovers and trade paperbacks. Perhaps we’ll see it recollected in the new “Modern Epic” line – especially if Rogue continues to have a prominent role in the X-Men line in 2023 and beyond.