Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

comic books

World of Whedon

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An extended interview with Joss Whedon, mostly on the topic of Dr. Horrible and how it represents a new revenue model for Hollywood, though how much revenue that entails is TBA.

(Also: a young YouTube auteur fills in the early years of Dr. Horrible’s video blog.)

Also, the never-before seen animation test for Buffy: The Animated Series just surfaced. As with Dr. Horrible, I wasn’t overly-impressed with it, but I can’t understand why no one picked it up:

(And, if you are a Whedon-fan who is truly asleep-at-the-wheel it may have escaped your attention that the official eighth season of Buffy is currently being released as a comic book. If you – like me – are a huge Buffy fan who is too busy and grown-up to be hoarding piles of individual comics you ought to consider picking up the first two collected graphic novels – The Long Way Home and No Future For You.)

(Annnnd, if you are a Whedon- and X-men fan you should have long ago purchased all four of the graphic novels of Joss’s run on Astonishing X-Men, the first two of which were one of the best X-arcs I’ve ever read: Gifted, Dangerous, Torn, & Unstoppable.)

If you enjoy keeping up with the world of Whedon – including Buffy, Angel, Firefly. Dr. Horrible, the upcoming Dollhouse, and all of the people that make them happen – you ought to bookmark the fantastic Whedonesque

Could We Be Heroes

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In eighth grade I started writing the story that would eventually give me my longtime internet handle: Crisis.

It was half a high school drama and half a superhero comic, paralleling puberty with the onset of special powers that brought with them the life and death choices of adulthood.

I wrote and re-wrote the story endlessly. Sheaths of handwritten pages, endlessly revised files on my first word processor, and an infamous purple binder in which I worked in parallel on a sequel novella, allowing Gina to read it once a week in the back of Health class.

I never finished Crisis Team on paper; it mostly existed as a narrative daydreamed in slow moments of class and long waits at the bus stop. Still, I knew every beat of the story, and how they broke down across every chapter. If someone had sat me down at a keyboard for a week I could have typed it in a single unbroken string of sentences.

Then came Gen 13.

I can’t even remember why I ordered it at the time, but when I cracked the first issue I realized that Crisis was over before it was finished – Gen 13 copped my entire storyline almost beat for beat, and it did it’s job very well.

It was too late to change the core concept of my story. all I could do was rewrite and revise and hope to transcend our shared archetype to create something more distinct.


For the past year I’ve been reading breathless media coverage of Heroes, and how it is the next generation of television, way better than 4400, and a comic fan’s wet teevee dream.

I admit, I let my hopes get slightly up as details of the plot saturated the media and eventually leaked to me through magazines. The Wolverine/Cheerleader wakes up from an autopsy. The Japanese Nightcrawler learns how to use a sword.

It all sounded fascinating.

Now that we’ve Netflixed the DVDs my hopes are proven to have been in vain. I can’t detect anything beyond the mundane about the show, except for Mohinder’s hair. The best I can say for it is that it’s nice to watch so many standard comic archetypes being explored on screen. Not thrilling, or must-see. Just nice.

By contrast, Elise returned from her pre-Australia shopping trip to inform me that, so far, she loves it. She even powered through an extra four episodes while I was asleep and out at rehearsal.

I was annoyed for a moment by the disconnect; Elise and I share a perfectly tuned kismet sort of taste in sci-fi television shows from which we hardly ever deviate. The Pretender. Buffy. Alias The 4400. Battlestar Galactica.

A second later I was all caught up.

Elise is Gina in Health class, reading from my big purple binder. She can pick an X-Man out of a lineup, but she isn’t connected to the collective comics unconscious that stores all of those many standard stories – that place that Crisis and Gen 13 and Heroes draw their underlying structure.

I, unsurprisingly, am me, and in my mind Heroes is the same thing as Crisis – just a different medium spinning a familiar archetype.

Of course, you can argue that about almost any concept. Aren’t most of my songs just reconstituted versions of songs by other people? Haven’t I written this post about this feeling before?

What’s the difference?

The difference is the execution.

I kept rewriting Crisis, hoping that at some point my skillful execution would transcend my story.

I was hoping the same for Heroes, but it’s all archetype and no execution. The script is inert compared to Buffy (chosen one fights evil, fate) , the pace sluggish compared to The 4400 (people gain and struggle with powers, are discriminated against), and the acting pale in comparison to the revised Battlestar Galactica (original Battlestar Galactica crossed with Star Trek Voyager (original Battlestar Galactica)).

I was so hoping for something along the lines of that trio of shows – a done-to-death concept rendered thrilling through unusually outstanding execution. And, though Heroes has plenty of story, and plenty of network gloss, it’s that extra ingredient that’s lacking.

Many Splintered Realities (or, The Conclusion of NaBloPoMo)

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I began this month by comparing my entry into National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) to a DC comics-style Crisis – a reboot of me and my entire multi-verse of blogging, all for the benefit of any new readers that might stop by. Everything familiar would be eliminated, or re-imagined from scratch.

 

 

I was never a DC comics fan, so fittingly this month wound up more of a Marvel Comics event, even if i didn’t intend it. Marvel doesn’t have a hand catchword like “crisis” for their crossovers, and they usually don’t destroy the entire universe to make their point.

Age of Apocalypse is a particular favorite of mine, because it involved the X-Men, which was my concentration in Geekdom. In it, Professor Xavier is assassinated in the past, causing decades of history to shift radically.

For four months all of the many X-Men books were canceled and replaced with their alternate reality counterparts, similar at the core but alien on the outside. Wolverine and Jean were mercenary lovers. Magneto formed the X-Men, and Scarlet Witch was the first to fall in battle. Beast was an evil scientist, and Shadowcat a heartless bitch.

Unlike DC Comics, Marvel never really eliminates the past. At the end of four months the history we knew and loved returned. Not unscathed, though … it came along with new insight onto characters, and relationships, and some new characters mysteriously brought over from the alternate time line.

 

 

My little Krisis of the Infinite Crises (AKA NaBloPoMo) wound up a lot like that.

Clearly I am still me, and everything I’ve written over the past six years of Crushing Krisis remains part of my personal canon. Yet, during NaBloPoMo I recast some of my major characters, topics, stories, and songs. Certain themes, previously prominent, didn’t merit a mention. Others were played up anew for dramatic and comic effect.

Some changes were temporary for the sake of simplicity, like the comedification of my mother, and the suspension of archives and backlinking to old posts.

One universe-shattering change is here to stay: the port of my blog to WordPress.

Other, smaller changes may or may not stick: The return of Trio, the web’s longest running single-artist web session (AKA podcast). Reinstatement of comments. Retirement of certain prominent persons and topics. New favorite reads. OCD Godzilla.

 

 

As I re-imagined my personal narrative for NaBloPoMo I was reminded about the best aspects of myself and my life, and how they could be reflected in the best aspects of my blogging. I realized how blessed I am to have a six-year-old website that I still enjoy updating, and how unique I am to be able to express some of my sentiments in song.

I realized how truly, truly lucky I am to have such fascinating people interested in reading about it and hearing it.

I thank each of you for your attention, patience, and support. I sincerely hope that you decide to stick around to see what the future holds in store.

 

 

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Rabbit-Totems and Purple Dragons

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Even before I had the internet I was always interested in connecting to people who I could understand on some intrinsic level.

In my pre-internet age, one of my favorite comics was Sam Kieth’s The Maxx. Many issues of The Maxx had a pen pals page tucked into the back. The idea of it thrilled me – some equal yet opposite alterna-comic fan flung far across the country could trade significant thoughts with a distant speck of me.

I whined and begged my mother for permission to write to some pen pals or, even better, to send in my information to be listed (because, surely each pen pal was reaping hundreds if not thousands of letters from eager writers such as myself).

I was flatly rejected. Repeatedly. Because, as far as my mother was concerned, it was the goal of the entire population of America to seduce me into acquiescing to a quiet, tidy kidnapping. Who knew what kind of lunatic was lying in wait for impressionable young comic fans such as myself to engage them in witty adolescent banter, only to suss out the likeliest kidnappees and stealthily infiltrate their homes in the night.

I shortly and unsuccessfully agitated for a P.O. Box, and that was that.

(Why didn’t I just send in the damn letter with telling her? Who knows. That is how good of a kid i was.)


When I first started Crushing Krisis one of my favorite things was to not only find and link to a new blog, but to get into a longterm habit of reciprocal linking – carrying on a sort of turn-based dialog in a series of blog posts meant not just for each other, but for our entire audience(s). In a way it was like a comic-book crossover.

Sadly, in most cases only my side of the chat still exists – six years of blogging yields quite an attrition rate. Of my virtual pen pals even the most venerable and permanent-seeming blogs I exchanged links with are gone. All but one.

Wockerjabby was a strange creature – six years ago just a clean layout emblazoned with a purple dragon, talking about college and exercise and veganism and astrophysics. Rabi, pronounced just like “Robby” (cotton on?) was… a girl? A girl named Rabi living just a few miles from my apartment? An awesome, intelligent, health-conscious, blogging girl name Rabi going to college around the corner from my favorite malll?

I was hooked from minute-one. And, just a few hours later, Rabi noticed my link and wrote me a nice email. And (nearly causing me to have a heart-attack in excitement) linked back.

Afterwards i started a (somewhat embarrassing, in retrospect) linking campaign professing my blog-love, and Rabi continued to reciprocate, carrying on merry conversations via email all the while.

If the story plateaued there – two bloggers trading links for six years – it wouldn’t be too remarkable.

It didn’t.

We decided to meet – Rabi was the first internet person i ever met. In the middle of a field, actually. Well, at a train station, and briefly in a grocery store, but predominantly in the middle of a field, where I sang songs and she read poetry.

We continued through Blogathonning and late night IM conversations discussing “Peter’s-Head Romantic Gravitational Units,” and a lengthy walk through night-time Philly, and somehow wound up flying together and then road-tripping together to Boston for concerts, followed by multiple iterations of walking the breadth of NYC and Philadelphia, eventually coming-of-age and enjoying martinis in both locations.

All of that from one link, six years ago yesterday. Not only a best internet friend, but a best friend.

Ever since Rabi’s link has always appeared on my link list. And, six years later, CK is still on hers.

It’s hard – still hard, even with blogs and MySpace – to thwart the natural tendency of our social circles towards homogeneity. Your friends will always have something in common with you, because if you have nothing in common the spark of friendship never catches, and a year later you’re left wondering why someone is still on your friends list. Because of the limits of the physical world, usually many of our friends wind up having the same things in common with us.

The allure of The Maxx pen pals and, later, the internet, is the offer of hundreds of different tangential contacts – small intersections of interest. The long tail of meeting people, the joy of which is following that connection to find even more connections.

In Rabi I have found the unique overlap of blogging, of loving music, of eating strange vegetarian foods, of remaining dedicated – even obsessed – with staying vibrant and real.

Probably way cooler than anyone i could have met from The Maxx.


(ps: Rabi, your Trio got usurped because i don’t know how to play two of the songs yet. Consider this your Trio IOU to be redeemed when i have more than a day to learn three songs.)

Plus, He Hangs Out With Santa

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I really, really have no experience with children.

I was, at one point, a summer camp counselor for four years, but children in a group setting are not children, they are CHILDREN. An entity. You know, like Borg. It’s about managing all of them in relation to each other.

Having no child-skills to speak of, in my limited interactions with wee ones i just do what my mother did – treat them like fully functional small adults who are slightly hard of hearing. I don’t engage in baby-talk, and i don’t engage in tacit little white lies about coal in stockings and Easter Bunnies.

Last night we had a wee pre-Thanksgiving for our friends that happened to include a toddler guest. As Elise and I are both blue state yuppies to the nth degree, dinner was slightly peculiar and entirely vegetarian. Not exactly toddler-friend fare. So, everyone spent the meal coaxing the infinitely cute toddler to try some of the peculiar offerings on his plate.

“Try the creamed corn! It’s like Mac’n’Cheese, but without macaroni. Or cheese.”

Eventually they hit upon the superhero angle. Superheroes definitely ate their food.

“How could the Flash be so fast without eating his fennel?”

They were on the right path, but it still wasn’t quite working. As i had the vastest comic knowledge of all in attendance (and was at this point slightly inebriated on my second or third Rose Martini), i felt the need to chime in.

“You know, Superman doesn’t just eat his vegetables. He eats everything. Superman invented the clean plate club.”

The toddler looked at me, eyes innocent and wide, while the guests regarded me in mute amusement/horror.

“Why,” i posited, “do you think he has so many more powers than all the other superheroes.”

The toddler dubiously lifted up his fork as a tiny part of my soul withered and died.

How the hell do you mommy bloggers do this every day?

A Crisis on Crushing Krisis (or, Welcome to NaBloPoMo)

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You go to Wikipedia to look up one thing and it turns into your entire night. Not a night about that one thing, but a night about all sorts of things you never knew about before.

For example, I never knew that there is a shrimp capable of producing shockwaves with its claws that can kill small fish or break glass. And I didn’t know that DC Comics’ hero Animal Man could manifest that power, or the power of any other animal, proportional to the size of his body.

I do know a bit about DC Comics in general, which came part and parcel with being a young boy in the eighties. I can rattle off the origins of all the major heroes as if reading straight from the origin cards that came with their Super Powers toys: Superman the sole survivor from Krypton, Batman an orphan, Wonder Woman an Amazon, et cetera.

The problem that DC Comics was having in the 1980s was that the origins weren’t really that simple, and neither was anything else. As a new influx of readers emerged from the simplified realm of cartoons and toys they discovered that Superman wasn’t exactly a sole survivor… Supergirl was his cousin, and Krypto the Superdog was his long lost pet. So much for being Krypton’s last son.

Other heroes had similarly puzzling paradoxes. The problems weren’t the fault of any single writer or editor so much as they was the fault of almost fifty years of accumulated comics continuity. Eventually the continuity became so splintered that some of the odder stories were explained away as occurring on alternate versions of Earth, but even this couldn’t solve all of the confusion.

The result was Crisis on Infinite Earths – a DC Comics event whose stage was the entire multiverse (and every comic title), and whose stakes were the very existence of life as we know it. Various Supermen and Wonder Women from other realities were knocked off over the course of the event, along with their confusing accomplices (like the aforementioned Supergirl).

When the dust settled the DC Universe was “rebooted” with a single Earth, containing heroes with discernable backstories that could be easily portrayed by cartoons and toys. Ever since, any continuity-impacting event is a “Crisis.” Last year had an Identity Crisis, this year an Infinite Crisis.

I swear, there was a point to all of that. Hang in there.

Crushing Krisis has been around for an extraordinary six years without interruption; it’s the longest running blog in Philadelphia.

Longrunning blogs are just as confusing as those pre-Crisis comic book stories. Blogs easily mix the present with the past, and the longer a blog exists the more and more of the present becomes the past in the form of archives. Past personal dramas continue to be referenced and – aside from the occasional backlink – a new reader is expected to keep up with the narrative without the benefit of comics standards like toys, or trading cards. Or stories set on alternate Earths.

In honor of National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), here at Crushing Krisis we are having a DC Comics style Crisis. A Crushing Krisis Crisis. Krisis’s Crushing Crisis. Krisis of Infinite Crises. I don’t know, choose whatever you think is catchy.

The point is that – for the entirety of November – I’m rebooting.

Because of my participation in NaBloPoMo I’ll be posting at least once every day, and my posts will contain everything you need to know about my life. Every character and plot strand will be introduced anew. No assumptions, no backstory, no backlinks – not even to reference things that were really funny the first time around. And, to up the ante, if I want to link to one of my original songs in order to refer to it, I will need to provide a brand-new recording of the song, commissioned especially for NaBloPoMo.

I hope this novel idea piques your interest enough to stay tuned through NaBloPoMo and Beyond, whether you are a regular reader or a random surfer. Welcome to the all new Crushing Krisis!