Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 3 – The Realness of Fortune Ball: recap & power ranking!

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Welcome to my recap of the third episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – The Realness of Fortune Ball!

In this episode of this special All Winners season, each our eight crowned queens have to construct a garment from scratch corresponding to a fabulous and colorful vacation destination – the sorts of trips offered as prizes on classic game shows like Wheel of Fortune.

Making a garment from scratch might be the one standard Drag Race challenge I’ve still never tried myself!

When I first started commenting on and recapping Drag Race back in 2014 I was doing it as a complete layperson. I knew plenty about singing, songwriting, acting, and public speaking – which covered a slew of typical Drag Race challenges.

When it came to the actual drag on the runway, I knew very little about make-up or fashion that I hadn’t learned from the judges. I was going off of what was pleasing to me without being able to articulate exactly why.

This is a frequent topic of discussion in Drag Race fandom, and amongst the queens themselves. Who is qualified to critique the work of these incredible artists, who are make-up artists, costume designers, and stylists all rolled up into one. The Drag Race judging panel sometimes struggles to have the right references to understand where queens are coming from, so who are we to try?!

I’m of two minds about that.

On one hand, you don’t have to be an expert in something to talk about if it resonates with you. That’s a way people gatekeep themselves from appreciating fine art, classical music, runway fashion, or any other form of high art.

On the other hand, I think Drag Race fans have consumed so much of the Drag Race industrial complex of endless franchise seasons, recap shows, podcasts, and fashion reviews that they think they’re an expert just because they’ve heard so much from the experts. There’s a Dunning-Kruger effect there, where even though fans don’t fully understand something about drag they assume they have have as much know-how as the queens themselves.

I’ve always been sensitive to that second bit, especially because I’m qualified to seriously critique a lot of elements of Drag Race OTHER THAN the drag itself.

That’s why I’ve spent the past few years trying to actually learn about drag other than by watching the show. I’ve read up on drag history and pageants. I’ve watched countless make-up tutorials. I’ve been keeping up with fashion blogs and runway shows. And, I’ve actually done my own drag make-up – which will never see the light of day on the internet! (At least, not until I’m much better at blending.)

I don’t think all of that is required to recap Drag Race. Nor do I think following runway collections and knowing how to contour doesn’t mean I’m anywhere in the same solar system of talent compared to these All Winners!

What I do think is that if you’re going to spend to time to go past consuming art to engage with it critically, you owe it to both yourself and to the artist to better understand their art form. (And, also, engaging critical doesn’t mean hating or belittling these artists! Turning in uneven work on one episode of a TV show has no bearing on how great a drag artist you are.)

Does that mean I understand how these queens built their dresses from scratch for this week’s design challenge? Hell no! Design challenges involve the peak of a drag queen’s power to create something from nothing, and I’ll cover every step of that process in detail here! Plus, at the end of the recap I’ll update my Episode 2 power rankings to show where the queens stand after another week of Legendary Legend badges. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 3 – The Realness of Fortune Ball: recap & power ranking!

How to slim down your comic collection

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I have too many comics.

If you haven’t seen my collection-moving video, let me set the scene for you: We’re not just talking a bookshelf full of comics. It’s not just a stack of longboxes in closet. I’m talking about a full on library of shelves full of collected editions and accompanying stacks of 100+ shortboxes in my garage of collected editions and floppies.

All told it represents over 30,000 individual issues. That’s why I have an occasional YouTube show called “Shelve, Store, or Sell?” where I work on thinning things out (but mostly wind up moving more things from the stacks to the shelves).

“Too Many Comics” is a relative amount. I have too many comics for me, today, in 2022. Me in 2012 would’ve delighted in this collection! For some people, “enough comics” looks like one shelf on a bookcase, and any overflow must be mercilessly sold. For others, it’s seemingly every comic ever printed.

I fall somewhere in the middle. I started expanding my childhood collection in 2010, before Marvel Unlimited and Marvel’s collection program both really exploded to offer widespread coverage of nearly everything. Mapping every X-Men comic book meant buying hundreds of uncollected issues. If I wanted to create a comic guide for a Marvel character and read all of their appearances along the way, that started with buying.

Would I have made the same decisions in 2020? Oh my goodness, no. Marvel is now systematically working through their back catalog through Masterworks, Epic Collections, and Complete Collections, leaving very few stones unturned. Every issue that winds up in one of those books is also on Marvel Unlimited. For less than the cost of one omnibus a year, you can read all of it, any time you want. DC is slowly moving in the same direction with their DC Universe service (though other publishers now all lag behind thanks to the shuttering of Comixology a few months ago).

Which brings me back to my too many comics. Deciding to slim down your comic collection isn’t easy. Sure, you can Marie Kondo it and “keep only those things that spark joy,” but what does “joy” even mean when it comes to a huge collection of collectibles? You might be happy you own a copy of Uncanny X-Men (1963) #137, but you might not plan on having a meaningful interaction with it once a month, or even once a year.

As I’ve shot the “Shelve, Store, or Sell” series, I’ve settled on my own paradigm for evaluating which of my “too many” comics are “just enough,” and I think it could be helpful for anyone with a too-large comic collection. (It also works for books, movies, music, or any other form of consumable media.

I call it “read, re-read, reference, collect.” The good ol’ 3RC.

What do I own for the purpose of reading it for the first time? Am I ever going to do that?

What do I own for the purposes of re-reading? Have I re-read it already? Will I re-read it again?

What do I own for reference purposes, including books I just enjoy flipping through or lending? How often do I actually touch the book?

What do I have purely for collecting? Why? What do I gain, monetarily or emotionally, from having it in my collection for another year compared to getting rid of it?

Want to understand more about each of these criteria and how I decide if a book qualifies? Keep reading! [Read more…] about How to slim down your comic collection

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 2 – Snatch Game: recap & power ranking!

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I’m back to discuss the second episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7’s back-to-back streaming premiere of its All Winners season.

If two Drag Race episodes in one day each packed with eight iconic champions wasn’t big enough to begin with, I have two more words for you: Snatch Game.

“Snatch Game” is an off-colour pun on the old TV game show Match Game, where contestants filled-in-the-blank in a phrase in an often-vain attempt to match what a panel of celebrities would fill in on their own cards.

Drag Race introduced it as a celebrity impersonation challenge in Season 2 and it immediately became a regular feature of every season of every franchise (except for All Stars Season 1, but we don’t talk about that).

One of the reasons Snatch Game has become such an iconic, enduring challenge on Drag Race is because it makes the show more accessible to a wider audience. Even if you don’t care about drag, this is a pre-packaged game show skit with easy-to-grasp rules, like a parodic round of Jeopardy on SNL – with the added thrill of each cast member improv-ing their own answers.

In recent years, some All Stars season have used the format of other TV game shows under the “Snatch Game” title, mimicking The Dating Game and Family Feud. Season 7 is back to the standard format… with a twist: every queen has to impersonate two celebrities on two different panels of the show!

I am old enough to have grown up watching all of these cheesy, campy old celebrity-driven game shows in syndication on daytime TV. In fact, they were one of the best things about staying home from school! Now, these camp curiosities have been relegated to special cable channels and YouTube clips. It makes me wonder how the challenge lands for younger audience members (and queens) who never experienced these things firsthand. To them, “Snatch Game” is primarily a Drag Race reference!

There’s no fear of that with this cast. They’ve all been through this gauntlet before. They’re all queens who have shown an ability to reference a massive amount of pop culture across their runs and reigns. And, half of them – Jinkx, Trinity, Shea, & The Vivienne – are previous Snatch Game winners!

If there was ever an episode a casual fan could enjoy, this is the one! I’ll cover every step of the episode in detail, including every celebrity impersonation and the slick “Pleather Principal” runway! Plus, at the end of the recap I’ll update my Episode 1 power rankings to show where the queens stand after another week of Legendary Legend badges. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 2 – Snatch Game: recap & power ranking!

Music Monday: “Wet Dream” – Wet Leg

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Music keeps you young.

It sounds like one of those pithy phrases you might find on a decorative wall hanging into the home of a not-so-young person. (Full-disclosure: at this point I am a not-so-young person.)

I’ve always said that music is essential to me. It’s something that fundamentally makes me happy. The more I’m listening to music and playing my own, the more cheerful and productive I get in every area of life. One of the difficult parts of making the switch to a fully-remote life during the pandemic was a lack of commute – not because I like commuting, but because it is where I got my required one hour of music a day.

As music has come and gone from my daily routine in the past few years, I’ve realized that it’s not only my mood that changes when I have tunes in my ears or beneath my fingers. I feel like my actual age oscillates. New music makes me feel mentally and physically younger.

That might sound delusional, so allow me to explain by way of Wet Leg.

I’ll be honest, when I heard there was a hip new band named “Wet Leg,” I did not leap to listen to their music. Hip bands with clever names and ironic, punny songs come and go every year, each putting their own tweak on the current trends in pop production. After a few years of not connecting with them at all, I felt like hearing each successive entry just made me feel older. I just didn’t get what the youths were into, which made me decidedly not a youth.

Then, one day last in 2021, I happened to see the YouTube thumbnail for Wet Leg’s “Wet Dream” video, featuring lead singer and guitarist Rhian Teasdale dressed like an erstwhile modern day pilgrim wearing a pair of oversized lobster claws.

“Okay,” I thought, “it’s a hip band whose first song shares a word with their band name and is accompanied by an ironic video. I am going to hate this. Here we go.” [Read more…] about Music Monday: “Wet Dream” – Wet Leg

A Krisis on Circuit 42! – Podcast Appearance

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I had the pleasure of sitting down with co-hosts Ian and Stephanie for this week’s episode of the Circuit 42 podcast!

I walked with a list of recent comics to discuss, but we wound up having a wide-ranging discussion that covered Drag Race, drag artists as superheroes and superheroes as drag, Bettie Page and Elvira in comic books, Rob Liefeld being a terrific “idea guy,” the unique power of Kickstarter as a marketing platform, the woes of international comic fans, and much more!