Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Anatomy of a Comic Book Guide (and a comic book collection)

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Finally slaying the ancient dragon that was my Guide to Legion of Super-Heroes inspired me to keep track of all of the many steps and processes it takes to put together a new comic book guide.

I think more people making more great guides to consuming comics (and other media!) makes the internet better for all fans. I love Omar’s Near Mint Condition video Reading Orders, How To Love Comics’s guide to reading your first comic, ComicsXF Primers, and ComicReleases solicits roundsups. All of them overlap with what I’m doing a little bit, but they’re all helping people find the comics they might love, which is why I started doing this in the first place.

Below I’ve listed my process for putting together a comic guide, which is also how I build a personal reading list or new comic collection! When I get interested in a new character, author, or title for the first time, my approach is almost identical to guide-building, even if I don’t plan on making a guide.

Throughout the list, I used my well-established Excalibur Guide and my new Patrons-only Legion of Super-Heroes Guides as examples. I tried to share some interesting behind-the-scenes nuggets along the way for all of you process wonks.

Feel free to use this guidance to help you put together your own handy guides, whether that’s for personal use or on a website. I certainly have some “secret sauce” and proprietary tools that help me make my guides so definitive, but anyone could work through this checklist to figure out a comics property from top to bottom. It takes me anywhere from 4 to 30 hours, depending on the complexity of the character or title I’m researching.

Here’s the breakdown of my steps.

  1. Create a list of series or volumes
  2. Decide on scope
  3. Organize (but don’t over-sort)
  4. Research your series list (this will include narrowing and expanding)
  5. Compile a collected editions list
  6. Assemble the stuff
  7. Conduct a clean-up pass
  8. Consider the meta-data
  9. Enjoy! (No, really! Make a plan for enjoying this hard work.)
  10. Schedule your first check-up

Now, let’s dig in! [Read more…] about Anatomy of a Comic Book Guide (and a comic book collection)

New for Patrons: Legion of Super-Heroes Guide

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I’m back with a guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis that has been thwarting my efforts to complete it for over two years! Well, I’m happy to report that today I have finally defeated… The Definitive Legion of Super-Heroes Guide!

[Note: This guide is now live for ALL readers of Crushing Krisis thanks to the support of my Patrons!]

I first started drafting this Legion of Super-Heroes guide in 2019 when news broke that Brian Bendis would be reviving the Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH) franchise for the Rebirth era.

I quickly realized I was in over my head. I might be an X-Men X-Pert, but when it comes to the 30th and 31st Centuries of DC Comics continuity I am a complete neophyte. I quickly pinged several Legion mega-fans, who gave me wonderful advice. In fact, in one instance I actually hired one of them to help me with an outline of the many different eras of LOSH because I was so overwhelmed!

And then… life happened. I changed jobs. We moved houses. ComicBookDB went down. I got a new job. The pandemic began. I got a new computer. I changed jobs again. I built my new solicits database. The pandemic finally reached NZ in full force. Comixology died an ignominious death.

Through each of those changes, I kept pecking away at the Legion guide in my spare moments. Was it really as complicated as I was making it out to be? Actually, it seemed like every time I worked on it, it just got more complicated and even longer!

Finally, over the past two months I began to wrangle it into a discernible shape. And, having spent many hours and thousands of words on The Legion of Super-Heroes, I am now going to summarize the entire franchise for you as simply as someone who has only read about 20 LOSH comics can… [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Legion of Super-Heroes Guide

Legion of Super-Heroes – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Updated Mar 6, 2025! The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH), Legionnaires, & Legion Lost 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 May 2025.

DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH) are a far-future team assembled from the best and brightest young heroes from many different planets, each with their own unique powers and physiology. Think of it as a cross between the Teen Titans and the Green Lantern Corps.

We usually think of DC comics as arranged by their publishing era, like Silver, Bronze, Post-Crisis, or New 52, which also tend to come with a continuity reboot (or, at least, a light reshuffle). Legion of Super-Heroes is different. LOSH fans do think about their heroes in terms of continuity reboots, but those do not line up DC’s publishing eras. LOSH is considered to be rebooted whenever their future continuity is radically changed such that not all new LOSH stories line up with prior ones.

Sometimes this happens right in the middle of series!

You can read and enjoy any LOSH story or series on its own, but to understand how certain stories rely on each other and where you can follow a specific group of LOSH characters, it makes sense to think in terms of reboots.

For many DC heroes, the first examples of this come with the Silver Age, or immediately after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Yet, the original LOSH) stories extend from the Silver Age through the Bronze Age and past Crisis on Infinite Earths. While they did have a slight pivot after Crisis in 1989 with “Five Years Later,” it was still within the same era of storytelling.

LOSH’s first major inflection point comes with Zero Hour in 2004, which begins what fans refer to generically as “Reboot” continuity.

Then, DC rebooted LOSH continuity prior to Infinite Crisis. This is known to LOSH fans as “Threeboot” era. Characters are sometimes referred to as “New Earth” versions.

However, there is a fourth reboot tucked into 2009 called “Retroboot” that kicks off with the Lightning Saga crossover. It’s called Retroboot because Geoff Johns retroactively inserted his version of the team back into the original continuity just after Crisis on Infinite Earths before handing the team to their author from that period, Paul Levitz. While the rest of DC reboots significantly after Flashpoint in New 52, LOSH continued their “Retroboot” era.

And, finally, Brian Bendis launched a familiar-but-new rebooted LOSH after Doomsday Clock and the explosion of the Source Wall in 2019 as a home for his newly aged-up Jon Kent.

This page exists thanks to research and consultation from @Atmageth!

[Read more…] about Legion of Super-Heroes – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

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DIE is a brilliant comic book about role-playing from Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles.

DIE is also a brilliant storytelling role-playing game (RPG) from Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook and Decard.

This takes some explaining.

The thing you need to know right now is that if you want a deluxe physical copy of the RPG you have only three more days to Kickstart it, and if you want a deluxe physical copy of the entire comic run you can pre-order it right now (including pre-ordering from your local comic shop – yes, it’s already time to pre-order November hardcovers).

Okay, now on to the explaining!

DIE is one of the most-fascinating indie comic books of the past few years, both in concept and execution. The comic has already come and gone – it ran for 20 self-contained issues from December 2018 to September 2021 in four tight 5-issue arcs with no fluff.

(Mild first-issue spoilers lie ahead.)

The story started something like Stranger Things: 25th Anniversary Reunion.

A group of friends used to play role-playing games together in high school, but it ended with their sudden, inexplicable disappearance – and just-as-sudden reappearance years later, minus one member of their party and with a bevy of physical and psychological scars.

Where were they? They’ve never uttered a word about it to each other or anyone else and went on with their lives. Some of them were successful, some started families, while others could never shake their trauma and subsequent guilt.

On the anniversary of their disappearance they receive an unsettling reminder of their shared experience and they cannot help but be sucked back into something they know is much more serious and deadly than any game.

There are plenty of “real world people are transported into fantasy” stories out there, but DIE had a special, undeniable magic to it.

Central to that were the real world characters – five wounded adults, some of whom had spent their lives trying to be completely different than their game characters while others chased after becoming more like their fictional selves. They each had relatable stories about loss, addiction, identity, and disability, and those themes were amplified by the fantastical world around them.

As the story progressed, it became clear that this was a fantasy story with a very specific structure. In fact, the structure was so well-formed we could refer to it as a set of rules.

That’s because Kieron Gillen, in all of his wild genius, not only scripted a 20-issue comic story, but also the complete ruleset of the role-playing game the characters were playing in the story. [Read more…] about It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

Music Monday: “King” – Florence + The Machine

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We all experience music in different ways.

When Cecily told me there was a new Florence + The Machine song out a few months ago, she said, “the first time I listened to it, I saw colors.”

Seeing (or otherwise experiencing) colors when you hear music is a form of Synesthesia. Explained simply, Synesthesia is when you experience one kind of sensory input, but it triggers a secondary perception or sensation. A common example is that some people think or see the color blue when they see the number “8” – even if the number is written in black or yellow.

Cecily’s comment made me consider how I experience new music.

As a musician, when I hear a song for the first time my brain usually begins to dissect it. How does the story in the lyrics track, what are the intervals in the melody, what is the chord structure, how do both change in the chorus, etc.

Yet, if I can press pause on my musician brain for long enough, I also hear music in a different way. Sometimes when my musician brain is switched off I hear a song and I get an intangible feel from it, separate from its genre or musical structure.

I don’t meant that the song makes me feel something, like happy or sad. It’s hard to describe. It’s almost more like a sensation. Some songs feel cold, slick, and metallic, like if I were to lick them my tongue would get stuck. Others feel like rubbery bubbles in a roiling boil, all ricocheting off of each other. Some have a sensation of fullness, even if their arrangements are sparse. I’m not picturing an image or a scene, but a concept.

I don’t get a feel from every song, and I don’t necessarily like a song if I get a feel from it. Sometimes I get the feel and I’m like, “Oh, so that’s what this song is,” and then I never need to hear it again. Sometimes the feel is addictive and I immediately crave more of it. Other times it is fleeting, and if I don’t jot it down in the moment I lose it forever.

Is that also a form of Synesthesia?

It’s hard to say, partially because I have so much difficulty defining it. My “feels” are not frisson, or “musical chills,” where certain musical passages give you physical goosebumps. I get those, too, especially on big crescendos! But, they’re distinct from this other sensation.

This was all on my mind the first time I listened to “King” with E (a major Florence fan). We pumped it out at maximum volume through our stereo speakers in the living room. [Read more…] about Music Monday: “King” – Florence + The Machine