Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Crushing Comics S01E037 – Grant Morrison’s New X-Men (and why he writes the best Jean Grey)

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I start off this episode musing about the skill of talk show hosting. It’s one thing to be able to extemporaneously monologue with coherence, but it’s another skill entirely to be able to do that while doing something with your hands – like unwrapping bricks of comic books.

The books I wind up unwrapping are a major part of the uncanny origin of my now-massive comic book collection. Grant Morrison’s New X-Men were the first trio of books I had delivered to our new house back in 2010. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with them since then, though even from my first read it’s been clear to me that Grant Morrison understood Jean Grey like no writer before him – and, none after have gotten the chance!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 37 features Grant Morrison’s complete run on New X-Men, covered in my guide to New X-Men and X-Men, Vol. 2.

Song of the Day: Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Ocean”

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I am in awe of anyone who can perfectly reproduce a performance.

I’m not just talking about concert pianists or ballet dancers. Marching bands fascinate me. E spent her high school years playing clarinet in a marching band, and it just blows my mind that she not only had to reproduce intricate music with her breath and fingers, but also hit the mark on choreography at the same time.

A famous anecdote of mine is that when I auditioned for an was cast in my first play, Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest, I thought that you didn’t have to learn your exact lines in theatre. I thought you learned the general semblance of them and then just sort of did some improv from there.

I’ve spent my fair amount of time on stage since that first time, but always in plays or in rock bands. I’ve repeated performances of many monologues and songs, but I’ve never been under the illusion that I am performing a note-for-note, beat-for-beat replica of an original. It’s not in my nature as a performer. Even at my most controlled I introduce many tiny deviations into every moment, both intentional and unintentional.

(This, I think, is part of my fascination with the process of film acting – not that two of your takes will ever been seen played on top of each other, but that you must be consistent enough for the performance and energy of any of your takes to match up with another one.)

I think that fascination with perfect reproduction has a lot to do with what I enjoy classical piano recordings so much. Orchestral music is beautiful, but it’s the product of dozens of people working together to create something greater. Intellectually I know each player is a highly-trained perfectionist, but the pessimist in me insists that there could be many tiny variations their performances could be masked by several others.

That’s not the case when you watch a single person seated at a piano. They are performing a high wire act with no net on an unforgiving instrument with no slurs or bends. The piano is both dynamic and impractically linear. Despite the potential for massive polyphony, you only have ten fingers and two feet to control it – and you can transform yourself in a 12-piece orchestra where each one of those appendages does its own distinct work.

I first heard Ravel’s “Une barque sur l’ocean” just a few weeks ago, in the trailer to Call Me By Your Name. I watched it because I had heard so much about the indelible performances in the film, but for the first half of it I couldn’t concentrate on the people. All I could hear was the music.

When I hear most piano music I can almost visualize the notation dancing and alive, the staffs rolling past with notes lighting up as they’re played. I couldn’t do that with “Une barque sur l’ocean.” I couldn’t picture individual notes or those twelve appendages. Even before I knew the name of the song, all I heard were great rolling waves of notes and a wash of blue green color.

Given my vivid reaction to hearing it, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the song was from the impressionist period of composing, nor didn’t come as a great surprise to learn that Ravel was a contemporary of Debussy (who I love). Yet, it wasn’t enough just to know the song and the composure. I had to see it played. How could two hands, ten fingers, and two feet create that rich, roiling sound? [Read more…] about Song of the Day: Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Ocean”

Crushing Comics S01E036 – When are you susceptible to change? + Absolute Planetary Volumes 1 & 2

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Do you know what you get coupons for new toothpaste when you move into a new home? It’s not just to welcome you – it’s because moving makes you more apt to change your habits!

It’s fitting that after chatting about changed habits that I pulled out one of the handful of comics that brought me back to collecting when I moved into my first house in 2010 – Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

The Champions – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Updated Apr 16, 2025! The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Marvel’s The Champions comic books and omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2025 with titles scheduled for release through February 2026.

Reading and Collecting The Champions

The Champions is one of Marvel’s most unusual teams, with a strange history both on the page and behind the scenes.

The team began its life as a pitch by writer Tony Isabella. While the details have grown hazy over the years, one thing is certain – Isabella had designs on Angel and Iceman, the two X-Men left over after the original team was splintered by the arrival of the Giant Size X-Men team, and the other three characters – Hercules, Black Widow, and Ghost Rider – were thrust upon him. The title was written entirely by Isabella and then by Bill Mantlo (with Claremont filling in on #4) along with a merry-go-round of artists.

The series opens with them all five characters on the UCLA campus, each for their own reasons, when it comes under assault by a strange group of anachronistic villains. They turn out to be agents of the god Pluto, who intends Hercules to be wed to Hippolyta!

Despite this oddball set-up, The Champions weirdly worked well. It’s a series about heroes being heroes because they simply cannot help it, joined together by proximity more than friendship or destiny. It gave Iceman and Angel a chance to breath away from Cyclops and Jean. It gave Black Widow a rare chance to shine after her breakup with Daredevil – she would go on to become the team’s chairman. And, it showed just how brutal and terrifying Ghost Rider could be – as he tended to have an unsettling effect on his teammates.

If fans took interest, this team could have become the de facto West Coast version of the Avengers years before that team made its debut. Alas, despite Marvel’s best efforts to promote the book it ended early, with its epilogue shuffled into a pair of Spider-Man issues.

That was the end of The Champions for forty years – unusual, given Marvel’s propensity for reviving their intellectual property every so often. In this case, it was because they were barred from doing so! While Marvel’s Champions were dormant, Heroic Publishing had began publishing a Champions comic book to support their popular 1980s role playing game.

Whether Marvel wanted to get the gang back together or not, they couldn’t – so Iceman and Angel returned from X-Factor to the X-Men in 1991, Black Widow and Hercules anchored the “Leather Jacket” Avengers, and Ghost Rider briefly expanded into his own franchise in the 90s.

Flash forward to 2016. Marvel is launching a youthful new team in the wake of Civil War II featuring characters like Miles Morales and Ms. Marvel that is quite deliberately not The Avengers. What could they be called? While the obvious answer seems like it ought to be “New Warriors” (especially with Nova on the team!), Marvel’s editorial team got a twinkle in their eye and asked Legal if they might be able to revive The Champions trademark – and they could!

That’s how we got a new Champions team so unlike the first one – it’s literally just an IP grab by Marvel of their own IP!

Surprisingly, this new Champions turned out to have some real staying power. Marvel’s youngest generation of heroes were never quite the right fir for the Avengers team they hero-worshipped as kids. They’re much more compelling when they are left to their own devices.

[Read more…] about The Champions – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Crushing On: Netflix’s Dark

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It’s pretty hard to convince me to sit down to watch a non-drag television show these days.

TV is a time suck and its decompressed storytelling can be stultifying. It’s a lot like back in high school when I wouldn’t partake in slow dances at the prom. “They’re just really long, boring hugs,” I would say, “They make perfect bathroom breaks. Come get me for the next fast song.”

(I still mostly feel this way about slow dances.)

That’s why I am relatively surprised to inform you I have binged all ten hour-long episodes of Dark, Netflix’s new German import, in a matter of days. And I loved it, aside from some questionable dubbing.

If you are a fan of Stranger Things and either Lost or Primer, I strongly suspect you will love it, too.

Dark is set in 2019 in Linden, a small German town that has built itself around the economic stability of a local nuclear power plant. The same people have lived in Linden for years, so that families have aged into multi-generational conflicts stretching back to the years just after World War II.

It is June in the opening moments of the show. We hear a disembodied monologue about the cyclical nature of time and then witness a man, Michael Kahnwald, die by suicide. Kahnwald leaves a letter behind, with instructions not to open it until November.

We return to the town in November, just short of the letter’s open-by date. Kahnwald’s son Jonas is trying to reacclimate to the daily grind of school just as teenage classmate has gone missing.

It’s not just his disappearance that unnerves the town. It dredges up memories of another boy that went missing, 33 years prior.

That boy was never found.

At first it seems as though the show will simply be about how Linden refuses to accept its roiling undertow of darkness, both in the present and from the past. Both parents and teens seem to recoil from the emotions surrounding from the elder Kahnwald’s death, and from Jonas and his troubled mother, Hannah.

The town also is hesitant to deal with the teen boy’s disappearance in any realistic way, from widening their search to more closely watching their children. Residents seem uncomfortable when the school principle urges them to take care and action.

At the end of that first episode, we watch as another young boy disappears – seemingly into thin air, much as Will disappears in the first episode of Season 1 of Stranger Things. 

It’s an easy comparison to make, and for an episode it seems like the shows will be going to a similar place. However, just as Stranger Things exploded at its halfway point, Dark turns into a totally different kind of story at the end of its second episode. Maybe an entirely different kind of show!

The subsequent hour of television a revelation, but also a sizable speed-bump to your binging. I almost quit watching.

Even when I am riveted by a TV show, I am awful at character names. It takes a show like Battlestar Galactica, full of constantly repeated unique call signs, for me to remember what anyone is called.

Dark starts out with over a dozen named characters, all of whom are vaguely similar-looking Teutonic white people who I could barely tell apart. Then comes the massive third episode twist that felt at points like a quiz on how well I had been paying attention to the first two episodes.

I thought I was done. I briefly turned the show off. Luckily, , which worked well as a character-name cheat sheet and also a plot refresher.

Armed with knowledge (or, at least, a rudimentary amount of name-and-face recognition), I pressed forward. I’m so glad that I did. Despite some truly dreadful English dubbing and an overbearing, ominous soundtrack that sounds like something that Forgetting Sarah Marshall‘s Peter Bretter might have cooked up during a bender, the intricate story and strong cast of Dark makes it 10 episodes of TV that reward your attention.

That said… you have to be willing to leave it there. Time might be cyclical, but Dark ends in a very different place than it began – one that means its multi-generational web of lust, deceit, and vengeance likely won’t dominate a second season as it did the first. Add to that the Lost problem – despite leaving at least 27 major questions unanswered, showrunners Writer Jantje Friese and director Baran bo Odar don’t have a darn clue of where they’re headed in Season 2 [heavy spoilers in both those links!].

I’m fine with that. I think Dark works perfectly well as a twisted low-fantasy allegory about how the radiation of a nuclear plant poisons the relationships in a town, forcing its residents to live out the same little acts of violence again and again. I don’t need a wider world with a higher stakes plot.

As much as the final frames are meant to be an unpredictable shock, they line up surprisingly well with restarting first episode, so that you can watch this on an endless loop, digging deeper in to the relationships that drive the mysteries on each pass. (Thus, my comparison to all-time-fav Primer.)