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New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s New Warriors (and an explanation of who they are)

November 20, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Today I’m happy to announce a humble page that makes me feel like Crushing Comics’s coverage of the Marvel Universe is mere steps away from being preliminarily complete, although I’ll still have dozens of other things to add to it.

That page is The Definitive New Warriors Collecting Guide and Reading Order. This new guide is available exclusively to CK’s Crushing Comics Club Patrons until January 8th. Want early access? Visit CK on Patreon to learn more.

new-warriors-1990-0001 New Warriors was an early-90s creation of Marvel, who was witnessing the cresting popularity of New Mutants and realizing they never truly had their own analog to Teen Titans despite having plenty of young heroes to staff such a team. Tom DeFalco, then the writer/editor of Thor, decided it was a hole that needed filling and cobbled together a team to do just that in Thor #411-412 in 1989.

Aside from the recently neglected Richard Rider as Nova, none of the other characters could be described a notable … or even memorable. The most high-profile was probably Firestar, created for the 1981 cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends that was still seen widely in syndication, but introduced into comics just a year prior by Chris Claremont in the pages of Uncanny X-Men.

Speedball was was a human superball created by DeFalco for a Spider-Man annual and expanded by Roger Stern and the imitable Steve Ditko in his own maxi-series. Namorita was a longtime Sub-Mariner supporting character at a time when Namor was making a major comeback thanks to John Byrne.

Marvel Boy was a largely forgotten creation of the 1970s, a youngster introduced in The Defenders to explain away the future Guardians of the Galaxy leader. His big story was being abused for being a mutant.

To that mix, DeFalco added his own creation, Night Thrasher, as their leader. This made sense, since on their own none of them really showed the kind of initiative it would take to assemble a super-team. Night Thrasher was a sort of Batman-esque hero who assembled a team to fight crime – which makes their initiation facing off against Terrax and then Juggernaut seem a bit outsized.

The team lasted through 75 issues in its initial run, guided two-thirds of the way by Fabian Nicieza. The scripter of both X-Force and New Warriors, Nicieza was known for wringing terrific human drama out of his young superheroes. New Warriors worked for the same reason all of Marvel’s best team titles have – not because it was part of a franchise like Avengers or X-Men, but because the team really became a family along the way.

new-warriors-2014-0001 Unfortunately, “assembled to fight crime (but not really ever doing that” and “team as family” combine to make successful reboots a tough prospect. Multiple iterations of New Warriors try the “we stumbled onto a fight” approach and barely live out a year, while an “assembled by Night Thrasher” version lasted for two. The team is probably best known to modern readers for being the cause of Civil War (seriously)! The best return to form was from Christopher Yost in 2014, which found Justice and Speedball in mentor roles across a new team of young heroes that mirrored the original line-up. Unfortunately, it didn’t catch fire and lasted only the requisite year.

Given it’s unremarkable pedigree, why is a New Warriors Collecting Guide so important to Crushing Comics?

It’s the reboots. New Warriors is one of only remaining Marvel series previously uncovered by Crushing Comics that was both long-running and rebooted multiple times. With it now catalogued, there’s scant few Marvel titles that have run for longer than two years and through more than three incarnations I’ve yet to recap – and none with this many issues to their names.

Since New Warriors itself only constitutes 129 issues I took an extra step for this guide. Not only does it cover how to collect each of those issues, but it presents a unified reading order for every appearance of each of the founding members of The New Warriors (except for Nova, who has his own guide, so I added perennial teammates Rage and Silhouette.) Now you can follow the team through events like Infinity War and through times when they were splintered, as in the wake of Civil War.

Just how collected are those 129 issues of New Warriors? [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s New Warriors (and an explanation of who they are)

35-for-35: 2002 – “5 Minutes” by Garrison Starr

November 20, 2016 by krisis

garrison-starr-promo-shot [Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]We’re getting into double-jeopardy now that I’m blogging about music from the years I’ve been blogging. I keep searching my archives thinking, “surely I’ve said something about this one before?”

This story starts in 1998. I don’t think Garrison Starr had written “Five Minutes” back then, but that when I first saw her play a live acoustic set in HMV on Walnut Street the day of my Junior Prom with my friends Ayelet and Susan.

I had been listening to Starr’s Eighteen Over Me ever since hearing “Superhero” play once on a local record station. It loved its framework of acoustic guitars with a heaping of heavy, squalling electrics on top. It made me feel like the music I had begun to write on my own acoustic guitar could transform into something bigger.

I desperately hunted for any other songs by her, including her 24/7 disc of promotional songs, and her indie Stupid Girl EP that I had to beg Mother of Krisis to let me order from the internet. (It was 1998 ! We couldn’t use credit cards on the internet, heaven forbid!)

Then, one random day while I was sitting in my dorm room in the spring of 2000, Garrison’s name popped up on MP3.com (remember that?) next to new music. It was an EP called Something To Hold You Over [now only available on iTunes], filled with seven songs that showed a clear progression in her songwriting. Some, like “I Can’t Wait” and “Take It Back” were fully produced and hinted at another LP with a massive sound. Others were just acoustic guitar and voice.

One of those songs was “Five Minutes.” It hit me like a punch in the gut.

It feels like love
Not some rigged-up holiday
Where I believe in somebody who can bring me down again
It feels like love
Is this how you make me pay?
Branding me with deep cuts that will never go away
Never go away

To say that I wore out this EP (which was eventually available to buy in physical form) is an understatement. I have the rhythm of the pick scrapes from “5 Minutes” seared into my brain. It’s one of the first songs I ever made up my own harmony to sing along with! I saw her play it live a year later with my friend Hillary (the first time I did not have to bribe my mother or a family friend to take me to see her at a 21+ venue), and I remember thinking as she thunked that first chord on her Martin acoustic guitar, “That is what an F should sound like every time.”

I can’t find that initial acoustic version on the internet, but you can still hear it – which is what brings us to 2002. Garrison Star released her second proper full-length record, the slightly country-tinged Songs From Take-Off to Landing. “5 Minutes” was the only song from Hold You Over to graduate to this disc, and after ten nude seconds of the acoustic EP version a full band slams into motion tracked directly on top of the original performance.

(They remembered to leave some room for my harmony.)

I will always be a fan of Garrison Starr. I’ve seen her many times since that first Junior Prom Day show almost 20 years ago and beamed with pride as she’s placed songs in movies and co-written with some of my favorite songwriters. I admire that she is still a performing songwriter after all these years andI own every one of her records.

She has never once put out a bad one.

I highly encourage you to follow her on Twitter, check out her discography, and listen to her band, Silent War.

PS: Since I can’t find the chords anywhere on the internet, they are:
Capo 1
Verse: Am E F C G/B
Chorus: (Am) F Am G F C Am G F

New Warriors – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Dec 22, 2024! The New Warriors comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated December 2024 with titles scheduled for release through July 2025.

This guide covers every series titled New Warriors, plus acts as a complete reading order for all of the major New Warriors characters: Night Thrasher, Namorita (AKA Kymaera), Firestar, Marvel Boy / Justice, Speedball (AKA Penance), Rage, and Silhouette. Nova is covered in his own guide. [Read more…] about New Warriors – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Backlash #1-5

November 19, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Backlash leaps to his own series after a brief supporting turn in Stormwatch and co-starring with Grifter in The Kindred.

(This clearly comes after WildCats #14 since Marlowe and Savage Dragon are on a first-name basis. It’s also after Wetworks #5, as we’ll see in Backlash #4. A brief scene with Diva seems as though it could fit between Stormwatch #11-12.)

backlash_v1_01 I’m not convinced anyone liked Backlash enough for him to merit his own series, but at this early stage in WildStorm’s life it seems they’re intent on playing out a certain set of plots and Backlash’s Daemonite hunt is one of them.

My main beef with Backlash to this point has been that his fearsome reputation doesn’t line up with what’s on the page. He’s supposed to be tough, but all we see is him getting the tar beat out of him. He’s supposed to be heartless and arrogant, and while he’s got the latter down to a tee he’s more tactical than he is cold-hearted.

This betrays a weak spot in WildStorm’s early scripting. Even when characters aren’t stereotypes, they’re a flat package of clearly labelled traits without much humanity. Backlash is a potentially rich enough character that he can actually portray these seemingly opposed traits, but no one with enough skill to balance it has written him yet – he slipped out of Stormwatch just before Ron Marz could get his hands on him.

Unfortunately, the writing that finally shows Backlash as the dynamic, serious threat he is rife with toxic masculinity that goes beyond any aspect of chauvinism in Backlash himself. In his five issue run, guards whine about their women and try to score with their female compatriots, Diva cries on Backlash’s shoulder, Backlash narrates about guarding his lover Diane even if she doesn’t want that from him (while calling her “kiddo” – super gross), a cop hopes to run into “a drunk starlet,” and Taboo is suddenly sex-crazed for Backlash.

Each taken on their own most of these would slip by me aside from the cop who wants to commit sexual assault, but they’re compounded by a particularly ugly one – Pike threatening Zealot with sexual violence. I think that’s a first so far in WildStorm.

Not only is the Zealot comment disgusting, but it’s the laziest of writing to take the toughest, most-dynamic character in your entire universe and decide the only way to weaken her is to threaten her sexual agency. It rings completely false on the panel, even if Pike is exactly that nasty of a guy.

This marks the first time a WildStorm title has kicked off without Brandon Choi having a hand in the proceedings. While Choi hasn’t exactly been the paragon of writing female characters not named Zealot, he’s been surprisingly even-handed when it comes to women as objects and women in peril. Not these writers – each issue is attributed to the crowd of artist Brett Booth, Jeff Mariotte, and Sean Ruffner. They’re giggling like maniacal pimpled teenage boys every time they can suggest one of their male characters might be able to seduce or assault a woman, and their version of agency for Taboo is her coercing Backlash into having sex.

Is Backlash any good if you can look past its misogyny? It might not be as weak as The Kindred, but it’s still just average tough guy fare, despite a killer first issue. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Backlash #1-5

35-for-35: 2001 – “Subdivision” by Ani DiFranco

November 19, 2016 by krisis

My second-favorite shot of Ani, shot by Danny Clinch.

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]As occasionally problematic and non-intersectional as Ani DiFranco can be, sometimes her willingness to just say stuff makes for compelling, provocative songs.

Case and point: her song “Subdivision” from 2001’s double-album Revelling/Reckoning, which starts with the line “White people are so scared of black people.”

Despite the bombshell opening line, “Subdivision” is not a song exclusively about racial divides, but about Ani’s beloved home town of Buffalo and her beloved country. Her city has seemingly been left behind by a march of modernity. Here, she wonders if that march is just about having the money and privilege to put more space between ourselves and our fears. Maybe if we’re far enough away we no longer have to confront them.

Except: when we’ve forgotten, buried, or sublimated all that we’ve been running away from, how will we know when it is stil driving our biases?

I had a sense of foreboding when I picked “Subdivision” as my song from 2001 as I prepared for this campaign last month. I’d be posting it just 10 days after the election. I wondered how its message would play in a post-election America, the same country we lived in the day before the election but potentially seen through a new lens. What would it say about a world where Hillary Clinton won the election? What about a world where Donald Trump won? Would it be equally true in both?

Now we know the outcome, and I ask that you simply listen and take from it whatever message you hear. That first line will always stand out for me, but in this redefined world it is teaching me something different than it was a few weeks ago.

Subdivision
by Ani DiFranco

White people are so scared of black people
They bulldoze out to the country
And put up houses on little loop-dee-loop streets
And while america gets its heart cut right out of its chest
The Berlin wall still runs down main street
Separating east side from west

And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse
In the boarded-up stores and the broken-down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
Just to prove they got no manners
No mercy and no sense