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

July 18, 2016 by krisis

I’m happy to share The Definitive Cloak & Dagger Collecting Guide and Reading Order! It includes every Cloak & Dagger appearance ever published – both together and apart – with notes on trade-reading order and the importance of guest appearances.

I know what most of your reactions will be – “Who the hell are Cloak & Dagger?” They’re not exactly Marvel’s most-prominent characters and they haven’t had an ongoing series to call their own since the 1990s, but they happen to be Marvel’s most-recent property to garner an order for a television season – on ABC’s Freeform network.

Bright-eyed readers may have seen this guide already, but as of today the guide is officially out of its beta-release phase and ready to help you collect Marvel’s pair of would-be-mutants who recently garnered an order for a TV show!

This is one in a series of new and revised collection pages I’ll be highlighting; last week I covered Doctor Strange, and you can already see several of the others in action in Crushing Comics.

Who are Cloak & Dagger?

The short answer is that they were writer Bill Mantlo’s insertion into Spider-Man of a pair of teens whose lives were altered by the prevalence of street drugs in blighted, early-80s NYC. They adopted the powers of darkness and light and briefly took on a life of their own for the next decade.

Marvel was having a bit of a younger-character resurgence in the early 80s, with Chris Claremont spinning New Mutants off of X-Men and Louise Simonson launching Power Pack. Cloak & Dagger were conceived just prior to those two moves but offered a terrific contrast to them both. They were more rough-around the edges than either team, and lacking in the scholastic environment of Xavier’s school and the familial love of Power Pack. (They would make guest appearances in both series.)

Cloak & Dagger first spun off into a 1983 mini-series after their Spider-Man debut, and then into a 1985 ongoing title that was released bi-monthly. In 1987, they were relaunched into Strange Tales, Vol. 2, a monthly title they split with Doctor Strange.

Then there was the little matter of mutant hysteria. [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger (and an explanation of who they are)

Marvel Now! 2016 – a book-by-book break-down

July 15, 2016 by krisis

It’s that time again!

Marvel Now 2016 July brings us the October comic solicitations, and that’s the month Marvel uses each year as their launchpad for a new wave of books. That’s the result of an increasingly network television influenced strategy for Marvel’s comic publishing, which sees volumes of books as seasons of a show that it makes sense to renew regularly – sometimes each year.

With their 2016 Marvel Now! initiative, Marvel has so far announced 62 titles, including a stunning 33 new launches or limited series (and that’s with only one X-Men title so far on the slate!). This post covers every single title, detailing what it’s replacing, the creators, how hyped I am, and what it will be about – plus, it points you to the collection & reading order guides where each title will be recapped.

Basically: this is your one-stop resource for all things Marvel Now! 2016.

If a title isn’t on the Now! list, is that a smoking gun that it’s cancelled without a replacement? That’s unclear. For example, Moon Knight releases issue #7 in October, but the issue listed for Now! is #10 – so, these new jumping-on points will be staggered. It could be some of the unlisted books are mid-arc and didn’t make sense to label as Now, or it could be they’re due for a relaunch in the new year. Of course, I expect some of them will simply wrap up in the three months of Now launches.

Here’s the list of titles so far absent from the Marvel Now checklist: [Read more…] about Marvel Now! 2016 – a book-by-book break-down

Kickstartered: Steve Lichman by Dave Rapoza & Dan Warren

July 13, 2016 by krisis

Given that my to-read pile of graphic novels is currently a nine-month backlog and my to-play pile of new games is at least six boxes deep, I thought it might not be a terrible idea to highlight things I receive from Kickstarter as they roll in, rather than whenever I get around to reviewing them.

Steve Lichman, Vol. 1 arrived a few weeks ago, and I must admit I had completely forgotten it existed since the Kickstarter campaign closed in October.

It only added to my confusion that the padded envelope I opened contained a cloth-bound hardcover book the size and heft of a novel with a skeleton debossed onto the cover in gold foil. Had I pledged to support a horror anthology?

In fact, this tome was a graphic novel – quite literally the nicest graphic novel I think I’ve ever received out of my collection of thousands of books. It has all of the external trappings of a beautiful signed-and-numbered 1st edition novel (mine is #5,518) and the paper and reproduction quality of a professionally produced comic collection – all for less than Marvel charges for a crap-quality six-issue trade paperback.

That means creators Dave Rapoza & Dan Warren self-published a literal 250 pages of comic all in one go. Given that the history of Kickstarter is littered with the failed projects of similarly ambitious creators, the quality of this project (and it hitting 1000% of its funding goal) makes more sense when you learn that Rapoza is a professional illustrator who works with client IP like Bethesda (Fallout, Elder Scrolls), Hasbro, and Blizzard (Warcraft), and on concept art for films like the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

It’s hard to explain exactly what it’s about. I guess it’s It’s sort of like Seinfeld if Jerry was a Lich and George was Dracula and their apartment was a dungeon? I don’t know, I’m an old, you can probably think of a better sitcom analogy than that after you read a lengthy preview of Steve Lichman on Rapoza’s site. Here’s their Kickstarter video:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stevelichman/steve-lichman-volume-1/

As for how I found about this project or why I pledged… I’ll get back to you on that one. It literally doesn’t ring a single bell, and I can’t find mention of it on any of the comic sites I frequent. This might have literally been a blind pledge from browsing the Kickstarter comics section, and it could not have possibly turned out to be a better choice!

Here’s another pair of photos of their marvelous book! I’ve loved the humor first few pages and the illustrations are consistently great, so I’m looking forward to digging into this further when I dig deep enough into my to-read pile.

Steve Lichman Endpaper

Steve Lichman Interior

Using Pokémon Go for interval training (or, how I went from Couch to 5k in one day)

July 12, 2016 by krisis

I just ran five miles.

The last time I ran five miles was NEVER. The longest run I’ve ever been on (even with a generous definition of “run”) was The Color Run 5k – and that was with Allie as my personal pace car.

The last time I ran 5k was last night.

I had no pace car these past two days – just Pokémon. I return to you accomplished, sore, sweaty, way more knowledgable about Pokémon Go and with four more levels to show for it, but still not much more of a Pokémon fan than I was two nights ago.

How did mobile game I don’t even love get me from couch to 5k in one day, and from 5k to 5 miles the next?

The first step was deciding I was playing – and running – for efficiency. I generally only have an hour to play at night after EV heads to bed if I expect to have time to do anything else before passing out. With limited time to play, I wanted to maximize my level gain and cover a lot of physical ground to try to collect a lot of stuff – both Pokémon and items – since I’m way too weak for my local Pokémon Gyms.

The temptation is to amble constantly so you can engage with each potential encounter or to camp in an area that’s heavily lured. Here are three ways to short-circuit that to turn playing into more consistent exercise: [Read more…] about Using Pokémon Go for interval training (or, how I went from Couch to 5k in one day)

New Collecting Guide: Doctor Strange (plus, 5 suggestions for new fans)

July 11, 2016 by krisis

I’m happy to share The Definitive Doctor Strange Collecting Guide and Reading Order! It includes every Doctor Strange issue ever published with notes on trade-reading order and guest appearances.

Agamatto-eyed readers may have spotted it last week, but as of today the guide is officially out of its beta-release phase and ready to help you collect Marvel’s most-famous mystic.

This is the first of several new and revised collection pages I’ll be highlighting over the next few weeks; you can already see several of them in action in Crushing Comics.

Doctor Strange was one of Marvel’s original Silver Age heroes, debuting in 1963 in Strange Tales, a title he split with Nick Fury. He is a brilliant-but-prideful surgeon whose career is ruined when his hands are injured in an accident, and in his quest to repair them he stumbles into the world of mysticism.

Like Fury, he was one of the few freshly-invented Silver Age solo heroes not to be hoovered up by The Avengers. This was exploited by his inclusion in The Defenders, a team of relative outcasts that also included The Hulk, Namor, and Silver Surfer.

Aside from a brief blip at the beginning of the 70s, Strange starred in an ongoing book in continuous publication through 1996, when his third volume was cancelled with no replacement.

Unlike fellow hot-in-the-90s hero Ghost Rider, Strange got no ongoing revival in the 00s, although he was finally absorbed by the Avengers under Brian Bendis’s tenure (partially due to his participation in The Illuminati).

After playing a critical (some may say “starring”) role in Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers mega-story that began in 2013, Doctor Strange finally found his way back into an ongoing title from Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo in the fall of 2015 in anticipation of his big screen debut in 2016.

I’ve always had affection for the good doctor, but I did some foot-dragging on giving him his own guide due to his relatively low profile in past years. However, with his movie coming up this fall, it was finally time to attack his guide – no small feat, since he’s had over a dozen series and one-shots to call his own plus a starring role in most incarnations of The Defenders.

If that all sound great but you’re kind of new to this comics game, what should you sample to find out of you like Doctor Strange? Here’s a few books to try: [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Doctor Strange (plus, 5 suggestions for new fans)