Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Fantastic Four – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated May 8, 2025! The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade-reading order on collecting Fantastic Four comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated May 2025 with titles scheduled for release through December 2025.


Fantastic Four (1961) #600

The Fantastic Four are known as “Marvel’s First Family,” not only because they are the most enduring family of the Marvel Universe but because their debut marks the start of the superheroic Silver Age at Marvel! [Read more…] about Fantastic Four – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Marvel Universe Events, Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Updated Apr 16, 2025. A comprehensive guide to line-wide Marvel Events – including story overviews, characters, issue lists, and how they can be read via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperbacks. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2025 with titles scheduled for release through June 2025.

Marvel Events HandbookSecret Wars. Inferno. Age of Apocalypse. Civil War. Secret Invasion. Avengers vs. X-Men. When it comes to epic-sized comic book events, Marvel Comics is the all-time champion.

These line-wide Marvel Events are overarching stories that can involve dozens of Marvel heroes – if not all of them, all at once! Events occur as either or both of  direct crossovers between ongoing titles and special limited-series.

That can make them hard to keep track of, especially at the current rate of one or more events each year. It’s also hard to track down every issue or graphic novel. It’s easy to miss issues or buy the same comic in overlapping collections.

That’s why I created this page – it includes summaries, issue lists, and collection info for every major Marvel event, ever.

Click the links below to leap down the page to the corresponding section. I have omitted most line-specific crossovers with only one or two cross-line spinoffs, such as X-Men’s Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Hulks. [Read more…] about Marvel Universe Events, Collecting Guide & Reading Order

#MusicMonday: “Trip To Your Heart” – Britney Spears

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This is a little embarrassing. Let me try to explain.

I’ve been really into synthesizer pop lately, because Studio Krisis has come into possession of a new synth and it’s not a language I speak fluently.

I am also working my way through roughly 1,700 songs from 2011 that I acquired in December.

Okay, enough excuses: this post is really about a Britney Spears song. I think it is awesome.

There, I’ve said it.

Two weeks ago E and I were lounging in our hotel room in Las Vegas between adventures when this came on my iPod. I looked up from my book. “This is really good,” I said. E nodded behind her book. When the song began to wind down I reached beside me and clicked back to the beginning without looking at the title or artist.

After two listens I picked up my iPod, curious to know who the singer was. It had a sort of UK pop sound to it, but also reminded me of the electric lounge of The Bird and The Bee or even The Cardigans.

Imagine my surprise to discover the singer: Britney Spears.

Let’s be clear here – I love pop music, but I do not like Britney Spears. In fact, 2011’s Femme Fatale is the only LP of hers I even own (mostly because we dance to a couple of the songs in Zumba).

This is mostly because she generally does not sing very well on record, and if you don’t sing well and you don’t write your own songs I don’t really get the point of you existing as an artist. At that point your face is just an ad campaign for someone else’s beats.

“Trip To Your Heart” disproves that theory, to a degree. She sounds lovely on it in a higher register I didn’t even know she had. Sure, she probably has a super-computer’s worth of digital processing tuning her up. She always has that, yet many of her other vocals still sound like hell.

Britney or not, if you like dreamy synth-pop with a good beat, this song is for you.

A Taste of Vegas @ Mesa Grill

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The food of Las Vegas is at once awful and awesome, sometimes within the same meal. It is an unhealthy mecca of artery-busting delights.

Yesterday I had the best bite of food I have ever bitten in my life. It was the Rough Cut Tuna Nachos at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill.

I don’t know if I can properly describe the experience to you. The rarest of rare tuna that almost melted on my tongue, dotted with capers and drizzled with reductions of chilis, avocados, and mangos, served on bite-sized puffed corn chips.

I thoughtlessly stuffed my first serving into my mouth and then halted, closing my eyes and sighing deeply as the flavor of it seeped into my tastebuds.

After that, my eating was much more measured. Each chip had to be perfectly arrayed with the correct blend of flavors, less I wind up with a sub-optimal bite of food. Each time I involuntarily closed my eyes once the taste hit my tongue. The experience was downright sensual.

The dish was $16, and included enough raw cubes of tuna for two. I would have gladly swiped my credit card for a $16 charge for every bite.

We will be going back to Mesa Grill.

PS: They also serve Cosmopolitan‘s #1 Must-Drink cocktail: The Cactus Pear Margarita, as pictured above. It was every bit as good of a bright pink drink as that distinction implies (and I don’t even like tequila).

PPS: Actually, we didn’t have a single thing that was less than amazing in the entire meal. Highly recommended.

Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – New Material

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Uncanny X-Men issue #534.1, from Uncanny X-Men: Breaking Point

Today I bring you a list of the best collections of new X-Men material released in 2011, which collect stories originally published over the last 18 months of comics.

Occasionally I wonder if comic collecting as an adult is merely a shameless attempt at recapturing our youth now that we have the budget to appreciate it properly – especially as I and many other fans (let’s be honest) fetishize premiere format reprints of the comics we coveted as a kids. (Last week’s post covered the best of those from 2011.)

Is there anything to this hobby other than rewarding our inner teenage geeks?

If there’s an answer to be found in X-Men comics, it must be on this list. These are the twelve new X-Men stories that captured my imagination like those old issues I still obsess over, and I categorize “the wonder of feeling like a kid again” separately from “trying to recapture youthful feelings with a dose of well-preserved nostalgia.” [Read more…] about Top 12 X-Men Collections of 2011 – New Material