Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
Saturday night E and I were excited to score a pair of tickets to see Phoenix at The Tower from awesome XPN local music blog The Key. The seats were prime – slightly forward of the soundboard, just off the left aisle.
Unfortunately, the concert was less than prime. Way less. (For a more positive spin, check out the review @ Phrequency, which includes some killer photos.)
The Tower, as shot on my phone this June when we saw Conan there.
The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting X-Men ongoing series – including X-Men solo series – via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated April 2016 with titles scheduled for release through December 2016.
he X-Men universe consists of a lot of comic titles as one of Marvel’s most-popular properties and the first after Spider-Man to develop its own set of spin-off series.
Ever since the successive launch of New Mutants, X-Factor, Excalibur, and Wolverine in the 1980s there have never been less than five X-titles in circulation counting both team books and X-Men solo series.
The biggest titles with the lengthiest runs tend to be team books, followed by X-Men solo endeavors from Wolverine, Cable, and Deadpool. However, there are many other X-Men ongoing series that last just a few years and are less collected than their more popular brethren.
This page lists every X-Men ongoing title that occurred in the main Marvel Universe (Earth-616). “Ongoing” means the titles – however brief – were not advertised as limited series (i.e., headlined with “Issue # of N”). The biggest, most-long-running titles will link to their own guides, but titles with a shorter lifespan are explained right here.
[Read more…] about Collecting X-Men regular series as Graphic Novels
Warning: This image actually has nothing to do with the rest of this post. It just makes me giggle.
Holy continuity, Batman! Do you remember where I left off over a month ago?
In short, I had to give up my monthly comic book addiction to fuel my constant need to be online, which brought with it Real-Time Strategy games like Warcraft & Starcraft. Static characters on a page couldn’t hold a candle to tiny sprites with their own hit points and attributes.
Oh, Sega Dreamcast. We had such good times. I will remember you. Will you remember me? Don’t let your life pass you by. Weep not for the memories.
I even got into console gaming, playing endless rounds of Madden 2k on Kenny’s Dreamcast.
Yeah, I’m old.
Actually, our college D&D sessions represented a major milestone for me - I RPed a male character!
The result? The Peter who dug comic books and video games evaporated completely long before I turned 21. Elise never met him, aside from a weekly night of Dungeons & Dragons and some in-browser gaming.
Any attention and cash I had left to spare after class and E went to my burgeoning collection of songs – both by other people and by me – and concert tickets, when I could afford them.
I really thought geek-Peter was completely dead and gone. That is, until graduation…
To find out how that happened next, you… well, you don’t have to do anything. I need to write at least two more entries of this transcribed oral history of geekdom. And, hey, let’s not forget that the impetus of this entire thing was my best-in-class Guide to Collecting X-Men Comics as Trade Paperbacks. As of today I am officially caught up to 2010 in X-Continuity!
Critical or contrary – which one are you? More importantly, can anyone else tell the difference?
The topic is on my mind thanks to something Gina said to me a few weeks ago. E and I were chatting with Gina after the last show of her Fringe Fest play. We joked about different narrative structures – ways her play of three connected one-acts could be turned backwards or inside out to get a different reaction.
(I know, nerds, right?)
At some point this phrase emerged from my lips:
That would be very Nolan-esque – like Inception, only without being awful.
Now, I don’t want to get into Inception drama – we’re all entitled to an opinion. I typically love Nolan, but what’s relevant here is people who liked Inception outnumber the dislikers nine to one and I’m in the “dislike” camp.
That’s where Gina’s response comes in. She whipped her head over to me and said,
Oh, Peter, you’re just contrary.
After years of having buck teeth and big ears, very few insults get under my skin, but this one cut deep.
I protested, “I’m not contrary! I’m just critical. I like plenty of things other people like. Twitter! Dark Knight! Lady Gaga!”
Despite my protests, Gina stuck to her label. To her, I’m contrary – I frequently dislike things enjoyed by a majority.
I don’t see that as contrary – just critical. If my reasoned response is to dissent on a musician or a movie while 90% of the world loves it, that’s part of my critical barometer. If you don’t like Inception either, maybe you’ll agree with some of my other opinions. Whole recommendation engines have been built on this idea, like Netflix and Hunch.
Disagreeing just means I’m critical, not contrary. Right? If we all agreed all of the time, what would be the point of art?
Let’s return to my opening query: critical or contrary – which one are you?
The answer is probably both. It depends on the perspective.
Like the proverbial stopped clock, any committed critic is going to come off contrary sometimes, just like a dedicated contrarian can still hit the critical mark on occasion.
Your challenge is that people listen to critics and ignore what’s contrary. When you’re the odd one out as a critic you still have to frame your opinion in a way that can engage and inspire your audience – even if that’s just your best friend.
Which one am I? In my head I’m a critic, and when it comes to music almost everyone I know trusts me to be one – because I offer reasoned opinions about everything from Gaga to Rodrigo and Gabriella. With movies, if I only take the time to dish on popular films I dislike (which are numerous) clearly I’m coming out all wrong. If I want my disappointment in Inception to be taken seriously maybe I need to dial up my enthusiasm about movies slipping past other people’s radars.
What about you?
It is 10 days until Crushing Krisis’s 10th birthday and I am having an editorial calendar failure. And a brain failure.
Really it’s kind of an overarching not being able to do anything except nap and read comic books failure, which as failures go is not such a bad one. It’s way better than the “so overstressed I can feel the ulcers growing” brand of failure I was experiencing two weeks ago.
Actually, I think the napping and the comic books had a lot to do with escaping that particular pit of despair. Napping, comic books, little purple pills, and not drinking a gallon of lemonade every single day.
Meanwhile, in news related to the brain failure, I have discovered that being in three separate musical acts each with their own set of unique arrangements is the functional limit of my brain capacity. The wherewithal to recall all of those songs seems to have jettisoned my ability to return phone calls or schedule home repairs.
I am now off book on seventeen bass arrangements for Filmstar. As long as someone yells out what key we’re in at the start of the song I am fine, except for the one song that only makes sense if I pretend we are playing a David Bowie song. Like, if we begin and I’m like, “Oh, it’s a Filmstar song,” then I am a hot mess and play about two correct notes. But, if I instead say, “This is the secret, unreleased B-Side to ‘Suffragette City,’” then I’m fine.
Meanwhile, as Arcati Crisis Gina and I are working on two new songs, which – per our modus operandi – are completely different in every possible way from anything we’ve done before. One is an acoustic dance song from me equally influenced by Gaga and Heart, which I just previewed on our Facebook page.
(The other is a Gina tune which could be referred to as “Message In a Bottle from an American Girl in Russia,” but is actually called the much more succinct “American Mikaela.” It’s chorus hook is so destructively catchy that I have successfully lobbied to sing it three times as much as Gina originally planned.)
There’s also the musical artist that is me, who I can sometimes forget about in all of the commotion between the other two and commuting to my actual, fully-paid, highly-beloved full time occupation. He’s rehearsing to support Mieka Pauley this weekend at our house concert shindig, where he is rumored to debut a brand new Madonna cover (and, when you rumor something to yourself, it’s pretty sad if it doesn’t come true, so I need to get on that).
Meanwhile, ten years minus ten days ago I was sitting in a dorm room with a broken collar bone, registered for a year of music courses totally outside of my major and wondering if I would have anywhere to live in a month.
Ten years. Wow. What were you doing ten years ago today?