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RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16, Episode 4 – RDR Live & Night of 1,000 Chers Power Rankings

January 28, 2024 by krisis

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16, Episode 4 gave us another rendition of RDR Live – their spoof on Saturday Night Live – with with an all-time great “Night of 1,000 Chers” runway branded as “Everything Every-Cher All At Once.” The combo led to some great television, a shocking win, and some shake-ups in the power ranking!

This episode emphasized our tightly-grouped trio of front-runners, but it also allowed several queens from the middle of the pack to make a case for why they should stick around until the back half of the season. There was no “I was rooting for us” levels of disastrous performances here, although one queen in particular completely missed the reference of her skit.

RDR Live is actually an interesting bit of illusion. Because it is satirizing Saturday Night Live, it’s easy to think of it as an improv challenge where queens have some control over their fate. However, it’s really just a scripted comedy acting challenge like Daytona Wind, which means certain roles are locked in as mediocre or even risky based on the script.

(Here’s another interesting tidbit to mull over: These queens may have shot this “RDR Live” challenge without even seeing the All Stars Season 8 version, which aired around the same time this cast was sequestered. Of course, you don’t have to see a spoof of SNL to know how to play a spoof of SNL, but it meant that they were choosing roles without any intel of how Ru and the judges reacted to similar choices from another cast of queens.)

The result was the three front-runner queens making wise choices and doing well for themselves, one upstart taking a risk and paying it off big-time, and a handful of potential cannon fodder queens doing their best to break out of the pack of early-outs.

That yielded a Bottom Two that surprised me with a shocking elimination that I claimed would be impossible in my Power Rankings of the Mother of All Balls last week. Not only was this episode’s “Sashay Away” a shocker, but it also slightly jostled our pack of front-runners with a potential new narrative.

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best drag queen win!

Debating our Evergreen Marvel Omnibus List – LIVE on Near Mint Condition

January 25, 2024 by krisis

Are you ready for a fight? Today, I’m live with Near Mint Condition @ 1pm to share my Evergreen Marvel Omnibus List – that means they should never go out of print! Omar of Near Mint Condition, Jess the Omnidog, Ødfel, Lars of Mad Norwegian Press, and more distinguished panelists will share their lists, too… and then we’ll fight to the death over our officially endorsed Evergreen Marvel Omnibus List.

Okay, maybe not to the death, but it’s gonna get ugly! I mean, we’ll all look great, but fighting for your favorites and mocking the choices of the competition is highly encouraged.

Will the gang mock one of my choices like they did last time on the Evergreen DC Trade Paperback List show with Hawkman? Will OmniDog and I come to blows while we struggle to find things we actually disagree about? Tune in to Near Mint Condition on YouTube find out!

Evergreen Marvel Omnibus List on Near Mint Condition

ROM, Spaceknight – Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Guide to ROM, Spaceknight (New for Patrons!)

January 24, 2024 by krisis

Today, Marvel Comics is releasing an omnibus we never thought would come to exist, so I’m releasing a guide I never thought I’d ever make exclusively for Pledgeonaut Patrons of Crushing Krisis. It’s a guide to a toy that became a comic that defined the toy (which was a bit of a flop, as it turns out), but is now back thanks to our collective nostalgia. That’s right, it’s a Guide to ROM, Spaceknight – including his reading order at both Marvel Comics and IDW Publishing!

Guide to ROM, Spaceknight

Okay, I know what you’re thinking (unless you are exactly in the Gen X age range to have specific existing nostalgia for this comic book). You’re thinking: “Really, Krisis? A whole guide just for a comic book about a toy? Is this really necessary?”

In a word: YES.

In several more words: ROM is perhaps the most-shining example of Marvel’s 1970s and 1980s licensed character comics, which involved a bevy of Marvel’s best creators breathing life into media properties and toy lines in the form of a richly-built world and dynamic supporting casts.

Of course, Marvel’s Star Wars continuity is well-known and well-loved. And, Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe is rightfully lauded for its incredible tight coordination with the continuity of the toy line (for which he wrote all of the packaging copy). However, ROM by Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema, & Steve Ditko is remarkable for expanding a single failed toy launch into a heroic, dramatic, and occasionally tragic seven-year comic run that crossed over with the likes of the X-Men, the Avengers, Incredible Hulk, Power Man & Iron Fist, and more!

Except… Marvel was never allowed to reprint any of the issues… UNTIL TODAY, the day of the release of the first of three ROMNIBUS volumes collecting Rom’s complete 1979 series as well as the handful of guest appearances that Marvel has always been forbidden to reprint.

New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – January 24, 2024

January 23, 2024 by krisis

It’s the fourth new comic book day of the new year! This post covers Marvel Comics January 24 2024 releases. Missed last week’s releases? Check out last week’s post covering Marvel Comics January 17 2024 new releases.

This week in Marvel Comics: a ROMnibus appears, Straczynski & Gillen’s Thor runs finally reunited, Al Ewing up to something with Magneto, and more!

This list includes every comic and digital comic out from Marvel this week, plus collected editions in omnibus, hardcover, paperback, and digest-sized formats. For each new release, I’ll point you to the right guide within my Crushing Comics Guide to Marvel Comics to find out how to collect each character in full – and, if a guide is linked from this post, that means it is updated through the present day!

Marvel Comics January 24 2024 Collected Editions

Marvel Two-in-One Epic Collection: Two Against Hydra
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302931766 / digital)
See Guide to Fantastic Four or Guide to Thing (eventually). Marvel is slowly-but-surely pressing on with their collections of this Thing team-up title, which included a few more significant stories than its sibling Marvel Team-Up (1972). This volume (and all collections of this material, in general) skips issue #21, which includes a team-up with Doc Savage – Marvel no longer has the rights to reprint it.

ROM: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus Vol. 1
(2024 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302956714 / digital)
See Guide to ROM, Spaceknight. We never thought it could exist, but here it is – the ROMnibus! FYI, there are THREE DM variants of this omnibus cover – Frank Miller X-Men, George Pérez, and Sal Buscema. Marvel will cover this series in a trio of omnibuses, and there’s no guarantee they will print it in any other format (like Epic Collection), so this could be your one chance to finally own a reprinted, remastered collection of this material.

Siege
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302952792 / digital)
See Guide to Marvel Universe Events. Marvel has been working through paperback reprints of most of their line-wide events in the past year, likely to serve as complements to the Epic and Modern Era Epic lines. This event isn’t particularly satisfying to read on its own – all three of the Avengers books at the time heavily filled out the action, in particular New Avengers.

Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: The Menace Revealed Vol. 4
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302953911 / digital)
See Guide to Star Wars Legends – The Old Expanded Universe. This is not only the last Epic of this era (which stretches from pre-prequels through the prequel trilogy), but also potentially the second to last of the Legends Epics! There’s only one major uncollected series remaining – Star Wars: Invasion (2009) #0-16. After that, we’re just down to recollecting old Star Wars comics coverage omnibus format and Epic reprints.

Strange Academy: Year Two
(2024 paperback, ISBN 978-1302953003 / digital)
See Guide to Doctor Strange. This collects the back half of the original 2020 series and its “Finals” mini-series from 2022. Strange Academy had such a massive cast to start that sometimes it could be hard to zero in on the characters, their histories and powers, and how they related to each other. Here at the end the book is hyper-focused on one particular relationship and conflict, which escalates to a pretty epic level by the end. This is a rare in-continuity Marvel book that would work well for a YA crowd, though I’d perhaps call it for 10YO+ due to some themes related to drug use.

Thor by Straczynski & Gillen Omnibus
(2024 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302953010 / digital)
See Guide to Thor, The Odinson. This is a relatively rare release from Marvel in that it specifically expands the content of a prior omnibus release! The Thor by JMS omnibus was a great read that kicked off the modern era of Thor, but it has always been an incomplete work since Gillen dropped in to finish off JMS’s abandoned plot threads before Matt Fraction took the reins. Now this volume completely plugs that gap, butting perfectly up against Thor by Matt Fraction and Loki by Gillen. Plus, it adds Gillen’s excellent Beta Ray Bill material. Strong recommendation from me on this one for Thor fans – it’s the ground level of his modern comics! [Read more…] about New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – January 24, 2024