Crushing Krisis

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Conan The Barbarian: Marvel’s Most Well-Collected Hero (really!)

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Today I bring you a first for Crushing Comics – a guide to a licensed character who has lived with two different publishers over the course of his nearly 5o-year comics career: The Definitive Conan Comics Collecting Guide and Reading Order!

Created with the support of Patrons!

In fact, I’d say that Conan might be Marvel’s best-collected hero of all time – better than X-Men and Spider-Man! More on that, below.

I’ve always been fascinated with Conan, starting from catching scenes from Arnold’s 1982 film on my parent’s TV as a kid and a tattered old copy of Conan The Barbarian #62 I somehow inherited straight through my first attempt at penning new releases posts in 2015.

It was in researching that post that I became obsessed with how deep Conan’s reprinted archives were – Dark Horse had issued dozens of paperbacks covering his entire primary run at Marvel as well collections covering over 100 issues in the new Dark Horse continuity.

Conan-the-Barbarian-1970-0062

Possibly my first comic book ever! I still have the tattered copy in my attic as a keepsake.

As I said then, “[N]ow I kind of want to read Conan. This is how it happens.” I’m a sucker for long runs, and an even bigger sucker for coherent collected shelves.

While I’ve managed to avoid the siren call of collecting these dozens of books, I couldn’t resist trying to untangle the various releases.

Marvel held Conan license from 1970 to 2000 and produced several distinct continuities of Conan in that period – including 23 years of Barbarian (the majority written by Roy Thomas) plus a magazine called The Savage Sword of Conan and King Conan, a title with stories of the more mature hero.

Marvel rebooted Conan in 1994 before Dark Horse acquired the rights (which included rights to reprint Marvel’s stories!). Then, in 2003, Dark Horse launched their own Conan continuity, originally written by Kurt Busiek and hewing very closely to the original Robert E. Howard stories.

Dark Horse’s Conan has run through s sequence of titles ranging from 12 to 50 issues in length, starting with plain old Conan, followed by Conan The Cimmerian – even though that’s actually a befitting title for an initial volume considering it’s how Robert E. Howard originally described him:

Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

Between the two publishers, they’ve printed over 850 original Conan comics across multiple continuities and timelines – which definitely merits some guidance when it comes to collecting, especially seeing as some volumes have nearly the same names as each other! And so my Guide to Conan was born.

Just how collected are those Conan issues? Would you believe over 90% of them are available in a modern collected edition from 2003 and forward? Keep reading to learn how it breaks down.

[Read more…] about Conan The Barbarian: Marvel’s Most Well-Collected Hero (really!)

a wonderful snow day

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I really love snow days.

I’m sure on some level that’s based on the vicarious “home from school” thrill that comes along with them even now that I don’t have any school or work to be home from. More than the thrill, though, there is the wonder. A chilly world covered in white. The familiar landscape transformed into a topography I cannot readily recognize. Even on days I still had school or work my eyes would twinkle with delight on the trudge to the trolley.

Plus, now I get to experience it alongside a tiny person!

Unfortunately, today’s blizzard was not the spectacle of last year’s – complete with fluffy mounds of snow taller than my toddler and a white-out at twenty feet. That day our neighborhood was a wonderland of which I remind EV constantly to make sure her memory of it is cemented. No, today was alternating crunchy flakes and freezing rain, creating a heavy layer cake of ice crystals I can still hear neighbors struggling to upend as I write this.

Thus, EV and I engaged in another time-honored snow day activity: curling up on the couch and reading comic books.

EV has some of her own comics, which she reads until the point of disintegration – mostly Lumberjanes and the spectacular (and local) Creep. She also loves some of mine, particularly Ms. Marvel and Spider-Gwen.

Somehow in the process of making my regular new comics order I wound up with an extra copy of the anthology-style Sensation Comics: Wonder Woman, which has laid dormant on EV’s bookshelf for months.

Suddenly, the past two days, she’s completely obsessed with it. And, well, Wonder Woman was my superhero gateway drug, so I’ve been over the moon to see her carrying the book everywhere she goes. Thus, today after reading her the brilliant Jason Bischoff / David Williams mother/daughter story with Hippolyte from issue #4 , I turned to EV and said, “Would you like to read a real Wonder Woman comic – the ones that I read back when I was a kid?”

I saw the little stars light up behind her eyes before the sibilant, “yessssss,” escaped her lips.

You see, about a year before we had EV I decided that despite not having read Wonder Woman in years that I wanted to own all of it – collections for the impossible-to-find Golden and early Silver Age material, but then floppies from as far back as I could manage to present day.

I’d enjoy knowing I owned it, and maybe the hypothetical eventual child E and I had discussed would be interested in the and I’d have them bound into one massive set of hardcovers to keep on the bookshelf like a set of encyclopedias.

Not only was today a magical snow day, but today was that day. I read EV the first issue of George Perez’s 1987 post-Crisis reboot of Wonder Woman’s mythology.

She stared at every page in slack-jawed amazement. This wasn’t the superhero comic she was expecting, but a story about Greek Gods (which she knows from her treasured Encyclopedia Mythologica pop-up book, and also from Lumberjanes). The gods plotted and struggled, and eventually gave birth to the Amazons, one of whom in turn created a child from the clay of Themyscira’s shores. [Read more…] about a wonderful snow day

little hits (of dopamine)

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I’m an addict.

I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t smoke or touch caffeine. My addiction is satisfaction and I will mainline anything that can produce it. That chemical feeling of being satisfied. Those little hits of dopamine in my brain.

This week it’s been games. Boring, pointless, meaningless internet games literally in a category called “idle” to indicate that they’re purely engineered for running in the background and wasting your time.

(Think Sim City when you used to leave it running overnight to gather mucho dollars and hopefully avoid an earthquake, only instead of sleeping you are watching raptly as the numbers tick ever higher.)

The urge came on Saturday night. Weekends after bedtime are usually my big opportunity to knock out huge chunks of writing on CK – and, especially for finishing new comic guides! This past Saturday I couldn’t get in the mood. Words were coming in fits and starts. Nothing satisfying.

And so, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I loaded up Kongregate for the first time in years and started poking around for simple games to play. My drug of choice is usually tower defense, but I stumbled into idlers and my night was gone.

The games were at once awful and great for satisfaction. The numbers tick up constantly! You get to click things! If there is enough ticking and clicking, sometimes new things light up! It’s the adult equivalent of an infant playmat that lights up and makes sounds. The best of the bunch was surely Swarm Simulator, a plain text game all about exponential growth and ratios, with dozens of different numbers ticking up constantly. At least it’s math, I told myself.

Even as I was playing the games I hated myself for it. I’ve had them running all week and I keep hating it. I know they’re a crutch for getting my satisfaction elsewhere by doing things like working out or hitting the “Publish” button.

I just needed those little hits. [Read more…] about little hits (of dopamine)

hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)

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Of my memories of my two grandmothers, both now long since passed, many are of their food.

They were both Italian and both only a few generations removed from southern Italy, but they cooked two distinct sets of recipes. Even their meatballs and gravy were entirely different from each other. My paternal grandmother made the best minestra maritata – or, “Italian Wedding Soup” – I’ve had in my life, to this day. My maternal grandmother made potato gnocchi from scratch – springy, substantial gnocchi the likes of which I’ve never since tasted again.

Some members of my father’s family can duplicate the Italian Wedding Soup, but my mother and I cannot recreate those gnocchis. We’ve both tried. Despite making them many times with my grandmother, I couldn’t possibly tell you the recipe.

There wasn’t one. She eyeballed the ingredients every time, combining them by hand right on her kitchen counter, cracking the eggs into a mound of flour. She could never settle on the most efficient process to cut and “thumb” them – that is, put the little divot in the middle. She alternated between a butter spreader, a pizza cutter, and her bare hands, never satisfied with any of the methods.

(Once I attempted to make them myself from memory right on our kitchen counter, not realizing that our countertops were not actual granite and would not withstand hundreds of passes with the pizza cutter, my tool of choice.)

(Oops!)

There is one recipe of my maternal grandmother’s I can make. “Scapels,” she called them, a sort of plain, egg crepe rolled up like cigars with sharp grated cheese inside and served under scalding hot soup. I only know how to make them because she could not eyeball the ratios of ingredients in the batter. My grandmother grew up during the Great Depression and barely had a grade school education. She wasn’t confident writing more than a few words in longhand and couldn’t easily multiply entire lists of ingredients.

I became her walking recipe card and recipe multiplier. The phone would ring. “PeEEter,” she would say in her Philadelphia accent, “it’s gram-mom.”  “I’m makin’ scapels. Eh, what is the recipe again? Three ta three ta one?”

“Three to one to one,” I would reply, exasperated, probably interrupted from reading a book.

“Right, right,” she would reply, as if she was just testing me and had known all along. “But, I wanna make a triple recipe. How many is that?”

“Times three, gram-mom. Nine eggs to three to three.”

“Awright, thanks. Love you.”

The recipe for her scapels is dead simple – 3 parts eggs to 1 part each flour and water, plus some salt, pepper, and parsley, and rolled up with Pecorino Romano cheese.

The hard part is cooking them to the right consistency. [Read more…] about hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)

Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones

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This post makes me absolutely giddy with joy: I’m debuting a song by my favorite band in Philly, who I also interviewed for this post, and if you buy it all the proceeds go straight to Women’s Law Project.

The song is “If You Harden On The Inside,” the first new tune from Hezekiah Jones since after their 2016 EP Har Har Har and a track on December’s Vilomahed project curated by Michele Lynn. You can get it for as little as $1, although I encourage you to donate more!

Hezekiah Jones is the folk collective formed by and around Philly-based songwriter Raphael Cutrufello. He pulls a peculiar double-duty while fronting the band, acting the entire time as Hezekiah, with each one of the band’s rotating cast of musicians presenting themselves as another fictional member of the Jones clan.

(My favorite: Dow Jones.)

That little touch of mythology goes a long way to contextualizing Cutrufello’s songwriting. When you hear Hezekiah Jones’ music, you have the profound sense that a weird band of back-country geniuses have briefly descended from their cloistered home on a hill to play for you, like a roving band of thespians in Shakespeare.

(It may be a hill in an alternate timeline.)

The songs are full of piercing observations on the human condition, always tinged with optimism. There’s also a smattering of details that place them in a vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape full of endless roiling wars and the Mississippi river expanded out to a sea.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

“If You Harden On The Inside” could easily be a handclaps-and-harmony 60s pop song if it was dressed up with a full band arrangement. Instead, a whimsical chorus of Hezekiahs sings “blah blah blah” as backing to the track, later joined by a swell of electric pianos. As the song whirrs to life with its halting rhythm it gives serious vibes of Dirty Projectors.

Cutrufello AKA Jones plays everything on this track save for drums by Daniel Bower (AKA Roy G. Biv Jones) and bass by Philip D’Agostino (AKA Pepe Jones), a Philly music scene legend and touring member of Get The Led Out.

Half your saints
Are playing video games
Or they’re out doing meth
Or too depressed to get out of bed

All these bodies
What a delicate make
If you harden on the inside
You’ll be easy to break

If someone
Gave into love
Their guard would be down
We could steal all their stuff

That is the paradox of our human fragility in three stanzas, each repeated to make sure the message sinks in. [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones