Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

topics

The king of memetic Twitter comedy is just some guy

by

It has been a tumultuous year to be a Twitter power user. The birdsite that unites us all and has yielded endless good things in my life has turned into a hellscape as a certain Elongated Muskrat has taken it over and gutted it for fun and profit. Yet, one thing that has sustained throughout my entire Twitter experience is Dril.

Dril is an acerbic king of single-tweet comedy. Since 2008 he has churned out so many ludicrous tweets that he has achieved a Simpsons-esque sense of ubiquitous omnipotence. Or, in fewer words: it seems like there’s a Dril tweet for everything.

I never put much thought into who is behind the Tweets. Maybe it was a famous comedian ranting incoherently on Twitter as their side gig. Or, maybe it was a collective of individuals, sweating away all day like monkeys at typewriters to churn out a handful of pithy tweet-lengthed absurdities.

Nope. As I learned from this brilliant Ringer write-up from Nate Rogers, Dril is just some guy. A guy whose identity has been widely known for a few years now, and who has even appeared on his own comedy show on Adult Swim! Yet, even with his previously-secret identity revealed, there’s still some question as to how much of Dril is real and how much is just another layer of performance art.

New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth (to end my Indie Comics Month!)

by

It’s time to bring the first ever Crushing Comics Indie Comics Month to a close! This month I’ve already added 15 new guides to the Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics. This final guide of the month is for one of my favorite series, one that changed what I expected from comics (and, in a way, what I wanted from life). It also arrives exactly when I always wanted it to – to mark the 30th Anniversary of the debut of this title! I’m incredibly happy to share with everyone my Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth.

Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth

I never planned to have an Indie Comic Month on Crushing Krisis.

My original plan was to begin the expansion of my Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics for my birthday back in September. I always like to spend a little me-time on a special project as a celebration of a new year of life. 2022 marked the 30th anniversary of the launch of Image Comics, and as of September I would have had to launch five guides to get caught up with celebrating the individual series anniversaries that had already passed. Then, I could roll out more Image Comics guides at a pace of one or two per month as new anniversaries arrived, plus expand to other, more-recent indie books I love.

Then, just as I was starting to build the initial Image guides, life happened… in the worst possible way.The Maxx: Maxximized (2013) #17

I’ve largely lived a charmed existence with comparatively few low points along the way. I’ve lost one dear friend and had to preside over one excruciating layoff, but beyond that there’s just not that much hardship or tragedy in my adult life. Being a kid sucked by comparison – starting in poverty and detouring through bullying before I met my BFF Gina and the rest of a tribe of people who allowed me to finally, gradually become myself.

I picked up my first issue of The Maxx shortly before I met Gina, two years before it hit MTV as an animated show. It was weird and somewhat hard to follow, but I liked it. It was telling a deeper, more mature story than most of the other comics I was buying every month – certainly more than any of the other Image launch books. Who was this muscular purple man with his weird buck-toothed mask? What was the secret of mysterious Outback he roamed?

I loved the comic, but I also loved the letters pages and back matter. I always loved that sort of thing back then. I was the kid who read the TV Guide from cover to cover every week, who endlessly re-organized my GI Joe file cards, and who devoured every letters page. I think I liked them partly because some of the letters were from other kids like me, who obsessed over the small details of storytelling. At that point in my life I hadn’t met that many of those.

The Maxx had more than a letters page – it had a pen pals directory. A directory I was never allowed to take advantage of, per my mother’s ruling. I first wrote about that back in 2006 – long before I was back to collecting comics, and highlighted it again in the series of posts that I wrote to launch my first X-Men guides back in 2010. It was a formative point in my life. In a way, my burning desire to meet the people who listed their addresses on that page is what spurred me to convert my comics budget into a dial-up internet budget back in 1996. I wanted to reach out to a wider world to find more kindred spirits.

That 2006 post begins with this line:

Even before I had the internet I was always interested in connecting to people who I could understand on some intrinsic level.

When we decided to move to New Zealand, it never occurred to me just how many of those intrinsic connections I was giving up by leaving Philadelphia. I never though that it would be not only difficult to build new ones in New Zealand, but seemingly impossible. [Read more…] about New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to The Maxx by Sam Kieth (to end my Indie Comics Month!)

one thing leads to another

by

Sometimes getting older feels a lot like the old lady who swallowed a fly. One thing leads to another. One minor inconvenience that you might not have even noticed in your youth quickly cascades into bigger and bigger problems until your entire life is a wreck.

That’s not just my pessimism at play! I’m actually hot off of a few miserable months after just such a bit of bad luck.

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

The bad luck involved our sectional couch. It was destined to happen. The day I met the couch, I turned to E and said, “I’m going to hurt myself on one of its legs. I just know it.”

The legs are set exactly at the corners of the couch rather than in from the edge, and since they are metal they’re surprisingly thin – enough so that your foot could catch on them rather than impacting and sliding off in one direction or the other.

Of course, it came to pass. I was walking across the room for no particular reason and slammed my foot directly in the middle of the couch’s leg, toe-first.

It was more than a stubbed toe. It was a collapsing onto the ground after, seeing stars for an hour, ice-packs all night sort of impact.

It felt exactly the same as when I fractured middle finger just before COVID struck, another one of these inconveniences that put the whammy on my life and my plans for months on end. Something felt internally wrong in my foot.

I visited a doctor first thing the next day. He shrugged at me. “Maybe it’s chipped,” he said. I pleaded for a X-Ray, but he said that even if it was broken, it wasn’t in a way that would require a cast or splint. He thought giving me a boot would be overkill. I’d just have to not walk it off.

Easier said than done. [Read more…] about one thing leads to another

my weighted blanket is hungry

by

E gave me a weighted blanket as a holiday gift.

I am the kind of person who likes to burrow under a mountain of blankets to go to sleep. Maybe with some other stuff piled on top – like my laptop on my chest and the contents of several laundry baskets scattered on top of the blankets. That’s a difficult sleep tableau to maintain – it’s given to tangles and things falling off the bed.

(It also means I like to sleep where it is COLD, because I’m going to pull something across my body regardless of the temperature.)

Enter the relatively-recent trend of weighted blankets. They went from a niche product for people with anxiety or serious sleeping problems to something you can find in every home goods store. Sometimes you can even choose between multiple brands and weights!

I’m not sure how exactly they went from nice treatment to retail seller, but every time I’d see or hear about them I’d think, “Huh, maybe I’m piling all of that stuff on top of me not for warmth but for the weight of it.”

Thus, my holiday gift. It is 10 kilograms – 22 pounds! That’s much more than the recommended amount for my size and weight, but I believe my request was, “I want to feel crushed as flat as a pancake and E really delivered. And, let me tell you, 10kg isn’t necessarily a heavy weight to lift as a barbell or even a wriggling baby, but 10kg spread out across a queen-sized blanket? That is hard to wrangle. Think of all the ways you casually toss or fold a blanket over the course of making your bed or slipping beneath it to go to sleep.

Not with this fat mama. It ain’t going anywhere it doesn’t want to go.

When I emerged from my first night of sound sleep with it, I declared that I felt well-rested and “completely flattened.”

All seemed to be well and good for the first few weeks of our relationship. Then, I noticed that I wasn’t getting up as early in the morning, despite it being the height of summer here in New Zealand. I’m used to popping up before my alarm goes off, especially if I leave my curtains cracked. Now, I was sleeping right up to my alarm – and, if I somehow managed to turn it off or it came unplugged I could sleep the whole morning away. I lost that ability when I became a parent nearly a decade ago!

You see, my weighted blanket is hungry. Hungry to do its job. Hungry for companionship. Hungry to crush something beneath its velvety grey expanse.

It’s not even exclusively hungry for me. I noticed this a few weeks ago when my beloved Blogger.com t-shirt went missing. I was sure I had set it out just before a shower, but when I returned it was gone. I searched high and low for it for days to no avail… only to find it nearly a week later within one of the folds of my blanket!

I’m not saying the blanket is sentient. Not necessarily. I’m saying if you take a large floppy thing like a blanket and give it weight, it starts acting like a prehensile tail or the arm of an octopus. If the edge of it drags across the floor, it actually GRABS THINGS as it goes. And, if you give it a solid yank to fold it or flip it as you would with a normal blanket, it’ll curl around whatever it can grab a hold of and swallow it up in its folds.

T-Shirts. Headphones. Pencils. Your entire waking life. All devoured by a ravenous 10kg beast dangling innocently off of one side of your bed.

Maybe this is why the blankets come with weight recommendations. Maybe it’s not about the blanket being too heavy for my delicate frame. Maybe I’m just not enough to satiate it. Maybe if I had asked for a lighter blanket it wouldn’t wake up hungry in the morning and try to swallow anything I placed in hem’s reach.

Maybe so. But… I’m sleeping so well.

Dolly told me I’m doing okay

by

Last night, Dolly Parton reminded me that things come to me easily when I work the hardest. Just like Paul McCartney.

Also, our unconscious brain is the original A.I. engine.

Image by Chen from Pixabay

Except, I guess it’s a paradox to call the human brain artificial intelligence? Also, come to think of it, that first sentence was kind of paradoxical too.

Maybe I should back up a step. Maybe several steps.

I am mystified by people who run. Especially those who enjoy running or who can run quickly. I’ve always hated running and it seems to hate me right back. The process of my body lurching forward into a sprint has never once satisfied me. Every second I am running is a second I’d rather not be running.

Over the past year I’ve done a fair amount of running. More than 150 kilometers, at least – which certainly more-than-doubles my lifetime mileage.

Do you know what happens when you run a lot, even when you hate every single second of doing it? Eventually, it gets easier. I stopped getting as out of breath as I did at the start of the year. I stopped getting side stitches after a few months. After a while, I started getting marginally faster on every 5k route through my neighborhood.

Let me tell you: there is no kind of reward for running that is better than the running being over more quickly.

I look a break from running over the long, soggy New Zealand winter and spring. When I started running again in the past month, I feared I was right back to where I started. I was going to hate being slow and breathless and full of cramps. That was true the first few weeks. Then, something surprising happened. Without really trying, one day I checked my stopwatch at the end of my route and realized I had shattered my personal record by 30 seconds. Nothing about the run had seemed remarkable. I hadn’t even hated it any more than I hate any other run.

Things come to you easily when you work the hardest.

That’s also true for mental exertion. [Read more…] about Dolly told me I’m doing okay