Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Guide to Ant-Man & Giant-Man – now available to the public!

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I’m happy to announce that my Guide to Ant-Man (and Giant-Man!) is now available to all CK readers ahead of the debut of the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania trailer out next week! This guide exists thanks to the ongoing support of the Astonishing Patrons of Crushing Krisis.

Guide to Ant-Man & Giant-Man

Guide to Ant-Man & Giant-Man

This Guide to Ant-man doesn’t only cover the current MCU Ant-Man, Scott Lang. It covers all of Marvel’s Ant-Men, including Hank Pym and Eric O’Grady, plus Bill Foster as Giant-Man and Goliath! I’ve updated the guide to include every comic released through present day, plus collections solicited through the end of this quarter.

If you want to catch up on Scott Lang’s journey as Ant-Man in Marvel Comics, they’ve collected the vast majority of his solo series and major appearances in just three trade paperbacks:

Ant-Man: Scott Lang (2015 paperback, ISBN 978-0785192664 / digital) – This collection picks up Scott Lang from his first appearance in 1979 and collects the first few years of his major stories. This version of Lang is more of a former criminal screw-up and less of the lovable goof from the MCU.

The Astonishing Ant-Man: The Complete Collection (2018 paperback, ISBN 978-1302911324 / digital) – This collection includes both writer Nick Spencer’s run across two Ant-Man series. He writes Scott Lang very much in the mold of his MCU character. Many of these stories will feel like small-time capers he pulls between the Ant-Man films.

Ant-Man: The Saga of Scott Lang (2023 paperback, 978-1302950651 / digital) – This collection includes three unconnected miniseries from 2018-2020, plus a pair of one-shot stories. If you are less interested in ongoing story continuity and just want some fun, stand-alone adventures, this is a fine book to sample!

The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

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Gather ’round, readers, for a tale of unfortunate diary explosions, precarious Wellington roads, and one very ill-advised decision to put a LEGO set in the oven that nearly ruined Solstice.

For the record: Do not put your LEGO set in the oven. If you take nothing else away from this story of disaster and triumph, please take to heart this single important lesson. Do. Not. Bake. Lego.

Believe me.

Little did these poor, innocent elves know what Solstice would have in store for them.

Picture it: It’s the morning of Summer Solstice. There are a pile of presents under a tree acting as symbol of multiple different holidays. We’ve just finished having a delightful breakfast of gingerbread muffins and have opened all of the windows because it is the hottest day of the season so far.

(December holidays can be very confusing in the Southern Hemisphere for a Philly kid used to wishing for a White Christmas, which is why we have leaned into celebrating the change in seasons like Pagans with a Saturnalia festival spanning from Solstice to Christmas.)

(Yes, we also celebrate Winter Solstice.)

It was an ideal holiday morning. The kid had just opened her first gift, which was LEGO’s special 2022 free holiday gift set: a diorama of a pair of elves in snowy landscape.

We picked it as the first present not only because she loves LEGO, but because it was part of our Saturnalian theme. No, not human sacrifice. You see, because I am an obsessive dungeon master who can only celebrate things like Bachelorette Parties if I turn them into day-long, city-spanning alternate realty games, I can’t just put presents under a tree with normal “To / From” labels on them.

No. That takes the mystery out of things.

Instead, our Solstice gift-giving is a double-blind process. Every time anyone in the family wraps a present, they reserve a random number for that gift on a shared spreadsheet. Then, starting on Solstice and continuing through Boxing Day, we periodically reveal gift numbers to each other and it is the kid’s job to play Holiday Elf and find said numbered gift in the ever-decreasing spread of presents and deliver it to its intended recipient

The LEGO was a commemoration of her official role of Holiday Elf. It was the kickoff gift to our whole holiday festival.

And that’s where things started to go wrong.

The kid had dumped her LEGO into the middle of the floor to begin working on bag #1. I had made myself a peppermint milk in my home sippy-cup, because I am disaster-prone and cannot be trusted with an open container even in my own home.

(As will become evident in a moment.)

I attempted to hopscotch through the splayed-out LEGO to take a seat closer to the tree so I could watch the assembly process. During my incredibly graceful leaping, my grip on my sippy-cup slipped upward towards the lid. Unbeknownst to me, I hadn’t lined up the lid with the threads of the cup, so the connection between the two was tenuous at best. The combination of holding the cup by the lid and my hopscotching sent a half a liter of peppermint milk plummeting to the ground, where it struck DIRECTLY in the middle of the brand new LEGO kit like a minty dairy bomb and spread to cover the entire carpeted path to the tree.

This sent various family members springing into action. Well, the kid mostly sprung into whinging, which was totally justified based on me dunking her entire first gift as if it was a holiday Oreo.

(That joke wouldn’t work for a New Zealand audience, because they don’t dunk their cookies in milk here, but that’s a whole other post entirely.)

I bustled across the house to find supplies to begin the long process of making sure our carpet wouldn’t smell like spoilt milk for eternity. Meanwhile, E and the kid attended to scooping all of the milky LEGO into a fine strainer to whisked away to be rinsed off in the kitchen sink.

By the time I was done with my extensive soaking up, soaping, soaking up again, and-dehumidifying process there was no resumed LEGO-ing but the kitchen was suspiciously quiet. I poked my head in.

“Are the LEGO still drying?” I asked

“Yep,” E replied.

“Cool. It’ll probably take a while for the water to drain out of all the little nooks and crannies.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I put the LEGO in the oven.” [Read more…] about The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – Pre-Season “Meet The Queens” Power Rankings

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It’s time, my drag-loving darlings! That’s right, we’ve made it through a year of ten spinoff seasons of Drag Race to return to the mothership! And, mother has arrived with a massive cast of queens, so put on your reading glasses and get ready for my RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 Pre-Season Power Rankings.

This will be my eighth year writing about Drag Race in some form or another, which is wild! This time around, there’s plenty to write about: the show is launching with sixteen drag artists! The most, ever!

Each weekend (life allowing) I’ll share my Drag Race Power Rankings after the episode airs. My Drag Power Rankings aren’t about how good a queen is at drag or how much I personally like them. They are purely about predicting how well a queen might perform on the show based on their performance to date and how they are treated by the show’s editors

When it comes to the Pre-Season, I base my rankings off of two watches of each queen’s “Meet The Queens” promo interview and a quick 5-minute spin through their social media.

My Power Rankings are not about tearing any artist down. I revere Drag Race because I think it’s the most challenging competition show on television. Contestants need to act, sing, dance, model, lip sync, host, perform stand-up, sell products, write songs, make their own costumes, and more – all while applying face after face of stunning and intricate make-up. At this point in my life I’ve tried to do the majority of those things individually and they’re all pretty challenging.

And, I’ve done very few of them while wearing a corset and high heels.

While the tone of some of my critiques can be very pointed, every queen who competes on Drag Race is a world-class artist. I respect every one of them. I could spend an entire year and not get close to any of their performances in most challenges (except, of course, for songwriting).

One thing to keep in mind is that these “Meet The Queens” promos are shot after some or all of the season is complete. That means that the queens are interviewing with full knowledge of who will be first out and who will be a frontrunner. Drawing conclusions from these interviews isn’t just about prognosticating. Sometimes there are obvious tells from the queens about how things are going to go.

Who’s on top based on first impressions solely from their Meet The Queens and social media? And, who do I think is likely to receive the first boot when the season premieres on MTV this Friday?

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – Pre-Season “Meet The Queens” Power Rankings

time, see what’s become of me

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I am making a New Year’s resolution.

I haven’t made any resolutions for over two decades. I’ve always believed that resolutions are intentions to fail.

Or, as I said back in 2001, “You can’t really resolve to do anything except for those things so explicitly under your own power that you could and should be doing them anyway.” A decade later in 2011, I added, “Why should 1/1 be any different from 4/5 or 6/6 or any other day of the year?”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In January 2004 I said I was not resolving to do three things, but that I’d like keep my focus on them throughout the year. They were:

  1. Know What I’m Spending
  2. Be Aware of What I Eat
  3. Use Time Smarter

Even as my life got more complex in the following decade, I hewed closely to those non-resolves and they served me well. As I said in 2007, “even if I went on a bender of money or time wasting, or food devouring, at least I knew it was just a bender.”

(A decade ago I tried to expanded those three goals to 10 Commandments. They were an excellent set of commandments that would be terrific to live by, but they proved to be too many things to keep in mind all the time. Three is a magic number, after all.)

After I had those three rules in place, instead of making resolutions I began to focus on goals. Goals aren’t ephemeral ongoing vows. They are tangible, doable, accomplishable things, like “get my driver’s license” or “record 10 songs.”

I liked to set a large amount of goals in January and then see where the year took me. I thought of them as the corporate balance sheet of the business of me. I’d grade myself at the end of the year, and it could be as revealing to score well as to score badly. As I explained 2010, “The goals were good for something else, too – they let me know what wasn’t important. If I cannot bring myself to tag the last 800 posts from CK’s first three months even with my grade hanging on the line, it’s just not gonna happen.”

In 2014, I claimed even those goals were getting overwhelming, and I was going to strip down to a simple flowchart. I think that had less to do with the goals being a bad idea and more to do with having an infant human to raise and an infant start-up team to grow, plus two adolescent bands to lead. I needed simplicity.

Then, all of those non-resolutions and goals trickled away. I kicked off both 2015 and 2016 without mentioning them at all. January 2017-18 & 20 were consumed with comics posts. I didn’t even post in January of 2019 or 2021-22.

Something interesting happened in those intermediate five years other than just moving to New Zealand. To put it plainly: my life went from the simplest it has ever been to the hardest I’ve ever experienced. [Read more…] about time, see what’s become of me

Happy New Year (from the future)

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I am writing this message to you from the future.

Unless you are reading this from New Zealand.

Image by TianaZZ from Pixabay

(Or if you are reading this from Fiji, parts of Republic of Kiribati, French Wallis & Futuna, or US Territory of Wake Island, but I don’t think I have any readers in those places. Say hello if that’s you!)

Yes, this is a joke about the International Date Line. New Zealand is one of the first places to experience a new day, which means it’s also amongst the first places to celebrate a new year.

I thought perhaps these International Date Line jokes would be old by now – over five years into living in New Zealand. However, people (okay: Americans) keep being surprised, confused, and delighted by the time difference between us. Especially when it comes to setting meetings. So, I keep getting to make jokes about living in the future.

I don’t make the rules, okay. (Except that I do.)

The strange thing about living so far into the future compared to the majority of my existing world of connections in America is that when I’m very focused on a specific day – like New Years or a birthday – that day lasts forever. That’s especially true while we’re in summer time here in NZ. I get to I live all 24 hours of the day here in New Zealand, but when I go to bed the US West coast is only three hours into their version of it. (And, Hawaii is just one hour into it – hello, J!)

That means the day lives on for another 23 hours beyond when I’m first done with it for the people I know and love. I get 47 hours of birthday, 47 hours of Christmas, and 47 hours of New Year’s Day.

I like it. It means I get to experience the joys of these days first, but also get most of them out of the way before all my loved ones in the US wake up. They might have questions about how their birthday will go or if it will be a Merry Christmas, but I already know.

That appeals deeply to my spoiler-loving self.

If you are wondering, I’d say 2023 is relatively calm so far. I only have this first 30 minutes to go by, but aside from a few sparse fireworks in our suburban cul de sac it has been quiet. I didn’t hear any banging of pots and pans. (We did that the one time I stayed at my father’s for New Year’s Eve.)

The one problem with living in the future is there’s no one ahead of me. I’m always the one with the toes on the edge of the diving board. I don’t have the luxury of not jumping – the rest of the world is lined up behind me ready for their turn.

Every new day is a high dive into the unknown. I know New Year’s Day isn’t really any different than any other of those days, but it feels like a higher and more exciting dive to me.

Happy New Year from the future.