Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula Power Rankings – Season 2, Episode 4

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It’s week four of Dragula, the search for a Drag Super-Monster who is equally gifted in the areas of glamour, horror, and filth.

This week’s episode totally took my breath away. The cast’s interpretation of alien life – complete with a live birth – is hilarious, stunning, and scary all at once.

It also stretches the boundaries our belief when it comes to reality editing. Clearly these looks were put together with a lot of resources on hand and more than one day of notice. The implication seems to be that everyone finds out what the theme was before they are dismissed from the previous week of shooting.

(If that’s the case, I’m not sure why the Boulets can’t just say, “As we told you last week…” when they explain the challenge.)

If it’s hard to suspend disbelief about the editing of the show, it’s not at all hard to imagine that the remaining seven contestants are really female alien life who really reproduce live on camera. Even the weakest performances goes above and beyond what I expected to see. The floor show is absolutely transfixing.

Enough talk – watch Dragula’s fourth episode, and then see if you agree with how I’ve ranked the queens below.

[Read more…] about The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula Power Rankings – Season 2, Episode 4

Crushing Comics S01E25 – Why I don’t like Avengers vs. X-Men (but do like Wellington weather)

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What happens when you combine my favorite comic franchise with a editorial direction I despise? Buckle up for a rough one, folks, as I dissect Avengers vs. X-Men and how it was a necessary evil to set up Marvel Now, plus discuss the difference between theoretical and actual weather conditions.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 25 features Avengers vs. X-Men (Amazon / eBay) and Avengers vs. X-Men Companion (Amazon / eBay), both covered in the Guide to Marvel Events.

Review: Doomsday Clock #1 vs. Watchmen #1

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It is 2017, and every classic work of art or commerce is just another chance to launch a new franchise. Everything old is flogged again.

The Handmaid’s Tale is now an Emmy-winning television show that has extended its universe both before and after the story in the classic novel. The long-running Archie comics have been turned into a nonsensical thirst-trap of a TV show about sex and murder where it is every season of the year on every day to allow for a full range of fashionable costuming.

Classic franchises are groaning under the weight of being re-franchised. It’s franchising squared. Disney is determined to pump out Star Wars movies almost as frequently as they used to release Star Wars novels back in the day and Warner Brothers has rushed a Justice League into the theatres before we’ve had a chance to care about most of the individual heroes who would form it.

There’s even news that Amazon is planning to make an ongoing series out of Lord of the Rings, ignoring the extended fart sound that was made by the bloated Hobbit trilogy and the fact that they could simply serialize the original film series across two entire seasons if it was carved into TV sized chunks.

I’m trembling in anticipation for the “long awaited” adaptations of some of my favorite TV commercials and magazine ads.

(That is only halfway a joke.)

And here we are, revisiting Watchmen, one of the comic medium’s true masterpieces, because we cannot leave well enough alone.

Yes, we already had a Watchmen movie and a Before Watchmen, but they were each one-time events. This is more than an event. It’s also a mash-up with DC’s ongoing universe that we never asked for but cannot help but watch like rubberneckers delighting in a gruesome accident. (Which says nothing for the ethical concerns, .)

If anything can be forgiven of being a retread of past ground, shouldn’t Watchmen? After all, it was Alan Moore’s original idea to take a dead comics universe and put its characters through a meat grinder of a final story. He might have wound up using his own original characters in the end, but he’s just as culpable of re-franchising as any of these modern examples. Moore’s career is full of these examples – MiracleMan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and even Peter Pan. He loves digging up comics corpses to reanimate as much as films studios do!

And therein lies the truth of the matter. Moore always got a pass because his work was derivative but delightful. All of these franchise sins can be forgiven if the new extension of the franchise is good. The Handmaid’s Tale won that Emmy, after all, and everyone loves an Archie with abs.

Why not revive the Watchmen? Everybody’s doing it and they’ve been doing it forever – since long before Moore did it back in 1986.

Doomsday Clock #1  & Watchmen #1 4.5 stars

Doomsday Clock #1 written by Geoff Johns, drawn by Gary Frank, and colored by Brad Andersen. Watchmen #1 written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, and colored by John Higgins.

Doomsday Clock is not meant to be a slavish, panel-by-panel homage to Watchmen, but the parallels are clear.

Both issues open with similar narration. Both are largely contained in a 3×3 nine-panel grid structure, and this first issue of Doomsday Clock employs a similar rhythm of breaking the grid to Watchmen #1. Both issues end with a sudden scene change punctuated by a historic quote that is followed by illuminating back matter.

There is an additional storytelling parallel that Doomsday Clock #1 ought to have picked up from Watchmen #1. Watchmen included several scene transitions throughout the issue, though each one turned out to be an extension of Rorschach’s journey through the narrative.

The first scene change in Watchmen is the most significant. On page nine, we cut from Rorschach looking at the Comedian’s photo of the old Watchmen to that same photo hanging above Hollis Mason as he enjoys a beer with Dan Dreiberg. Their conversation reveals they are the two Nite Owls, old and new.

The scene could have existed elsewhere, but the transition immediately lends it additional context: some of the Watchmen are still alive, and some of their mantles were handed down to others.

A page later, we realize this story is still the story of Rorschach, who shows up unexpectedly in Dreiberg’s house as he returns. The implication is that Rorschach, too, was a Watchman – which also tells us that the membership has changed over time, pre-explaining the upcoming scenes with Ozymandias, Dr. Manhattan, and Silk Spectre.

For all his withering critique of society in his journal, Rorschach was once involved in protecting it. We immediately realize that, in a way, his pessimism is him bemoaning his own failures. [Read more…] about Review: Doomsday Clock #1 vs. Watchmen #1

Beige Friday

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I think today might represent the most remarkable cultural difference we’ve experienced so far in our three months of living in Wellington.

What’s so remarkable? That today is completely unremarkable, aside from the stunning weather.

Of course, living in the states, this day is Black Friday – a day (and term) invented in Philadelphia. A day that’s ostensibly about the convenience of so many people having off (unless they work retail), but has metastasized into 30hrs of capitalist frenzy to get rock bottom prices on things you may or may not have any practical use for in your life or budget to buy but suddenly must acquire because Christmas or something.

I tended to batten down the hatches on Black Friday and keep them sealed until the entire Christmas shopping season has passed. Why risk going anywhere and getting sucked into the capitalist vortex of deal-seeking shoppers?

Here in New Zealand, Black Friday is just another Friday, owing in part to the fourth Thursday in November simply being the fourth Thursday in November. Today is still Black Friday in the sense that US holidays completely pervade the world calendar thanks to the hegemonic force of their culture.

Shopping on Black Friday is a thing here, but there are few readily visible indications of that. It comes with only a modest sales uptick on the order of 30% over the previous week, which owes at least in part to the fact that the majority people are actually at work here on this utterly normal, beautiful day.

With the lack of a push behind the retail holiday, there’s also a commensurate lack of a sense of the holiday season having suddenly begun. Christmas decorations haven’t suddenly appeared in every business and on every house’s facade.

There are other, trickle-down effects of not having Thanksgiving and Black Friday to kick off the official holiday season. Here, Christmas retail kicked off on November 1st with relatively little fuss. I would say, “the day after Halloween,” but that’s also not really a thing here. Our nearest neighbor advised us that if EV6 dressed up they would find some candy to give her, but no one else in the neighborhood would have any.

That’s not just our neighborhood. We were out and about for the day and did not witness a single costume and nary a pop-up shop in the preceding weeks. Despite being an ostensible global holiday, Halloween is uncelebrated enough by Kiwis that each year there are Very Serious articles written about Trick-or-Treating and if it should be embraced or rejected.

(From the rejected side of the debate: “it is a repugnant excuse of a holiday, dripping in slimy American commercialisation.”)

(Seriously, I like it here so much.)

Even as someone who doesn’t personally partake in Black Friday or Halloween, their effective cultural absence leads to a queer void in my perception of passing time. Sure, the nationwide NZ Secret Santa began on November 6th, but without the unavoidable drumbeat of those twin poles of autumnal capitalist frenzy I hardly believe the end of the year is approaching – which isn’t aided by the fact that today is the most gorgeous one we’ve seen in three months of living here.

The cumulative effect is that I find that I’m not dreading December here the way I did in the states. Yes, I’m sure people will be busy with holiday plans and parties. Christmas on the beach is a thing; after all, it will be summer here. There’s simply not the sense of stepping out of Thanksgiving to fall into a month-long unrelenting blizzard of blaring holiday music about Santa and snow.

Black Friday might bear all of that weight back in the states, but here it is jut another day.

Crushing Comics S01E24 – Atari, Wonder Woman newspaper strips, Gaiman’s Death & Sandman Overture, & more!

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In this episode I pull an unusual hunk of books of the shelf – a set that pulls me far out of my Marvel Comics comfort zone! Watch as I reminisce about things old and new including my Atari 2600, Wonder Woman’s newsprint comics, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman prequel and afterword all rolled up into one, and more!

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 24 features Wonder Woman: The Complete Newspaper Comics (Amazon), Death Deluxe Edition (Amazon / Absolute Edtion), The Sandman: Overture Deluxe Edition (Amazon), Daytripper Deluxe Edition (Amazon), and Mystery Society (Amazon).