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Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis (The Phoenix Era)

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This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:

The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis

This era covers every X-Men story starting with Giant Size X-Men #1 in 1975 through “Days of Future Past” in Uncanny X-Men #141-142 in 1981. That includes every back-up from Classic X-Men.

The guide allows you to read every X-Men story from the period perfect continuity order, but also presents a simplified version of that order so you can enjoy bigger chunks of the most important stories without inserting every minor guest appearance.

This was a fun reading order to revise for a few different reasons. [Read more…] about Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #2: Second Genesis (The Phoenix Era)

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Suicide Squad – from Silver Age to Present Day!

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Today’s guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis seemed like it would be a straight-forward team guide, but I wasn’t accounting for how unique each iteration of this death-defying squadron tends to be…

Suicide Squad – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Suicide Squad wasn’t always a team of villains serving a compulsory stint as reluctant heroes.

The title has its origins in the Silver Age with a pair of paramilitary mad science tales in The Brave and the Bold and Star Spangled War Stories (which, by the way, means that Suicide Squad actually predates the Justice League by a few months).

That Squadron X was a wildly different team than the modern version lead by Amanda Waller. The two were cleverly linked in the wake of Legends, the first post-Crisis DC event. Legends served as the introduction to Waller and her team of ne’er-do-wells, most of whom were incredibly obscure villains. Captain Boomerang was probably the most widely-known of the original cast, at the time!

Of course, now we associate Suicide Squad as much with Amanda Waller and those once-obscure villains like Boomerang, Deadshot, and Enchantress as we do with Harley Quinn. That was all the work of the New 52 iteration of the team in 2011 and the 2016 film version. Harley’s addition to the Squad makes for an odd fit at points, but it’s the version that hit cinemas so it’s like to be a permanent change. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Suicide Squad – from Silver Age to Present Day!

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Domino – star of Deadpool 2!

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Today’s new guide started for Patrons of Crushing Krisis as a quick’n’dirty way to cover a new X-Men title but turned into one of the most thorough single character guides I’ve created…

Domino – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Domino is a character I’ve always loved. Sure, she started out as part of an influx of X-TREME characters (and extreme T&A) in Liefeld’s X-Force launch, but Domino is the rare 90s comics babe who has become much more than that while maintaining agency in her depictions as a sexy, sexualized character.

Domino has all the skill of Deadpool and all the leadership ability of Cable. She’s funny, self-deprecating, and self-interested. She has a thing for big hunks of men and has no hesitance about making her affections known. She lead X-Force as a knowledgable friend rather than a commanding parent, and it shows in her continuing relationships with characters like Boom Boom and Warpath. She’s a complex, damaged character whose trauma never entirely defines her.

That makes Domino a treat whenever she appears, as she has in all but one iteration of “X-Force” – making her the team’s most-consistent cast member!

In reading her new ongoing series from Gail Simone, I realized that I’ve missed out on a lot of Domino’s major development; I stopped reading comics in the 90s before the “Road Trip” era of X-Force and her pair of limited series. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Domino – star of Deadpool 2!

Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)

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This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:

The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men 

One of the biggest factors in CK’s popularity exploding in the early 2010’s was the X-Men Reading Order I debuted back in 2012.

It emerged from a moment of frustration, as all of my best projects tend to. This time, my ire was focused on the fact that no one had produced an actually readable chronological guide to reading X-Men. Existing guides were either simply ordered by release date or ridiculously complex lists that broke down every single-panel flashback.

None of them were comprehensive of every book, nor were they appropriate for the Trade Era of collected editions.

Despite being a major feature of CK, I can’t say I’ve ever been proud of the presentation of the Reading Order. A lot of the pages have a certain “git’er’done” quality to them that was a hallmark of CK’s early expansion that I’ve never had the time to improve.

Honestly, they always makes me think of the scrawlings of a Serial Killer, like the notebooks upon notebooks in Se7en. That’s what it looked like to figure out – I had giant rolls of paper unspooled across the floor with scribbles and crossouts and loop-de-loop arrows on them. [Read more…] about Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Vision

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis is long overdue – 17 months overdue, to be precise, since it was the last guide you all voted for in a Patrons’ Choice Poll just a few weeks before my entire life got flipped turned upside down…

Vision – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Despite anchoring five significant limited series spanning from 1982 to 2017, Vision has spent the majority of his publishing life as a team character in Avengers beginning in 1968.

In that sense, he is one of the most quintessential anchoring Avengers, because he’s never really appeared elsewhere! Plus, what character could be more of a core Avenger than an android created by Ultron (himself the creation of Hank Pym) based on the brain waves of Wonder Man and who falls in love with Scarlet Witch!? [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Vision

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis was actually the guide that caused me to start the avalanche of smaller guides to fill in the gaps in my Marvel Legacy era page! It’s for a group of characters who have always been curiously X-Men adjacent, despite definitely not being mutants…

Power Pack – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Power Pack’s long-running association with the X-Men is down to their creator, Louise Simonson.

Simonson was coming off years as an editor, and heading into several years of writing X-Factor and, later, a portion of New Mutants. Not only that, but she frequently pulled Power Pack into the X-Men’s 1980s line events – they tied in to Mutant Massacre (where they faced Sabreooth), Fall of the Mutants, and Inferno!

That’s the only tie the four siblings of the Power family had to Marvel’s mutants. They got their powers not through their genes, but in the style of Green Lantern – via an alien who was part of an intergalactic struggle dying at their feet on Earth.

Power Pack was one of the only Marvel titles to be explicitly in-continuity and purposefully written with early grade readers in mind. That made them popular both with kids and adults in the 80s, but it left them without an audience in the 90s as comics shifted towards teens and speculators. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack