Crushing Krisis

This November on Crushing Krisis

November 1, 2017 by krisis

A year ago today, I began an unusual experiment on Crushing Krisis called “Blog of Tomorrow.”

November has always been a big month of blogging at CK, but in 2016 the idea was that I would spend an entire month posting as if blogging was my full time job in order to convince you, the reader, to contribute to CK’s Patreon campaign. Each day including a one-two daily punch of a Song of the Day and a “From The Beginning” read of Wildstorm. Plus, I debuted a new comic collecting guide each week and shared installments of my namesake novel, Krisis, for the first time.

It was every bit as insane as it sounds. I’m not sure I slept at all the entire month. The resulting 90+ posts were some of my best blogging of all time and I became a much better blogger in the process of writing them, which is not something I expected to be able to say in my 17th year of doing this! And, along the way, a small subset of CK’s readers kindly volunteered to pay for all of its hosting costs(!!!).

The only way I keep up that level of daily effort throughout 2017 was if readers were literally paying my salary – which would require an order of magnitude of more donations. That would be amazing, but it was never the point. The goal of my experiment wasn’t getting to writing the “Blog of Tomorrow” on a permanent basis, but to push myself to invent the quality and quantity of content that such a blog might entail.

Today, it is once again November 1st.

Part of me was tempted to go all-out yet again, trying to squeeze close to a 100 posts into a single month. It’s not like I lack for content. I have no end of ideas of series of posts to tackle, even if they would mean going another month sans sleep.

Yet, as much as I love big projects, I hate repeating myself. We’ve already proved that my blogging full-time could probably generate more content than most of you could read (or, at least, enjoy) on a daily basis.

This year, instead of thinking bigger, I want to think wider. Less posts and less hours, but more content and visibility. I’d love to get you back to visiting every week and knowing you have several posts of catching up to do each time.

What does that look like? [Read more…] about This November on Crushing Krisis

Updated: The Definitive Guide to Luke Cage, Power Man

October 31, 2017 by krisis

Today I have another freshly spruced-up comic character guide for you: The Definitive Guide to Luke Cage.

Need the short story on what Luke Cage has been up to in 2017 both in comics and in collected editions? Keep reading for a recap, plus a quick reintroduction to the character and a final tally of how many of his starring comics have been collected in color.

Song of the Day: “Look What You Made Me Do” – Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox featuring Kenton Chen

October 30, 2017 by krisis

The problem with perfection is the same one as the one with success: both are an expression of infinity.

If you are driven, you can be successful but still feel you aren’t successful enough. If you are a perfectionist, you can control every little detail but still feel you could have done more.

In each case, you’ve halved the distance between you and the infinite – there is still an infinite distance left to travel.

I think about this concept a lot, but never more than when I am considering a well-made album. Isn’t that the perfect intersection of success and perfection, plus some other nearly-infinite-to-measure quality of talent? As an artist, how do you go back into the studio when your last album is a critical and financial success, and just perfectly executed? It’s a tightrope act from which a lot of acts tumble.

Case and point: Taylor Swift’s 1989. It’s as perfect of a pop record as I’ve heard in my life. Every single song could survive on the radio as a single. And, unusually for a golden pop LP, it actually took home the Album of the Year trophy at the Grammies – a rarity.

I don’t think there is any way to top 1989, so Taylor just … didn’t. At least, not with her lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” of off Reputation, out next week.

Swift has a habit of releasing somewhat bare, unusual lead singles, but this one is less than that. The entire songs lacks for melody before it dissolves into an embarrassing faux-hip hop retread of “I’m Too Sexy.” The overwrought lyrics, usually a Swiftian specialty, but here coming off as protesting too much. And the cinema-quality video, which mashes up a lot of disconnected elements. (Why is she a zombie at the beginning? What is with the Beyoncé rip-off dance break).

Yes, I know it currently has over 600 million streams on YouTube. That’s the kind of half-infinite success you can maintain after a long streak of near-perfection.

If there’s one good bit of the song (and the video, as it happens), it’s the string-tinged bridge with little tinkles of carousel music. It’s everything the rest of the song isn’t but wants to be – catchy, lush, and foreboding.

It’s from that point that retro arrangement wunderkind Scott Bradlee developed his band’s cover of the song. Described as a cover in the style of a James Bond theme song, it picks up the strings theme from the bridge and stretches it luxuriously across each verse to turn the previously bare vocal into a poisonous vamp.

New For Patrons: Definitive Guide to Scarlet Witch

October 29, 2017 by krisis

Today I launched a long-awaited guide especially for Patrons of Crushing Krisis – The Definitive Scarlet Witch Collecting Guide and Reading Order! This guide was their top pick in a Patrons’ Choice poll for April.

This guide covers Wanda Maximoff’s entire chronological Marvel history, including every single appearance from her debut as a villain in X-Men #4 to joining The Avengers in Avengers #16 to her later romance with Vision, breakdown in “Avengers Disassembled,” return in Children’s Crusade, and – finally – a 15-issue Scarlet Witch solo series in 2016-17.

Even with her mid-2000s hiatus from comics, Scarlet Witch’s Avengers membership accounts for nearly 45 years out of the Avengers’ 54 years as a franchise – making her one of the longest-running, most-permanent heroes on the team’s roster. It’s only in the course of the past decade that it isn’t a truism that Wanda would be appearing somewhere in the Avengers line-up, and recently it seems she can be expected to co-anchor Uncanny Avengers along with Rogue.

Want access to this guide? Patrons’ Choice guides get picked from a pool of pages I’m not planning to work on for many months, so this one isn’t scheduled for released to the public anytime soon! But, you can be reading it tomorrow in exchange for covering $1.99 a month of CK’s hosting expenses.

Fan-Casting RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 4

October 28, 2017 by krisis

Last week, RuPaul announced nine of the ten queens for Season 3 of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, but the season itself is still months away.

What to do in all that unfabulous down-time?

Your first impulse might be to speculate on that final, unannounced queen. I’m already thoroughly spoiled, but here’s a non-spoiler post if you want the odds on who that missing queen might be (plus, thoughts on who’ll sashay away first and who could win it all).

With that mystery already considered, the next most-obvious is, “Who could wind up on All Stars Season 4?”

These queens are not only some of the fiercest we still haven’t seen back for a repeat engagement, but also some of the most-deserving of the major profile- and fandom-boost queens get when they return for a turn on All Stars.

Plus, many of them complement each other’s stories despite being wildly different queens from different seasons.

Are you ready? Let’s get All-Started! [Read more…] about Fan-Casting RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 4