Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

New Collecting Guides: DC Comics Rebirth & New 52 (plus: What is DC Rebirth, anyway?)

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It’s a new year and with it comes something I never thought I’d be saying on Crushing Krisis:

Today I’m announcing the first pair of what will eventually be 52 DC Comics Guides coming to CK –DC Comics Rebirth and DC Comics New 52.

Yes, really. Each guide comprehensively covers the issues of their era, with every comic listed and every collection linked.They’re available thanks to my supporters on Patreon. If you find them useful, I’d love it if you’d chip in $1 a month.

Why DC? Why now? And, what is DC Rebirth, anyway?

That’s a slightly longer story.

I get a modest amount of reader mail. It’s always extremely generous and kind and makes me obscenely happy. I try to respond to every message.

The vast majority of the questions therein can be classified into two categories. One is “Will you extend your X-Men Reading Order into Marvel Now?” (The answer is: “I’d really love to, but it would take a very long time.”)

The other is, “Would you ever consider creating guides to DC Comics?” [Read more…] about New Collecting Guides: DC Comics Rebirth & New 52 (plus: What is DC Rebirth, anyway?)

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade

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It’s back, girls and boys!

I had so much fun reading and writing about the WildStorm Universe in November that I’m not quite ready to go back to just reading it, so I’m going to file the occasional continuing readalong post on a much lesser intensity and frequency because I so do not have the time or stamina to write about 126 WildStorm comics every month.

While I’m very eager to pick up all of the books exiting WildStorm Rising to check out their new status quo, I’m going to use the next few installments to review later WildCATs solo outings that fit into pre-crossover continuity – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade One-Shot, the Spartan: Warrior Spirit mini-series by Kurt Busiek, Zealot’s three-issue mini-series, and some WildCATs anthology stories.

This makes for a fantastic moment to pause and call out a really phenomenal blog: Weathering WildStorm. The author is undertaking this endeavor slightly more slowly than I have been, but he is doing it with the benefit of having read almost all of these books before. As a result, he’s got a fairly well-reasoned reading order that explains how these various side-stories fit. It’s by far the best one I’ve seen on the web in the four years I’ve been getting books together for this read!

Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade was published in August 1995, a hair later than WildStorm Rising, but per Weathering WildStorm’s guidance it directly follows either issue #13 or 14 (and maybe explains why the team was so ready for a break in #14-15). It follows up on Steve Gerber’s strong story in WildCATs Special #1.

The issue begins with an intriguing (and beautiful!) opening scene of all women, including Providence and Destine from Special #1 facing each other down in the remains of Yurgovia.

The next page is an ass-shot of Zealot followed by she and Voodoo fighting while dressed in their best Vampirella outfits. Those art choices are not just for the benefit of one splash page – this issue takes its “Skin Trade” name literally and gives a heavy dose of T&A whenever possible courtesy of artist Michael Lopez.

I’m tempted to write this one off as pure wish fulfillment, but there is considerable plot content tangled up with all the skin. Skin Trade turns Voodoo into a bit of a Mary Sue murder doll at points, but it gives context to her more active role in her own psyche in #18 and then on the battlefield in #19 and WildStorm Rising. It also greatly deepens Zealot’s history, if not her character, and creates a (largely unfulfilled) plot hook.

And, if you can tolerate a heaping of cheesecake, Lopez’s art is truly remarkable throughout the book save for a few pages with one bad inker on a solid team effort.

Final verdict? If you’re going all in on a sequential WildCATs read you ought to include this, but if you’re simply revisiting the high points of WildStorm you can skip it.

Continue reading for a recap of Skin Trade‘s plot. Need a copy? Check Amazon and eBay. As for what’s next, I still need a bit more of a breather to work out a schedule for my my leisurely readalong. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade

Song of the Day: “Head Underwater” by Jenny Lewis

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Last month I wrote about my enduring affecting for Rilo Kiley, especially their final studio album, Under The Blacklight.

It wasn’t obvious at first that Blacklight was the end of RK, but when Jenny Lewis followed it with another solo record and then forming Jenny & Johnny, I despited. Her soulful, alt-country Rabbit Fur Coat and and Acid Tongue were both solid, objectively good records, but they didn’t have the magic alchemy of Rilo Kiley for me.

I chalked up all the propulsive catchiness, killer riffs, and Fleetwood Mac overtones to Lewis’s RK co-writer Blake Sennet and kept Under The Blacklight in my heavy rotation.

Thus, I wasn’t paying all that much attention when Jenny Lewis dropped her lead single for The Voyager, “Just One of the Guys,” in 2014. It had a clever, star-studded video and still had the alt-countryish tinge. I’d buy the LP out of dedication, but it wouldn’t fill the Rilo Kiley shaped hole in my listening habits.

Then, I heard the first song on the LP, “Head Underwater” and understood that I was completely wrong about everything.

I’m not the same woman
That you were used to

I put my head underwater baby,
I threw my clothes away in the trash

Somehow “Head Underwater” does almost everything that Under the Blacklight does in a single song in a tenth of the time. It accelerates from the soulful sunny pop of “Silver Linings,” passing the wistfulness of “When The Angels Hung Around” on its way to the breezy 80s Fleetwood Mac of “Dreams.” I half expect a sweep of wind chimes every time she says “magic.”

[Read more…] about Song of the Day: “Head Underwater” by Jenny Lewis

Book Notes on Krisis, Issue #1

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Even more than I enjoy Author’s Notes (and oh boy do I love a good Author’s Note), I love when authors provide behind-the-scenes commentary on their writing. If I’m going to be releasing Krisis out in into the wild, you can better believe I’m going to do a commentary track.

Perhaps three chapters is too small a denomination to dive deeply into, but the entire point of my posting this novel is to expose my process – and this is all process.

Haven’t read any of Krisis yet? No problem – here’s Chapter 1 (pt. 1 & 2), Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 (pt. 1 & 2).

on the “Issues”

The impetus for me to finally write this novel was Eric Smith and his audiobook for Textual Healing. In fact, I was originally writing quite specifically with creating a full-cast audio play in mind as my means of distribution.

That meant I was concerned with having a number of smaller chunks of rising and falling action throughout the plot that could be digested separately from the whole. As I was in the beginnings of my X-Men acquisition quest at the time, I was struck with the idea of “issues” of the novel. Each issue would consist of a trio of chapters, always setting up, rising, and then pushing the narrative forward. While I wouldn’t offer quite as much exposition for new readers as an issue of a comic book, each issue starts relatively cleanly after a point you could easily summarize in a quick “The Story So Far” recap.

krisis-chapter-01b-timothy-krause-flickrIt was as much to keep potential future audio-casts interesting as it was to give me a series of small goals to conquer in the course of my writing. I remain enamored with the issues, since that’s how I’ve been writing it this entire time. We’ll see how they stand up for you, the reader.

on first impressions

Ever since the first day of National Novel Writing Month in 2010 the first line of this book was:

“Nathan wasn’t a man of faith or of ritual, except for on April tenth.”

Then, in a fit of pique just before I posted the chapter, I changed it to:

“Everything felt different on April tenth.”

I changed it for two reasons. First, the “wasn’t a man” version was reliant on playing off of the next line being “He wouldn’t even tell you that he was a man, necessarily.” Having the first two lines of a book tell you all about what a character is not seemed like starting on the wrong foot.

That had bothered me for a while, but the other, more subtle problem was that Nathan is a man of faith or ritual on days other than April 10th! All throughout this chapter he talks about the little rituals he has with Ella. And, saying he had no faith is me being an obstinate agnostic rather than saying something useful about the character.

“Everything felt different on April tenth” is a much more fitting first line, considering everything that occurs to Nathan in the following week.

on white not being the default

It’s obvious (and will become more obvious) that Nathan is based on me and that Martina is based on Gina. The main character of Krisis was always a personal stand-in stretching back to the earliest drafts I wrote in eighth grade.

Relatively late in the editing process (three years in?) I realized that while Nathan started as me, he wasn’t me anymore. In fact, he had became equally connected to E’s little brother in the little details of his backstory that took up residence in the crannies of my brain.

Essential to that, he was no longer a white character, but a mixed-raced character. [Read more…] about Book Notes on Krisis, Issue #1