Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Children’s Book Review: Stellaluna by Janell Cannon

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This week EV got her own library card.

She was excited by the prospect. Maybe not in anticipation – even as a book-loving three-year old, I don’t think she really understood the concept of an entire building whose purposes was housing books which you could borrow. Yet, once we arrived and she witnessed the seemingly unending shelf of books she could choose from, the excitement became all too real.

I spent a lot of time at the library as a kid, partially owing to the fact we didn’t have the kind of money that made regularly visiting bookstores an option until I was older. My mother made sure I had books as a constant presence in my life, and though I was late to read I’ve been a voracious consumer of printed material ever since.

I don’t have a good excuse for abstaining from the library until now, other than the fact that E and I both really like owning books. However, three years into the children’s book accumulation endeavor and every possible shelf is filled … which makes this collection no different than our CDs, DVDs, graphic novels, guitars.

You get the idea. We like stuff. Or maybe I’m just a luddite, considering I could have a smaller collection of all of that (even the guitars) if I would embrace digital more.

Either way, E is a wonderful curator of great books for EV, and I’d like to start reviewing our favorites here – as well as covering picks from the library. Even if you’re not a parent, everyone has to get a gift for a kid every so often. I’ll do my best to steer you in the right direction, including noting challenging themes and bad behavior in books, which are both pet peeves of mine.

To start out, I want to highlight one all-star book in our collection which not only is parent-selected and toddler-approved, but also our go-to gift for other kids.

Stellaluna, written and illustrated by Janell Cannon

stellaluna-cover-smallCK Says: 5 Stars – Buy It!

Gender Diversity: Female protagonist; supporting characters are female or agender
Ethnic Diversity: Not applicable
Challenging Language: “Awful” (so, none, really)
Themes to Discuss: parents in danger, gross food, obeying adults, assimilation

Stellaluna is a charming, positive story full of female anthropomorphized animal characters that includes several interesting hooks for discussion. We’ve found it to be a go-to re-read, not only for the depth of the tale but for its vocabulary and a clever secondary narrative.

Stellaluna is the story of a baby bat who loses sight of her mother and winds up raised alongside a trio of tiny birds in a nest. She has to endure such indignities as sleeping upright and eating worms (she’s a fruit bat), essentially losing touch with her bat identity while struggling to be more birdlike. She later finds her colony of bats, including her own mother. In the process, she learns to love being a bat, but also the differences between her and her bird friends. [Read more…] about Children’s Book Review: Stellaluna by Janell Cannon

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Power Rankings, S2E02 – “All Stars Snatch Game”

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RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars Season 2 Snatch GameThe second episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars came packed with even more surprises than we’d typically expect from a Snatch Game!

First, Adore Delano decided to the leave the cast before the challenge. Second, a trio of high-quality, gag-worthy queens wound up in the bottom two – including both top queens from last week!

Of course, this entire cast is high-quality and gag-worthy, which makes every elimination a painful one – especially since the queens are the ones doing the eliminating. However, this one couldn’t help but be controversial because Alaska found herself choosing between her Season 5 BFFs Detox and Roxxxy Andrews and relatively forgotten (though wonderful) Season 2 queen, Tatianna.

Let’s check out where the rankings wind up after the carnage, and then I’ll get back to Alaska’s decision to cut Tatianna from the cast. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Power Rankings, S2E02 – “All Stars Snatch Game”

Marvel announces Monsters Unleashed series from superstar team

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This post is not about the X-Men. I really thought it was going to be. Instead, it’s about Monsters Unleashed.

Marvel unveiled a string of five nearly identical teasers in the past few days. Each teaser shared an anonymous acronym (“MU” is frequently used to mean “Marvel Universe” or “Marvel Unlimited”), and all the same information save for a differing headline artist.

2016-bunn-mu_12016-bunn-mu_22016-bunn-mu_3 2016-bunn-mu_42016-bunn-mu_5


It seemed that – unless Marvel planned on pulling a fast on on us – the teasers certainly were X-Men related. [Read more…] about Marvel announces Monsters Unleashed series from superstar team

A Bendis Avengers Reading Order

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I’m excited to unveil my first non-X-Men comprehensive reading order: Avengers Reading Order – The Bendis Years (2004 – 2012)

The guide includes the story-by-story or “trade reading order” of all the Avengers team titles from Brian Bendis taking over Avengers with issue #500 in 2004 to the end of his run on the 2010 volumes of Avengers and New Avengers in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men in 2012. That’s over 350 individual issues from more than a dozen titles. In most cases, I explain the placement of each story and offer special notes for reading.

Head to the guide right now, or read on for more background on the period and how I assembled this Avengers resource.

BNAvgV01 - 0001rian Bendis completed the modernization of the Avengers begun by Kurt Busiek in 1998, taking them from a quaint card-carrying club of do-gooders to the Marvel’s Justice League. If Busiek helped to centralize and modernize a team that had lost its core in the mid-90s, Bendis made them Marvel’s ubiquitous, movie-ready flagship.

After his introduction of new members like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, and Dr. Strange, it became completely normal for any Marvel hero to be drafted into the team if it served a story. The period also expanded the team franchise from its previous all-time high of two books in the late 80s to a minimum of four.

It also tangled with a crazy line-up of line-wide events, rivaling 90s X-Men for the amount of interruptions of its plot – to the point that the interruptions became the plot, and standalone arcs were mere breaks in the action.

I am historically not a major Avengers reader. In my backlog of 90s floppies I have a decent run of 300s-era Avengers, but it’s mostly owing to Steve Epting’s amazing covers rather than being particularly allegiant to the series.

My early collected edition bookshelf reflected that, with just a few Avengers books marking major Scarlet Witch stories. (Just like Marvel and Fox, I consider her to be as much an X-Men character as an Avengers one.)

That changed in 2012. We were surging towards Avengers vs. X-Men, which came with rumors of Brian Bendis taking over the X-Men books. I foolishly thought knowing something about The Avengers’ recent history would help me be less depressed about the shoe-horning of Avengers into a rightfully X-Men story or Bendis likely derailing all of their awesome plotlines.

I browsed through New Avengers collected editions trying to decide what to sample, and I realized I could not make heads or tails of them. There were two different New Avengers runs with similar numbering and a set books with similar titles and covers that had wildly different contents! [Read more…] about A Bendis Avengers Reading Order

the unglamorous life

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I am writing this missive to you from a park bench at a playground, purple and pink hair half up in a messy bun, wearing a too-large Lisa Loeb t-shirt with an unidentifiable stain on the breast, a pair of gym shorts, and a pair of sunglasses dangling from a strap on my neck so I can see the screen.

I have gone “full dad,” as they say. No, this post will not be illustrated by any photos. Whatever you are imagining is bad enough.

There was a time when I had rules about leaving the house. The dress code was strict. I had a “t-shirts permitted in public” drawer that was kept untainted by over-large band shirts I wear to bum around the house. Dress pants or jeans were the only acceptable bottoms; I would only show my bare legs in a casual setting if the temperature was over 90°. Athletic wear? Only for actual instances of exercise. And certainly not any low rise socks that show my ankles. Offensive.

Hair was to be either spectacularly curly or wrapped up in a bandana. Facial scruff had an allowable limit As for a sunglasses strap … just no.

As dress codes go, I think it was stricter than a school’s but maybe not as hardcore as a religion’s. (I do make frequent exceptions to fetch our mail in my underwear, after all).

Well, it took three years, but toddler wrangling has worn me down. All the time I used to spend on choosing and preening is now spent dressing a toddler, making sure she has juice and a head band and a snack and a change of clothes, and maybe making sure her shoes are on the right feet if time allows.

Me? Again, I’ll point out that I willingly left the house in GYM SHORTS. Yet, I also carry a 20lb bag of toddler accessories including our own toilet paper in case we find the TP on our adventures to be unsatisfactory.

(Philly TP report: Philly Zoo, thumbs down. Longwood Garden, thumbs up!)

I think a large part of it has to do with the weather. Heat wears me down. After serving four years in inescapable heat as a summer camp counselor, I spent the next half of my life scurrying for cover (or a pool) on every hot day. I want none of it – not the sweat, not the sunscreen, not the bugs. I don’t have room in my brain to process all of those annoyances.

(I can’t even tell you a time prior to this summer I willingly wore sunscreen not for the purpose of going to a pool or on a long walk. Maybe Bonnaroo? And, if you recall, I was asking to be airlifted out of that by the second day.)

I knew when I made the choice to stay home that one of the biggest challenges would be keeping things interesting in the hot weather. My mandate to create great memories aside, a toddler’s manic wiggles don’t miraculously evaporate in the heat and humidity any more than they do in the frigid cold.

And apparently my coping mechanism is “not giving a fuck.”