Crushing Krisis

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 6 – “A deux c’est mieu!” makeover challenge Review and Power Ranking

March 26, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the sixth episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – A deux c’est mieu! That translates as “Two is better [than one].” That’s the perfect title for Belgium’s first makeover challenge as the queens partnered with five presenters from Radio-télévision belge de la Communauté française – or RTBF (Belgium’s version of NPR & PBS).

If you follow my RuPaul’s Drag Race coverage, you’ve just read my thoughts on the mercurial nature of makeover challenges from yesterday’s “Teacher Makeovers.” Makeovers give production carte blanche to make any placement decisions they please, but sometimes that involves less interference and more going with the flow of the narrative.

That’s exactly what happened in A deux c’est mieu, with each queen producing the exact result you’d expect. The excellent queens delivered excellence, the contentious queen delivered contested results, and the low-key queens had nowhere left to hide from the judge’s critiques in such a slim field free of anyone making a mess of things.

That resulted in a satisfying episode, even if it highlighted the particular deficiencies of Lufy as a judge.

In her workroom walkthrough it was obvious that Lufy was playing the Michelle Visage role of giving pushy, counter-intuitive advice that could easily backfire. However, Michelle backs that up with the utter conviction of being right all the time. If her advice turned out to lead a queen astray, she simply doubles down that if what she said was done correctly things would’ve turned out fine.

Lufy is a much less experienced media personality. She couldn’t deliver on the much-needed judging punchline when one queen one faltered because of her advice and another succeeded despite it.

Even if the judging this season feels inexperienced, Drag Race Belgique more than makes up for it with a stellar cast of professional, entertaining, personable queens. We had two queens exchange rankings compared to last week’s Snatch Game line-up, but we’re heading into the semi-final with the three queens I predicted for the Top 3 in the pre-season and a fourth who I was most hoping to see succeed.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 13 – “Teacher Makeovers” Review & Power Ranking

March 25, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the thirteenth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – “Teacher Makeovers,” a makeover challenge with a quintet of local women teachers who are members of or allies to the LGBTQA* community.

Let’s be honest about Makeover Challenges on Drag Race: it’s often a “free play” week that allows the show to create whatever narrative works best for the remainder of the season.

Few queens utterly fail at the makeover (though we had one tonight!) and even when they do they can be sent to lip sync with just about anyone else in the cast to ensure the desired result. And, good makeovers tend to be similar in their strength, which means picking a winner can come down to arbitrary details. It’s rare to see a total blowout in either direction.

This has lead to many questionable Makeover episode placements over the years, from Divina winning while Cheryl went home in UK Season 1 to Trinity The Tuck not being in the top for the All Stars Season 4 make-over in favor of Monét. Heck, even Canada does it, putting Icesis in the bottom for a spectacular makeover on Season 2 just for not using matching colors on obviously similar dresses.

That’s why the makeover challenge tends to come late in the season (along with other challenges with extremely subjective measures of success). You can hand out a questionable win in a makeover to much less scrutiny from the cast and the fans than you can for Snatch Game.

That can make for a somewhat miserable episode for the queens, who are usually exhausted by this point in the season. A little bit of rigger morris goes a long long way to cracking competitors who are already on the verge of a breakdown.

The positive that comes along with this is that Makeover Challenges bring outside influences into the workroom. That can shake up tense dynamics within the cast and bring new stories to light. This episode’s makeover focused on five women teachers from around the Los Angeles area, each with their own connection to Drag Race and the LGBTQA* community. These women are already champions, from a mom of queer children to an art teacher on her own coming out journey to a kindergarten teacher who emphasizes that “love is love” to her youngsters.

All five teachers were willing to put in an A+ effort for their queens, but one queen wasn’t in the mood to match her partner’s enthusiasm for group work. That lead to an obvious bottom placement and a preordained lip sync. What it didn’t do is shake up the power rankings at all from last week’s Rusical rankings. Production has made some deliberate storytelling choices heading into next week’s semi-final. We’ll see if they all pay off.

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best drag queen win!

Updated: Guide to X-Men flagship titles, 2010 – 2019

March 24, 2023 by krisis

This week my X-Men guide update includes an unusual event: the birth of a new guide page! Now that we have hindsight on the storylines and collections of X-Men from 2010 to 2019, I’ve consolidated all of the main X-Men flagship titles into a single guide. Welcome to the all-new, all-different Guide to X-Men flagship titles (2010-2019)!

Guide to X-Men flagship titles (2010-2019)

This page consolidates the contents of a pair of older pages – a “Guide to Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 2-5” and “Guide to X-Men, Vol. 3 & 4,” though some of the former contents of those pages now lives in the recently revised Guide to New Mutants & Young X-Men.

At the time I original created my X-Guides, the “Second Coming” storyline was still ongoing and the map of X-Men titles seemed so obvious. There had always been and would always be the 1963 volume of Uncanny X-Men, often accompanied by an adjectiveless X-Men title as well as many supporting teams and titles like New Mutants, X-Force, X-Factor, and Astonishing X-Men.

I thought I had it all figured out. But, when it comes to the X-Men, that feeling never lasts for long.

New for Patrons: Guide to Drax the Destroyer

March 23, 2023 by krisis

I’m back with the fourth in my impromptu mid-month run of guides to green heroes for all Patrons of CK. Did I have any inkling this grouping of four guides would all debut back-to-back, or that they would overlap with Saint Patrick’s day in the process? I wish I could say it was all intentional, but it certainly was not! This hero is the oldest of all the green heroes I’ve covered in the past week, he’s as deadly as Gamora, and he’s even had more transformations than those famous mutant turtles. It’s my new Guide to Drax the Destroyer!

Guide to Drax the Destroyer

Part of the fun of putting together my definitive guides and reading orders is that I get a new understanding of a character’s progression.

In the case of Drax, I’ve seen all of his appearances before, but I’ve never reviewed them all sequentially to understand the major plot cadences that have caused his character to change over the years – sometimes radically. Of all of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Drax is the team member who has had the most distinct eras in his comic history.

What’s so interesting about Drax and his eras is how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has mined each one for a minor detail of his character. While his film incarnation often feels the farthest from the comics out of all of the guardians, really he is equally close to each of his disparate eras from the 1970s through present day.

New for Patrons: Guide to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IDW Continuity

March 22, 2023 by krisis

My Indie Comics Month of March marches onward with another new guide for Pledgeonaut Patron supporters of CK! On Monday I debuted a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to Mirage Studios Continuity, which ended with the sale of the TMNT intellectual property to Viacom. However, that wasn’t the end of TMNT – really, it was more like the beginning! That’s because Viacom licensed the Turtles to IDW, who has maintained one of the best shared universes of continuity in all of comics. Read it all in my new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to IDW Continuity!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Guide to IDW Continuity

Before I get into any background on this guide, one VERY IMPORTANT note: you can read the entire first decade of IDW continuity for free if you subscribe to Amazon’s Comixology Unlimited. Every digital purchase link in this guide leads to a Comixology page on Amazon where, if you subscribe, you can “borrow” the book for free with one click on desktop, mobile, or your Kindle.

I highly recommend subscribing for a month and binging a ton of Turtles, because that’s just how I fell in love with IDW’s absolutely incredible TMNT continuity.

I had never read a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics before 2019. I mostly knew the Turtles from their classic cartoons, videogames, and toys. As a comics fan, I was dimly aware of them having a lengthy history as a black-and-white indie comic in the 1980s (as covered in my Mirage Studios guide), but I had never read a single panel of their comic.

That changed in November 2019, when I stayed home from a weekend camping trip and spent a fully day dedicated to checking out comics I had never read before. At 10:04 AM I opened my first issue of IDW’s TMNT continuity and immediately fell in love.