Crushing Krisis

Shazam Guide, The Captain Marvel of DC Comics – now available to the public!

March 13, 2023 by krisis

To celebrate this week’s release of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, I’m happy to present my Shazam Guide – The Captain Marvel of DC Comics – now available to all readers of CK!

Guide to Shazam, DC’s Captain Marvel

Read my original Shazam Guide launch post for an essay on Billy Batson’s origins and how DC has gradually lost the magic that once made Shazam and his family the most-loved (and highest-selling) heroes in all of comics.

If you’r thinking about reading Shazam for the first time you may find yourself daunted by the fact that he has been around for over 80 years. However, his Golden Age comics from 1940-1953 are almost wholly uncollected, and they are completely disconnected from his present day continuity.

DC revived Shazam in 2012 starting with a new origin and a large adopted family that match closely with the film continuity. However, I don’t think it’s worth starting there. There’s simply not that much material to read, and none of the stories are particularly satisfying. They often have a cruel, violent edge that is a total mismatch for the wide-eyed wonder of the character.

For a terrific, hefty Shazam read, try starting back in 1994 with Jerry Ordway’s The Power of Shazam. The first half of the nearly 50-issue series are collected as The Power of SHAZAM! Book 1: In the Beginning (2020 paperback, ISBN 978-1401299415 / digital) and The Power of Shazam! Book 2: The Worm Turns (2023 paperback, ISBN 978-1779521743), plus the entire series is available on DC Universe Infinite.

The title is set in pre-Crisis continuity, which isn’t presently relevant for Shazam, but it’s a complete and well-thought-out series that sees him as a part of the larger DC Universe alongside heroes likes Superman and Wonder Woman. I read much of the series while putting together this guide, and it’s enjoyable from start to finish.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it! My Shazam Guide covers every appearance the character has made from 1940 through last month, with links to collected editions and digital reading options for every major starring issue. Start at the launch of one of his many series, or just jump in randomly to an issue with a cool cover.

This guide exists thanks to the ongoing support of the astonishing Patrons of Crushing Krisis. They’ve had early access to the guide for the past month! Join for as little as $1 a month or $10.20 a year to get early access to dozens of existing guides and every new guide as it makes its first appearance on CK.

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 4 – “L’émission qui vous déshabille” acting challenge & “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway Review & Power Ranking

March 12, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the fourth episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – “L’émission qui vous déshabille,” a scripted acting challenge spoofing real-life documentary Ni juge, ni soumise. It was paired with a “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway celebrating surrealist painter René Magritte – plus, the library was open for a reading challenge.

If that sounds like a brainy episode, it was! But, it also showed how prepared the top group of queens remaining on this season are when it comes to surmounting any challenge thrown their way… except, perhaps, a reading challenge.

These Belgian queens seemed to be literally shaking in their boots when Rita Baga opened the library for the reading mini-challenge. Several of them seemed to be too nervous to even hold their prop glasses up to their eyes.

That made me wonder to what extent reading is baked into the culture of Belgian drag. Of course, there is a certain playful cattiness to most drag queens and drag scenes, and we’ve seen that on display in the workroom and in confessionals. Yet, reading tends to be a very direct, confrontational version of that cattiness. I get the sense that doesn’t come as naturally in Belgium as it does for queens other countries – like, for instance, New Zealand.

That stands in contrast to the acting challenge and the runway, which both seemed to capitalize on the cerebral qualities of the queens and Belgium’s appreciation for the arts. I wasn’t expecting much from a spoof of a documentary or a modern art runway theme, but this cast of queens came ready to impress.

My French is not good enough to have perfectly understood the acting scenes without subtitles and translations, but I got the impression that two of them went off without a hitch and were thoroughly amusing. The script relied on the broad humor of badly-behaved citizens facing off against a dour but impulsive magistrate, which means the queens all had genuine characters to act rather than simply spouting catchlines or delivering physical humor.

The same is true for the Magritte-inspired “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway theme. On other franchises I’d expect perhaps one or two queens who really understood the assignment of capturing the thematic qualities of a surrealist painter in their fashions. Here, no one missed the mark entirely. The same was true on their bande dessinée runway on episode two.

It seems clear that the average drag queen in Belgium is expected to know her cultural references and appreciate the country’s artistic heroes. I find it refreshing to be watching a version of Drag Race where the queen’s references are not simply drag, reality TV, and fashion. I don’t think any other franchise has seemed so enamored with connecting drag to the fine arts.

What does this cerebral episode mean for my Power Rankings compared to last week’s “Festival Realness” design challenge? One queen descended precipitously due to some factors out of her control, while a pair of winless queens jostled to secure a spot of runner-up to our clear front-runner.

(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 11 – “Two Queens, One Joke” Review & Power Ranking

March 11, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the eleventh episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – “Two Queens, One Joke.” It’s a typical Drag Race stand-up challenge with the added twist of being performed in pairs, a la All Stars Season 2. Plus, a voguing mini-challenge, a “Rip Her To Shreds” runway, and an all-time best lip sync!

There’s a reason that Drag Race places stand-up comedy challenges towards the back half of the season, and it’s not just to have enough run-time to show comedy sets from every queen.

Comedy challenges are some of the most-subjective Drag Race challenges of all. It’s easy for producers to craft any kind of narrative they want for a queen purely by having RuPaul laugh more or less during her set and then matching Ru’s energy in the edit. Even a genuinely hilarious queen like Bianca del Rio could be stopped short by complete silence between her jokes..

While queens have a little bit of control over their fates in writing their own jokes, it’s not much. There have been many re-edits of iconically bad past comedy challenges where the addition of an audience laugh track or Ru’s own screaming laughter makes seemingly dead jokes come alive. There’s a version of Laganja Estranja’s iconically bad stand-up set with laughter included that makes her out to be mildly amusing!

With that in mind, it’s no coincidence that “Two Queens One Joke” was used to dismiss a queen who did perfectly okay but who would’ve likely crushed her competitors next week. That would have made the road to the finale more complicated and potentially cost us several front-runners along the way. Of course, this is exactly what I predicted last week, because I have seen a few (dozen) Drag Race comedy challenges before!

Luckily for us as viewers, the challenge yielded a highly-entertaining lip sync to Doja Cat’s wildly fun “Boss Bitch.” It’s a song I am utterly addicted to even without a lip sync to pair with it! It helped that the lip sync ran a full two minutes and five seconds of a 2:14 song.

That’s not totally unusual. The Ariana Grande lip sync on the full-length Episode 2 was a couple of seconds shy of two minutes. However, last week’s “Single Ladies” was a slim 1:47.

Eighteen more seconds in a lip sync is a lot of time for queens to endear themselves, especially when it means we get a full song with virtually no edits. Even some of our favorite evenly-matched lip syncs of all time like “Shut Up & Drive,” “Sorry Not Sorry,” and “Miss You Much” are heavily edited, and it’s obvious we lost some material to the cutting room floor. Here, we saw the nearly entire thing.

That longer lip sync was a result of this week’s second lucky turn for viewers: this was the first week of Drag Race returning to a 90-minute TV runtime on MTV, which means an hour-long episode edit! The episode had so much more room to breathe with an extra 20 minutes of footage. The return of seeing the judges in their private deliberations reinforced for me how essential they are to keeping the narrative of the show moving forward.

What does this mean for my Power Rankings compared to last week’s interview challenge? Absolutely nothing when it comes to the dismissal (which I anticipated), but this episode’s placements shook up our potential final four in a major way for the first time in several weeks.

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

Updated: Guide to New X-Men by Grant Morrison

March 10, 2023 by krisis

I’m taking a brief breather from my Indie Comics Month today to continue my weekly series of X-Men guide updates! After last week’s update to my Guide to Uncanny X-Men in the 00s, it’s time to take a look at its sibling title and what might be the most-definitive X-Men run after Chris Claremont’s in my Guide to New X-Men & X-Men Vol. 2 the 00s (AKA Guide to New X-Men by Grant Morrison).

Guide to New X-Men & X-Men Vol. 2 the 00s.
AKA Guide to New X-Men by Grant Morrison

There are two pieces of major collected edition news in this Guide to New X-Men update!

First, there is a new fifth printing of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men Omnibus out in just a few months! This is one Marvel’s most-reprinted omnibuses, which after years out of print is now as close to “evergreen” as any single run at Marvel Comics.

Second, Marvel finally finished their “Complete Collection” reprint sequence of this material last year with their X-Men by Peter Milligan: Blood of Apocalypse, which is effectively “X-Men by Peter Milligan Vol. 2.” The first collection included the volume number in the title, so it’s puzzling that this one does not.

The printing of this collection not only concludes Marvel’s reprint of this period, but finally makes one of the hardest-to-find and most-expensive original X-Men trade paperback collections obsolete!

The original Blood of Apocalypse collection was murderous to find 13 years ago when I started collecting, and it hasn’t gotten any easier since then. At the time it was one of the few collections I had to finally break down and pay over cover price to acquire. I just don’t think that many of them were printed relative to the print runs of collections on either side.

That doesn’t mean I only added two collections to this guide! I added much more detail to the New X-Men section, including breaking the pair of paperback printings into separate sub-sections. I clarified the recollection coverage of the Austen and Milligan period, including how issue #165 is orphaned in a Complete Collection of mostly Uncanny X-Men. I explicitly placed of the two annuals in this run in reading order. And, finally, I added digital purchase links and Marvel Unlimited reading links to bring this guide in line with the new Crushing Comics guides.

That means all of my X-Men team book guides are now up-to-date through 2008! However, there are still several more pages to update to cover the intervening 15 years of titles between there and the present day – plus, several solo guides to update as well. Make sure to keep an eye on the CK homepage each week for my newest guide updates.

New for Patrons: Guide to Brigade

March 9, 2023 by krisis

I have another new guide for all Patrons of CK and, weirdly, this guide for a little known Image Launch title with few lasting fans is a big inspiration for expanding my indie comics coverage. Welcome to a guide about the Image Comics launch book from Rob Liefeld you’ve probably never heard of in my Guide to Brigade!

Guide to Brigade

If you recall Brigade from the 90s, you’d have to have been a major fan of the mythology of Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood. And, if the amount of information on the internet about this comic is any indication, there ain’t a whole lot of those major fans out there.

Brigade was the fifth comic launched by Image in 1992, and the second from Liefeld’s Extreme Studios. His Youngblood were positioned as a government-sanctioned super-team that doubled as major media stars. Brigade was the dark flipside of that. Its leader, Bloodstone, was a World War 2 veteran who served, died, and served again thanks to the Image Comics version of a super soldier serum. He once led Youngblood, but left in disgrace after the accidental death of one of his team members at his own hands.

Despite it all, Battlestone never gave up on fighting the good fight for justice – he just fights it from a different angle now with his own vigilante team.

I made that sound really cool, right? Like a disgraced Captain America leading the Dark Avengers a full five years prior to the debut of Thunderbolts (rather than fancy boy Iron Man leading a bunch of high-profile Avengers slumming it in Force Works, which was still two years after the launch of Brigade).

So, why don’t we recall this comic as the flipside of Youngblood the way we do with the conjoined pair of WildCats & Stormwatch? [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Brigade