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DC Comics
New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Mister Miracle
Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis is for a character who has gone in and out of vogue for nearly five decades, but who is having perhaps his highest-profile year of all time in 2018…
Mister Miracle – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
Mister Miracle is having a very good year.
His 12-issue maxi-series from Tom King and Mitch Gerads is one of the biggest critical and fan hits of the year. It generates endless conversation, speculation, and dissection every month upon its release and both King and Gerads took home 2018 Eisner Awards for their work just halfway through the run.
This is not a coincidence. Not just because King and Gerads are both at the top of their games right now, but because Mister Miracle is a character who ebbs and flows. It was time for him to make his return.
Before this iteration, there was Grant Morrison’s reimagination of the character in 2005. Before that, a string of New Gods series from 1992 to 2002. Before that, a long run in the Justice League and his 28-issue 1989 series.
It all started in 1971, when Scott Free was one of the major creations of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World at DC Comics. At the surface level, he seemed like an outlier – a random traveller on the countryside who stumbles into taking over the mantel of a famed escapologist. Yet, every issue unfurled more of Free’s complex entanglement with the wild world of Apokolips – from his epic love story with Big Barda to the and the nasty Granny Goodness and her female furies.
As it turns out, our charming Mister Miracle was actually the future sovereign of Apokolips… or of the more-peaceful New Genesis, based on a long-ago peace treaty slash child-swap between Darkseid and Highfather. When Scott Free defected from the pits of Apokolips to Earth, he voided the treaty.
All he had to do to fix things was give up his entire life. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Mister Miracle
New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Aquaman
Today’s guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis gets me one step closer to covering DC’s pantheon of most well-established heroes, although this hero in particular has suffered many indignities over the years both in comics and in the court of public opinion…
Aquaman – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been carefully dancing around addressing DC’s Golden Age in guides for a while now. Honestly, wrestling with Earth 2 and Earth 1 versions of Wonder Woman and Flash took the fight out of me, as did tracking all of the many anthology appearances of Green Arrow. It has been a relief to work on DC guides with titles set almost entirely in the Post-Crisis era, like Nightwing and Catwoman.
(Yes, I know I could just choose to skip the Golden Age portion of characters’ histories, but then I wouldn’t be creating the most-definitive character guides on the internet, would I?)
Despite the looming Golden Age challenge, I knew it was time to knock out the next of DC’s major Justice League heroes, and with Aquaman’s movie out next month he was the obvious choice over Green Lantern (oof, so many of them) or Superman (it’s still too scary to think about how I’ll organize that one).
As it turns out, Aquaman was the perfect DC character to ease me back into tracking Golden and Silver Age appearances.
Maybe that’s because he’s never been all that popular? That has always come as a shock to me, as a child of the 80s who knew Aquaman as an A-List cast member in DC Super Friends. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Aquaman
New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Suicide Squad – from Silver Age to Present Day!
Today’s guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis seemed like it would be a straight-forward team guide, but I wasn’t accounting for how unique each iteration of this death-defying squadron tends to be…
Suicide Squad – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
Suicide Squad wasn’t always a team of villains serving a compulsory stint as reluctant heroes.
The title has its origins in the Silver Age with a pair of paramilitary mad science tales in The Brave and the Bold and Star Spangled War Stories (which, by the way, means that Suicide Squad actually predates the Justice League by a few months).
That Squadron X was a wildly different team than the modern version lead by Amanda Waller. The two were cleverly linked in the wake of Legends, the first post-Crisis DC event. Legends served as the introduction to Waller and her team of ne’er-do-wells, most of whom were incredibly obscure villains. Captain Boomerang was probably the most widely-known of the original cast, at the time!
Of course, now we associate Suicide Squad as much with Amanda Waller and those once-obscure villains like Boomerang, Deadshot, and Enchantress as we do with Harley Quinn. That was all the work of the New 52 iteration of the team in 2011 and the 2016 film version. Harley’s addition to the Squad makes for an odd fit at points, but it’s the version that hit cinemas so it’s like to be a permanent change. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Suicide Squad – from Silver Age to Present Day!
New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Catwoman, Selina Kyle
Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis covers a DC character who went nearly 50 years without her own title before becoming a regular anchor of DC’s monthly lineup…
Catwoman, Selina Kyle – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
Putting this Catwoman guide together should have been super easy. She’s had one mini-series and four ongoings since 1989 plus Gotham City Sirens (already covered in the Guide to Gotham).
That, like, two hours of work tops, right?
Well, you know me: my motto is “make it harder.” It wasn’t enough to just knock together a list of collected editions for those series. I also had to list all of Catwoman’s many guest-starring turns, plus explain her continuity a bit.
How did she go from Batman’s ally and lover before Crisis back to a vigilante loner for two decades and then back to ally and lover again in Rebirth?! [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Catwoman, Selina Kyle