Infinity

Updated: Guide to Avengers Flagship Titles, 2010 – Present

July 21, 2022 by krisis

Today I’m excited to bring you a complete from-the-ground-up re-build and major update of one of the most-important guides to reading Marvel Comics from 2010 to present… Avengers flagship titles (2010 – present) – The Definitive Collecting Guide!

This massive update was made possible by Patrons of Crushing Krisis. It covers hundreds of issues across over 20 volumes of comics that have been collected in more than 250 different print editions, spanning four major eras of Avengers. Whether you want to buy collected editions, build a digital collection, or read as a Marvel Unlimited subscriber, this guide has you completely covered. [Read more…] about Updated: Guide to Avengers Flagship Titles, 2010 – Present

Crushing Comics S01E062 – Jonathan Hickman’s Infinity + brushes with the supernatural

January 18, 2018 by krisis

I open this episode by discussing my abridged history of brushes with the supernatural, including memorable stories CK posts like the blue hair dream and the graveyard ghosts. Then, I unwrap a pair of books that were the anchor to the early part of Jonathan Hickman’s run on Avengers and New Avengers – Infinity and Infinity Companion.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 62 features Jonathan Hickman’s Infinity and the Infinity Companion hardcover. See my Guide to Marvel Events for more information.

Song of the Day: “Look What You Made Me Do” – Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox featuring Kenton Chen

October 30, 2017 by krisis

The problem with perfection is the same one as the one with success: both are an expression of infinity.

If you are driven, you can be successful but still feel you aren’t successful enough. If you are a perfectionist, you can control every little detail but still feel you could have done more.

In each case, you’ve halved the distance between you and the infinite – there is still an infinite distance left to travel.

I think about this concept a lot, but never more than when I am considering a well-made album. Isn’t that the perfect intersection of success and perfection, plus some other nearly-infinite-to-measure quality of talent? As an artist, how do you go back into the studio when your last album is a critical and financial success, and just perfectly executed? It’s a tightrope act from which a lot of acts tumble.

Case and point: Taylor Swift’s 1989. It’s as perfect of a pop record as I’ve heard in my life. Every single song could survive on the radio as a single. And, unusually for a golden pop LP, it actually took home the Album of the Year trophy at the Grammies – a rarity.

I don’t think there is any way to top 1989, so Taylor just … didn’t. At least, not with her lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” of off Reputation, out next week.

Swift has a habit of releasing somewhat bare, unusual lead singles, but this one is less than that. The entire songs lacks for melody before it dissolves into an embarrassing faux-hip hop retread of “I’m Too Sexy.” The overwrought lyrics, usually a Swiftian specialty, but here coming off as protesting too much. And the cinema-quality video, which mashes up a lot of disconnected elements. (Why is she a zombie at the beginning? What is with the Beyoncé rip-off dance break).

Yes, I know it currently has over 600 million streams on YouTube. That’s the kind of half-infinite success you can maintain after a long streak of near-perfection.

If there’s one good bit of the song (and the video, as it happens), it’s the string-tinged bridge with little tinkles of carousel music. It’s everything the rest of the song isn’t but wants to be – catchy, lush, and foreboding.

It’s from that point that retro arrangement wunderkind Scott Bradlee developed his band’s cover of the song. Described as a cover in the style of a James Bond theme song, it picks up the strings theme from the bridge and stretches it luxuriously across each verse to turn the previously bare vocal into a poisonous vamp.

New Collecting Guide: Thanos, Marvel’s Mad Titan

September 13, 2016 by krisis

I’m happy to announce my first villainous comic guide – The Definitive Thanos Collecting Guide and Reading Order!

thanos-INFINITY2013004_Gen This guide isn’t only unique in focusing on a villain – it provides context for every one of Thanos’s significant comic appearances, so you can build your own ideal collection of Marvel’s Mad Titan.

Thanos made his cinematic debut in the post-credits scene in 2012’s The Avengers. From the explosion of fan fervor you’d never know that the multi-chinned purple villain had fewer than 200 in-continuity comic book appearances to his name at the time and had only once appeared in a monthly Avengers ongoing, over 35 years prior.

Originally a one-off 70s Iron Man villain, Thanos’s original notoriety came from his adoption by Jim Starlin, the creator behind the psychedelic space sagas of Captain Marvel and Adam Warlock. Thanos was the arch-nemesis of them both, but when Starlin’s initial run with Marvel wound down Thanos was shuttered along with Warlock and some of his supporting characters, revived only to usher Captain Marvel from this mortal coil in the classic Death of Captain Marvel graphic novel.

It was Starlin who again revived Thanos in the 90s during his run on Silver Surfer, this time as the only villain epic enough to assemble the entirety of Marvel’s heroes to fight him. Infinity Gauntlet was Marvel’s first linewide event with a featured mini-series plus tons of tie-ins that was centered on a singular foe. It was so successful that it spawned a pair of sequels in the following years.

After 1993, Thanos was finally unleashed on the Marvel Universe at large, but he was still used sparingly. Aside from an atypical run as a villain for Ka-Zar, Thanos stayed far away from the scrum of most of Marvel’s earthbound heroes for another 20 years! In that time he anchored another mini-series event, his own ongoing title, and was one of the main antagonists in Annihilation – the cosmic event that kicked off the line of stories that birthed Guardians of the Galaxy.

It wasn’t until Thanos’s cinematic debut that he entered the mainstream of Marvel, harassing the entire planet of heroes in Infinity while the Avengers were far afield in space. The result brought Thanos closer to the heart of Marvel’s storytelling than ever, with Jonathan Hickman using him as a central character in the run-up to Secret Wars.

Here’s the breakdown of all of Thanos’s major, most-essential appearances – each one is covered in the guide! [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Thanos, Marvel’s Mad Titan

Thanos – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The Thanos comic books definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated January 2024 with titles scheduled for release through April 2024.

Marvel has a handful of characters whose appetites for power and wakes of destruction single them out as a pantheon of the deadliest villains of the universe, and Thanos The Mad Titan is chief amongst them.

Modern audiences are just as likely to have met Thanos in his cheshire-grinning cameo at the end of The Avengers film as through comic books, but fans of every era of Marvel comics from his 1973 debut forward know of him – even if they’ve never read him directly. That’s because Marvel has used him judiciously over the years, keeping him largely under the pen of Jim Starlin and never making him a regular character, trivial guest-star, or easily-defeated foe. Thanos’s arrival has always been a main event.

The result is a tidy, eminently-readable back catalogue of Greatest Hits caliber stories.

thanos-INFINITY2013004_Gen It all begins in an unlikely fashion – with two anonymous, oddly-colored, muscle-bound aliens having a knock-down, drag-out fight in the middle of an unsuspecting Iron Man issue. Those aliens were Drax and Thanos. While Drax has undergone a considerable update for the modern day, Thanos remains true to that first appearance.

Soon after, he was adopted by Jim Starlin for his cosmic saga spanning Captain Marvel and Warlock, which together account for the first great Thanos story. It’s so great that it spills over to a pair of unrelated annuals for its resolution after Warlock’s title ends.

That was it for Thanos for over a decade aside from an interlude in Starlin’s landmark graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel.

Thanos remained out of play until Starlin took over Silver Surfer in 1990, immediately bringing his favorite obsessed-with-death villain into play. After over a year’s saga of lead-up issues, the result was one of Marvel’s most memorable events: The Infinity Gauntlet, which saw Thanos wielding the legendary weapon against the entire universe of heroes.

However, many readers of core titles like Spider-Man, Iron Man, X-Men, The Avengers never even knew Thanos was threatening the Earth! That’s because 90s mini-series events only intruded into lower-selling titles while borrowing top-selling heroes like Wolverine from their own books to boost the mini-series sales. Two more events followed in the same fashion, Infinity War and Infinity Crusade, which gradually twisted the narrative until Thanos was forced to fight alongside the heroes he so often sought to destroy.

After another relatively quiet period, Thanos returned (again, under Starlin) in Infinity Abyss and a resulting ongoing series, his first. Then, Thanos is thrust onto center stage at the start of Marvel’s blockbuster 2000s cosmic saga, Annihilation, and he reappears to terminate it with The Thanos Imperative.

Finally, concurrent with the release of The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy films, Brian Bendis and Jonathan Hickman formalized Thanos as a villain who can square off agains the assembled might of the Avengers. For many Marvel readers who hadn’t read the Infinity or Annihilation sagas, it was their first exposure to Thanos.

It wouldn’t be their last exposure, as Marvel has kept Thanos visible in their books every few years as an iconic MCU villain.
[Read more…] about Thanos – Collecting Guide and Reading Order