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New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Domino – star of Deadpool 2!

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Today’s new guide started for Patrons of Crushing Krisis as a quick’n’dirty way to cover a new X-Men title but turned into one of the most thorough single character guides I’ve created…

Domino – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Domino is a character I’ve always loved. Sure, she started out as part of an influx of X-TREME characters (and extreme T&A) in Liefeld’s X-Force launch, but Domino is the rare 90s comics babe who has become much more than that while maintaining agency in her depictions as a sexy, sexualized character.

Domino has all the skill of Deadpool and all the leadership ability of Cable. She’s funny, self-deprecating, and self-interested. She has a thing for big hunks of men and has no hesitance about making her affections known. She lead X-Force as a knowledgable friend rather than a commanding parent, and it shows in her continuing relationships with characters like Boom Boom and Warpath. She’s a complex, damaged character whose trauma never entirely defines her.

That makes Domino a treat whenever she appears, as she has in all but one iteration of “X-Force” – making her the team’s most-consistent cast member!

In reading her new ongoing series from Gail Simone, I realized that I’ve missed out on a lot of Domino’s major development; I stopped reading comics in the 90s before the “Road Trip” era of X-Force and her pair of limited series. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Domino – star of Deadpool 2!

Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)

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This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:

The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men 

One of the biggest factors in CK’s popularity exploding in the early 2010’s was the X-Men Reading Order I debuted back in 2012.

It emerged from a moment of frustration, as all of my best projects tend to. This time, my ire was focused on the fact that no one had produced an actually readable chronological guide to reading X-Men. Existing guides were either simply ordered by release date or ridiculously complex lists that broke down every single-panel flashback.

None of them were comprehensive of every book, nor were they appropriate for the Trade Era of collected editions.

Despite being a major feature of CK, I can’t say I’ve ever been proud of the presentation of the Reading Order. A lot of the pages have a certain “git’er’done” quality to them that was a hallmark of CK’s early expansion that I’ve never had the time to improve.

Honestly, they always makes me think of the scrawlings of a Serial Killer, like the notebooks upon notebooks in Se7en. That’s what it looked like to figure out – I had giant rolls of paper unspooled across the floor with scribbles and crossouts and loop-de-loop arrows on them. [Read more…] about Updated: X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men (The Silver Age)

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Vision

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis is long overdue – 17 months overdue, to be precise, since it was the last guide you all voted for in a Patrons’ Choice Poll just a few weeks before my entire life got flipped turned upside down…

Vision – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Despite anchoring five significant limited series spanning from 1982 to 2017, Vision has spent the majority of his publishing life as a team character in Avengers beginning in 1968.

In that sense, he is one of the most quintessential anchoring Avengers, because he’s never really appeared elsewhere! Plus, what character could be more of a core Avenger than an android created by Ultron (himself the creation of Hank Pym) based on the brain waves of Wonder Man and who falls in love with Scarlet Witch!? [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Vision

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis was actually the guide that caused me to start the avalanche of smaller guides to fill in the gaps in my Marvel Legacy era page! It’s for a group of characters who have always been curiously X-Men adjacent, despite definitely not being mutants…

Power Pack – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Power Pack’s long-running association with the X-Men is down to their creator, Louise Simonson.

Simonson was coming off years as an editor, and heading into several years of writing X-Factor and, later, a portion of New Mutants. Not only that, but she frequently pulled Power Pack into the X-Men’s 1980s line events – they tied in to Mutant Massacre (where they faced Sabreooth), Fall of the Mutants, and Inferno!

That’s the only tie the four siblings of the Power family had to Marvel’s mutants. They got their powers not through their genes, but in the style of Green Lantern – via an alien who was part of an intergalactic struggle dying at their feet on Earth.

Power Pack was one of the only Marvel titles to be explicitly in-continuity and purposefully written with early grade readers in mind. That made them popular both with kids and adults in the 80s, but it left them without an audience in the 90s as comics shifted towards teens and speculators. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Power Pack

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Ant-Man – every one of them!

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis covers one Marvel’s first Silver Age superheroes who was among the last to get his own ongoing series – and that series featured the third iteration of this hero…

Ant-Man & Giant-Man – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

This is one of the handful of Marvel guides that have been stymieing me for months now. I think you’ll soon understand why.

The original Ant-Man was Hank Pym, who debuted in a late-Atlas-era monstrous one-shot story in Tales to Astonish just as Marvel’s Silver Age superhero universe was gaining traction.

He was quickly brought back as a superhero (rather than a mad scientist) to anchor anthology stories in that title as well as to found the Avengers, though he was immediately super-sized in Giant-Man while Wasp held on to the miniaturizing powers of the couple.

Hank Pym would go on to be one of the Marvel characters to hold the most different superhero names in the course of his career – Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath, Yellowjacket – later he even took Janet’s name of The Wasp!

When Pym abandoned the Ant-Man name for good in the late 70s, Scott Lang took over. (There was a precedent for this – Pym’s lab assistant Bill Foster nabbed the Goliath name in 1975 when Pym and Hawkeye were through with it. He’s in the guide, too.) [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Ant-Man – every one of them!

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Legion, David Haller – The Son of Xavier!

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I’m back with a brief guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis that covers an obscure character – yet, he’s one who has been getting an outsized amount of attention thanks to having his own television show…

Legion, David Haller – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

David Haller is a son that Professor Charles Xavier never knew he had until his introduction in New Mutants #26-28 – and neither did we!

Haller is the product of Xavier’s brief (and somewhat unethical) affair with his patient and eventual colleague Gabrielle Haller, a noted attorney (and, later, an ambassador). When the Haller family becomes the target of terrorism, David unconsciously defends himself with his prodigious mutant powers.

David’s survival comes with a steep cost – his psyche becomes fractured by a post-traumatic dissociative disorder and his nascent powers are shattered along with it. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Legion, David Haller – The Son of Xavier!