Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Marvel Comics

New for Patrons: Jane Foster Guide – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie

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I’m back with a new Marvel Guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis that’s about to be very relevant in a few weeks with the release of Thor: Love & Thunder, for a run that I hold in very high regard…

Guide to Jane Foster – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie
Note: This guide is now available to ALL READERS!

Jane Foster is one of a particular group of Marvel’s Silver and Bronze Age supporting characters who had a few hundred appearances without ever having a specific story of their own until relatively recently.

That recent story is a huge one. Jane Foster’s turn as The Mighty Thor during Jason Aaron’s run on Thor might be Marvel’s most-definitive modern classic of the 2010s! It’s big, it’s gorgeous, and it’s an incredibly emotional read. It is by far my top recommended reading from both Marvel and DC from the past decade!

It would’ve been easy to simply pull together a Jane Foster Guide to her as Thor and her subsequent transformation to Valkyrie. I’ve read every single issue of Marvel since that transformation and I have extensive notes on them all!

Yes, it has been recollected across many formats – Omnibus, deluxe hardcover, Complete Collection, and a pair of new “greatest hits” style paperbacks – but her story covers a finite set of issues across a number of specifically ordered series.

Yet, I had questions about Jane’s past. When did she stop being Thor’s love interest to get married to another man? When did she go from Nurse Foster to Doctor Foster? Had she ever been super-powered in the past? And, did any of her past stories have an influence on Aaron’s modern direction for her character?

Thor of you who have been following me for a while will not be surprised to hear that these questions lead me down a rabbit hole of inquiry, as I realized that no other Jane Foster Guide or wiki on the internet answered them the way I wanted them to be answered.

The solution? Read every single panel of Jane Foster from 1962 to 2012 and summarize it in my guide.

What did I learn? [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Jane Foster Guide – The Mighty Thor & Valkyrie

Updated: Ms. Marvel Guide – a Kamala Khan Reading Order!

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I’m excited to announced the public release of my Ms. Marvel Guide – a complete collecting guide and reading order to Kamala Khan, now the star of her own Disney+ show!

Guide to Ms. Marvel – Kamala Khan

I originally launched my Ms. Marvel Guide to Patrons on 11 December, 2017 as part of several “Marvel Legacy” character spin-offs from existing guides.

At the time, we were only midway through G. Willow Wilson’s second volume of Ms. Marvel, launched in 2015 in the wake of Secret Wars. Since then, Kamala had another ongoing written by Saladin Ahmed, plus a mini-event centered entirely around her with Outlawed.

Now, the guide is now fully updated with all of Kamala Khan’s series, collections, and appearances announced through the present day – plus links to read digitally on Marvel Unlimited! That includes the new series of thick digest-sized paperbacks that collect the entire G. Willow Wilson run in five volumes.

Unlike many older Marvel heroes, Ms. Marvel’s series have existed entirely in what I refer to as “the trade era” – meaning that Marvel collected all of them into trade paperback collections after their release as individual issues.

Does that mean that every in-continuity Kamala Khan story is collected? Not quite. Last month, Kamala garnered her own Marvel Unlimited Infinite Comic. It was written by the author of her last mini-series, Samira Ahmed, so it has a certain ring of authenticity to it that many digital one-shots don’t. However, this new line of Infinite Comics launched in September 2021, and so far none of them have been collected physically. (You also cannot read them on a web browser; they are for app-users only.)

That still leaves you with over 88 issues of Kamala-starring titles to read, plus all of her appearances in All-New All-Different Avengers and Champions.

What are you waiting for? Dig into reading Kamala Khan’s adventures in the Marvel Universe today with my Ms. Marvel Guide.

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s X-Man, Nate Grey

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis covers an unusual X-Men character, a copy of another character who went one to helm one of the longest-running X-Men solo series before disappearing into the aether (literally) for nearly a decade…

X-Man, Nate Grey – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: yes, this is really a guide for one 80-issue ongoing and fewer than 50 additional appearances by a character who went forgotten for a decade, and then for another half decade after a brief return.

That’s it! And, yet, X-Man AKA Nate Grey is about to make a major comeback to the world of X-Men, so it was time he got his own guide.

He debuted as part of “Age of Apocalypse” in 1995, and it’s important to remember that this event was quite specifically not an alternate reality at the time. It was the only version of Marvel’s reality that existed in the present day thanks to Legion going back in time to murder his father, Charles Xavier, rather than his target Magneto. (Oops!)

Nate Grey was a critical figure in the Age of Apocalypse – a version of Cable unravaged by time and the TO virus. While our Cable relied on his tactical skill and his leverage over the timestream to thwart his enemies, Nate Grey only needed Cable’s heritage of raw, uninhibited mutant power – the kind that Mr. Sinister had spent years trying to realize in our original timeline.

Age of Apocalypse was well-received and marvelous fun to read at the time. The idea of four of its characters and one of its titles persisting into Marvel-616 continuity was thrill! Of course, it made the most sense for that title to be X-Man, the most unique and singular of all the converted books.

However, there was the question of what to do with Nate Grey. In the Age of Apocalypse he was the most-powerful rebel, but in 616 Marvel he had nothing to rebel against. There was no narrative to welcome Nate Grey to the main Marvel timeline.  [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s X-Man, Nate Grey

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!