Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Marvel Comics

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

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What started as a quickie guide to a character with just 26 issues to their name turned into a massive research project, which yielded a brand new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis…

The Sentry – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

This guide covers every Sentry appearance, from his debut in 2000 through his return in Marvel Legacy.

Not only does it cover every appearance, it also summarizes all of his guest appearances, so you can know if they are critical or just a cameo.

I gained a whole new appreciation for Sentry from working on this page. I’m not usually a big fan of major retcons, and that includes retconned characters. However, Paul Jenkins created a perfectly flawed Marvel Superman in his retroactive insertion of The Sentry into Marvel’s Silver Age – and he came with the perfect excuse for why we’ve all forgotten them.

Then, Brian Bendis made Sentry’s flaws one of the major themes of his run on Avengers. Those flaws aren’t just of a single character, but representative of how the moral purity of Silver Age heroes decays in the modern age. In his inflexible pursuit of rightness, Bendis’s Sentry sides with registration in Civil War, joins Norman Osborn’s Dark Avengers, and eventually implodes into his darkness.

In a way, I feel like I wasted my initial read of Bendis’s Avengers because I wasn’t already familiar with The Sentry when I started!

It’s not a coincidence that a Sentry guide helps me to plug a hole in the new Marvel Fresh Start era page. If you want to predict my next few Marvel guides, it’s as easy as thinking about the gaps of my coverage of ongoing series in Fresh Start, Legacy, All-New All-Different, and Marvel Now.

Want access to this guide today? It’s available, along over a dozen other exclusive guides, in exchange for covering $1.99 a month of CK’s hosting expenses.

New for Patrons: Guide to Marvel Fresh Start Era

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Sometimes it takes a long time for a plan to come to fruition.

Case and point: tonight’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis, which is less of a guide than a directory page … and which has been in the works for well over a year (even though it’s a guide for something that has just been announced)!

Marvel Fresh Start Era (2018 – Present) – The Definitive Guide

This Marvel Fresh Start page covers every series announced so far for Fresh Start, including ongoing series that are continuing into the era. For each series, it lists the launching creative team, explains where it is continuing from, and links to the guide that contains the full reading order details.

The plan for this page began in December of 2016. At that time, I was working on the massive DC New 52 and DC Rebirth guides to debut for Patreons early in this campaign.

It made so much sense to see an entire era of comic books summarized in one page … so why hadn’t I done that for Marvel!?

The answer to the question has to do with the transgressive nature of those two guides. I have a “double jeopardy” house rule on CK where I try my utmost to avoid detailing how to collect issues of a certain series in more than one place. If I do, that means I’ll have to update more than one place as new collections come out over the years – doubling my work load.

However, when I launched the DC section of the site, there were literally no other DC Guides, so I had no choice but to detail the full collection information of every series on the New 52 and Rebirth pages.

I was definitely not going to take that approach for Marvel – it would be the death of me! However, the alternative was for a Marvel Era page to link to the corresponding guide page for every series in the era. I’ve got pretty strong coverage of Marvel’s bibliography, but not quite that strong!

Thus, began my journey to catch up my comic guides with the present day of Marvel. That involved not only several new guides, but breaking up existing guides that covered multiple characters and changing section structures so I could link into each one at a consistent spot for each era.

It also meant catching up on reading Marvel, so I could explain the continuity of the post-Secret Wars Marvel Universe. I’ve read over 1400 issues of Marvel comics in the last 16 months!

This era guide is just the first in a series – I’m already putting the finishing touches on Marvel Legacy, plus working on launching new character guides to support era pages for All-New All-Different, Marvel Now, Heroic Age, and more.

Eventually, Crushing Comics will cover every Marvel series and issue from the beginning of the Silver Age through the present day!

Want access to this guide today? This is guide is available to all Patrons of Crushing Krisis, regardless of their level of support. Join the campaign by pledging as little as $1 a month to support a site that can help you fall in love with and follow thousands of your favorite comic books.

Marvel Fresh Start Era (2018 – Present) – The Definitive Guide

A comprehensive guide to every comic book series in Marvel Comics’ 2018 Fresh Start era. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Updated May 2018.

What is Marvel’s Fresh Start?

Marvel Fresh Start promo image

Marvel Fresh Start represents an era of Marvel’s comic line that began officially with Avengers (2018) #1 in May 2018, but also informally includes several series launches in the months leading up to that kickoff.

Titles did not carry an explicit “Fresh Start” banner or trade dress, so for some titles the beginning of Fresh start is approximate.

In continuity, Fresh Start does not coincide with the end of a specific event or an inciting incident.

There are a few specific story beats that precede it, including (roughly in order) the resurrection of Las Vegas in Doctor Strange: Damnation, the return of Hulk in Avengers: No Surrender, the return of Tony Stark at the end of Invincible Iron Man, and the death of Mighty Thor (which is chronologically the final plot beat of Marvel Legacy, since Thor appears in many of those other stories).

Marvel Fresh Start isn’t associated with any specific new storyline, but it mirrors DC Rebirth in that it returns the focus to a recognizable core of Marvel heroes and titles that have mostly been well-known for decades with a few exceptions. [Read more…] about Marvel Fresh Start Era (2018 – Present) – The Definitive Guide

Crushing Comics S01E085 – Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon, John Cassaday, & Laura Martin

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In today’s episode I unwrap my final omnibus, which (as many of you have likely surmised through a process of elimination) is Astonishing X-Men. I use this famously self-contained, blockbuster run as an opportunity to muse on getting back into comics and the surprisingly limited scope of the comic book market.

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

Episode 85 features the Astonishing X-Men Omnibus, covered in the Guide to Astonishing & Amazing X-Men.

(Yes, I skipped posting Episode 84 – it was just a episode prompting folks to guess the final omnibus.)