New Comic Book Guide

New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to Youngblood (to kick off my Indie Comics Month!)

March 1, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to the kickoff of “Indie Comics Month” at Crushing Krisis! I’ll be expanding the Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics all month long, and I can’t have an Indie Comics guide without covering some Image Comics. I meant to kick that off last year for their 30th anniversary, but what could be more in the spirit of early Image comic books than running a few months behind schedule? Today I’m covering the first Image ongoing comic. Yes, it’s Rob Liefeld’s X-adjacent squad of X-Treme government heroes in my Guide to Youngblood!

Guide to Youngblood

To celebrate the start of my Indie Comics month, this new Guide to Youngblood is immediately available for all CK readers thanks to the X-Tremely Awesome support of Patrons of CK! For as little as $1 a month you can help to support the costs of maintaining and expanding the 200+ comic guides of Crushing Comics, plus get early access to guides like this one (and every X-adjacent guide).

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Krisis, did we really need a guide to Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood? Wasn’t there some other indie comic you could’ve started with?”

The answers to those questions are yes and no, respectively – but, maybe not for the reasons you think. [Read more…] about New for ALL CK Readers: Guide to Youngblood (to kick off my Indie Comics Month!)

New for Patrons: Guide to Adam Warlock

February 27, 2023 by krisis

Today I’m here with a new guide for all Patrons of CK that has been secretly part of another guide for close to a decade! Of course, it’s not really helpful to new readers to have a whole character’s guide stealthily tucked away somewhere they might never look. That’s why I just went on a deep dive through the 56 year comic history of a major Marvel character who at first was only known by his pronouns. Now his golden skin is about to hit the silver screen. That’s right, I’m talking about “Him,” whose comic history is covered under his better-known name in my Guide to Adam Warlock!

Guide to Adam Warlock
This guide is now available to all readers thanks to the supernatural support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

I’d hazard a guess that the vast majority of CK readers have no idea that every Adam Warlock appearance from his 1967 debut through 2017 is summarized in my Guide to Guardians of the Galaxy.

Guess what? I had totally forgotten about that, too! I truly thought the Guardians guide only covered the movie team as individuals. Imagine my surprise when I checked a collection on it recently to discover that it also encompassed Adam Warlock, since he was one of the initial cast members of the now-classic Abnett & Lanning 2008 run that set the stage for the team to appear in the MCU.

All of that Warlock material still exists for public perusal in the Guardians Guide. However, aside from the obscurity of knowing where to find that information on the site, I also saw an opportunity to explain things in a much clearer way in a dedicated Guide to Adam Warlock. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Adam Warlock

Guide to Shazam, The Captain Marvel of DC Comics

February 20, 2023 by krisis

This week I’m back with my first new DC Comics collecting guide and reading order of 2023 for CK’s Plegeonaut Patrons on Patreon! This guide is for one of DC’s oldest characters, though really he has only been a DC character since the Bronze Age… or since Crisis, depending on how you count. I thought that would make for a confusing muddle of continuity. Instead, it turned out to be a delightful research project putting together this new Guide to Shazam, DC’s Captain Marvel!

Guide to Shazam, DC’s Captain Marvel
This guide is now available to all readers thanks to the magical support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

Here is what I knew about Shazam before researching his 83-year history for this guide: He’s really called Captain Marvel but we don’t call him that anymore (for reasons). He’s a Fawcett Comics character who DC (legally) stole. A wizard gave young Billy Batson the power to effectively become Superman (which is why DC stole him, legally), with the knowledge of Solomon and some other stuff that spells Shazam.

Oh, and: Geoff Johns is obsessed with him.

Honestly, that’s not a bad place to start with Shazam knowledge, but it turns out he’s both much simpler and much deeper than that. [Read more…] about Guide to Shazam, The Captain Marvel of DC Comics

The Wasp Guide to Janet van Dyne – now available to the public!

February 16, 2023 by krisis

If you thought I was done with guide releases to celebrate the kickoff of Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 5 with Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania, you thought wrong! I couldn’t miss the chance to release a guide for one of Marvel’s original leading ladies with my Wasp Guide to Janet Van Dyne.

Guide to Wasp, Janet Van Dyne

This Wasp Guide includes a complete reading order of every Janet van Dyne appearance, from her debut in June 1963 to the launch of her first solo series last month. That’s a lot of Janet van Dyne comics, so I’ve also summarized every one of her team appearances and provided a cheat sheet of her greatest hits if you only want to read issues where she is in the thick of the action.

As with many of Marvel’s Silver Age women on super-teams, Janet is often a bystander, romantic interest, or damsel in distress in her early stories with only occasional starring roles (like her series of solo back-up stories in Tales to Astonish). The big difference is that in 1981 Janet broke free of her romantic plot and became the leader of The Avengers in Avengers (1963) #217!

Even though several other Marvel women had scored their own long-running solo titles by that point, Janet being the chairman of the Avengers made her Marvel’s female character with the most authority across their entire line of books – it would be another five years before Storm formally took on leading the X-Men. As a result, Janet has a period where she is at the center of Avengers stories (and decisions) that makes for a satisfying read.

While Janet was a major part of the end of Secret Invasion as well as the resolution of Brian Bendis’s run on Avengers, she doesn’t have many iconic stories in the past decade until the introduction of her adopted step-daughter Nadia van Dyne, The Unstoppable Wasp. If you read no other modern Janet stories, please read her narration in Unstoppable Wasp (2017) #7-8. Author Jeremy Whitley did a magnificent job of creating a signature voice for a character who had rarely ever gotten the chance to tell her own story in her 60-year history.

This Wasp Guide exists thanks to the ongoing support of the astonishing Patrons of Crushing Krisis. They’ve had early access to the guide for the past three weeks. Now, the guide is open to the public and updated through the present day.

Unstoppable Wasp Guide – now available to the public!

February 15, 2023 by krisis

I’m happy to announce that my Unstoppable Wasp Guide is now available to all readers to celebrate the release of Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania, in theatres today!

Guide to Unstoppable Wasp, Nadia van Dyne

This Unstoppable Wasp Guide includes a complete reading order of every Nadia van Dyne appearance, from her debut in Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) 2016, through her stint in The Avengers, into Secret Empire and out into the Champions on the other side – plus, Nadia’s own delightful book, Unstoppable Wasp.

Throughout the reading order, I indicate where some books are very tonally different for the character (a-hem, Secret Empire), in case you’re reading along with the kids in your life. If you’re Not in the mood for a full-on Unstoppable Wasp reading order, I also provided a slimmed-down list of “Greatest Hits” issues so you can get only the core of Nadia’s story without background appearances and cameos.

Nadia occupies an interesting space in Marvel’s mythology. She is Hank Pym’s daughter, but she is not his daughter with The Wasp (Janet van Dyne) that neatly aligns with Hope van Dyne of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Instead, Nadia is Hank’s previously unknown child with his first wife, Maria Trovaya. Maria was introduced via flashback in the Silver Age debut of Janet van Dyne. As Hank recalls in that 60s comic, Maria was abducted by foreign agents on their honeymoon and presumed dead for decades of comic continuity. Even when it was later suggested that she was kept alive and held captive, there was nary a hint of a secret daughter until Mark Waid created Nadia in 2016.

Even if Nadia isn’t the same as Hope, there’s something very clever about how she has been handled. That’s because she has allowed Janet van Dyne to take on a maternal role (even giving Nadia her last name!) without aging her to be the mother of a teenager of her own. While moms absolutely can be (and are) heroes, Marvel is always shy to make a female hero into a mom without artificially aging up her child – as we’ve seen with both Jean Grey and Scarlet Witch!

(Sue Storm remains Marvel’s mom-in-chief, parenting two teenagers who aged up off-panel alongside her during an eight-year gap spent tending to other universes after Secret Wars).

This Unstoppable Wasp Guide exists thanks to the ongoing support of the amazing Patrons of Crushing Krisis. They’ve had early access to the guide for three weeks. Now, the guide is open to the public and updated through the present day.