Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

New Comic Book Guide

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 DC’s Catwoman, Selina Kyle

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis covers a DC character who went nearly 50 years without her own title before becoming a regular anchor of DC’s monthly lineup…

Catwoman, Selina Kyle – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Putting this Catwoman guide together should have been super easy. She’s had one mini-series and four ongoings since 1989 plus Gotham City Sirens (already covered in the Guide to Gotham).

That, like, two hours of work tops, right?

Well, you know me: my motto is “make it harder.” It wasn’t enough to just knock together a list of collected editions for those series. I also had to list all of Catwoman’s many guest-starring turns, plus explain her continuity a bit.

How did she go from Batman’s ally and lover before Crisis back to a vigilante loner for two decades and then back to ally and lover again in Rebirth?! [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Catwoman, Selina Kyle

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!

New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Nightwing, Dick Grayson

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Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis fills in one of the major gaps in my DC coverage and brings my collection of Bat-Family guides a little bit closer to being complete:

Nightwing, Dick Grayson – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

Dick Grayson occupies a distinct spot in both DC and Marvel history as a rare hero who had a long-standing, in-continuity early identity to which he will likely never be reverted.

That’s because Grayson was the original Robin to Bruce Wayne’s Batman in the Golden and Silver Ages – but, he’s spent the entire Post-Crisis modern age of comics as Nightwing (except for those few years he was Batman).

As a reader of primarily Marvel Comics, the first time I encountered Dick Grayson was during his time as Batman in Grant Morrison’s epic run with the caped crusader. I really didn’t know a thing about him other than that he was the first Robin, which made him seem pretty boring to me – like a character DC kept publishing just out of habit. It seemed like a dull gimmick to turn him into Batman.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Grayson was new to wearing the cowl, but not to being a hero. He wasn’t as foolproof as Bruce as Batman, but he was more emotionally complex and pragmatic. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: The Definitive Guide to DC’s Nightwing, Dick Grayson