Six Months of Krisis (AKA Where I've Been) (Patreon)

Hello, very patient Patrons! 

I hope you are all safe and well, and if you aren't I invite you to drop a line so I can hear what's happening with you and keep you in my thoughts.

(If you're not at all interested in where I've been and just want new comic guide content, skip right on over this post and check out the following one in half an hour!)

I wanted to share a not-so-brief update on where I've been and what I've been up to these past six months.

The short story is: everyone is happy and healthy in our household, but it's been a wild ride both for us personally and for the entire world! This past week has been my first chance to dig into CK and Patreon for several months, and I had no idea people were still able to sign up after January! 

I'm working to get everyone new logins right now!

But, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

When we last left your intrepid hero in November, I had just moved my massive comic collection to a new house. I was in the midst of unpacking and shooting a new YouTube series when we learned that ComicBookDB was shutting its doors. 

At the time, I was planning on a month or two of Image Guides (I had just launched Spawn!) followed by the launch of a big new DC hero.

Instead, in a panic, I produced a Captain Britain guide as a proof of concept to see how things would go without CBDB as a reference... and the experience sucked. I don't only use CBDB when I make a new guide, but any time I have a question about any single issue that's my destination, and that happens many times over when working on a guide page.

Thus, I spent the entire rest of November and the first half of December essentially getting 500+ guide pages to the 10% mark while CBDB was still up. I saved many webpages. I made many outlines. Honestly, I worked around the clock every day and I don't have a recollection of too much else happening in that entire 45 day time period. I was worried that I'd never be able to make a high quality guide in under 12hrs again.

(At some point we had family visit from the States for a week. That's all I've got for you.)

CBDB's final day coincided perfectly with the start of my daughter's summer break (remember, we're down under), so fresh from my back-up scramble I got to spend four uninterrupted weeks entertaining her - which was amazing. It was an awesome vacation after what was ultimately one of my least favorite years of all time.

Around that time, I decided that I had to do some major work to get back on track with comic guides post-CBDB, so I removed all of the tiers on this Patreon campaign except for the $1 and $1.99 levels, and I set them to be full at their current capacity. CK wasn't going anywhere, so I was happy to keep serving current Patrons, but I didn't want anyone new to sign up while I wasn't creating new content.

(As it turns out, I didn't turn off anything - I basically just converted this into a "pay what you want" mode. I had absolutely no idea of that, and didn't know new people were signing up until less than two weeks ago. Not my finest move. I'm working to correct that as quickly as I can today.)

(Also, in "you cannot make this shit up," a few hours after making this post I was checking my CK email and I discovered all emails from the contact form on the site have been marked as spam for several months. No idea why or how. Yikes. Running a web empire by yourself is hard. I've fixed it for now.)

In January, with my partner off from work to help juggle school break responsibilities, I produced my first ever "Best of Year" comics countdown. I had read over 2000 issues from more than 500 comic titles released in 2019 and I wanted to shout about how great my favorite 125 titles were. I've been building up to being able to do that sort of countdown for the past three years of reading, but 2019 was the first year where I really felt caught up on everything and able to make a definitive list.

Then, I got a new job! Quite unexpectedly!

An amazing company I interviewed with in July 2019 (and, obviously, didn't join) moved my ideal position from their office in the States to NZ for 2020. I had perfect timing in leaping onto it, and given that they had met me once already I was whisked right into a full time position in a matter of weeks - perfectly coinciding with my daughter's first day in a new school.

(One small wrinkle: Since we had no idea I'd have a job so early in the new school year, I was the one who was supposed to be picking her up and dropping her off from school every day. Another minor crisis to surmount.)

It's my first time back to working in my actual industry since 2016, and it's with a group of terrific people. I felt like I had hit the Mega-Power-Ball Ultra-Jackpot. I took a few weeks break from everything from comics to cooking dinner to learn the ropes of my new role.

My new routine was settled and I was ready to enjoy reading comics and working on comic guides alongside working full time again... so, of course, it was time for another crisis. 

What can I say: it's my brand.

Our family had a Visa emergency. Not the credit card. The little document that says we're legally allowed to live and work in New Zealand.

Just as suddenly as I had a new job, now it wasn't legal for me to work there. Or be paid. Or to go to the doctor. And if we didn't fix the minor misunderstanding that had turned into major trouble, we'd be deported in under two months time.

I won't get into all the sordid details, but the short story is that we were in a total panic for two weeks wondering if the next minute is when we would learn we'd have to pack everything and leave the country. It involved a lot of frantic filling of forms, talking to lawyers, and endlessly reloading our email inboxes.

It was a major relief when that reached its end so that our lives could get back to normal... except, I only got to spend one week partially back in my office (during which I realized I had broken my finger and couldn't play guitar), and then... 

...well, you all know what's been happening in the world the past few months. New Zealand locked down earlier and harder than many other countries, and then it was a game of waiting and watching numbers.

While we were in strict social isolation and working at home, I took on two huge projects that had been weighing on my mind.

First, I rebuilt my song lyrics database interface from the ground up. I know not many of you have seen me in my musical incarnation these past few years, but it's a huge part of my life (and my sanity)! Last year an update in PHP on my server took down my DB access, and that meant I was suddenly locked of accessing 300+ original songs, including their lyrics and chords. It took a few days of constant coding to get it up and running, but I'm proud I fixed it myself without having to hire a helping hand.

Second, I finally launched a pilot run of the show I started working on back before all of these major life events - Shelve, Store, or Sell! Since the world has already witnessed me unpacking my oversize hardcover collection, now I'm tackling 140 boxes of all my other stuff, including my entire X-Men trade paperback collection, my complete WildStorm collection, my 45yr run of Wonder Woman, and more!

Which brings us back to CK and Patreon.

I'm back to my office for first the first time since March this week, and for my first full week since February. Plus, it's my daughter's second week back in school. That will bring its own level of hectic back to my life, but in a lot of ways this weekend feels like the first "normal" weekend I've had since... uh... 2017? 

Seriously!

This Memorial Day weekend marks the three year anniversary of when my partner was offered a job in NZ, which began the wild events that took me, my family, and my comic collection almost 9,000 miles around the globe.

While there have been many happy moments in that time, it has featured constant uncertainty. There has not been a single moment of life where in the background I wasn't either packing boxes, unpacking boxes, looking for a job, or wondering if I should leave a job. 

(Spoilers: I should've left that job on the first day!)

As I dug into making a comic guide today, I realized it was the first time I was doing that without the constant thrum of uncertainty in the back of my mind. There's a lot to be uncertain about in the world right now! But, it's not the same stuff that has been up in the air for me for three whole years.

I'm sure this new feeling of normal won't last for long, and I'm not going to take it for granted considering how much of the world is very not normal right now. I'm not going to make a big pronouncement that I'm going to be back to making guides constantly. I think my posts here over the past three years prove my best laid plans always go awry after a month or two, at best.

However, I'm happy to be back with you in this moment, and I'm sorry that many of you signed up in the past few months only to be met with silence.

The good news is, I've already finished the next six guides. Why six? Well... you'll find out very shortly.

As always, thank you for sticking with me and for making it possible for CK to stay alive. The unspoken element through this six months of story is that at several points I didn't have any way to keep CK up and running other than all of you. Without your support, Crushing Krisis would've disappeared just like CBDB - and that would suck!

Excelsior!