Geek Punditry #198: Carrie White and the Flanaganverse

blakemp Geek Punditry , , ,

When Amazon announced that Prime Video was going to make a miniseries based on Stephen King’s novel Carrie, I had the same reaction as pretty much every other sentient lifeform: I added a package of Fruit Rollups to my cart and ignored it. After all, what possible reason could there be for adapting Carrie yet AGAIN?

Then someone gave me a perfectly reasonable answer to that question: Mike Flanagan.

“Who the HELL thought it would be a good idea to — oh, him? Okay, then.”

There seems to be a rule that in any given era, one filmmaker is allowed to make the truly great adaptations of Stephen King’s work. For a while there, that was Frank Darabont. After he finished The Mist, he decided it was time to take a breather and passed the torch on to Flanagan. Flanagan’s original movies, like Hush and Oculus, have all been entertaining. When he started doing long-form miniseries for Netflix, we got some amazing television based on classic horror: things like The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. But most pertinently, he’s done three previous Stephen King movies; every one of them is a film that was an unconventional choice at best, and every one has been a triumph.

Gerald’s Game is a novel about a woman who is handcuffed to a bed when her husband has a fatal heart attack during a little…well…game. (No points for guessing the husband’s name.) Almost the entire novel is the wife, Jessie, trying to escape, having flashbacks to different portions of her life that give context to the predicament she finds herself in, or fearing a strange phantom that may or may not be real. Because of the very nature of the story and the fact that at least 50 percent of it all takes place in Jessie’s head, it spent decades as one of those books that the unimaginative declare “unfilmable.” But in 2017 Flanagan filmed it, Carla Guigno delivered a knockout performance as Jessie, and Flanagan was on the map.

“He made a movie out of WHAT?”

In 2019 he tackled Doctor Sleep, a novel that was problematic for a totally different reason. The book is a sequel to Stephen King’s classic The Shining, which of course was made into an iconic movie by Stanley Kubrick in 1980. Kubrick’s film took some wild swings with the novel, though, and despite being considered one of the must-watch films in the canon of American horror, Stephen King himself was not a fan. At the very least, most people will agree that while the film is effective in its own right, it does a poor job of actually adapting the novel. Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the book, not the movie, and as such it went in directions that were faithful to the original story but flat-out contradicted Kubrick’s film. Making Doctor Sleep into a sequel to Kubrick’s movie while still satisfying fans of the novel seemed an insurmountable task. But somehow, Flanagan pulled it off.

“He made a movie out of what AGAIN?”

Then just two years ago, he adapted King’s novella The Life of Chuck, one of those books King writes periodically to remind people that he does not only, in fact, write horror. Chuck is a tender, bittersweet, beautiful tale, but for reasons that are hard to discuss without giving away some of the best twists of the story, it didn’t seem like a likely candidate for adaptation. But Flanagan rounded up Tom Hiddleston and several members of his usual repertory of actors and turned out one of the most powerful, lovely, and heartfelt films based on a King work since the era of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (both Darabont films).

“He made a — who IS this guy?”

All that said, Carrie is a different matter than any of those. To make an eight-hour miniseries based on Carrie seemed like a wild idea at the outset. It’s already been adapted three previous times (not counting the stage musical), and the first of those adaptations is considered a seminal classic of the horror genre. What’s more – eight hours? The original novel is pretty slim, especially by Stephen King standards. The only way to stretch a story out that much is to add things that aren’t in the original. The good news is that Flanagan has proven himself to be adept at that time and again. After I watched his Fall of the House of Usher, I described it as him taking all of his Edgar Allan Poe LEGO sets, dumping them into a pile, and building something totally new out of the familiar pieces. Similarly, his Haunting of Hill House uses the original Shirley Jackson novel less as source material and more as a general suggestion. What Flanagan has done with these stories in the past is take the elements that we already know and use them as the context for new, gripping stories. And although the changes weren’t as dramatic as those other examples, he did the same thing when he adapted Carrie.

Flanagan’s series dropped a few weeks ago, and it’s really buzzing amongst fans of Stephen King and Flanagan himself. The talk is mostly positive, although there do seem to be people upset about the ending. (I am not one of them.) I’m going to get into some spoilers today so if you haven’t watched it yet, you may want to skip the rest of this column until you do, but be assured that I was very satisfied both in the show itself and its potential implications for King/Flanagan collaborations in the future.

The new Queen of King…

The basic framework of the story is more or less the same as what we already know: Carrie White (played wonderfully by Summer H. Howell) is a young girl who is bullied at school and smothered by her overbearing mother (Samantha Sloyan, one of Flanagan’s regular collaborators, delivering a phenomenal performance). After a traumatic episode surrounding her first period, Carrie discovers she has telekinetic powers. The bullying continues until a bloody climax at the prom leaves hundreds of people dead and sends Carrie off for a fateful confrontation with her own mother. Those elements are all still there. But that story has been told very adroitly in less than two hours in the past. To expand it to eight episodes, Flanagan added a lot of stuff that isn’t in the King original or any of the previous films.

Much of the additive elements are spent enhancing the characters’ backstories. Chris Hargensen, for instance, is a fairly static character in the original. Carrie’s primary tormentor is an uber-example of a high school “Mean Girl” decades before that term was even coined. In Flanagan’s version, we spend almost as much time with Chris (played with delightful nastiness by Alison Thornton) as we do with Carrie herself, and we see the circumstances that shaped her into who she is. She’s got parents who are neglectful and narcissistic, and her father (Michael Trucco, another Flanagan regular) in particular is an unfeeling jerk who seems to see his daughter more as an annoyance than an actual child. And as bad as those parents are, it’s even worse for Chris when she finds out that they’re going through a divorce.

You may remember, a few weeks ago, when I wrote a column (GP #194: Can We Just Let Bad Guys Be Bad?) about the fact that I find the trend of “humanizing” villains to be tedious, and my praise for Carrie may seem contradictory. I’m here to tell you, that’s not the case. While it’s true that the TV series explores the reasons behind Chris’s behavior, it doesn’t try to justify that behavior like the recent East of Eden or to reshape the story so she’s not really a villain as in Wicked or Maleficent. Yeah, Chris’s life sucks, and we see that, but at no point does the show attempt to EXCUSE her behavior. Do you feel bad for a kid whose parents barely seem to recognize that she exists? Sure. Does that sympathy disappear when she creates the “@CarrieRed” Instagram account to terrorize not only Carrie, but the entire student body and faculty of Ewan High School? So, so much. The show demonstrates that Chris’s parents are terrible people, but that does not make anything that she does okay. Over and over again, she makes the choices of a sadistic, heartless monster. Over and over again she is presented with an opportunity to recant that behavior, and instead she chooses to double down. Chris Hargensen is a villain, and her villainy is not excused.

I’m sure Alison Thornton is a lovely person, but when she looks at you like that it’s obvious why she was cast as the nastiest 12th grader in literary history.

Carrie’s mother Margaret White is similarly expanded upon by the adaptation, and like Chris that exploration gives context without attempting to give justification. In the original, and in most adaptations, Margaret’s violent religious fundamentalism and paranoia are the fuel that feeds Carrie’s rampage. This adaptation shaves some of those edges off: while the fundamentalism is still an element of the character, Flanagan doesn’t lean on it as much as usual. Instead, we see a Margaret that, like Chris, could potentially be an object of sympathy: as the series begins she is recently widowed and forced to take a job and send her teenage daughter to school for the first time. She’s been largely isolated and sees the world as attacking her child, a child who needs protection. There’s a particularly emotional scene in episode four when Carrie comes home covered in mud and heartbroken because she’s learned that Chris has been orchestrating her torment while pretending to be her friend. The audience – and Carrie – expect Margaret to explode and punish her for the crime of going out late and lying about her whereabouts, but the instant she sees Carrie standing there, filthy and sobbing, Margaret’s anger evaporates and she takes Carrie into a sincere, comforting embrace, behaving more like a mother than we’ve ever seen.

But again, none of this is ever used to justify the dark parts of her character. Margaret IS overbearing, smothering, and even abusive (the famous “prayer closet” from other iterations of the story remains as the most prominent symbol of her crippling fundamentalist nature). She’s also petty, getting her manager at work fired when it is clear to the audience that the woman is doing everything she can to HELP Margaret, a new widow she recognizes is desperately struggling. We see Margaret’s invasive nature, hiding cameras around the house to spy on Carrie when she has to be at work. I mentioned earlier that Chris has opportunities to pull back from her own behavior – in the last such instance it seems as though she is about to do so, until Margaret (displaying an utter lack of mercy) goads her until she again doubles down. We see how she has isolated Carrie from the world for her entire life and would have continued to do so had her circumstances not changed in such a tragic fashion. Margaret is a mother who sincerely believes she’s doing the best thing for her child, but at the same time, has been strangling that child from the moment she emerged from the womb. Margaret White is a villain, and her villainy is not excused.

Similarly, Samantha Sloyan looks like she’s offended by the very fact that you’re even having a day, so she’s here to ruin it.

As for Carrie…well, Carrie’s villainy doesn’t need to be tempered, because Carrie White is not a villain, and never has been. Carrie is a victim. She’s a victim of Chris and a victim of her mother. She’s a victim of a world that is structured in a way that is terribly unkind to anybody that is different. She’s a victim of her own genetics, having an incredible and terrible power that she does not understand and ultimately cannot control. Carrie is never really given the chance that Chris had, to pull back from her mistakes. Once she breaks, there is no opportunity to rectify anything. Carrie White is not a villain, but rather an example of the fact that you don’t HAVE to be a villain to be responsible for horrifying things.

There are, I should point out, some people who disagree with me about this – they feel that Flanagan DID go too far, that he DID try too hard to make Chris and Margaret into sympathetic figures. To these people I will say that I respect your right to your opinion, but go get your own dang column.

The other major changes to the story, which again are all additive, are perhaps even more intriguing than the character work Flanagan did – and again, I caution you, I’m about to get spoileriffic up in this piece. The miniseries brings in a framing sequence that exists in the novel but was left out of the classic Brian DePalma movie: it’s set after the cataclysmic prom night, and some of the survivors of the massacre are being interviewed, telling their versions of the story. The end of episode one, however, drops a bombshell that has not existed in any other version of Carrie, namely that our titular character was not acting alone that night.

“Surprise!”

As the series progresses, we learn that there are other people like Carrie, people with various psychic powers. Some of them want her to join them, other people are trying to actively destroy the psychics. In the climactic prom scene, in fact, after Chris and her boyfriend have doused poor Carrie in pig’s blood, Flanagan’s version has Carrie’s psychic friend Emaline (Thalia Dudek) “take the wheel” and use Carrie’s body and powers to lash out. This is the one contention people have with the series that I can kind of agree with. Usually, Carrie is the one that carries out the Prom Night massacre, having lost control of herself. In this version, Emaline is the primary aggressor and Carrie is mostly a weapon. I suspect that in large part, Flanagan made this change so that the character wouldn’t be too psychologically damaged to continue the story. Normally, if this were the end, that wouldn’t be an issue, but just yesterday (as I post this) Amazon has announced that they’ve given a green light to a second season of this show.

At the end of Flanagan’s series, Carrie survives and escapes with Emaline, fleeing into an unknown future. Although Carrie was announced as a miniseries, Flanagan has said that he’s got plans for a three-season story arc, and as the first season pretty much covers the entire novel, there are a LOT of questions about where he’s planning to take it. But fans of Flanagan and King probably already have at least an inkling.

Get your hiking boots — you cannot believe how long this walk is gonna be.

Carrie was Stephen King’s first published novel, but he has come back to the well of people with different kinds of psychic powers over and over again in the decades since. The way the different factions are presented in Carrie even evokes – quite deliberately, I’m certain – different groups and organizations that exist in stories such as Firestarter, The Institute, and even Doctor Sleep, which you should remember, was also adapted by Mike Flanagan. It seems more than likely that Flanagan is planning to draw on some of this mythology in future seasons.

But that’s not all. One of the most prominent uses for psychics in the work of Stephen King comes from his magnum opus The Dark Tower. One of the many (many, MAAAANY) subplots in this series involves the Big Bad, the Crimson King, forcing different psychics to work as “Breakers,” using their powers to literally “break” the beams of force that hold up the Dark Tower itself, which is a sort of nexus of all creation. If the Tower falls, so does the entire multiverse. It’s kind of a big deal.

There have been plans for years to try to adapt The Dark Tower to screen, and one movie version that made a horrifically misguided attempt to condense eight novels (many of which are the size of phone books) into a film of less than two hours. Let’s not talk about that. What’s important is who currently holds the rights to try a new adaptation of the saga: Mike Flanagan. I’ve written before (in Geek Punditry #160: The Difficulty of a Kingamatic Universe) about how tough it’s going to be to do justice to this property, but Flanagan is determined. He’s been highly vocal about his desire to bring this series to the screen in as faithful an adaptation as possible. His plan, he says, is to make a TV series that would run for five seasons, then two feature films to complete the epic. And unlike Carrie, his goal is to simply film the books and try NOT to change things up too much.

However, anyone who knows anything about storytelling can tell you that SOME changes are inevitable. Cinema and books are different mediums, and things that work in one don’t always work in another. Most fans, I think, can accept this as long as the adaptation is done well. But there’s a bigger issue involved in The Dark Tower than your standard adaptation pitfalls: the eight books in the series are not wholly self-contained. They contain references to and characters from numerous other works of Stephen King’s, and a great many of his other books return the favor, containing references (sometimes blatant, sometimes oblique) to The Dark Tower itself. This causes a totally different problem when it comes to adapting the series: licensing rights. Over the five decades of his career, almost every story King has ever written has had the rights sold to one studio or filmmaker or another, and many of them are still held by those other companies. ‘Salem’s Lot and It, two novels that have quite important ties to the series, are both owned by Warner Bros. Another significant novel, The Stand, was the property of Paramount last time I checked. I don’t have a comprehensive list of where the rest of his works currently lie, but be confident in knowing that they’re all the heck over the place.

This guy is just WAITING for another go.

What this means is that, in order to adapt The Dark Tower, Flanagan is going to have to do one of two things: either negotiate the rights with all the other companies that own bits and pieces of King’s multiverse, or make changes to work around those properties he can’t get his hands on.

The good news is that probably the three MOST significant connections, from the three books I mentioned previously, are tied up in two companies that have merged into one; Warner Bros and Paramount are now both part of Skydance. That might make ironing out those wrinkles slightly easier…then again it might not. It depends largely on the attitude of the executives involved. But Flanagan worked with Warner Bros for Doctor Sleep, so presumably, there are already some inroads there.

Flanagan seems quite optimistic. It’s taking time to get this project started, but it IS moving forward. And if you look back at his previous work, he’s been aiming for this all along. As far back as his Gerald’s Game adaptation he was dropping Dark Tower references. He continued that in Doctor Sleep and Carrie, even though none of those properties are among the ones that are more directly connected to the Tower. It is entirely conceivable that Flanagan has already begun laying the groundwork for a Stephen King cinematic universe, the likes of which fans have long thought impossible, and that some of the plans he has for Carrie’s future include establishing elements he can use in his Dark Tower – such as characters he has the rights to that may take the place of characters he can’t get. (I’ve got no idea who owns the rights to Insomnia, for example, but it would be relatively simple to swap out the significant psychic who came from that novel with somebody else, and I doubt most fans would be terribly upset about it.)

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know how important The Dark Tower is to me. It’s one of my favorite series ever written. I met my wife on a long-defunct Dark Tower message board. It is entirely conceivable that, were it not for this series of novels, my son would not exist.

It kinda means something to me, is what I’m saying.

So I want to see justice done to these books as much as anybody alive. And after watching Carrie, I am more confident than ever that if we’re EVER going to get a successful version of The Dark Tower, it’s going to be thanks to Mike Flanagan. In the meantime, I’m looking at every King project he makes (and the next one is going to be a new version of The Mist – another highly linkable story) as one more brick in the long, long road to the Tower.

Because Flanagan knows, if anyone does, that all things serve the Beam.

…and the King of Queens. No, that’s a Kevin James sitcom. Oh, you get the point.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Superman Stuff #42: Halloween With the Super Friends

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Here’s the thing about Halloween, guys – it seems to happen every year. Funny at that. But despite the proliferation of Halloween comics out there, it’s harder to single out Superman-specific comics that focus on the holiday, especially since I covered a lot of the big ones last year during the original Year of Superman. This week, I decided to take a slight detour, then, to a Super Friends comic, in which the unlikely partnership of Jimmy Olsen and the Wonder Twins save Halloween!

Super Friends #28
Title: Masquerade of Madness
Writer: E. Nelson Bridwell
Art and Cover: Ramona Fradon
Inks: Vince Colletta

It’s a wild Halloween party in Gotham City, and Zan and Jayna – the Wonder Twins – are enjoying watching their friends have fun with the premise. As they walk around having used their powers to turn into an abominable snowman and a black cat (respectively), Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson are having a little fun with their dates by dressing as Batman and Robin, and Jimmy Olsen has used the ol’ magic potion he’s used in the past to turn himself into a real werewolf for the party, with the promise from Jayna that she’ll kiss him after the party and end the curse. But when the clock strikes midnight and everyone is supposed to unmask, they find themselves trapped in the forms of their costumes, courtesy of the evil sorcerer Felix Faust.

Apparently, Bruce Wayne and several of the other guests each own ancient gems containing immense power that Faust wants to unlock, and he refuses to release the partygoers from their monstrous forms unless they surrender the gems to him. As most of the guests try fruitlessly to attack Faust, Jimmy lures the Wonder Twins away. Using the kind of logic that really only makes sense in cartoons like Super Friends, Jimmy explains that Faust’s magic only affected people wearing costumes – and since he’s a REAL werewolf, the spell didn’t work on him. The twins realize that the same spell prevents them from returning to their human forms, but they can affect SOME transformations, so Jayna turns into a cat-bat to fly off and find Wonder Woman and Aquaman while Jimmy summons Superman with his signal watch.

As the assembled heroes go on the attack, Faust forces the enchanted partygoers (dressed as Solomon Grundy, Bizarro, Swamp Thing, Man-Bat, and the Demon) to fight them back, raising some serious questions as to what kind of costumes you can find at Spirit Halloween in Gotham City. Like, is there a Joker costume? Would that be like a mass-produced outfit that lets you dress up like Charles Manson or something? The implication here is the creepiest thing about the issue. But anyway, what follows is several pages of the Justice League fighting Faust’s captives, in some amusing face-offs. Superman, naturally, fights “Bizarro,” Aquaman tackles “Swamp Thing” (whom he’s heard is pretty powerful), Batman fights “Grundy,” Robin takes “Man-Bat” and Wonder Woman lassos the “Demon.” You get the usual stuff about the heroes not wanting to actually hurt them, since they’re innocent people who have been transformed by magic, but the captives have all the powers of their costumes and none of the usual compunctions. In the end, though, it’s Jimmy and the Twins who finally get the drop on Faust, with Zan turning into an ice skeleton and freaking the villain out with a Grim Reaper routine long enough for Jimmy to get in and deliver a knockout punch.

I’m always amused by these old Super Friends comics. At the time these were being published, continuity was a fast and loose game, and even though DC Comics had pioneered the concept of a multiverse, it wasn’t something they used as vigorously as they do today. The result were Super Friends stories that tried to pretend they were part of the mainstream DC Universe with various references and callbacks that were probably wasted on the younger readers that the comic was aimed at. For instance, when the League is trying to come up with a plan to fight Faust, Superman suggests calling up the only Justice League member with magical powers, Zatanna, but unfortunately she’s busy on her own case. Jimmy’s werewolfism, as well as the cure (a kiss from a pretty girl) is a callback to one of the classic Silver Age Jimmy Olsen comics (in fact, I’m pretty sure I wrote about that one LAST Halloween), and there’s even a casual reference to the fact that Jimmy learned Batman’s secret identity on a previous adventure, which is a story I’ve never read or even heard of before, so I GOTTA find that one.

At the same time, the stories are light and simplistic, even compared to the DC Comics of the 1970s. They’re not making this comic for older kids, they’re trying to hook the younger ones. Those links are a neat way to do it, although a few footnotes indicating which issues they’re referencing would be nice.

As was often the case with Super Friends, the ending comes pretty abruptly and without much fanfare. Zan scares Faust, Jimmy punches his lights out, and as soon as he hits the floor the spell is broken and the people trapped in their costumes are set free. There’s also a quick beat at the end where the (unnamed) girls who came to the party with Bruce and Dick ask where they heck they’ve gotten to and the “real” Batman casually tells them that their dates have been placed out of harm’s way. It’s astonishing how often people in old comic books fell for that excuse.

It’s a fun little story, though, and I enjoyed reading it. With one Wednesday left until Halloween, though, I want to find something spookier. Hit me in the comments, guys – what’s the scariest Superman story you know?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!

Geek Punditry #197: It’s Not “Elevated” — It’s Just Good

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As always, October has got me in the mood for spooky novels, short stories about monsters that appear with no rational explanation, comics hosted by a decaying corpse with a wicked sense of humor, and undead cereal mascots with the most advanced case of rosacea you’ve ever seen. And if you’re a horror fan, we are in something of a golden age. Not only are we being inundated with a lot of horror movies, but many of them are REALLY GOOD. And if that wasn’t enough, they’re achieving CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL ACCLAIM as well. As somebody who lived through the lean years of the early aughts, when almost every horror movie was a reboot, a sequel, or a remake of a Japanese film, it’s like a dream come true. Back on January 1st it probably wouldn’t have been hard to predict that Spider-Man: Brand New Day would be the highest-grossing movie of the year so far, but there are few people who would have suggested the likes of Obsession and Backrooms would also sit proudly in the top ten ahead of a new Star Wars film, a Steven Spielberg sci-fi epic, or Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie.

You’d be surprised how much this guy and Marshall have in common.

Even movies that didn’t score the box office heights of those two have been doing very well, relatively. Movies like Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and Buddy both generated all the chatter. Iron Lung may only have made $27 million at the box office, but with its shoestring budget and a self-released model that eschewed any sort of major studio backing it’s considered a massive success story. And it ain’t even over yet: this weekend brings us the aquatic thriller Whalefall and next week drops DC Studios’ body horror film Clayface, both of which are drawing fantastic early reviews. In an era where general audiences are starving for entertainment, horror movie fans feel like we’ve killed the fatted calf.

But as we are in this era of excellent and acclaimed horror, it still chafes me sometimes when I see the hoops that the mainstream has to leap through before they can accept that a horror movie is just…good.

The term “elevated” horror has been around for some time now. I don’t remember exactly when I first began hearing it but I know it goes back at least to movies like The Babadook or It Follows, both from 2014, so it’s not a new concept. It is, however, kind of an insulting one. When I hear a movie described as “elevated” horror, the gist I get is that this is a horror movie that’s actually ABOUT something: some sort of crisis, some trauma, some dark aspect of the human condition that the movie is exploring. In The Babadook, for example, people who dissect these things point out that the monster itself is not actually a “traditional” monster, but rather a manifestation of the main character’s repressed grief over the death of her husband. It Follows, similarly, is about the anxiety of a teenager discovering her burgeoning sexuality. You see, these elevated movies aren’t REALLY horror, not like Freddy or Jason, they’re movies that use horror movie THEMES to actually EXPLORE something of artful depth.

Pictured: Repressed Grief

And some people may be nodding their heads along with this and saying, “Sure, what’s wrong with that?” And the answer is: there’s nothing wrong with it. That’s why horror writers have been doing it SINCE THE INVENTION OF THE GENRE.

One can easily make the argument that Frankenstein, specifically the second edition, is really about Mary Shelley wrestling with her anxieties over death after the loss of her husband and children. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is often seen as a metaphor for female liberation in an era before such a thing was a mainstream concept. How far back you wanna go? The folktale of Bluebeard is about women being afraid of the power of an overbearing man. In The Odyssey (Homer’s, not Nolan’s) it’s easy to view parts of Odysseus’s journey into the underworld as being about the terrors of war and the guilt of the people who survive it. Every werewolf legend is seated in a terror of a violent, animalistic urge that may be hiding in the person sitting next to you. When you say that horror that’s “about” something is “elevated,” you discount the fact that horror has ALWAYS been about something.

Let’s look again at some of this year’s big hitters: Obsession and Backrooms. I recently read an article on Substack (which I’m sorry to say I can’t find and link to, but if you’re interested – hey! – go ahead and subscribe to MY Substack and get a free short story in your mailbox) that argued both of these movies are, at least in part, about the “male loneliness epidemic.” That’s not a hard argument to make. In Obsession, every bad thing that happens can be traced to the fact that Bear is a pathetic, weak-willed creature who doesn’t have the courage to just admit to his actual feelings. Backrooms is fueled by the pain of a man who has lost his wife and is losing his company and has pretty much given up on his dreams. This same Substack writer, it should be noted, went on to argue that a lot of this year’s other box office winners — including Project: Hail Mary, Spider-Man, and even The Odyssey (Nolan’s, not Homers) — are about this same theme. I’ll let you decide for yourself if they all fit, but does that make Brand New Day an elevated superhero movie?

Tone is something else that frequently gets referenced when someone calls a horror movie “elevated.” If you look at the examples I’ve given so far, you’ll probably notice that all of these movies have kind of a slow burn. They start from a place of relative normalcy, although often a bleak, somewhat hopeless kind of “normal,” and then over the course of the movie the supernatural elements incrementally creep into the characters’ lives before finally reaching that point of maximum chaos and violence. I can accept movies with that tone as being a subcategory of horror, but there are a lot of non-horror movies that have that same kind of dour feeling: No Country For Old Men, Apocalypse Now, The Road, even Oppenheimer (Nolan’s, not Homer’s). If all it takes to be “elevated” is a general sense that everything sucks and it isn’t going to get any better, turn it on CNN. They’ve been trying to elevate the news for decades.

Even horror that’s “lowbrow” is about SOMETHING. People who talk about elevated horror as if that makes them some sort of Svengali are ignoring the fact that slasher movies of the 80s were predominately about “punishing” people for perceived sins like sex and drinking, that monster movies of the 50s were manifest versions of Cold War anxieties, or that even as early as 1936 Dracula’s Daughter took cues from Bram Stoker and painted the consequences of sexual repression as bloodthirsty monsters.

It’s basically a woman’s empowerment fable. Like Xanadu or something.

All of this is to say that “elevated” horror is nothing new, and pretending like it is doesn’t make you smart, it just makes you sound pretentious. I’m not disparaging any of the movies that are called elevated, mind you, I’m just disparaging the people who call them that. The filmmakers themselves will usually tell you that they weren’t making any effort at “elevation,” they were just making a scary movie…like people always have. If you think calling it “elevated” somehow gives you permission to appreciate something that you usually wouldn’t associate with, that’s a you problem, my friend. It’s not the genre. Horror has always lived in this area, and it’s not going anywhere.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Superman Stuff #41: Supergirl’s Zoo-Per Heroes: Krypto’s Big Break

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This week’s “Superman Stuff” is going to be a little different – a review, yes, but also a bit of a personal reflection. This week we’re going to look at one of DC’s young reader graphic novels, and how awesome it was not just as a book, but as an experience for my family. 

Supergirl’s Zoo-Per Heroes: Krypto’s Big Break
Writer & Artist: Rob Justus

This young reader’s graphic novel starts with Supergirl and Krypto playing on the Justice League Satellite. Krypto is, of course, a good boy, but even good boys get into trouble sometimes, and his antics cause the Satellite to accidentally dump the Justice League’s laundry into space. Cosmic comic book physics happen on the way down and, when the costumes fall on some zoo animals, the animals find themselves possessing the powers of the hero whose costume they’re wearing. With the rest of the JLA trapped on the Satellite in their underwear, it’s up to Supergirl and Krypto to get their uniforms back.

It’s a silly story, with logic that wouldn’t even hold up in the goofiest of silver age comic books, and frankly, that’s kind of why I love it. The physics don’t make the slightest bit of sense, and the villain of the piece is a ridiculous caricature. There’s also a running gag about the fact that Krypto and the other animals can speak to each other, but the human characters don’t understand them, which makes Supergirl’s attempts to speak “animal” to them hilarious as they get exasperated with her gibberish barking. Justus’s characters have a simplicity that is absolutely charming, and there’s a sense of humor that appeals to the kids while winking at the parents who are reading along.

It’s that last part that makes this book particularly special to me. I didn’t read this book just for myself; I read it with my son, Eddie. Eddie is an ADHD kid, and while he’s capable of reading anything you put in front of him, he often doesn’t have the patience to do so for more than a page or two. My wife and I often try to get him to read with us, but it can be a struggle, as he’d rather be playing or watching football. But despite that, every other week I take him to the library and we check out a few books. Sometimes he reads them, sometimes he doesn’t. Picking up this one, though, turned out to be a great choice.

I sat with him and opened up the book last night (as I write this), and made a deal with him. “How about you read what Krypto is saying, and I’ll read the other characters, okay?”

And he did. He did it with zeal. He did it with APLOMB. Eddie jumped right into his role, barking and woofing when that’s what Kryto was doing, reading the lines in English when that was the case. He did it with vigour, acting out like everyone’s favorite hyperactive Kryptonian puppy, no doubt because he feels in our beloved Superdog something of a kindred spirit. As we sat together reading the book, he announced his parts gleefully to his mother, who was watching the whole thing with amusement.

I’ve been reading to my son since he was an infant. Getting him to read back to me has sometimes become a chore. But he LOVED this book.

It ended on a cliffhanger, and I’m eagerly awaiting book two. I also intend to try to track down some of Justus’s other work, including the two volumes of Superman’s Good Guy Gang, and share those with Eddie as well. It wasn’t just reading, it was sharing, and that made it all worthwhile.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!

Geek Punditry #196: That Primal Fear

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Halloween is coming up, so today I’m going to talk about the scariest thing I can think of: kids.

No, creepier.

Okay, not exactly. In my class we’re currently in a unit where students are reading up on and writing arguments about artificial intelligence, including its depiction in fiction. And as part of that unit, I demonstrate that we have had stories, fables, folklore, and myths that include things fitting our definition of AI far longer than we’ve actually had AI. We see it in Pinocchio, we see it in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, we see it going back to the ancient Hebrew legend of the Golem. And as we discuss these old stories, I ask my students for other examples of non-living creatures that are given life in order to fulfill some sort of need of its human creator. One kid brought up Astro Boy. Another mentioned Marvel’s The Vision™ (I include “Marvel’s” here for purposes of trademark). One kid asked if Toy Story counts, which gives me a chance to point out that A) we have never learned, in-universe, WHY the toys are alive, and B) despite the fact that Toy Story 5 was an excellent rebound from the mediocre Toy Story 4, I still think they should have stopped with 3. 

But one of the things that came up over and over again in this conversation is just how often the stories are about creations that turn against their creators. It’s not really October until I’ve mentioned Frankenstein at least 11 times, so let’s start there:

Okay, that’s ONE…

Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with conquering death, and thus creates a new lifeform by assembling parts of dead bodies. When his creation is too hideous for him to deal with, he abandons it and leaves the poor thing to exist on its own, which turns out to be a huge mistake, as the creature grows to resent his creator and turns against him. It’s the classic archetype, and we’ve seen it turn up over and over again. There are obvious, deliberate takes on the idea in things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show; there are more subtle but still clear allusions in movies like Edward Scissorhands, but they’re all portaging Mary Shelley’s idea when they tell their own story. Sometimes the creation is actively evil, sometimes it’s misguided, but the common thread is that pretty much all of them are dangerous.

Except maybe Frankenweenie. He was a good boy.

But this idea is prevalent in modern sci-fi horror as well. Look at M3GAN, a franchise built around the idea of a robotic plaything that turns murderous. Chopping Mall is about a robotic security system that turns murderous. The entire Terminator franchise is predicated on the idea that the computer systems we humans have built will become murderous. WHY ARE WE SO OBSESSED WITH THESE MURDER BOTS?

You should definitely find one of these scarier than the other.

There is, of course, a reason. Fiction – good fiction, at least – reveals something about its creator, and in the case of horror, what it usually reveals are the things that people are afraid of. Why, then, have we been afraid of those things we create going bad for hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years? This question was always puzzling to me.

That is, until I became a dad.

I’m no psychologist, I’m just a guy who reads a lot of books and watches a lot of movies, but I’m going to explain what I take away from what I think of as the Frankenstein complex that is revealed in fiction. I think that the Frankenstein monster and M3GAN and all the others come from a place of people being afraid of who their children will grow up to be, and THAT fear is rooted in a fear that we, as parents, won’t measure up. That’s literally the message that modern audiences get from Frankenstein, that the whole tragedy is caused by Victor’s egregiously lacking parenting skills. The supposition – and I think it’s a fair one – is that if he had not abandoned the monster and left him without guidance, structure, or even a name, then he may have been nurtured into a creature of value rather than the murderer he became. In fact, of all the various derivative versions of the Frankenstein story, the only ones that I can think of that have happy endings are the ones where the scientist character embraces the creature as he would a child, such as in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein.

This was the tenderest depiction of fatherhood ever on film until the creation of Bluey.

I don’t know if this was what Mary Shelley was thinking when she wrote the book, and I’m not trying to argue that it is. I’m saying that this is what I take away from it (and the whole “Death of the Author” argument says that my interpretation is as valid as anybody else’s so nyeah). I’m also saying that I think this interpretation explains why this archetype has been so popular for two hundred years – no matter what other changes happen in culture, politics, art, science, or society, parents are always going to worry that they’re screwing up their kids.

This doesn’t mean, when I look at my darling, innocent son as he is watching YouTube videos of sports stadiums being imploded, that I’m worried he will grow up and frame innocent people for murder or throw small children into a river. But it doesn’t HAVE to mean that. Horror is a metaphor, it exaggerates our fears. I’m not afraid of having a dream so scary that I literally die from it either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get what A Nightmare on Elm Street is about. No, I worry – like I think every well-intentioned parent does – that my kid will someday make a bad choice that could have been prevented if I had been a better parent. I feel that fear every time we get a message from his teacher that says he’s being too loud in class or every time I have to tell him not to shake a tree because we don’t know if there are wasps hiding in there or every time he wants to watch Blippi instead of literally anything else. Is there something I could have done, is there some way I could have prevented this? And with the exception of Blippi, none of these are really serious offenses…but what if some day it IS?

Sorry, but I’m writing about horror this week. There had to be at least one legitimately frightening image.

That primordial fear of parenting is what draws us to stories like Frankenstein and all the others. We are afraid of making something that goes out of our control and does something terrible. And obviously most parents are never going to have to deal with something like this, thank goodness, but wherever I see a true crime documentary, I find myself waiting for some sort of a conversation with the villain’s mother to see if he broke her heart or if she’s a classic example of what makes a kid go bad. 

If you’ve never had kids, maybe this doesn’t make sense to you. But if you have, I guarantee you’re going to think about this the next time you watch Boris Karloff and Colin Clive working out their own issues in your gear-up for Halloween. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Superman Stuff #40: September Reviews

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It’s time once again for a healthy helpin’ of reviews. Here are most (if not all) of the Superman-related comics that hit the stands in September, including the second half of Kingdom of Zod, a few journeys to alternate universes, the “Weirdest” co-star Superman and Batman have ever seen, and the newest incarnation of Superman’s ORIGINAL Super Friends.

Supergirl #17
Title: Kingdom of Zod Part Five
Writer: Sophie Campbell
Art: Bruno Frenda & Joe Quinones
Main Cover: Lucas Meyer & Guiliano Peratelli

The second half of Kingdom of Zod kicks off with Supergirl and Superboy (the time-tossed Clark Kent from his teen years) getting caught in a time bubble with Ursa, who’s travelling to the past in an apparent attempt to save Krypton from discussion. The issue checks in briefly with the rest of our cast, including Lana and the Steels dealing with the Krytonite zombies, Superboy (Conner) and Superboy-Prime trying to help an injured Superman, and Lois doing the same with Jonathan. But each of these story threads is given no more than a page or two, with the bulk of the issue focusing on Kara and Clark’s adventures on Krypton.

There’s always a delicate balancing act with intra-family crossover events like this one. In the books where the “lead” character of the franchise (in this case, Superman) is the same as the lead of that title, there’s no real issue. When you have a chapter in an issue of a spinoff character – which Supergirl is, let’s be honest – you have to struggle between maintaining the focus on the person that the regular readers buy the book for and continuing the overall event that may have brought in new readers. Campbell accomplishes this really well. We spend most of the issue with Kara trying to teach a young, inexperienced Clark about the dangers of time travel while at the same time trying to prevent Ursa from making things worse. The interaction between the two of them is really entertaining, with Kara taking on the big sisterly role she thought she would have before she woke up on Earth that first time and discovered that her baby cousin was now older than her. I know that once this is all over Clark is going back to his own time, but I would love to see this dynamic played with more often. 

More importantly, the time-travel arc doesn’t feel like a superfluous side-story here, but part of the large whole, and that’s what you really want most of all when you’re reading a story like this one. It needs to feel consequential, or the readers will feel cheated. I don’t think that’s going to happen with anybody here.

Action Comics #1102
Title: Kingdom of Zod Part Six
Writer: Mark Waid
Art: Montos
Main Cover: Lucas Meyer & Guilano Peratelli

Like the Supergirl chapter, Action Comics this month focuses mostly on young Clark and Kara on Krypton, although the side-stories progress a little bit further. Of course, they progress to a point where it just seems like it can’t get any worse. The adult Superman and his group finally reunite with Lois and Jon, but the one person who may be able to protect them from the growing Kryptonite radiation that’s engulfing Earth may not be of help after all.

But back in the past, back on Krypton, young Clark is separated from his cousin as Kara and present-day Ursa are taken into custody by past-Zod. Man, time travel makes these recaps harder to write. The gist of it is this: in this issue we see the teenage Clark that’s been the star of this title since Mark Waid took over have to make some of the choices and learn some of the maturity that’s going to characterize him when he gets older and becomes a true Superman, and that’s a great thing. If you read the classic Superboy stories of the Golden and Silver Ages, there’s not a lot of difference between the character as a teenager and as an adult. He’s the stalwart, confident paragon that we want him to be right from the jump, and while that’s a good thing for a mature Superman, it doesn’t make as much sense when you see him as a kid. Waid’s Superboy is someone who is still learning, still capable of making mistakes, but with a core of purity and decency that you can see developing into the all-loving hero that Superman is. This issue makes for a nice focus on that, a great examination of who Clark was and who he’s going to become, all mixed up in the larger storyline. It’s deftly played.

Superman Unlimited #17
Title: Kingdom of Zod Part Seven
Writer: Dan Slott
Art: Rachael Stott and Montos
Main Cover: Lucas Meyer & Guiliano Peratelli

Part Seven of Kingdom of Zod flips the formula from the last two issues – a quick check-in with Clark and company back on Krypton, with most of the issue in the present, and the wave of El Caldero Kryptonite radiation that’s threatening the entire Earth. But here’s the thing: early in the run of this series, Dan Slott gave Superman a little boost that just may be the thing to save the day.

This is one of those issues where somebody with super-speed does a whole lot of stuff really fast, where things zip along in much less time than it takes to tell the story. I like issues like that, because a good writer can use them to give us quick glimpses at the hero being the hero. As Superman is racing to save the world from the Kryptonite, we see him take moments with friend and enemy alike that remind us of just what kind of a man our hero is. Not that we necessarily NEED that reminder, of course, but seeing Superman in action doing what Superman does is always a treat, and Slott really nails it here. In the midst of this huge storyline, it’s the small moments for Superman that really make this issue worth reading.

Superman #42
Title: Kingdom of Zod Part Eight
Writer: Joshua Williams
Pencils: Eddy Barrows & Eduardo Pansica
Inks: Eber Ferreira & Julio Ferreira
Main Cover: Lucas Meyer & Guiliano Peratelli

The penultimate chapter of “Kingdom of Zod” FINALLY brings all of our heroes together. Recovering from the Golden Mode adventure that cancelled out all of the El Calderan Kryptonite on Earth, Superman and his allies come together and learn (courtesy of Booster Gold) that Ursa stole his time-bubble, with Supergirl and young Clark going after her. This issue, they come back, along with a young Zod.

And all hell breaks loose.

Williamson, whose work on this title has made him one of my favorite Superman writers since the Triangle Era, is really showing how adept he is with these characters. Superboy-Prime meets up with Superman again for the first time since his self-proclaimed (and highly effective) Redemption Arc during the “Reign of the Superboys” storyline, and the moments where those two connect are really well-done. On the other hand, Conner Kent seems to be somewhat bitter about the whole thing, and I find myself desperately hoping that Prime’s redemption isn’t going to incorporate a heel turn for the other Superboy. I keep telling myself that Williamson is too good a writer for that. I am telling myself that very, very hard.

The huge cast that shows up in this issue comes together well, with good moments for Lois and Jon, Lena Luthor, and Superboy’s time-travel pals Mary Marvel and Martian Manhunter. Others are somewhat sidelined (I could always do with more Steel in this or any comic book), but that’s kind of the nature of the beast. The more characters there are in a story, the more likely some of them are going to ride the bench. And that’s especially true when you remember that, c’mon now, it IS Superman’s comic book.

Superman: Kingdom of Zod Special
Title: Kingdom of Zod Part Nine
Writer: Joshua Williamson
Art: Paolo Villanelli
Main Cover: Dan Mora
Supergirl Epilogue By: Sophie Campbell, Tamra Bonvillain & Josh Reed
Action Comics Epilogue By: Mark Waid, David Messina, Ivan Plascensia & Josh Reed
Superman Unlimited Epilogue By: Dan Slott, Rachael Stott, Giuliano Peratelli & Josh Reed
Superman Epilogue By: Joshua Williamson, Bruno Frenda, Luis Guerra & Josh Reed

It’s hard to get too much into this without delving into spoilers. There’s a great fight scene, but it’s actually not the main focus of the book. A lot of the threads of this story have been tied off already in the previous chapters, so all that’s really left here is for Superman and his family to deal with the time-lost Zod who came back from the era before Krypton’s destruction. As they do so, our various heroes are each given something different to deal with: Supergirl gets an artifact of the past that seems poised to set up her future. Tomorrow Man and his dad have a heart-to-heart about Jon’s new direction. The time-travelling Superboy has to deal with the knowledge of his future that he’s picked up along the way. And the other two Superboys – Prime and Conner Kent – each have decisions about their own future to make.

The Conner stuff is, as I mentioned in one of the previous chapters, one of the few parts of this story that gives me concern. We’re seeing a bitterness in the character that doesn’t really suit him. At the same time, it’s understandable: with both Jon and Prime around, he feels like he’s been shunted aside, and honestly, that’s a fairly accurate metaphor for the way fans of his have felt all the way going back to the New 52 reboot. People have been in agreement for quite some time that Conner Kent is a character in need of a new direction, and it seems that Williamson is preparing to finally tackle that story. I’m trusting that he’s too good a writer to make that new direction follow the cliched path of turning him into a villain.

The actual confrontation with Zod is good, but over with surprisingly quickly. The bulk of this issue is concentrated more on putting pieces into place for the future. The creative teams of each of the four respective Superman-family titles each get an epilogue sequence focusing on their own core cast and giving a taste of what we presume will be the next story arc in each. I don’t mind them doing that, but I do feel a little as though it came at the expense of the conclusion of the actual Zod storyline.

As a whole, I’ve enjoyed Kingdom of Zod. Having a new chapter coming out every week made it feel just a little like the glory days of the Triangle Era again, and I miss that period greatly. The ending could have been a bit stronger, but I’m excited to see what comes next.

Absolute Superman #23
Title: The Toyman (Get Brainiac Part Two)
Writer: Jason Aaron
Art: Juan Ferreyra
Main Cover: Rafa Sandoval

As the Toyman rears his head again, Kal flashes back to a harrowing childhood experience back on Krypton. And of course, Brainiac lingers in the background.

The A-plot here is about Superman seeking the Toyman, whose murderous playthings have been enhanced thanks to a collaboration with Brainiac. That’s all well and good, but honestly, it’s not the part of this book that I’m particularly interested in. It’s the flashback scenes that really get my attention this month. It’s easy to forget just how different this Kal-El is from the one we knew. He lived a whole childhood on Krypton before it was destroyed, he has memories of his birth parents (both good and bad) and an awareness of the culture of his home planet that the main timeline Superman lacks. And this is a very different Krypton than the one we know, a fact accentuated by the awful thing that young Kal-El stumbles upon and the explanation for it he receives from his mother. The main Superman comics have had so many stories and miniseries that explore life on pre-cataclysm Krypton that it’s practically become a cliche. This is one situation where I think an exploration of the world that was would actually be warranted. Come on, DC – Absolute Jor-El and Lara? Guaranteed seller.

Adventures of Superman: Book of El #12
Title: Finale
Writer: Philip Kennedy Johnson
Art: Scott Godlewski
Main Cover: Scott Godlewski

The House of El makes its final stand against Kryl-Ux, and with a Kryptonian carrying the power of a god, even an entire super-family has its work cut out.

I…don’t even know anymore. This series from the outset has felt so divorced, so removed from everything that engages me about the Superman mythos. Pulling him into the distant future, setting up a whole mystery that is predicated on him never coming home…it’s been hard to take it seriously. And the finale of the storyline doesn’t help with that. Ultimately, it still feels somewhat inconsequential.

I’ll give it credit for a few things. The heart of this series is definitely in the right place. Johnson gives the story a focus on all the good things about Superman: compassion, redemption, a belief in the best of us. Those elements are at the heart of all the best Superman stories, and we’ve got that here too. Also, I appreciate the fact that the book didn’t have as hard a reset as I came to expect, and that it wasn’t just an excuse to wipe Otho and Osul off the map. In the end, their story is still there and available. It does raise the question, of course, of where the hell they’ve been in the main Superman comics as of late. There’s an answer available in this issue, but it’s something they’re going to have to address sooner or later.

The best thing I can really say about this series, in the end, is that I’m quite certain it will read better as a whole instead of in chapters the way it’s been parcelled out over the past year. It’s certainly happened before. I was kind of underwhelmed at Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow as a monthly series because of the slow burn, but when it was over and I read it as a single book I was deeply moved and impressed. I hope that will be the case here as well. I’m not going to do it anytime soon – I need a little time away from it to clean the slate – but perhaps some time next year I’ll go back and try to read it as one unified story. If I do, I’ll be sure to tell you what I think about it on the second go-around.

Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #55
Title: Extinction Event Part One
Writer: Mark Waid
Art: Adrian Gutierrez
Main Cover: Dan Mora

With most of the Justice League off-planet, Ra’s Al Ghul assembles a group of villains who share his cause to exterminate most of human life. With his new harbingers of the apocalypse, he unleashes a devastating attack that begins spreading illness across the globe. Superman and Batman are among Earth’s remaining defenders, but when the sickness strikes too close to home, even the Dark Knight may be compromised.

One of the many things that makes Mark Waid’s run on this book is how well he straddles the line between huge storylines of global significance and small, character-focused stories. This issue, for instance, as if Queen Bee’s swarm of alien insects threatening an apocalypse wasn’t bad enough, one of the early victims is somebody that we – and the other heroes – care deeply about. It hurts a little that this book is set in the past and, as the stricken character is someone who is alive and well today, there’s not really a question of IF the heroes will succeed, but rather HOW. On the other hand, it’s still Batman and Superman we’re talking about here, so is there really any question as to whether they’re going to beat the bad guys in the first place?

Getting past that, Waid really explores the way these events affect our heroes. Batman is already approaching the story from a place of conflicted emotion, considering that his primary informant is Ra’s Al Ghul’s daughter Talia. This seems to be the first time Superman learns about the whole Batman/Talia thing as well, which puts him in a bit of a pickle. Bruce is his best friend, of course, but can he be counted on to be at his best? It’s a great way to get into the relationship between the two, with a degree of mutual trust that’s impaired just because Batman himself is too emotionally invested in the whole thing.

It’s another excellent issue. I’ve come to expect nothing less.

Batman/Superman/Weird Al: World’s Weirdest #1
Writers: Mark Waid & Tyrone Finch
Vibes: “Weird Al” Yankovic
Art: Dan Schoening & Fico Osso
Main Cover: Dan Schoening

At last! My two favorite heroes in an adventure together with Batman!

In this deliciously absurd one-shot, Mr. Mxyzptlk’s cosy home in the Fifth Dimension is unsettled when everything strange in his world starts to become…normal. Terrified, he goes to Earth to find Superman for help, only to find the plague is striking there as well Mxy, Superman, and Batman quickly discover the key may be the one person who seems to be immune to the “Mundanity Wave” striking both worlds: “Weird Al” Yankovic. 

This story is silly, absurd, totally inconsequential, and has no reason whatsoever to exist. I loved it. Look, I’m an easy sell. Obviously I read anything that has Superman in it, and “Weird Al” is perhaps the last remaining celebrity on Earth that everybody likes (now that we’ve lost Dolly Parton), so it wasn’t really an uphill battle to get me on-board for this one. But that doesn’t mean it’s not still a fun read. Seeing how different DC characters become “normal” when hit with the Mundanity Wave is as weird as anything that’s being turned mundane. (Somehow the Joker in a normal suit and with a normal skin tone is more unsettling than the psychotic clown we all know and love.) 

The villain reveal is a great one, too. It’s not somebody that we see all that often, a relatively obscure villain to anyone but fans of the series that birthed him, but he’s absolutely perfect for this book. Mark Waid’s knowledge of the DCU remains unparalleled, even as he’s able to take a quick dig at himself at one meta-moment.

I haven’t seen a lot of Dan Schoening’s work since IDW’s Ghostbusters series wrapped up, but he’s a good choice for this book. After years of chronicling adventures of characters that looked almost, but not QUITE, like Bill Murray and the boys, he’s got a good eye for near-caricature that suits his depiction of Al very nicely. He also has a light touch with his line, crafting a book that looks almost like a cartoon, which is entirely appropriate. 

Bizarro: Year None #3
Title: How Do I Look?
Writers: Eric Carrasco & Kevin Smith
Art: Nick Pitarra
Main Cover: Nick Pitarra

Jimmy Olsen spends a day with Bizarro on his Bizarro world, and the two of them each begin to realize just how different from Superman he actually is. In the meantime, Bizarro Lois and the others on her world began making their moves to change things about the planet they’re essentially trapped on.

You know, when they said “Kevin Smith is writing a Bizarro origin story,” I bet a lot of us were expecting a sort of goofy, silly exploration of a character that more often than not is played for a joke. We were wrong. Moments of humor in this issue have become few and far between, and the exploration of Bizarro has never been less amusing. It’s like we’ve delved into an exploration of the Bizarro from the first few scenes in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, a deeply troubling creature that’s every bit as strong as Superman but possesses none of his kindness or humanity. It’s actually a bit frightening. 

The really baffling thing about the book is where it belongs, in a publishing respect. The solicits for this series have referred to it as the “official” origin of Bizarro, but those same solicits are written in Bizarro-speak, also calling the series “terrible.” So it’s not official, we got that. It’s also not labeled as an Elseworlds, although it could be. But honestly, as dark as this story has gotten, I’m wondering why the heck it’s NOT marked as a Black Label comic. It would fit there much more than most of the Superman books that have carried that particular sticker. 

Supergirl: Survive #4
Writers: Ethan S. Parker & Griffin Sheridan
Art & Main Cover: Rod Reis

Finally having reached a planet with a yellow sun, Kara and Kal-El are beginning to taste the power that being a Kryptonian truly brings with it. But despite their power they’re still stranded, with no way to get to the distant planet Earth that is their destination…until they encounter another visitor to this world who may be able to help them.

As they did with the Lantern Corps and Lobo in previous issues, this month Parker and Sheridan bring in another DC character to build out this other universe. This time, it’s one who has links to the Superman family to begin with, and he falls into his role quite naturally. As an Elseworlds, one is forced to wonder whether his gregarious nature is going to turn out to be a long con and he’s really up for some supervillainy, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any overt indication of that, and I’m glad. It would be a pretty tired trope for this character to go bad, and it’s about time poor Kara got a break.

Another couple of time skips in this issue and we’re watching as Kal-El grows from baby to child, with a personality beginning to develop. So far, he’s coming across as a fairly typical kid, albeit one with remarkable powers. He gets frustrated, he gets scared, and he turns to Kara – his protector, his only family – when that happens. Like this month’s guest star, Kal-El could go in many directions, but we’re definitely getting the sense that Kara is doing the best she can to steer him, which can’t be easy with a super kid.

Once more, I’m really impressed with this book, and I want to see this iteration of the DC Universe explored more and more.

Superman: Father of Tomorrow #5
Title: Strife 
Writer: Kenny Porter
Art & Main Cover: Danny Earls

One issue from the end, Father of Tomorrow takes another step in the right direction. As the sorcerer Lex Luthor makes his move on Metropolis, Jor-El confesses the events that led to his exile on Earth and why he came alone. Luthor, meanwhile, faces off against Lois Lane’s father Sam, who has become this world’s Captain Atom.

My favorite thing about this whole series has to be Luthor playing with magic. It’s intriguing to see him push his genius in this direction rather than science, but he avoids coming off as just a Dr. Doom clone. This is still Luthor through and through, with all the pettiness and ego that implies. He points out of the hypocrisy of Sam Lane’s anti-superhuman stance now that he’s turned himself into one of the world’s powerhouses. He is faced with an extremely real threat and shrugs it off because, you know, he’s LEX LUTHOR, so what could possibly touch him? It’s a great new angle for a classic villain.

The reveal about Jor-El’s past works well, and it gives his position on Earth a little added flavor of tragedy, although I feel like it’s something that could have come earlier in the series. It does explain his urge to “fix” things in a way that’s suitable. My big problem with this series to date has been people opposed to Jor-El “fixing” Earth without actually providing much evidence that there’s any downside to his changes. We still don’t get any of that this issue, but we don’t dwell on the idea that his changes are bad either, so on that front I’m gonna call this issue a draw and look forward to next month’s finale. 

Superman: The Stranger #1
Writer, Artist, and Main Cover: Wes Craig

The newest “Black Label” series featuring the Man of Steel dives back to the Golden Age. In a Metropolis where people are struggling to get by, young Clark Kent is desperately trying to get a job as a reporter while, at the same time, using the bizarre powers he has to patrol the city at night as Superman, defender of the defenseless. But a chance encounter in an alleyway sends him questioning where the real villains may lie.

I’m very much on the fence about this book. First of all, the vagary of the Black Label imprint continues to be an issue. Ostensibly a line of “mature” comics featuring the DC heroes, the Superman books in this series have very rarely had any content that would mark them as such. The “17+” rating on the back cover in tiny little letters doesn’t seem appropriate, and I can’t find anything that makes me think this shouldn’t be an Elseworlds, since that imprint has returned from the dead.

That’s more of a fault of editorial than the comic itself, but the comic itself leaves me with concerns. Frankly, it feels like we’re just exploring some well-worn territory. A Golden Age Superman? Seen it numerous times since the Golden Age. Superman versus corporate greed and corruption (as embodied, of course, by Lex Luthor)? It’s so familiar you could draw it in your sleep. I need something more original to justify the $5 price point of this book.

That’s not to say there’s nothing promising. Clark, honestly, seems to have more to distinguish him from other incarnations of the character than Superman himself. His thirst to work at the Daily Planet has him settling for a job at the very bottom of the pole, and I’m not talking editorial. And despite the fact that his name is, as usual, “Clark Kent,” there are some ruminations in this book that call me to question whether he was actually raised by the Kents or if his Earthly origins are different than what we’re used to. That question remains dangling at the end of this issue, which is fair enough, but I’m hoping that we return to it in the future, because so far there’s little to set The Stranger apart. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #1
Title: Who Killed the Future? 
Writer: Joshua Williamson
Art & Main Cover: Hayden Sherman

I wasn’t necessarily planning to write a review of this book. After all, this column is “Superman Stuff,” not “Superman’s Friends Stuff.” But the Legion is, in many ways, as much a Superman spinoff as Supergirl, Steel, or Krypto, and I don’t hesitate to write about those. Plus, even though Superman doesn’t actually appear in this issue…well, he’s all over it.

I am on the record as saying we do not need yet another reboot of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and I am standing by that statement. But if you’re gonna do it, Joshua Williamson has found a good way in. The book begins with the murder of R.J. Brande, a name familiar to Legion fans, whose death is being investigated by the unlikely duo of Brainiac 5 and Tenzil Kem. As they search for the facts behind Brande’s death we are introduced to this version of the future: how super-heroes are outlawed, how anybody who develops super powers is required to register them with a peacekeeping force called the Persuaders, and how many people don’t believe the legendary “Superboy” ever even existed. From there, we glimpse at the lives of three very familiar super powered young people, and the shape of this story begins to come into focus.

What’s making this story work for me, along with a healthy dollop of faith in Williamson as a writer, is Garth Ranzz. We see a Lightning Lad here with a thirst to be a hero, a craving for justice, and a locker whose contents could very well have been my own. A one-page glimpse into the legend of Superboy at the beginning serves to frame his desire for a different, better world, and even in one issue that craving feels infectious. It’s going to be rough on him when this issue’s last-page revelation hits home, but I feel like he’s going to be resilient.

And that drive, that thirst seems infectious. Imra and Rokk both appear here as well, and although none of our proto-Legionnaires interact in this first issue, we get the sensation that they’re already linked, and that the threads that link them and that will draw them together go back 1000 years to the age of heroes. 

I liked this first issue very much, and I’m anxious to see how Williamson is planning to tie it into the revelations from this summer’s Superman Annual. But I don’t know if I’m planning to review every issue of this book. It’s not a Superman comic, after all. Except for in all the ways that matter. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!

Geek Punditry #195: Paperback Blues

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If you can remember back a full seven days to my previous Geek Punditry column (#194: Can We Just Let Bad Guys Be Bad?), you may recall that the discussion was spurred by the announcement of a new Netflix miniseries adapting John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. The book lovers among you will not be surprised to learn, then, that as I spent some time pondering the changes being made between the book and the show, I got a hair up my nose to give the book another read. This was a little difficult, however, when it came to my attention that I suffered from a chronic condition shared by over 7 billion people on this green planet of ours: I don’t actually own a copy of East of Eden. 

And I feel like it’s judging me for that.

I own books, of course. I own a LOT of books. And the recent shenanigans by people like the bastards at Anthropic have made me more adamant than ever that owning as many books as possible is a good thing. That said, I DO have a limited amount of storage, and I’ve drifted more towards eBooks for most of my casual reading. I still love physical books, but unless it’s a keepsake (like a signed edition or something written by a friend of mine), something that’s unavailable in eBook format, or a book I need to complete a collection, I’m usually satisfied with the electronic version. So I decided to look into how much the eBook of East of Eden costs.

$12.99. And I looked at that $12.99 with the same sort of distrust that you look at the current prices at whatever gas pump is nearest to your house.

Look, I am a writer, and I believe wholeheartedly in paying writers what they’re worth. That said, I also believe that anyone charging more than ten bucks for an eBook is gouging you, because there are virtually none of the production, shipping, or storage costs involved with creating a print book. And when it’s a book that’s nearly 75 years old, the incredulity just rises.

That afternoon, I happened to be taking my son on our biweekly trip to the local library. While we were there, I thought, I should just check the book out. That’s what libraries are FOR, after all. They are a vital part of our community, and by NOT checking out books, I am doing them a disservice. It was such an obvious solution. So after convincing Edward that he actually had to follow ME through the stacks for a change, instead of me racing after him on a frantic search for the kitty pictures hidden around the children’s room as part of the library’s monthly scavenger hunt, I tracked the Steinbeck book down and looked at it.

I reeeeeally looked at it.

East of Eden is Steinbeck’s longest novel. And by “longest,” I mean it clocks in at about the same page count as Stephen King can turn out on a typical Sunday in October – it’s hefty. Let’s be clear about this: I do not mind a long book. I am by no means intimidated at the idea of reading a doorstopper. But I am also realistic, and I had serious doubts about my ability to finish the book and return it to the library in a timely manner. And even though the good people who work at the St. Charles Parish Public Library (Destrehan Branch) are uniformly kind, friendly, and helpful, I also reread Stephen King’s The Library Policeman a couple of months ago and I didn’t want to risk it.

Yeah, yeah, “it’s just a book” — SOME OF US CAN’T TAKE THAT CHANCE.

Anyway, I told myself, I’m an English teacher. I really should OWN a copy of such a seminal work in the canon of American literature. I should just get a paperback instead. So I looked it up: $20.

Then I went back outside to stare at the gas station again.

I remember a time – a time not all that long ago – when most paperback books fell in the $5.99 to $7.99 range. And sure, East of Eden is a huge book, clocking in at over 600 pages. But I started to look around at the NEW release paperbacks as well, many of which would take a full three or four whacks to kill a mouse, as opposed to the one thump that East of Eden would require, and I saw that $20 was about the average price these days. Part of that is because American publishing has all but abandoned the mass market paperback: the smaller sized and more affordable book that was ubiquitous for decades, small enough to fit into a largeish pocket, the glorious format upon which most people born before the turn of the century learned how to love books. Sadly, after making books accessible to the masses for nearly 100 years, this format has become almost nonexistent. If you ask publishers and distributors why that is, a lot of them will tell you that “the market” was no longer purchasing them, was no longer interested in them. As a member of “the market,” however, I can tell you that I was never surveyed about this decision. I never reached a point where I thought, “You know, I’m going to buy this larger version of the book that costs twice as much.” I just noticed that the smaller, less expensive versions were no longer being published for some reason. 

Although I have no statistics, quotes, or data, I firmly believe that the push away from mass market was spurred almost entirely by a publishing industry that wanted an excuse to increase its prices. And again, writers deserve to be paid. But I don’t believe for a second that, in the vast majority of cases, the inflated price tag on these books has equaled an increased cut for the person who actually created the book. Almost universally, the added revenue being collected is going into the coffers of the publisher, which of course provides the invaluable service of deciding which books they want you to spend money on.

I also believe – without statistics or data – that this format shift is also at least partially responsible for the decline in literacy in America. Look, there are a lot of reasons that people might not want to read books: social media, video games, other media drawing their attention, being afraid of being labelled a “nerd,” difficulty finding books that match their interests, their mother read Danielle Steele that one time she got hit by an ice cream truck and there’s no WAY they’re taking THAT risk, and so forth. But I think the fact that books are no longer cheap enough to be an impulse purchase makes every single one of those problems even worse than it already is. 

The funny thing is that while traditional publishing is doing everything it can to make it harder for people to become a part of their audience, comic book publishers are doing the OPPOSITE. I’ve written at length about DC Comics and their “Compact Comics” line, (In GP #119, GP #124, GP #164, and GP #178, but who’s counting?) so I’ll just do a quick recap here. DC now has a line of paperback editions of some of their most popular stories and graphic novels in a smaller format – ironically, about the same size as most of the paperback novels that have shoved mass market paperbacks into their grave. These Compact Comics collect the same stories that are published in traditionally-sized graphic novels, which usually have a price point ranging anywhere from $20 to $40, depending on the length. DC’s Compact Comics, however, have a uniform price tag of $9.99. And this format has proven to be a MASSIVE hit, selling out printing after printing not only in comic book stores, but in big box bookstores and other places that people buy books, like Walmart and Target. The line is so successful that nearly every other major comic book publisher has responded with their own line of smaller-sized bargain-priced paperbacks, and the result is an easily-accessible, affordable series of books that is appealing to both old and new readers alike.

Size-wise, these two books are everything you could want. Content-wise…well, one of them is.

Compact Comics also blow the argument for a $20 paperback out of the water. While a traditional book may have to pay a designer, a cover artist, and a few other people besides the author, a comic book has many, many more hands than that: multiple writers and artists, colorists, letterers, editors, and so forth. And while each of their pieces of the pie may be smaller than those of a single author who has written a single novel, the color pages and the paper that holds those images is also of a better stock than your usual paperback. The production cost for a Compact Comic is inarguably higher than that of a novel, and yet DC can afford to sell them for half the price.

To put it another way, if I have $20 in my pocket, I can buy Steinbeck’s East of Eden, or I can buy a copy of Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s exquisite graphic novel Kingdom Come AND have enough money left over for compact anthology of comics from Oni Press’s Rick and Morty series. And I’m sorry, but Steinbeck never ONCE included a plumbus in any of his novels, so this isn’t even really a contest.

If you look hard enough, though, you can probably find one in Shakespeare.

As a teacher, a writer, and a reader, I hear the phrase “literacy crisis” thrown around on a daily basis. Authors are desperately hustling to try to get readers. Readers are finding themselves in a cultural wasteland as it becomes more difficult to find people in your daily life that you can share your love of books with. Teachers are crawling behind students on hands and knees BEGGING them to read just a chapter or two of The Great Gatsby, because there’s a scene where a woman gets hit by a car, maybe because she’d read a Danielle Steele novel, I dare you to prove that she HADN’T. In fact, EVERYBODY seems to be doing anything they can to try to get people reading again.

Everybody, that is, except for the companies that have established themselves as the de facto gatekeepers of the entire world of literature: the publishers. Rather than making books available and attractive to as many people as possible, they seem to be on a quest to identify micro-cohorts of potential readers and squeeze every drop of cash out of THEM, rather than make reading appealing to the masses.

It’s an insane practice, but that’s the world we live in.

I broke down and got the Kindle version of the Steinbeck book, by the way. At $12.99, it would take me almost three years of late fines at the library to offset the cost, but by then I should be almost finished reading it.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Superman Stuff #39: Kneel Before Zod!

blakemp Superman Stuff , , , ,

The conclusion of Kingdom of Zod drops today (assuming you read this on Sept. 30), but I won’t have time to get to the comic shop and write a review before my admittedly self-imposed deadline on this column, so it’s going to join the overall September wrapup you guys can expect next week. Today, I wanted to go back a couple of years to 2024, and the eight-issue Kneel Before Zod series written by Joe Casey with art by Dan McDaid. 

The series was touted as Zod’s first starring series, although it’s kind of unclear whether it was intended to be a miniseries or if it, like so many comic books in the modern marketplace, was structured in such a way that it could keep going if the sales permitted. Regardless, it’s one of the darkest stories in the main Superman continuity you’ll find. As the series begins, Zod has founded a “New Kandor,” a planet where he intends to restore the glory of Krypton with his wife Ursa and their son, Lor-Zod. But things fall apart almost immediately, as Zod finds himself forced to exile his child (who went off to share the Sinister Sons miniseries with Sinestro’s boy) and his new planet targeted by an alien invasion. 

The first half of this series places Zod in the unusual role of defender, trying to protect his world from the invading aliens. But Casey does it in an effective way, maintaining the general brutality and evil nature of the character. I’ve written recently (in Geek Punditry #194) about how modern media has a disturbing tendency to try to excuse villainy, something that I think is somewhat damaging to the culture as a whole. Casey doesn’t do that. Zod may be the protagonist here, but that doesn’t make him a hero. While the flashback scenes that showcase Zod’s past may help to explain the way he is today, these scenes are presented for the purpose of illumination, not justification, and that makes all the difference.

The reason I think this was probably intended to be an ongoing series is that it takes a drastic turn about halfway through, starting an entirely different storyline with Zod in space, alone, until he finds and takes command of an army of villains. It goes from a story of a man protecting his home to the origin of a sort of cosmic pirate clan, a drastically different story that feels as though it was intended to be the next stage in a longer arc that got cut short. As such, this second half of the series isn’t quite as engaging as the first, feeling less complete and more unfinished.

Dan McDaid’s artwork comes from the Keith Giffen school in many respects. The linework is detailed when need be, sparse when appropriate, and he usually incorporates the nine-panel grid that Giffed so often used. It helps with the pacing, and somehow (despite the fact that Giffen would use these techniques in silly books like Ambush Bug), McDaid’s use of it adds to the sense of menace.

I wish Casey had been given just one more arc on this book to try to tie things up more neatly. As it is, it just kind of ends, dangling Zod in space, where he remained until his reemergence following Absolute Power took him on a slow march to the story that’s happening in the Superman comics right now. There’s connective tissue here, but I feel like there was supposed to be more, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to see it all.  

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!

Geek Punditry #194: Can We Just Let Bad Guys Be Bad?

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Item #295 on the list of “what are people on the internet in an uproar about THIS week?” is East of Eden, the new Netflix miniseries adapting the classic John Steinbeck novel, which is coming under fire for following along with a rather sizable trend in modern fiction: making the villain less…y’know…villain-y. 

Because nothing says “controversy” like an adaptation of a 74-year-old book that’s only read by English majors.

Now I am not a Steinbeck scholar, I should concede. I don’t have strict reverence for the novel or the original film version, adapted in 1955 by director Elia Kazan. I do, however, recognize trends, and some of the buzz around this miniseries concerns me. The series was produced by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of the aforementioned Elia, and some of the things that are being done with the new version actually sound pretty good. East of Eden, the novel, is a complex generational saga tracking the history of two intertwined families in the decades between the American Civil War and World War I. Elia, in making his movie, trimmed out all but a single generation and made a film focusing on only about a third of the novel’s content. Expanding it into a miniseries to make it more faithful to the book is a logical idea, one that makes much more sense than a lot of remakes that seem to be fueled by the promise of “Well, we own the IP, so let’s do it again.”

The problem, though, comes in the character of Cathy Ames. In Zoe Kazan’s version of the film, Ames is played by Florence Pugh, which is an inspired choice. Pugh is a phenomenal actress, and I’ve got no doubt that she can nail the bitter rage of the character, who is very much the villain of the novel. The issue is that I’m not entirely certain Pugh IS going to be playing Steinbeck’s villain, at least not from the way Kazan keeps describing her. In a recent interview on Good Morning Washington, Kazan said, “What if we think about her not as the embodiment of evil, but as a person who does really bad things?…I think we can learn more about ourselves if we don’t think about evil people as being that different from us.”

This is a statement about Cathy Ames. This is a character who, as written by Steinbeck, is unabashedly violent, selfish, sadistic, and cruel. A character he referred to as representing “Satan himself.” A woman who – over the course of the novel — abandons her infant sons, burns her own parents to death in a fire, frames innocent boys for sexual assault, drives a man to suicide, and manipulates a woman (whom she then murders) into leaving her a brothel in her will, then turns the brothel into a den of sadism and torture.

Ms. Kazan, respectfully, I very much WANT to think about people like Cathy Ames as being different from us.

I obviously have not seen the Netflix series yet (it doesn’t drop until Oct. 1), and I have enjoyed a lot of Kazan’s work in the past, both as a writer and actor, in movies like Ruby Sparks and The Big Sick. I’m just a bit concerned that this may push East of Eden into the trending area of “Villain Justification.”

To be fair to Kazan, in an interview with Time magazine she said, of Ames, “I don’t think anything in her background excuses her behavior,” but then she comes right back around and says “there’s something really compelling about her insistence on her autonomy and selfishness, especially as a woman.” I can accept an evil person as being compelling. But that doesn’t mean I think a character like Cathy Ames should necessarily be RELATABLE. 

I’m not against a morally complicated villain. The BEST villains are morally complicated. But at the same time, sometimes evil is just evil. You can understand a villain without thinking that they’re “like us.” To go to comic books (because they’ve got the most dramatic examples of villains out there), let’s look at characters like Dr. Doom or Lex Luthor.

These aren’t guys you would ask to help you get something off the top shelf at Walmart, is what I’m saying.

These two villains – arguably the two greatest villains in comics – are similar in many ways. Their true danger comes from just how brilliant they are. Both of them have the intelligence to change the world and make it a better place, were they to choose to use their gifts in that way. But they don’t, and for very petty, very human reasons. In the case of Doom, he believes that his genius makes him the most suitable to rule the world and is willing to crush anybody who stands in his way. Luthor (modern Luthor, anyway) isn’t concerned with ruling the world per se, but he cannot overcome the unbearably obstinate jealousy he feels because the people of Earth love an alien more than they love him, so rather than channel his intelligence in a positive way he is intent on destroying Superman and “proving” he’s “better” than the Kryptonian. Both of these villains are fascinating, intriguing, and wonderfully complex…but that doesn’t mean I see myself in either of them, nor do I want to.

This has been a trend in fiction for many years now, the de-villainizing of villains. Gregory Maguire didn’t invent the concept when he wrote Wicked, retelling The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West, but I think the smash hit Broadway musical is directly responsible for how pervasive that trend has become. Maleficent and Cruella are both movies built around showing how some of Disney’s most colorful villains ain’t all that bad. The ABC series Once Upon a Time made Snow White’s Evil Queen (eventually) one of the heroes, and did major rehabilitation work on characters like Rumplestiltskin and Captain Hook as well. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker movie takes the sadistic, serial-killing clown of our dreams and shows us how he’s beaten down by society. Like many patterns, once you’re aware of it, it’s hard NOT to see it.

This novel launched a thousand ships, by which I mean fanfiction.

None of this should be construed as a CRITICISM of these movies, books, or TV shows. I’m not saying that they’re poorly-written, poorly-acted, or in any way invalid projects. I’m just saying that as a TREND, the sheer number of stories that seem to try to excuse evil behavior as opposed to explaining it kind of bothers me.

Another part of the issue, as many people have noticed online, is a severe lack of critical thinking from modern audiences. People seem to think that liking a fictional character is somehow an endorsement of their behavior, and that makes people try very, very hard to avoid making characters who are purely evil. The whole thing is preposterous. If I say Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street is my favorite 80s slasher, I’m not saying that I approve of murdering teenagers in their sleep, I’m saying that Robert Englund is entertaining to watch. Somehow people have started to view what fiction a person consumes as an entire component of their personality, and I think that’s dangerous. It comes back to something I wrote about a few weeks ago (in Geek Punditry #191), about how some people allow their fandoms to completely consume who they are. This is a side-effect of that – my fandom consumes who I am, and therefore I assume that yours does the same, and when you tell me you like Friday the 13th I’m worried you’re going to put on a hockey mask and terrorize a camp. Q.E.D.

Poppycock. 

And finally, there are the moral relativists out there, the ones who have the opinion that there IS no good or evil, which is a mindset I fully reject. Some things are simply evil, like murdering innocent people or using Chat GPT to answer a math problem when you’ve got a calculator app on the same damned phone. And it’s possible to explore that darkness in fiction without trying to rationalize it. I’ll use the Joker as an example again, specifically Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke.

This is one guy who doesn’t need an LLM to hallucinate.

In this story, the Joker takes the position of that moral relativism – everybody out there is really just “one bad day” away from becoming a sadistic sociopath just like him. He sets out to prove this by hurting Batman and the people closest to him – specifically by shooting Barbara Gordon in the spine and torturing her father. His hypothesis is that even good men like James Gordon can be pushed over the edge. But the story rejects this notion; even after everything that has been done, Gordon insists that Batman takes in the Joker by the book, and that he not cross the line the Joker wants him to cross by killing him. Admittedly, the ending of the book is deliberately vague as to whether Batman chooses to cross that line or not (and if you accept it as an out-of-canon story as Moore intended, it remains vague), but the message here is that evil, ultimately, is a choice. 

I’m not saying that I don’t want villains to be fully-developed characters or have rich, intriguing backstories. I’m not even saying that I don’t want them to be sympathetic, because it can be pretty powerful to understand why somebody is doing something bad, even if you still condemn the action. But I’m kind of over seeing sympathy being confused with empathy – you can feel bad for somebody without feeling like you’re the SAME as them.

We’ve lost clarity in the name of complexity, and it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. Yes, I want interesting, intriguing villains. But that doesn’t always mean that they’ve got to be one step removed from the guy who lives next door. Good and evil are real things, and we’ve lost something by losing fiction that recognizes that fact. Sometimes good is just good. Sometimes bad is just bad. And if we can’t even concede that point in our fiction, how is that going to twist the way we think in life?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Superman Stuff #38: An Afternoon With Zod

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With the whole “Kingdom of Zod” storyline in high gear over in the main Superman comics, I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at some of the more classic General Zod storylines over the years. This proved to be troublesome, though, when I realized that most of Zod’s characterization is actually based on the movies, specifically Terrence Stamp’s portrayal of the character in the first two Christopher Reeve films. Prior to the movies, Zod was a rather generic “evil” Kryptonian from the Phantom Zone. Since the movies, he’s gained much more depth, but that depth is all based on the cinematic portrayal. What’s more, I already covered some of the best Zod storylines back in the original “Year of Superman” project.

So I turned to the New 52 era, and that month about two years in when the regular titles were given over to “decimal” issues featuring not the heroes, but rather one of their traditional foes. Essentially, they were one-shots that weren’t TECHNICALLY one-shots. So let’s take a look at that era’s version of Zod from Action Comics (Vol. 2)

Action Comics (Vol. 2) #23.2, because integers know what they did.
Title: DC Comics Unleashes Zod
Writer: Greg Pak
Art: Ken Lashley
Main Cover: Gene Ha

This quick read is less a story and more of a series of snapshots from the life of Dru-Zod, beginning in his childhood and ending with his expulsion into the Phantom Zone. There’s interesting stuff here, showing young Zod with his parents, scientists, and how a cataclysm leaves him to fend for himself. A year later, a semi-feral Zod is found by Jor-El and Zor-El and reintegrated into society, but the damage, it seems, has been done.

From there we get to what I think is this issue’s primary failure: the biggest timeskip of out of several. We go straight from lil’ Zod playing Tarzan to a fully grown adult Zod already commanding an army. The rest of the book – the bulk of the issue, in fact – is made up of exploring Zod’s rise to power as a military leader on Krypton. Pak’s story is fine and Lashley’s art is great, but this is an era of Zod that has been covered extensively over the years. There are lots of different stories about “General” Zod, both before and after Krypton’s destruction. And look, I get it, the point of this issue was specifically to detail the history of the New 52 version of Zod. Technically speaking, it was uncharted territory. But is it really uncharted if you’re following a course set by people who just got there in a different way? What I’m getting at is that I wish Pak had spent more time in those in-between years, because the first two scenes of the book are some of the most interesting. We’re very used to seeing Zod as a fascist, a sociopath, and all of the other things that make him one of Superman’s most memorable villains. This is one of the few glimpses of him BEFORE that.

That said, the glimpse is pretty good. Those few scenes at the beginning are bookended with a flashback at the climax of the book, showing us the fate of Zod’s father that had previously been skipped over, and it’s a harrowing moment. It’s more demonstrative of who and what Zod is than any of the military stuff in the rest of the book. I don’t think this particular version of Zod is in continuity anymore (much of the New 52 stuff is of dubious canonicity at best), but either way I think there’s room to explore here.

Alas, explore they did not.

I think there’s room to pick at Zod a little more, though. In 2024, Joe Casey came in with an eight-issue series called Kneel Before Zod, which is far more relevant to what’s happening in the Superman books right now. I haven’t read that one since it first came out, and it feels like maybe next week would be a good time to go back and do that again.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!