Month: January 2024

Geek Punditry #56: The Pundy Update

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January is kind of a stale month, pop culture-wise. There aren’t any huge movies out to discuss. The holiday backup has us all in its grip as we spent the month recovering from frivolity by trying to get everything back in order, so we don’t have as much time to indulge in the things we love in the first place. The playoffs are a thing. And this year especially, although the writer and actor’s strikes are over, the delay in new material has us rather struggling to find decent TV worth watching. Yes, friends, it’s a quiet time here in the Geek Punditry Global Media Hub. I don’t have a ton of things to say a lot about.

So instead of choosing a topic that doesn’t quite fit into a full column and stretching it out unnecessarily, this week I’m going to do a little bit of an update. I’ll scroll through columns from the past and give you a bit of new information to tell you how those topics are going, how I feel about them now, whether or not anything has changed since I last wrote about them. It’s this or another mailbag. What do you say?

That’s what I thought.

Item One: Last April, I wrote about the magic of the show I Love Lucy and how Lucy, in many ways, codified the sort of serialized storytelling that is commonplace on television today. (See Geek Punditry #15: How Lucy Gave Us the Arc.) In that column, I also spent a little time talking about the greatness of Pluto TV. This is an app on your smart TV that gives you free access to hundreds of channels of specialized content. There’s one channel that just shows the entirety of I Love Lucy, another devoted to The Carol Burnett Show. Others bring us RiffTrax, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Top Gear, Bar Rescue, Unsolved Mysteries, and hundreds of others. I know there are other apps, like Roku TV and FreeVee, that have similar features. Some of them even have the same specific channels. But Pluto TV is the one we use most often, so it’s the one I’m talking about.

I’m just saying, there are worse ways to spend a weekend.

Not long ago, while trying to find something appropriate for my son to watch that wouldn’t make me want to gouge my own eyeballs out, I stumbled upon Pluto’s Garfield and Friends channel, and I left it on. Eddie soon became hooked. He now specifically requests Garfield on most occasions when I let him pick what to watch unless there’s a football or hockey game on. (My kid is a sports nut, which probably makes people who knew me in college snort milk out of their noses laughing. Even if they aren’t drinking milk at the time.) I watched this show when I was a kid and I enjoyed it, but this is the first time I’ve really sat down and paid attention to it in quite some time, and can I tell you something folks? As comedy, Garfield and Friends legitimately holds up.

Comedy peaked in 1989.

While the Garfield comic strip is often criticized for being somewhat bland in its comedy, pushing no boundaries and having as much of an edge as a donut, the show is actually quite the opposite. The scripts are littered with sharp puns, sarcastic humor, and the occasional slightly more adult reference you know the writers were just hoping would slip past the censors. The fourth wall on this show is less of a rule and more of a vague suggestion, and the propensity for overly-long jokes is the kind of thing that I’ve always found hilarious. Part of the credit has to go to head writer Mark Evanier, a longtime TV and comic book writer who perhaps is best known these days as the co-writer of Sergio Aragones’s sword-and-sandals parody comic Groo the Wanderer. Evanier had spent a lot of time working on cartoons where the kind of stale, inoffensive storytelling we criticize the Garfield comic for was the norm, and apparently he went into full-on rebellion against the form. 

There are a lot of episodes of this show with kind of a downer ending, if you really think about it. Jon Arbuckle is a perennial loser and he’s treated as such. Garfield’s relationship with Penelope (who replaced the comic’s Arlene for reasons that still aren’t clear) is completely selfish, with him only loving her because her owners have an Italian restaurant. Evanier even introduced the maddening Buddy Bears specifically to mock the shows he had worked on before – the Buddy Bears’ credo is that you are never allowed to disagree with anything and you must always get along, and thus they are portrayed as completely insane. The US Acres (or Orson’s Farm segments in certain countries) similarly have a slyness to them that most cartoons of the time couldn’t touch, and few cartoons specifically for children do today. If you haven’t watched Garfield and Friends in a couple of decades, click over to Pluto TV and give it a watch. The show is still great. And if not, it’s at least better than whatever is on Disney Jr. right now.

Item Two: Back in November, I wrote about Marvel Comics announcing a new version of Ultimate Spider-Man, featuring an adult Spider-Man married to Mary Jane Watson and with two kids. (See Geek Punditry #44: What’s Wrong With a Spider-Family?) Having spent the better part of two decades complaining about Marvel Comics’s refusal to tell stories about an adult Spider-Man with a wife and a family, I felt it would be somewhat hypocritical of me not to try the new series by Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto. The first issue came out a couple of weeks ago and, I’m happy to report, it’s even better than I hoped. It may well be the best single issue of a Spider-Man comic that I’ve read in twenty years. I am not exaggerating that number, friends. 

This is what a Spider-Man comic book ought to be, people.

I’m going to explain what makes it so great, but I can’t really do that without getting into spoilers for that book, as well as the miniseries that launched this new Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Invasion. So if you haven’t read either of those and are trying to stay spoiler-free, just leave it at knowing that I really liked this book and jump down to Item Three. Deal?

Ultimate Invasion was about the Maker, the Reed Richards of the original Ultimate Marvel Universe (the one that gave us Miles Morales), which was destroyed during the 2015 Secret Wars event, also written by Hickman. Miles and the Maker were the only two survivors, and migrated to the main Marvel Universe. In Invasion, the Maker decides to recreate his original universe, but with “tweaks” this time, eliminating the events that created many of that world’s superheroes and manipulating the one that remain, so we are given a world that is quite different from the Marvel Universe we’re used to. Most relevant to this book, the Maker prevented the genetically altered spider from ever biting Peter Parker, thus denying this world its Spider-Man. 

Ultimate Spider-Man #1 picks up that story in the present day, where an adult Peter is married to Mary Jane and has the aforementioned kids. But the book is loaded with many more surprises than that, such as when we find out that the editor of the Daily Bugle is, in this universe, Peter’s uncle Ben Parker. You never think about it, but in this world where Pete never becomes Spider-Man, his uncle is never murdered. Then a few pages later we learn that Ben is a widower, and that in this world it is MAY Parker who died from violence, during a terrorist attack carried out by Howard Stark (read Ultimate Invasion for that sentence to make sense). 

Aside from the surprises, I’m utterly in love with the way Hickman is writing the Peter/Mary Jane dynamic. Peter is deeply dissatisfied with his life because of this horrible, gnawing void in his stomach. He knows something is missing, but he doesn’t know what. Too many writers – too many BAD writers – would play this for drama at the expense of Peter and Mary Jane’s relationship: MJ would take his dissatisfaction personally, thinking it has something to do with her, a rift would form between them, drama would ensue. Hickman’s MJ, however, is both smart and kind enough to realize that’s not the case, and while something is missing from her husband’s life, it’s not about her and he doesn’t blame her for it. THIS Mary Jane is deeply supportive and believes in her Peter. So when he gets a message from a kid calling himself TONY Stark, claiming that the universe is messed up, Peter was supposed to be one of this world’s greatest superheroes, and there’s something in this package that can fix things, MJ is the one who encourages him to do it. And then he opens up the case and finds a vial with an itsy-bitsy spider…

This book is just gold. Hickman has built new versions of very familiar characters that feel truer to the spirit of the ones we love than any version we’ve seen in ages. I know this first issue did blockbuster numbers, but that’s not a surprise. Hickman is a hot writer, it’s launching a new universe, and it has a billion and twelve variant covers, all of which translate to sales. The key will be to see if people keep buying it six months from now. I hope they do.

Item Three: One of the consequences of this fallow period in television is that, among all of the other things that aren’t happening right now, there’s no new Star Trek for me to enjoy at the moment. I’ve mentioned my affection for Star Trek in the past (See Geek Punditry #1-55), but it occurred to me that I’ve never mentioned exactly what happened to draw me so deeply into Trek fandom over the last few years. I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was a kid, growing up on the original series and reruns of the animated series on Nickelodeon. I got into The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine pretty heavily, and in high school and my early college years, I was a major fan. But as you get older you get into more things and different things, and my passion started to wane. It never died – I still liked the shows and I’d watch every new movie, but it wasn’t so much a lifestyle choice for me.

In 2017, my sister told me about a podcast she was listening to called Star Trek: The Next Conversation. Hosted by TV writers Matt Mira and Andy Secunda (Mira also being podcast veteran from shows like Nerdist, James Bonding, and approximately 400 others), the concept was that Andy was a Trek fan who had never watched The Next Generation for some reason, so hardcore fan Matt would walk him through the series an episode at a time as they broke down and dissected the storytelling from the perspective of TV writers. I’d listened to several of Matt’s shows before and Andy won me over immediately. There’s a friendship and chemistry between the two of them, which is probably the single most important element to making a successful podcast. Their thoughts and insights on the show are solid and interesting, and their wild tangents (the second-most important element in a successful podcast) are crazy entertaining. 

Don’t tell Paramount about the logo, though. I don’t know if there’s a copyright thing going on here.

What’s more, listening to these two guys geek out about Trek made ME geek out more about Trek. Since then, I’ve been watching every episode of Star Trek along with them, even shows I didn’t care for, because listening to these two guys talk about it has been my reward. They finished The Next Generation in May of 2022, and since then they’ve been going through my favorite series, Deep Space Nine. And if you’re willing to jump into their Patreon, they also cover Voyager, Enterprise, and all of the live-action new Trek series as new episodes drop. (They do not cover my beloved Lower Decks, sadly, because as comedy writers they feel like their nitpicking of Lower Decks would not be as entertaining as the other episodes…and honestly, based on their commentary on the Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover episode, I think they’re right.)

But not only has this show made me start watching more Star Trek, my fandom has increased as well. I find myself hunting down and reading the old comic books and novels. I’ve gotten more shirts and nicknacks. I slowly began to assemble a collection of the miniature Eaglemoss Enterprise models, only to rush and get the last few when Eaglemoss went under. What I guess I’m saying is that Matt Mira and Andy Secunda are responsible for making me an even bigger nerd than I already was, and I thank them for it. 

Item Four: I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who reads the little blurbs at the end of every one of these columns, but if you are, you know that I’ve worked in a bonus joke in the last line of every one. Good for you. If you rearrange the letters in them you’ll get a secret message.

More importantly, though, that blurb has also always had a pitch for my Kindle Vella series, Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. The language of that blurb is going to have to change beginning this week, though. I’ve always called it my “Current” writing project. As of this week, it will now be my “most recent” writing project. After two and a half years, I’ve finally finished this epic story. I talked more about it on this blog a few days ago, so I won’t get into detail about it right now, but if you’re the kind of person who likes superheroes and adventures and absolute doorstoppers of storytelling I’d like to invite you to check it out. I’m immensely proud of the story I told, and I’m hoping that you’ll enjoy it too.

Come on, people, how often do I ask you for anything?

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, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. What about a Garfield/Star Trek/Spider-Man crossover? Would that be a thing? Could we make that happen?

A little star falling to Earth…

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I woke up to a strange world this morning. Strange to me at least. It’s a world that hasn’t existed since June of 2021. It’s a world where I did not get up and start thinking about what was going to happen next in Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars.

I guess I should back up a little bit. Several years ago, I had an idea. In and of itself, there is nothing special or unusual about this. This is what people who want to use AI to write or make art will never understand. This is what you simply can’t explain to someone who finds out you’re a writer and says, “Oh yeah? I got an idea. How about I tell it to you and you write it and we’ll split a bazillion dollars?” It doesn’t work that way. The ideas are the easy part. It’s doing something with them that counts.

And the period in which this idea came to me was, frankly, the most fallow period of my life in terms of productivity. For reasons I have gone into multiple times and don’t feel like rehashing now, I had an extended period where nothing was working, from a writing standpoint. Even in that barren era, the ideas were there. I had dozens of them that I started working on and simply abandoned because I couldn’t find any traction. Many of them clung to the themes of parents and their children – sometimes from the parents’ perspective, sometimes from that of the child, sometimes from someone in the middle generation dealing with both at the same time. I liked a lot of the ideas. It was the doing something at which I was failing.

Then an idea came to me for a new story in my Siegel City series. This one would not feature Copycat or any of the previous heroes as main characters (although Copycat would grow to more prominence in the story than I originally intended, it is still not HIS story) but a whole new generation of young heroes…plus one young woman who was desperately trying NOT to be a hero. The trouble with this particular idea was that…well…the Siegel City yarns were all novels and short stories, but this was neither. This was a longer tale, something that would be comprised of multiple mini story arcs that would build together into a larger tapestry before finally colliding in a grand finale. It was less like a novel and more like seasons of a television series or a longform comic book. I would have loved to turn it into a comic book, honestly. That’s my most fervent dream.. I even wrote most of the first issue for such an enterprise. But then it died off, as I am largely a one-man operation. It is possible, if not profitable, to write and publish novels and short stories on your own. But it is far more difficult to do so with comic books. I don’t have a publisher and I can’t draw anything so much as a stick figure, and even those look hideously malformed, so producing a comic book as a solo endeavor was out of the question. (Whenever I tell people this, someone inevitably points out how many friends I have who ARE professional comic book artists, and I reply that yes, they are PROFESSIONALS, and as such deserve to be paid for their work, which isn’t really possible for a guy on a public school teacher’s salary.) 

And so I pushed the story aside, thinking it would join a dozen others in this fallow period as a “nice idea, but didn’t go anywhere.”

In spring of 2021, though, the evil empire called Amazon actually kind of saved me. Amazon was launching a new platform called Kindle Vella, in which writers could serialize stories a chapter (or “episode,” as they called it) at a time. That…actually sounded pretty good. I would have the ability to do a longform story without having to pace it like a novel. I could do my arcs. I could take breaks in between, if necessary. And the chapters, as a constraint of the platform, could be no longer than 5000 words. Even in this awful, rudderless time, I thought, I could do 5000 words a week.

And so I did. In June of 2021, I dropped the first three episodes of what had become Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. It was the story of Andeana Vargas, a high school senior whose mother, Carmelita, was secretly the world-famous and universally-beloved superhero called Shooting Star. Everyone who knew her mom’s secret also knew Andi, and expected her to grow up to be a hero herself, even though Andi had no intention of doing so. Then, at the end of that third chapter (this was important, because on Vella the first three chapters are free, so ya gotta have a hook), a video is leaked to the press that shows Andi’s mother removing her mask and revealing her true name to the world. Where did the video come from? Who made it? And what were they going to do now that their greatest secret was no secret at all?

This past Sunday afternoon, while the Detroit Lions were winning their way to their first NFC Championship game in three decades, I was doing something that was, frankly, much more remarkable: I finished writing Little Stars. The final two installments will both drop on Wednesday, because the final episode isn’t really a chapter in and of itself but more of an epilogue, and I didn’t think it would be fair to make people wait a week for it after the climax of the story. When I began, I thought the story would take maybe a year to get out of me. Of course, when I started writing the original Other People’s Heroes, I thought it would be a short story, too.

Shows what I know.

Two and a half years of my creative life went into this story, and while the journey isn’t quite over for me (more on that in a minute), I think this is a milestone worth sitting back and appreciating. I never thought it would take this long. I never thought it would be this long. But the final word count for all 119 episodes is a little over 400,000 words. That’s more than most people read in two and a half years, let alone write. For you non-writers who may be asking how many pages that is, it doesn’t matter. Page count is a little useless for a writer. It can change from one edition to the next, change because of page size or font size, and it’s impossible to keep track that way. It’s the number of words that matter to us, because word count is constant unless you revise. For comparison, for my own edification, I looked up the word counts of some of the most famous doorstoppers of literary history.

WAR AND PEACE: 587,287 
LORD OF THE RINGS (All three volumes combined): 579,459
LES MISERABLES: 545,925 
THE STAND (Uncut): 467,812
GONE WITH THE WIND: 418,053 
OTHER PEOPLE’S HEROES: LITTLE STARS: 409,206

I didn’t set out to write my Lord of the Rings, and of course I have no intention of comparing myself to Professor Tolkien (Little Stars, for instance, has considerably less food blogging), but just in terms of how much crap we’ve dumped on the page, I’ve actually chiseled out a spot among the giants here. And I feel like I’ve come out revitalized. I’ve done several short stories in the time since I started Little Stars. I started my weekly Geek Punditry columns right here. I feel like I can create again, and the memory of that time in which I couldn’t chases me like a wild bear I need to escape. I don’t want to go there again.

So the question is…what now?

Well, first I drop the end of the story on Wednesday, and I really hope you’ll all be there for it. This is something that clearly means a lot to me, and I hope I stick the landing. But after that, maybe a little break, and then the revision work will begin for the next iteration of Little Stars.

The thing is, guys, as grateful as I am that the Kindle Vella platform exists and allowed me to crawl out of that nonproductive pit of despair I was trapped in, it didn’t work out that well. Amazon was trying to capture the periodical audience that enjoys apps like Wattpad, but I don’t think it’s carried over like they hoped. Part of that is my own pitiful efforts at self-promotion, of course. I am the worst person on the planet in terms of promoting myself because my paralytic imposter syndrome makes me feel like a snake oil salesman if I try to tell anybody I’ve done something good. But another part is that I don’t think Amazon has done a good enough job selling people on the platform. The “token” system seems to confuse a lot of people, and for some inexplicable reason, when Vella launched it was only available on iOS devices – you couldn’t even read Amazon Kindle Vella stories on an Amazon Kindle. Thankfully they’ve fixed that problem and branched out to Kindle and Android, but the stories on Vella are STILL, last time I checked, unavailable outside of the United States. I didn’t know how many international readers I actually HAD until I started posting about Little Stars and got messages from people asking when it would be available in Australia or the UK. The answer to that, by the way, is, “Soon, I hope.”

So while I like the creative challenge of Vella, I don’t think I would do it again, at least not without some major changes to the platform. What does that mean for Little Stars? It means it’s time for me to revise and reformat. Even though the story wasn’t planned as novels, I’ve figured out what I think are the best places to break it down into three acts, three installments…a trilogy, in other words. I thought briefly about just putting out one ginormous mama-jama book with the entire thing in it, but some wise friends convinced me that the trilogy route was much better. Alexis Braud, if you’re reading this, thank you for pointing out that a 400,000 word book just doesn’t fit comfortably in a purse or bookbag. (There is, however, still just enough of a narcissist in me that I may do a custom printing of that mama-jama edition just so I can put it on my own bookshelf and admire the chunkiness of it all.) 

With this new version, there will have to be some changes to make it fit. So after a little bit of a break I’m going to start revising. I don’t intend to make any massive changes to the story itself, but I will probably tweak the details, fix any continuity snarls that I can find, tighten the story up, and hopefully improve the characters and themes that evolved as I went along. When it’s over, while the Vella version will remain, the novel version will be the “official” history of Andeana Vargas as far as Siegel City canon is concerned, and in any discrepancies between the two, the books will be triumphant.

And then?

I have other ideas, of course. I think I made it abundantly clear that ideas are easy. And two of them are fighting it out right now, both of which are stories I worked on in the past and can’t quite get rid of, which I think is a good sign that they deserve revisiting. One of them is a science fiction epic, a story about two sisters trying to hunt down an inheritance left for them on a distant planet known as Earth. This would technically be a YA novel (or series, if I’m being honest), although I currently have no plans for a love triangle involving a bland, Mary Sue protagonist and a pair of bland, interchangeable heartthrobs. No, this is a story about sisters. And their parents, to some small degree, because I really can’t escape that. But mostly the sisters.

The other story I’m considering would bring me back to Siegel City right away. It’s the story of the oft-discussed but mysteriously missing STAT. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I based STAT on an old City of Heroes character of mine and that I had a whole backstory of his that I wanted to put in a book some day. This is the book I’m talking about. I even found myself working in more frequent references to STAT and dropping some Easter Eggs in the final act of Little Stars, little story seeds that would grow in this hypothetical novel. And yes, once again, this would be a story about parents and children. It’s just THERE.

Or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow with a totally different idea that I can’t help but get started on. I really don’t know.

But the gap between my last novel, The Pyrite War, and the beginning of Little Stars was nine years. Sure, in that time I kept producing my Christmas stories, a couple of novellas, and my humor book Everything You Need to Know to Survive English Class, but the narrative gap was simply too long. I don’t want that to ever happen again.

So on Wednesday, please enjoy the grand finale of Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. And then keep coming back to see what I’m working on next. Hopefully you’ll be as surprised by it as I will.

One last note – a special and very sincere thank you to Lew Beitz. Lew and I are moderators on the Comic Book Collecting page on Facebook, and over the last couple of years he’s become not only a friend, but the best darn Beta reader I could ask for. And he may be the only person on Earth who loves Keriyon Hall more than I do. That’s saying something. 

Geek Punditry #55: Terry, the Turtle, and a World Full of Magic

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Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, as I’ve mentioned many times, is one of my favorite stories ever written. King is often thought of as a horror novelist, and he is, but The Dark Tower is more of a fantasy series, encompassing multiple worlds, wizards, magic artifacts, and a cowboy. And it was because of my love for his series that I was interested in Robert Silverberg’s Legends anthology when it was released way back in 1998. In this anthology, several popular writers were invited to contribute a novella set in their most famous fantasy universe. King contributed The Little Sisters of Eluria, a prequel that told a story about Roland of Gilead in the early years of his quest. There were other writers involved, of course, some I was familiar with and others I wasn’t. I loved Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, but I hadn’t read any of his Tales of Alvin Maker before. I’d heard of The Wheel of Time, but I’d never touched on Robert Jordan. And while the name George R.R. Martin was totally unfamiliar to me, I rather liked The Hedge Knight, the prequel to something called Game of Thrones, and I thought I would have to check it out some time.

I can’t help but think that, were this published today, Raymond E. Feist would be bumped off the cover to make room for that Martin fella.

But of the new (to me) writers that I discovered via the Legends anthology, none resonated so clearly as the unique and inimitable voice of Terry Pratchett. In The Sea and Little Fishes, a group of witches tried to dissuade a force of nature named Granny Weatherwax from participating in their annual “witch trials” because everyone was tired of losing to her. The concept was far sillier than the other books in the anthology. As it turned out, it was more memorable too. 

The Sea and Little Fishes, I learned, belonged to Pratchett’s Discworld series, and over the next few years, I would find myself drawn to the Disc time and time again. The Discworld is exactly what it sounds like: a planet that’s actually flat, carried through the endless expanse of space upon the backs of four enormous elephants, which in turn stand upon the back of a gargantuan turtle, the Great A’Tuin, that drifts through the cosmos. On Discworld, magic is so plentiful as to be almost a tangible element, and is far more dangerous because of that. The Discworld is what you get when you line up every fantasy universe, mythology, and religion in existence, break them with a hammer, and don’t pay attention to what you’re doing when you’re putting the pieces back together. It is an absolute delight.

This is the world as Kyrie Irving imagines it.

After reading the installment from Legends, Pratchett’s name stood out to me, and I kept it in mind the next time I went to the mall (kids, ask your parents) and rushed down to B. Dalton Bookseller (kids, ask your parents). When I went to the fantasy section, I was taken aback to realize that there were over a dozen Discworld novels, and I had no idea where to begin. Remember, this was 1998, and we didn’t all have a device in our pockets that we can use to access the full totality of human knowledge but instead use to watch stupid videos of morons doing a “spontaneous” dance routine in a grocery store. Unsure of where to start, I picked the book that looked most appealing. It was nearly Christmas at the time, the novel was called Hogfather, and the cover had red and white stripes and a guy in a sleigh. It was worth a shot.

HO. HO. HO.

I mentioned Hogfather here last month, calling the TV adaptation one of the best fantasy Christmas movies there is. What I had no way of knowing was that Hogfather was totally the wrong book to begin my Discworld journey. The story was about the Hogfather (Fantasy Santa Claus) getting murdered by a guy named Teatime and replaced by Death himself (HUH?), while Death’s granddaughter (DOUBLE HUH?) Susan (QUADRUPLE HUH?) tries to solve the mystery of what happened to the ol’ fat man. I would learn later that this was actually the twentieth book in the Discworld series and the fourth in which Death was one of the principal characters. It was insane. It was confusing. I had no idea what was going on.

And yet, I loved every page.

Terry Pratchett had a gift for words, a way of turning a phrase that no other writer in my experience can match. Hogfather, for instance, included the following exchange when Death tried to leave a small child a weapon as a present:

‘You can’t give her that!’ she screamed. ‘It’s not safe!’
IT’S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY’RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.
‘She’s a child!’ shouted Crumley.
IT’S EDUCATIONAL.
‘What if she cuts herself?’
THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.

See? Genius.

Other bon mots that Pratchett provided us with over the years include “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind,” “That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know I suspect we’ll never know,” and “A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” The man painted with words the way Van Gogh used colors, and his paintings were no less elaborate. 

I learned, eventually, that while it was true that Hogfather was the wrong book to begin reading Discworld, it’s also true that EVERY book is the wrong book to begin reading Discworld. The entire universe – which expanded to a full 41 books by the time Pratchett died in 2015 – is an enormous, brilliant, glorious mess of time and space and trolls and vampires and witches and wizards and monsters and a set of luggage that runs behind its owner on hundreds of tiny little legs. There is absolutely no correct order to read these books in, and you’re just as well off throwing a dart in the fantasy section as you would be attempting to read the books in publication order.

This image is different every time you look at it.

When I first began to wade into the Discworld books, my immediate response was to compare them to the works of Douglas Adams, writer of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. It was a fair enough comparison – they were both British authors, they both used a sort of parody of a traditional genre universe as a setting for satire, and they seemed to have a lot of overlap in their senses of humor. It also didn’t hurt that Adams was the only other British humorist I was familiar with in those days, having devoured all of the Hitchhiker’s books time and again. In fact, in conversation it was not uncommon for me to describe Discworld as the fantasy equivalent of Hitchhiker’s Guide.

As I got older and read deeper into Pratchett’s catalog, though, that comparison felt less and less apt. The truth was – much as it would pain high school Blake to hear this – Pratchett’s work outpaces Adams in a lot of ways. And one of the biggest reasons for that, I believe, is that Pratchett branched out, whereas Adams did not. In the Hitchhiker’s series, Adams stuck pretty closely to the adventures of Arthur Dent and the assorted weirdos who came into his orbit. (The only Adams-penned Hitchhiker’s story I’m aware of in which Arthur is not the central character is the short story “Young Zaphod Plays it Safe,” although I’m sure someone will correct me if there are others.) And after a while, it became clear that Adams was getting kind of tired of it. The first two books in the series were essentially adaptations of Adams’s radio drama of the same name upon which the series was based. The third book – as I would learn many years later – was a reworking of one of his scripts for Doctor Who that had not been produced. Book four was pretty good, with a more personal story for Arthur that brought him to a kind, sweet conclusion, and then came a fifth book that undid Arthur’s happy ending in the same sense that an 18-wheeler barrelling down the highway will “undo” a tower of playing cards that someone inconveniently left out in the middle of the road. Adams was a cynical person, and a certain bitterness crept into that last book in a way that ended the series on an unsatisfying note. Even Adams himself wasn’t satisfied with it and was planning a sixth book when he passed away, which is really the only reason I accept Eoin Colfer’s follow-up, And Another Thing…, as series canon.

(This, by the way, will not happen to Pratchett. Upon his death his daughter – as per his request – took his hard drive full of his notes and unfinished stories and had it crushed by a steamroller to make sure no one else could continue his work. No, really. So that’s it for new Discworld stuff, at least until the far future when it comes face to face with our old pal Public Domain.)

Most writers only think about using one of these on the critics.

But back to Pratchett. Whereas Adams seemed to get bored with his creation, stagnating with Arthur Dent and company despite having all of time and space to play with, Pratchett realized by book three that he should take advantage of his entire sandbox. After two books about the wizard Rincewind, the third novel in the series, Equal Rites, was an adventure of Granny Weatherwax, she who would later turn up in the novella that introduced me to Pratchett in the first place. This was followed by Mort, the first story where Death was a main character, although he’d appeared in the others. Over the course of the 41 books, Pratchett developed at least seven different subsets of characters that he would follow from time to time, as well as devoting several novels to one-off characters and storylines. And while these various subsets could and did cross over and interact, there were so many of them that it would have been impossible to grow bored. Unlike the Hitchhiker’s series, there is no one single “main character” in the Discworld, and that’s all to the good. 

In fact, the only character that I think even appears in every novel is Death, and I’m not even 100 percent sure about that. You see, I haven’t read all the books yet. I’ve gotten through roughly half of them. It’s a common problem of mine – when I get into something I really like I try to read (or watch or whatever) everything that’s available, but it’s only a matter of time before I come across something ELSE I really like, and now I’ve got TWO series I’m trying to keep up with, and then I discover another author, and then there’s a new book in a series that I thought was over ten years ago, and before you know it, there’s so many things I haven’t read that I’m never going to finish before I go off to follow Pratchett to the land beyond the Disc. Regular book readers know exactly what I’m talking about, but in case anyone thinks I’m exaggerating, I actually keep a spreadsheet of what series and authors I am currently reading and what books I haven’t gotten to yet. At the moment I am alternating between going through all of the Discworld novels, all of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson universe, Scott Sigler’s Galactic Football League and assorted spinoffs, every official Oz novel, every UNofficial Oz novel, Orson Scott Card’s Enderverse, the Wild Card novels, the various series that connect to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, approximately 4000 Star Trek books, and the complete works of Stephen King. Fans of George R.R. Martin don’t realize how lucky they are. Sure, you may never finish the series, but that’s gonna be GEORGE’S fault, not because YOU were poor at managing your time. 

If I’ve got any shot at finishing my reading list this year, this is going to have to be June.

But Sir Terry (given the Order of the British Empire in 1998, the same year I discovered him, although admittedly, this was probably a coincidence) deserves all of the attention. He was a genius, he was an artist, and he’s probably the funniest British human being to never be a member of Monty Python. So it’s time I buckle down and finish my trip across the Disc.

The good news is, that just got a little bit easier. You may be familiar with Humblebundle, the online retailer that offers digital packages of books, games, and software at a massive markdown with some of the money earmarked for assorted charities. It’s a way to get a lot of content for a low price, and I’ve purchased many a selection of books and graphic novels there, which only exacerbates my problem of having entirely too many things to read and not nearly enough time to do it, although I maintain that as vices go, that one is far preferable to, say, methamphetamines. Humblebundle is currently offering a bundle of almost the entire Discworld series, $400 worth of books, for as low as $18 (although you have the option to pay less for fewer books or pay more to give more support). The money for this bundle is going towards Room to Read, a charity that promotes literacy amongst young children, and if you can name a better use for that money I’ll jump off the edge of the Disc. If you haven’t experienced the glory of Terry Pratchett before, here’s your chance to do so for pennies. And if you have, here’s a way to finish the journey, or start it all over again. But the bundle is only available until Feb. 1, so don’t get stuck like the water in the River Ankh. It’s a good cause, and it’s a great read – get to it.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He thinks maybe he’ll read Snuff next. Or maybe Unseen Academicals. Or maybe A Hat Full of Sky. Ugh, this is hard. 

Geek Punditry #54: The Little City That Could

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My little Geek Punditry column is about pop culture, especially pop culture that I’m personally interested in. I tried writing about pop culture I wasn’t interested in once, but as it turns out, I found that really boring. Anyway, my pop culture awareness tends to have four quadrants, all of which have been frequent subjects of conversation here: books, movies, television, and comic books. These are the four ways I tend to consume stories, and I’m happy with them. There’s one major area of American pop culture where my awareness remains relatively low, though: video games. I’ve never been a huge gamer. The only video game console I’ve ever owned was one-third of the Sega Genesis my parents got for my brother, my sister, and me to share one Christmas. I play a few mobile games, but those are mostly in the genres of “tell this guy to do a job for 16 hours” or “put the red 5 on the black 6.” I’ve never Called a Duty, I don’t Halo, and whenever people start talking about “the new Madden” I get confused because he died in 2021 and I didn’t know they were planning to reboot him. In other words, I don’t video game much.

But there was a game, many years ago, that I got really into for a while. It was a hell of a game, one that crossed over into my “comic book” quadrant and appealed to me on that level. It was a game that allowed me to conjure up my own superheroes (something I had been doing since I was approximately seven years old anyway) and insert them into a world full of hundreds of other players, fighting alongside them in defense of the peaceful citizens of Paragon City. The game was City of Heroes, and I loved it.

This was, indeed, my jam.

City of Heroes was an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) that launched way back in 2004. The appeal of the game was that, rather than playing as Superman or the X-Men or any of the superheroes that had scored their own video games over the years, players could create their OWN characters, live their OWN stories. The creation engine was pretty impressive, too – there was a decent array of power types to choose from, and lots of different body types, uniform templates, and colors. You could make a character that looked like pretty much anything you could imagine. At first, I made versions of my own pre-existing characters (my first main character was based on Lightman, a character I’d created back in high school and who later made brief appearances in the world of my novel Other People’s Heroes). I later branched out and made new characters, some of which I enjoyed so much that they stayed with me and made their way into my writing. The often-mentioned but little seen hero STAT from Little Stars was my healer character from City of Heroes. It was a name and visual I really liked, and I wound up writing an entire backstory for him. It was too much work to go to waste. (He’s got his own book in my head somewhere, and I hope to write it some day.)

STAT before and after his cape upgrade. This was a real thing, folks.

The city lasted for several years, and I played a lot – sometimes with friends with whom I had formed a Supergroup, sometimes with random characters I encountered wandering around the massive server. The game kept putting out new content and new stories, eventually expanding into a spinoff game called City of Villains. My main character from THAT game was Malefactory, a villain whose power allowed him to create robotic drones – and if you’re reading Little Stars like all people who are good of heart and statistically likely to win a large amount of money in the lottery next week, you may recognize that Malefactory followed STAT to Siegel City and became that story’s main antagonist. 

Admittedly, the ultimate evil could use more JPEGs.

Anyway, I loved the game. I loved the lore behind it. I loved the fact that a subscription to the game included a subscription to the Top Cow comic book series with stories featuring the game’s legendary NPC heroes like Statesman and villains like Lord Recluse. The comic even included work from some of my favorite writers and artists like Mark Waid, Dan Jurgens, and Troy Hickman (whose Common Grounds is still one of the most inventive and entertaining superhero comics I’ve ever read, and I wish it would come back). The world of City of Heroes just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I was enjoying it and more.

No, actual, physical comic books. They came in the mail. Ask your parents, kids.

And then, like an asshole, life happened.

When City of Heroes first launched I was in my twenties with no family of my own and few responsibilities that really demanded my time. A few years later, things had changed. I became a teacher, a job which you may famously remember was the point of a joke when Richard Dreyfuss said he thought teachers had a lot of free time in the motion picture Mr. Holland’s Opus. I became more active in my local theater company, with rehearsals four nights a week, and more in the last few weeks before a show. I launched a podcast with a friend who lived 90 minutes away, which in those pre-Skype days turned recording a couple of episodes on a Sunday into an all-day affair. I found myself spending less and less time in Paragon City, not because I wasn’t still enjoying the game, but because that time just wasn’t there anymore. 

In early 2011, City of Heroes took an even bigger hit – the launch of DC Universe Online. It was another MMORPG, another game that allowed you to design and play your own superhero characters, but now you could have your characters fight alongside the likes of Batman, the Flash, or Harley Quinn. There were even in-game events that corresponded to stories currently happening in the DC Comics. How could a nerd like me resist? I played DCU Online for almost a year…and then the same time constraints that drew me away from City of Heroes ended that avenue for me as well.

But not before I took this screenshot to prove to my friends that I met Superman and Wonder Woman and that guy in the flying mouse costume.

Even though I hadn’t played in ages at that point, I was sad when NCSoft announced that they were going to shut down City of Heroes in November of 2012. It really was a great game, one that I had always hoped to return to someday, and the knowledge that I wouldn’t have that chance was pretty depressing. But life went on – after all, November of 2012 was also the month I got engaged, and that resulting marriage led to the current little time-eater in my life, my son Eddie. Having a family is the best thing that ever happened to me, make no mistake about that, but it would be dishonest if I didn’t admit there are some things from my younger days that I sometimes miss, like having a quiet place to record a podcast or the free time to be Max Bialystock in The Producers. 

If parenthood effectively ended my podcasting and stage acting careers, how could I possibly play video games with a small child in the house? No, seriously, I’m asking. I know people who both have children AND an active video game profile, and I don’t know how the hell they can do it. Sure, as Eddie has gotten older I’ve been able to do more reading and writing, or watch more movies, but those are all things that have either a literal or metaphorical pause button that allows me to stop at a moment’s notice if the boy needs attention. That doesn’t work in an MMORPG – how am I supposed to tell my teammates that their healer is abandoning them to fight Lord Recluse without him because the kid just asked me if I wanted to guess how many Uncrustables can fit in the tank on the back of the toilet?

But even though I knew I had no opportunity to play, the fact that it wouldn’t be an option kind of sucked.

Last year, I was made aware that superfans of the game had created their own little outlaw servers to host clones of the game unofficially. Some of those servers had even united as City of Heroes: Homecoming, and were adding in content from the various official editions and updates of the late, lamented game. The servers were funded entirely by donations, and the game was free to play for everyone. When I heard about it, I thought about jumping in, but I hesitated. Time, of course, was still my primary concern, but there was also the fact that the game was unofficial. At any point, I knew, NCSoft could discover the existence of the rogue server, demand it be shut down, and all would be lost. It would be just my luck to find my way back to the game, get really into it again, and then immediately have it taken away. So while I tipped my hat to the heroes who were keeping City of Heroes alive, I stepped aside.

Last week, that changed.

On January 4, NCSoft announced that they were granting an official license to City of Heroes: Homecoming, legally allowing the servers to continue to host the game and add new content. What’s more, this resurrected City of Heroes is STILL funded only by donations and remains free to play.

Second best homecoming ever. Right after Spider-Man, but before the DHS game of ’98.

This is awesome.

It was awesome that there were people who loved Paragon City (and who, unlike me, are tech-savvy) enough to bring it back. 

It was awesome that the community survived and spread the word of something that they loved, looking for other people who loved it like they do, instead of just whining and complaining about its absence.

And it was especially awesome that the company which would have completely been within their legal rights to shut the whole thing down, even though it’s a property that they are not currently using and seem to have no intention of resurrecting, decided instead to make a deal with the fans to allow their project to continue to exist.

Everything about this story is awesome to me.

Nothing has changed about my life, of course. As I type this I’ve got a six-year-old sitting on my hip, bouncing up and down and cheering at a hockey game, so this isn’t a good time to fire up the portal and dive into Paragon City for my triumphant return. I don’t know if that time will ever come, if I’m being totally honest.

But it’s awesome to know that if that time DOES come, the City of Heroes will be there waiting for me. If you’re ever wandering around Paragon City and you happen to run into STAT, the Medical Marvel, that means I’ll have found my way back.

Say hi. Maybe we can save the world together some time. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. If any superfans of City of Heroes happen to read this and notice that he got some of the details of the game or the history wrong, go easy on him. Hell, he had to Google the game to remember that it was even CALLED “Paragon City.” It’s been a decade, peeps. 

Geek Punditry #53: How Not to Use the Public Domain

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January brings a lot of things with it: New Year’s Resolutions, a deluge of commercials from companies offering to do your taxes, another chance for the Cowboys to choke in the playoffs, and – most importantly – new items moving into the public domain. A quick explanation for those of you who don’t know: when a creative work (like a book, painting, movie, song, etc.) moves into the “public domain,” that means that the copyright has expired and anyone is free to use that work in certain ways – remake it, create derivative works, write their own sequels, and so forth. It’s the reason that anybody can make their own version of a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel, or why it’s okay to sing certain songs on TV without worrying about paying for the rights. The full explanation is as complicated as anything else related to the law, but currently, copyrights in the United States last for 95 years, with the work in question rolling into public domain on the first of January the next year. Over the last few years, this has taken on an almost party-like atmosphere, with people champing at the bit as they wait to see what new toys they’ll have to play with. In recent years we saw The Great Gatsby enter public domain, bringing forth a wealth of unauthorized sequels, “reimaginings,” and crappy party supplies bought by people who didn’t read or understand the book. Two years ago, the earliest Winnie-the-Pooh books joined the club, bringing with them the inevitable horror movie Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. And a few days ago, on January 1, 2024, we got the big enchilada. “Steamboat Willie” and “Plane Crazy” entered the public domain, the first two shorts starring a little guy the world would come to know as Mickey Mouse.

I can finally post this picture without making a Disney lawyer’s Litigation Sense start to tingle.

I need you all to understand something. I am a firm adherent to protecting copyright. The person who creates a work of art is entitled to exploit that art to the fullest. Sometimes, of course, they “exploit” that right by selling the copyright to someone else or, in the case of a lot of things, they created it as a work-for-hire and a company owned the copyright from the beginning. (There are a lot of people who have been screwed by work-for-hire agreements, historically, but the principle is valid.) But I also believe that this protection should expire and that works should eventually become free to use by all, and that’s for the good of art itself. Allowing future generations to create their own twists and spins on a classic piece of art or storytelling helps to keep those works fresh and alive. But it’s also important that those works be respected in the process. So while I’m not terribly surprised that mere hours after “Steamboat Willie” became free to use we were deluged with announcements of Mickey Mouse as the star of horror movies and violent video games, I am substantially disappointed that people can’t find a better way to use this newfound freedom.

Walt Disney is rolling over in his cryogenic suspension unit right now.

There have been great works created based on things that are in the public domain. Universal Studios built their brand on it in the 1930s with their versions of Dracula and Frankenstein, neither of which were particularly faithful to the respective novels (Dracula was actually based on the stage play), but they still defined the characters for subsequent generations. Without those two films, who’s to say anybody would remember Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley today? There are a thousand and twelve versions of A Christmas Carol, and although plenty of them are trash, there are also some excellent ones. A Muppet Christmas Carol is a fantastic rendition of the story, quite faithful to the book, with one of Michael Caine’s most legendary performances. Scrooged is a great update of the story to the 1980s, with Bill Murray giving us a different but perfectly valid take on the character, making it into something new while still, clearly, owing its own existence to the Charles Dickens novel. And what about West Side Story, the 1950’s musical about street gangs that lifts cleanly from Romeo and Juliet? In fact, I would argue that West Side Story actually IMPROVES upon Romeo and Juliet. In West Side Story, the two young lovers are destined for a tragic ending because of the arbitrary labels of race and class that divide them, making a statement about those things that was not only poignant to the era and place where the musical is set, but is equally applicable to all times and all places. In the original Romeo and Juliet, though, the two young lovers are destined for a tragic ending because everybody in that play is dumber than a sack of hammers. 

(Note to any ninth grade students who are scheduled to study Romeo and Juliet in this upcoming spring semester: I am TOTALLY kidding about this. Romeo and Juliet is the bomb. The bomb dot com. Listen to your teacher and stay in school.)

“The bad news is you’re still gonna die. The good news is that, thanks to public domain, you don’t have to die like a moron this time.”

Anyway, the point I’m getting at is that the folks behind Mickey’s Mouse Trap and other, similar works are taking the easy way out. They also display a pretty specious understanding of how copyright actually works, because what’s in public domain are specifically the versions of Mickey and Minnie that originally appeared in “Steamboat Willy” and “Plane Crazy,” nothing else. They also don’t seem entirely aware that copyright and trademark aren’t quite the same thing, and the trademark behind Mickey is still nice, strong, and supported by enough lawyers employed by the Walt Disney Entertainment Global Megaplex and Shadow Government to invade Portugal. They may be able to get away with showing a guy in a black-and-white Mickey Mouse costume holding a knife, but calling the movie Mickey’s Mouse Trap? I am sitting nearby with a bucket of popcorn waiting for the lawsuits to start.

“M…I…C…”
“See you in court!”

But even if that weren’t the case, that doesn’t change the fact that a Mickey Mouse slasher movie is the cheap and easy way out. The freedom we get when something joins public domain is important, but far too many people waste that freedom with lazy works churned out for shock value without any real reason to create something other than to say, “Heh heh, that’s messed up.” And while I know some would disagree with me here, that’s not a good enough reason. Blood and Honey thought it would be funny to take a beloved icon of childhood and make it a bloodthirsty killer. I didn’t see the movie because, frankly, the idea itself is distasteful to me (and you’re talking to someone who’s excited about the Toxic Avenger remake, for heaven’s sake). But at least they did it first. The filmmakers behind Mickey’s Mouse Trap don’t even have THAT in their favor. They’re pulling the same joke somebody else did. It’s lazy, and it’s boring. Telling a bad joke once is unfunny. Stealing a bad joke from somebody else is the sign of a hack.

I usually have a pretty firm rule not to try to analyze a movie I haven’t seen, so I’m going to base my critique purely on the trailer, which not only looks lazy and boring, but straight-up steals one of the most famous jokes from the first Scream movie. In and of itself, the fact that they chose to showcase this joke in the trailer quashes any hopes I may have had for this movie’s transcendence, I’m sure the filmmakers, if confronted with this, would claim it’s an “homage,” but if this were an essay turned in by one of my 12th-grade students, this is where I would stop reading and simply give them an “F” for plagiarism. (Unless, of course, they gave proper citations to Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven.) 

Do you have the right, legally speaking, to make a movie whose only real purpose seems to be to show cartoon characters committing brutal acts of violence? Sure. But as George Lucas tried to demonstrate to us when he had Greedo shoot first, just because you have the right to do something doesn’t always make it a good idea. The best argument for letting works into the public domain is so that new, innovative works can be built upon those things that have helped build our culture. Things like Mickey’s Mouse Trap fails on both of these counts. 

“Wait, people thought we were serious about this?”

The 1920s and 30s were a pretty rich time, culturally speaking, and there are a lot of characters and works that will soon be free to use. Next year the first Marx Bros movie, The Cocoanuts, will be in the public domain, along with Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms. In 2027, the aforementioned Universal Frankenstein and Dracula movies will no longer be copyrighted. And looking ahead a decade, the first appearances of Superman will be public domain in 2034, followed the next year by Batman and, the year after, Wonder Woman. And I’m sure there’s some hack filmmaker already planning to do his Superman slasher that year (hint: there already is one, it’s called Brightburn, and it was pretty good), followed by the other two, and then bringing them together as an evil Justice Society once All-Star Comics #3 joins the PDA (Public Domain Association). 

“Been there, done that, murdered innocents with my heat vision.”

I’m putting you on notice now, guys: if you’re planning to exploit these works when the time comes, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. But if your idea of doing so is nothing more than “Ha ha, what if Superman murdered people?” keep it to yourself. We all deserve better. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He feels ways about things sometimes. 

See you at Fan Expo New Orleans!

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Hey, friends — if you follow this page I assume that means that you actually like listening to me ramble on about stuff. And since one of the things I ramble the most about is Star Trek, perhaps you’d like to listen to me do that in person! This weekend is the annual Fan Expo New Orleans convention, and I’ve been invited to sit on on a fan panel named “How Star Trek: Picard Launched the Next Generation.”

People who read my Geek Punditry columns will remember that I have a LOT to say about that specific topic, and I’ll be discussing it with my pals Eric LeBlanc and Justin Toney at 3:30 p.m. in room 271. Drop in and say hi!