I am kind of a nerd. I know, I know, I hide it well, but the truth is that I have certain areas of interest about which I am extremely passionate. And one of the aspects of my nerdity that one must be aware of is the fact that I’m a little obsessed with making lists. I’ve been doing it at least since middle school, when I distinctly remember making a paper bookmark upon which I kept a list of every book I read, a list which quickly became too large for a bookmark that fit in anything less than an unabridged dictionary. The list-making obsession hasn’t changed, only the medium. I’ve often said that there are four “quadrants” of pop culture I mostly talk about here in Geek Punditry: movies, TV shows, books, and comics. It should not surprise you that I have a separate app in which I track my activity and make ridiculously detailed lists for each of these quadrants. (That would be Letterboxd, Trakt TV, Goodreads, and League of Comic Geeks, respectively. If you’re on any of those platforms, feel free to follow/friend me.) My wife says that this list-making thing is because of an inherent desire to create some semblance of order and control because in most areas of my life I feel like everything is in a state of permanent chaos and there’s nothing I can do about it. I reply by telling her to shut up, which she understands to mean, “I love you and you’re right, now stop it.”
I might have a problem.
Anyway, on Letterboxd a few years back, I decided to whip up a list of every superhero movie I could find, part of my desire to eventually watch them all. You would think that this would be a relatively non-controversial endeavor, assuming that you’ve never been on the internet. Those of us who HAVE been online at some point, however, are acutely aware that there is NOTHING online so benign that you can’t find SOMEBODY ready to argue about it. In the comments of my list, some people complained that I decided to skip non-English language films (because odds are I’ve never heard of those and I don’t want to dedicate my entire life to tracking them down), fanfilms (because for some reason those are frequently deleted and re-added to the Letterboxd database and I don’t want to have to keep putting the same movies back on again), and “adult” films (because make your own list, you weirdo).
But what took me by surprise is when someone decided to complain that I left off the movie Howard the Duck. The exclusion had nothing to do with quality, mind you. I included every superhero movie I am even vaguely aware of, even the worst one ever made, by which I mean the Josh Trank Fantastic Four. No, I skipped Howard because – despite the fact that the movie is based on a Marvel comic book – Howard the Duck is not a superhero. He’s a comedy character, usually used in satirical stories, and while he does have adventures and has been known to interact with other inhabitants of the Marvel Universe, that doesn’t make him a superhero any more than it does Peter Parker’s Aunt May. The person who disagreed with me told me that the title of the film in his native country (Brazil) translates in English to Howard the Superhero, which he says indicates that it should be considered a superhero movie, whereas in reality it just made me question what’s wrong with the Portuguese word for “Duck.”
Never forget that THIS was the first theatrical movie based on a Marvel comic book, nerds.
So I decided that, in order to quell debate (note: this is impossible), I should probably come up with an actual definition of “superhero.” This turned out to be more difficult than it seems. You would think it’s obvious – get five different people to make a list of 100 superheroes and chances are 75 names would appear on at least four of the lists. But what MAKES a superhero? I decided to check with Merriam-Webster, which gives me two totally useless definitions. The first is “a fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers,” which fails as a definition because it excludes Batman, and nobody is ever allowed to exclude Batman. The other definition is “an exceptionally skillful or successful person,” which seems kind of dumb because, arguably, Genghis Khan was exceptionally successful at what he did. And let’s not get into John Wayne Gacy.
“Behold! A superhero!” “Put a sock in it, Diogenes.”
I needed something broad, but not too broad. I pondered, and I eventually came up with not a SINGLE definition, but a list of criteria. I would consider a character a superhero, I decided, if they fit at least TWO of the following criteria:
Superhuman powers and abilities. These abilities need not be inherent, mind you. Green Lantern has no actual super powers, but he has a ring that gives him superhuman abilities, so he counts.
A double identity, although this identity need not be secret. Everyone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man – his ego wouldn’t allow them not to – but he still HAS that second identity.
An identifiable (and toyetic, let’s not forget toyetic) uniform or appearance. This is, I admit, somewhat subjective. What’s identifiable to one person may not be identifiable to someone else. Think of it this way: if someone is cosplaying as a character and that cosplay is easily recognizable to someone familiar with the IP, that character probably meets this criteria.
Fights crime or battles the forces of evil.
All basically the same thing.
What I like about this list is that none of these criteria make somebody a superhero by itself, but each time they’re combined you get closer to that superhero line. It also makes it easy to include anybody that I want, such as Zorro. People often say Superman (who first appeared in 1938) was the first superhero, and he is certainly the character who named the genre, but I don’t think it’s true that he’s the first. He was preceded by several characters who meet many of the criteria I’ve listed. Zorro (1919), the Lone Ranger (1933), and the Green Hornet (1936) all meet categories 2-4. The Shadow (1931) and the Phantom (also from 1936) meet all four. Even the Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) hits categories two and four. If anything, Superman is the first comic book superhero, and I’m sure even that is open for debate. As such, I included all of these “proto-heroes” on my cinematic superhero list.
Fun Fact: Canonically, the Lone Ranger is the Green Hornet’s great-uncle. Less Fun Fact: Both of these movies are embarrassments that should never have been made.
Of course, even my criteria leaves a lot of room for debate. There are plenty of characters that one usually doesn’t think of as superheroes that fit at least two of the criteria. Harry Potter, for instance, has magical powers, fights evil, and has a very distinct appearance. The same can be said for Luke Skywalker. One could even argue that any Star Trek character from a race with psychic or shapechanging abilities would qualify. Are Spock, Odo, and Counselor Troi superheroes, or do their powers not count since they’re not unusual for members of their respective species? There are certainly people who would argue that all of these are superheroes, and while I wouldn’t put them on my personal list, I don’t know that I could effectively argue against their inclusion either.
Where, exactly, do we draw the line?
What about Indiana Jones? He fights evil. He’s easily cosplayable. And his real name is Henry Jones, Jr. Does his nickname qualify as a second identity? How about James Bond? He fights evil all the time. The uniform is a little harder to quantify – the most iconic Bond look is a tuxedo, but anybody can put on a tuxedo. And the second identity…does being Agent 007 count? Back in the day there was the fan theory that “James Bond” itself was a pseudonym passed down to whomever was Agent 007 at the time, which was a theory I liked and would most certainly qualify, until the film Skyfall quashed that theory for good.
Some people may ask what difference it even makes. We’re talking about fictional characters, after all. Who cares which ones do and do not count as superheroes? To those people I say, “Oh good for you, you’re far more well-adjusted than those of us who debate these sorts of things on the internet, please stay that way.”
For the rest of us, I know that my attempt to define the term has probably caused more debate than it stopped. Sorry about that. If you’ve got a better definition than I do (or than Merriam-Webster does) I would love to hear it. And I’d even like to hear some unusual characters that you would say meet the criteria. But in the meantime, the only thing I can really say is that when it comes to a superhero, I know one when I see one.
And Howard, I’m sorry, it ain’t you.
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. He looked up the Portuguese word for “duck.” It’s “pato.” Why didn’t Brazil just call the movie “Howard o Pato”?
With all due respect to films like Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie is the Jimmy Stewart thriller Rear Window. In this taut little drama, Stewart plays a photographer who was injured in a car crash and is stuck in a wheelchair while he recovers. Unable to leave his apartment, he takes to observing the activities of his neighbors through the windows as a sort of perverse entertainment – entertainment that takes a chilling turn when he thinks he sees one of his neighbors commit murder.
“Mr. Gower, no! No, what are you doing?”
Sure, there are some elements that are kind of icky – Stewart is literally spying on his neighbors for most of the film, which isn’t exactly kosher. And how anyone could be so interested in what’s going on across the way when your girlfriend is Grace Kelly and she’s at your house every fifteen minutes seems almost beyond belief. But hey, it’s a movie. Suspension of disbelief is a thing. The thing that makes Rear Window so great is that virtually the entire film takes place in a single room, and despite that, Hitchcock is able to amplify the tension even more than when he had Cary Grant dangling from Mount Rushmore five years later. A single-room thriller is very difficult to pull off, but he did it TWICE, both in this masterpiece and in the underrated Rope.
Pick up your pulse without ever leaving the room.
The reason I’m talking about Rear Window today, though, is not because I’m going to give you a list of confined space thrillers worth watching (Wait Until Dark, Phone Booth, Buried – that’s enough of a list to get started), but because I noticed a few days ago that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the film and, lo and behold, Fathom Events is holding a nationwide anniversary screening on August 25. This, of course, is a date of monumental significance because it also happens to be the birthdate of several notable figures, namely Sean Connery, Tim Burton, Regis Philbin, Billy Ray Cyrus, and myself. (Incidentally, if this doesn’t completely disprove astrology once and for all, I don’t know what will.) Anyway, whilst I’m sure I’ll be occupied with the customary parades, speeches, and address to the nation, the idea of seeing my favorite Hitchcock movie on my birthday IN A MOVIE THEATER is enticing as hell.
Not long ago, I saw a Facebook conversation in which one person expressed an interest in an upcoming screening of Shrek at his local theater, and somebody else began to chastise him for buying a ticket to watch a movie he can watch at home for free. This is an all too common attitude, of course, especially with younger audiences. I know I’m about to sound like a curmudgeonly old man (because I, like Tim Burton and Billy Ray and our fellow August 25th baby Claudia Schiffer, AM a curmudgeonly old man). My high school students are perfectly happy watching everything on their phone screen. Of course, they’re also incapable of paying attention to anything longer than 37 seconds in length, which I assume is the maximum amount of time you can spend watching a film intended to be projected onto a 70-foot screen on a device smaller than a slice of bread. I wholeheartedly believe that a screen as small as a smartphone is a terrible way to watch any sort of longform entertainment and that is part of the reason that younger generations have such an abysmal attention span and, furthermore, I would like to invite you all to get the hell off my lawn.
I know it sounds like I’m blaming TikTok for this, but there’s a good reason for that: I am.
That aside, though, the larger question seems to be why one would pay for movie theater prices to see a movie that you’ve already seen. That, at least, is an argument I can comprehend. My answer to that, though, is that I’m not lining up to rewatch Mac and Me, I want to see Rear Freaking Window. As I wrote last year, I sincerely believe that every movie is more enjoyable if viewed in a theater with a receptive and enthusiastic audience. That’s true whether I’ve seen a movie five thousand times or zero times (and, truth be told, I bet that watching Mac and Me could actually be a hoot if you have the right people in the theater with you).
Having the proper audience is important, of course. With new movies, this is a crapshoot – the studios tend to make every movie look as homogenous as possible to draw in every quadrant, and nobody knows for sure if what they’re going to watch is any good or not. I always HOPE a movie is going to be good, of course. I don’t understand “hatewatching.” I can honestly say I’ve never walked into a movie theater WISHING for a movie that disappoints me. But when it’s a movie that no one has ever seen before, you’re rolling the dice.
That said, the right audience is essential. My wife Erin and I saw this firsthand when RiffTrax did their live theater screening of the Doctor Who serial, The Five Doctors. RiffTrax, if you don’t know, is put on by classic cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they carry on the mission of cracking jokes at movies. It’s a blast, if you’re a fan.
IF you’re a fan.
If you don’t know what you’re getting into this poster is very confusing. Mathematically speaking.
When we arrived at the theater, we encountered a couple wearing heavy Who regalia who were very excited about a theatrical screening of the legendary story. They took a seat behind us and began to excitedly chatter…but in that chatter, it became quite obvious to Erin and I that while these two were major fans of Doctor Who, they didn’t seem to know WHAT RIFFTRAX IS. As the presentation started, the riffers launched into a short film about safety around electrical wires, cracking their usual jokes about the absurdity of the film, and I heard the man behind us tell his wife, “I hope they don’t do this during the whole movie.”
I turned into that emoji with the clenched teeth. 😬
They lasted about 15 minutes into the Doctor Who serial and left, clearly irritated at the irreverence with which their beloved Doctor was being treated. And I felt bad for them, because they obviously didn’t know what they were getting into…but once they were gone, the rest of us had a grand old time.
It’s about being with the right crowd. One of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater was when the Star Trek documentary Trekkies was released back in 1997. The film is a glimpse into the lives of Trek fans from across the country, a particularly niche subject matter, and it didn’t get a wide release. However, someone I knew happened to have a connection at the local UPN affiliate (home of Star Trek: Voyager) and scored some free passes to a screening they were hosting. The result was an entire theater full of people who LOVED STAR TREK, and there is no better atmosphere in which to watch this movie. We laughed at the people who went a little too far. We cracked jokes about the woman who dressed up her poodle as Spock. And we collectively shed a tear when James Doohan shared the beautiful (and now oft-told) story of how his connection with a fan saved them from committing suicide.
AND he was shot six times on D-Day! The man didn’t need to go to outer space to be a hero.
That “right crowd” mindset works very well when going to see a classic movie in the theater. Odds are, the majority of the audience HAS seen the movie before and is excited to see it with a crowd, and those that HAVEN’T seen it before are there because they want to join in the fun. It’s the reason that interactive screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have endured for such a long time. To give another example: Erin’s favorite movie is Jaws, and as it was released before either of us were born (we’re old, but we ain’t THAT old), when a special screening was announced at a Movie Tavern within an hour’s driving distance, we decided to make it a date night. (It goes without saying that this was before Eddie was born, although Erin was pregnant at the time.) Near us sat a father with his daughter, who I guessed was about 13 years old and who clearly had never seen the movie before. She was doing fine right up until the scene where Richard Dreyfuss finds Ben Gardner’s decapitated head drifting in the shipwreck underwater, at which point she jumped into her dad’s lap and stayed there for the rest of the movie. It was amazing.
This was a major bonding moment.
After Gene Wilder died, there were special screenings of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Blazing Saddles, and we did a double feature. Saddles is – and I say this with firm conviction and damn the mobs who want to piss on everything older than 2008 – one of the funniest movies ever made, and seeing it for the first time in a theater was fun. But Wonka was downright magical. The screening was full of parents with kids, many of whom had never seen the movie before. Those kids were mesmerized, drawn into the magic and swept up in this 50-year-old film in a way that the 15-year-old remake by my birthday buddy Burton couldn’t hope to match.
Betcha he never would have used AI and charged kids fifty bucks for a half a lemonade, either.
And you know, I don’t think those kids would care if they HAD seen the movie before. Seeing it on the screen is DIFFERENT. It’s only adults that are too stupid to push that aside. If my son can watch the same YouTube video of the 2017 Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop 47 times in a row, he sure as hell isn’t going to walk into a screening of Despicable Me and say, “Daddy, I’ve seen this before.”
When I was a kid, Disney used to frequently re-release their classic movies. I got to see films from decades before I was born like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Sword in the Stone. With the exception of one-night or short-term engagements, that doesn’t happen anymore (possibly because Disney is afraid people will remember how much better the original versions of these movies are than the lifeless remakes they’re turning out lately). But damn it, it should. My family doesn’t get to the movies much these days, but if I was at a movie theater right now and given a choice between seeing Fast and Furious 11 for the first time or watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the twentieth time (but the first time in a theater), it wouldn’t even be close.
With movie theater attendance struggling, there’s a desperate effort to create content that fills seats, but I feel like theaters are missing out on an obvious opportunity here. Doing a revival screening of Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz may not sell as many tickets as a Marvel movie, but it also costs a hell of a lot less to put back into theaters. Give us more classic family movies! Give us more events! When the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy hit theaters in the 90s, we fans came out in FORCE (pun intended), not because we wanted to see Greedo shoot first, but because we wanted to see him in a room the size of a house and full of other people who loved the movie as much as we did.
These screenings DO happen. Like I said, Fathom Events does anniversary and event screenings a lot. There was the aforementioned Gene Wilder double feature. And Disney just announced an all-day nine movie marathon of the Star Wars films on May 4th. But I don’t want to have to wait for an anniversary that ends in a 5 or 0 or for somebody to die before I get to see a classic.
Our only hope.
I wish there were a nearby, easily-accessible theater in my area that frequently did revivals or special screenings of classics, but alas, there aren’t a ton of options, especially if you don’t have a lot of opportunities to go into New Orleans proper. So I keep an eye on Fathom events and I cross my fingers for special screenings and I long for the day when the cinematic community figures out how to make this happen.
And I hope to see Hitch’s cameo the way it was meant to be seen: big enough to fall into his nostrils.
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new season of Night Court airing right now. Now that may surprise you if you, like most of us, remember the show going off the air back in 1992. But it may be slightly less shocking if I tell you that the new series, like approximately 75 percent of television these days, is a reboot.
Criminal Court Part 2, Part 2.
We live in the age of reboots on TV, and I think there are few obvious reasons for that. First of all, the people who fell in love with shows like Night Court during their formative years in the 80s and 90s are now largely the ones calling the shots at the networks, contributing greatly to the already-cyclical nature of pop culture. If you loved something once, it’s not unnatural or unusual to want to reclaim it and bring it back again, so when that kid who grew up watching DuckTales was given a shot at pitching an animated series to Disney, you damned well better believe he was gonna pitch a new DuckTales.
The other reason, of course, is that the TV world in utter chaos as ratings for broadcast television drop like Wile E. Coyote strapped to an anvil and nobody knows how to interpret what little data we get from streaming services. It’s considered a safer bet to hitch your star to an older series that might bring its older audience along for the ride. It’s why we got shows like The Connors, Fuller House, Girl Meets World, Quantum Leap, Animaniacs, Raven’s Home, One Day at a Time, And Just Like That, and, for the kiddos from the aughts, iCarly. It’s why every couple of months somebody floats the idea of a new version of The Office and why Bryan Cranston likes to tease us to say he’d totally be down to resurrect Malcolm in the Middle. Reboots are here and they’re not going anywhere. It’s like all these old shows were buried in the TV Land Pet Sematary, and sometimes they come back VERY wrong.
More shambling corpses than 10 season of The Walking Dead.
The truth is, like any other wave in entertainment, there are good and bad attempts, and I think one of the things that contributes to how well a reboot is accepted is the adherence to the original. It’s bizarre how often a studio will bring back an old show and then change everything about it, sometimes resulting in something as appalling as Thundercats Go! (the Gage Creed of the TV Land Pet Sematary). The logic of the producers is usually something along the lines of “We’re trying to get new fans, not old ones.” My response to this is, “if you’re not trying to get the old fans, why the hell did you call the show Walker: Texas Ranger?”
One of the most interesting examples of both a failed AND a successful reboot is Star Trek: Picard. When the first season was launched, the idea was to focus solely on Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard character, with only sparse appearances from some of his old castmates. They didn’t want to just make season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The problem, of course, was that the fans just wanted season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So after two seasons of – I’m going to be kind here – dubious quality, for the third and final season they threw away most of the elements that weren’t working, got the crew of the Enterprise-D on the phone, and made one of the most entertaining and warmly-regarded seasons of TV in Trek History.
I’m never gonna get tired of this picture.
But back to Night Court. The new series is set in the same courtroom as the original, and it is a continuation rather than a full continuity restart such as Charmed, which I for one prefer. The head of the new ensemble is Melissa Rauch (of The Big Bang Theory) as Judge Abby Stone, daughter of the character played by the late Harry Anderson in the old series. While many of these reboots make an effort to have a cast that frequently blends the old and the new, there isn’t a ton of cross-pollination in Criminal Court Part Two, and for a fair enough reason: most of the original cast is no longer with us. Night Court, tragically, has suffered a far greater attrition rate than most other shows of the 80s. Of the entire original main cast, only three of them were still alive when the reboot was announced, and one of them (the great Richard Moll, who played Bull Shannon) passed away after season one without ever agreeing to make an appearance. Marsha Warfield, touchingly, has made two appearances, and Brent Spiner (who played a recurring character for a few years on the original) has shown up as well, but fans looking for familiar faces will be disappointed.
The only original cast member that’s a regular on the new version is John Larroquette, whose Dan Fielding is almost unrecognizable as the same character. 80s Dan was sleazy, lascivious, and somebody that wouldn’t last ten minutes in a modern courthouse without getting “Me Too”ed into oblivion, which is probably the reason for the drastic change. Modern Dan is old, curmudgeonly, a combination of Oscar the Grouch and Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace. I’m not saying that I need a sleazeball character for a show to be enjoyable, but considering how it was his defining characteristic, it seems ridiculous that his bed-jumping past is almost completely ignored in favor of this somewhat lonely man that Dan has become. I don’t even mind that he’s changed, I just wish there was a clearer path of transition, because they don’t talk about his past at all. He’s mentioned the death of his wife, which is implied to have triggered this change in his personality, but HELL, that’s a story I want to know! Tell me about the woman who changed Dan!
I just want someone to make this make sense.
The show isn’t quite as wacky as the original either. Oh sure, the classic series didn’t start wacky, but it spun wildly out of control and by the final season it was practically a live-action cartoon. In fact, in one memorable episode, a defendant in a one-scene gag turned out to be the fully-animated and aforementioned Wile E. Coyote. The reboot occasionally makes a flailing grab at bringing that sensibility back, but it usually feels forced. So far the most authentic thing about the series is ditching the actor playing the Court Clerk and replacing him between the first two seasons.
Anyway, the new Night Court is okay. It’s not great, it’s okay, and that’s how I feel about most of the reboots that I’ve watched. Fuller House drew most of its charm by reminding the viewers about the cheese of the original series. The Animaniacs relaunch gave me a few laughs, but there was nothing that came even close to the genius of the Anvilania episode of the classic.
And then there’s Frasier.
The show that gave the world tossed salads and scrambled eggs.
I’ve written before of my love for Cheers and how I consider it one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, and that love extends to its spinoff. In fact, I would say that Frasier and Better Call Saul belong on a special shelf labeled “spinoffs as good as and sometimes even better than the original.” It is a very, very exclusive club. Laverne and Shirley keeps petitioning for admission but is denied on the grounds of the Cindy Williams-less last season. And because I loved Frasier so damned much, I was wary of the reboot when the first season dropped last fall. I finally worked myself up to give it a watch and…
…be surprised by this…
…it’s okay.
Let me tell you a little bit about the new set-up. In the original Frasier, Kelsey Grammer’s character from Cheers moved from Boston to Seattle where his father Martin (John Mahoney) wound up moving in with him. Frasier, of course, was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist with more than a little bit of pretension, whereas his father was a retired cop who liked beer and basketball. The Odd Couple style dynamic between them provided a lot of the fuel for what was one of the greatest comedies in television history (and that’s not even bringing up the brilliance of the rest of the cast). In the reboot, Frasier moves back to Boston and moves in with his son, Frederick (played by Jack Cutmore-Scott) who has inherited both his father’s intelligence and his grandfather’s working-class sensibilities. The original show gave us a long and rewarding arc of Frasier and Martin reconnecting and forging a sincere and touching bond. In perhaps the reboot’s most interesting twist, Frasier deliberately moves in with his son in an attempt to recreate this father/son bond following Martin’s death.
“I’m confused. Which one of them is supposed to be the new Chopper Dave?”
Cutmore-Scott and Grammer work well together, mirroring the Frasier/Martin dynamic but reversing the archetypes of the characters. The rest of the cast, though, isn’t as engaging, and I don’t think there’s anybody who watches the reboot who isn’t waiting for Niles and Daphne to show up. Obviously the late John Mahoney can’t make an appearance, but his specter hangs over the first season of the reboot and it makes for one of the most authentic elements of the show. It’s telling, though, that the two best episodes of the first season are the ones that guest-starred Bebe Neuwirth (as Frasier’s ex-wife and Freddy’s mom Lilith) and Peri Gilpin (as Frasier’s old radio producer Roz Doyle). Supposedly David Hyde Pierce and Jane Leeves, who played Niles and Daphne in the old show, were approached to appear in the reboot but declined. I’ve probably heard a half dozen explanations for why they turned the offer down, and since I have no idea which if any of them is correct, I’m not going to speculate or point fingers. All I’m going to say is the show has a much better chance of getting a season three if they find a way to get Pierce and Leeves to show up in season two.
If you’re going to bring back something from the past, you need to keep in mind what people loved about it in the first place. That doesn’t mean it needs to be exactly the same. In many cases – be it because of changing societal values or the loss of beloved performers – it can’t be. But if you don’t at least identify the spirit of the original and do your best to bring it back in the reboot, then what the hell is 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, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s waiting with baited breath for the reboot of Mama’s Family now that Vicki Lawrence is actually age-appropriate to play Mama.
We’re back again, folks, with the second round of PLAYING FAVORITES with superheroes. For those of you who are new, in “Playing Favorites” I choose a topic and ask my friends on social media to suggest categories for me to discuss my favorite examples. This time around the topic is superheroes, and in the first installment I discussed my favorite legacy superheroes, superhero logos, superhero TV shows, super-pets, and superhero costumes. This time I’m dipping into the list of suggestions and pulling out a few more topics to ramble about. Join me, won’t you?
Origin Stories
Lew Beitz is back, this time asking what my favorite superhero origin stories are. I’m running with this because it gives me a chance to share with you my personal feelings on origin stories, which are thus: in this day and age, origin stories are largely unnecessary. In the early days of the superhero, before all the tropes were codified and the rules established, it may have been a requirement to explain how Alan Scott became the Green Lantern or where that humanoid robot called the Human Torch came from, but when’s the last time you saw a truly ORIGINAL origin story? Most of them, even with good characters, are remakes and rehashes of origins we’ve seen before. As early as 1962 Stan Lee recognized that it was getting hard to come up with an origin that hadn’t already been done, so he just decided these five kids he was writing about were all BORN with their powers and called them the X-Men. This, of course, turned out to be a decision of almost obscene serendipity, which would also be a great name for a rock band.
“Metaphor, schmetaphor, I’m just out of ideas.”
Furthermore, in a world where even someone who’s never touched a comic book is intimately aware of superhero tropes through movies and TV, does it really matter anymore? Think about this – one of the best superhero movies ever made was Pixar’s The Incredibles. It’s a great film. It’s a great SUPERHERO film. But do you know how Mr. Incredible and Elasti-Girl got their powers? No. Do you care? No. No more than it matters what compelled every single character on a medical drama to be a doctor or every officer on a police procedural to become a cop. I’m not saying that we should never tell an origin story again, I’m just saying that unless you’ve got a really interesting and compelling take, do it away with it via a line or two of expository dialogue. The origin is almost never a character’s best story, and if it IS, then that’s not a character who’s going to be around very long.
All that is to say that, like with the costume, Spider-Man probably has the best origin story in comics. Earlier characters usually had very clean origins – Superman is an alien from a dead planet, Captain America became a super-soldier through a government experiment, etc. Others had good motivation, like Batman wanting to avenge the deaths of his parents or Plastic Man being a criminal whose life was saved through an act of kindness and decided to join the side of angels. But with Spider-Man, the origin took a new level. No, not the part about being bitten by a radioactive spider – that’s how Peter Parker got his POWERS, that’s not what made him Spider-Man. What made him Spider-Man was the death of his uncle, Ben Parker. I don’t think I need to recount how it happened (there are three stories that NEVER need to be filmed again, no matter how many reboots happen: the explosion of Krypton, the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne, and the murder of Ben Parker), but WHY it happened matters. Ben died because his nephew did not take the opportunity to do the right thing when it was presented to him, and Peter has been trying to atone for that original sin ever since. Sure, there are a lot of heroes who are motivated by the death of a loved one, and I can’t even say for certain that Spider-Man was the FIRST hero who bore a personal sense of responsibility for his loss, but he is certainly the most notable.
The leading cause of death for male actors age 65-80 is “Playing Ben Parker.”
Incidentally, this is also the reason I think the Tom Holland trilogy of Spider-Man movies in the MCU is nearly perfect. Even though we never see how Pete got his powers in the MCU, the three movies do the job of the emotional component of his origin beautifully. In the first film, he has to learn what it really means to be a hero. In the second, after Tony Stark’s death, he has to learn how to be his OWN kind of hero. And in the third, which pulls a fantastically unexpected twist on the traditional Spider-Man origin, he learns the COST of being a hero. It’s not until the final moments of No Way Home, Tom Holland’s sixth film wearing the costume, that he truly, fully becomes Spider-Man.
Publisher Jump
Duane Hower asked an interesting question about my favorite superheroes who have changed publishers over the years. This has happened more often than you might think. There have been a lot of characters who have moved from one publisher to another, often because their original publisher went out of business and sold or licensed their characters to somebody else. DC Comics, for example, has absorbed the heroes from lots of defunct publishers, including Quality Comics (Plastic Man being the most notable of their characters), Charlton Comics (giving them the likes of Blue Beetle and the Question), Jim Lee’s Wildstorm (featuring the WildC.A.T.s and Gen 13) and Fawcett Publishing (original home of the Shazam family). Marvel has done this as well, buying the heroes of Malibu Comics, especially their Ultraverse line, but unlike DC they buried their purchase and still show no signs of doing anything with them nearly 30 years later.
If you go to the Marvel Comics commissary this picture appears on all of the milk cartons.
My favorite character from this category, aside from Shazam and the Blue Beetle, is probably Magnus: Robot Fighter. Originally published by Western Publishing’s Gold Key imprint, Western shut down their comic publishing in the 80s (although they have recently resurrected the brand, with a new Boris Karloff horror anthology now being published and a new kids’ comic in the crowdfunding stage). In the 90s, they licensed some of their characters to Valiant Comics, who used Magnus and Solar, Man of the Atom, as the cornerstones for their own superhero universe. Magnus was a hero from the distant future of 4000 A.D., a world where sentient robots were beginning to run wild and had to be battled, which means ChatGPT got here nearly 2000 years early. I loved that book, and when Valiant itself went under the license for Magnus and the other Western characters began to bounce to various publishers, including iBooks, Dark Horse, and Dynamite. None of those ever had the zing of the Valiant version, though. I don’t know who currently owns the license, but I kind of hope that now that Gold Key exists again, they’ll make an effort to bring back the original.
Pictured: The moderators of every comic book group on Facebook that’s trying to stop members from posting AI art.
The other way a hero can bounce publishers is if it is not owned by the publisher itself, but rather the creator, who moves to different publishers over time. For example, Matt Wagner’s titles Grendel and Mage were originally published by Comico, but after that publisher died he took them to Dark Horse and Image, respectively. Kurt Busiek’s Astro City started at Image Comics, moved to Jim Lee’s Wildstorm (published via Image), then moved to DC when DC bought Wildstorm. It was published under the Wildstorm imprint for years before moving to DC’s Vertigo line (perhaps the worst fit possible), and recently bounced back to Image.
But the best hero to play the publisher mambo is Mike Allred’s Madman, a character published by Tundra Comics, Dark Horse, Image, and Allred’s own AAA Pop over the years. Madman is a modern take on the Frankenstein story (he even uses the name “Frank Einstein”), a hero who was brought to life in a reanimated corpse and doesn’t remember his previous existence. The book is full of wild sci-fi concepts and can go from hilariously funny to deeply philosophical at the turn of a page. It’s been too long since there was a new Madman story, so if you’re listening, Mr. Allred, please bring him back. I miss him.
I know it’s hard to believe, but this comic is even cooler than it looks.
Cursed By Their Powers
My uncle Todd Petit, who gave me some Green Lantern and Legion of Super-Heroes comics when I was a kid and thus is largely responsible for half the things I write about, asked who my favorite characters are with powers that are “as much a curse as a blessing.” It’s an interesting trope, isn’t it, to have superpowers that ruin your life? It’s an idea that gets used again and again, because when it’s done well, it works like nobody’s business. The Hulk is probably the most well-known example, a man who transforms uncontrollably into a manifestation of his own Id and breaks tanks. Then there’s Rogue of the X-Men, whose power makes it impossible to have physical contact with another human being without stealing their powers, their memory, and potentially (if the contact is prolonged) their lives. It really makes Halle Berry’s Storm seem tone deaf in the first X-Men movie when she tells Rogue there’s nothing wrong with her, and every time I watch it I hope for the deleted scene where Anna Paquin tells her, “The hell there isn’t.”
Anyway, I think there’s one story that expresses that concept better than any other. And that story?
Project: ALF.
If I ever go through a whole “Playing Favorites” column without posting this, consider it a signal that I have been abducted and am being held hostage.
No, of course, my favorite “cursed by his own powers” hero is Benjamin J. Grimm, the Thing, of the Fantastic Four. Put yourself in Ben’s position for a minute. Your best friend convinces you to help him steal a rocketship he built. He ropes his girlfriend and her kid brother into coming along for the ride. The four of you are bombarded with space-rays that give you all amazing powers, but transform your bodies as well. The kicker is, unlike your three teammates, you can’t turn your powers off. Reed Richards can stop stretching, Sue can become visible, and Johnny can quench the flames of the Human Torch, but Benjy is trapped in an orange rock shell 24/7. If anybody in comics has the right to complain that he lost the superhero lottery it’s him.
Instead, he became the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed idol o’ millions.
Too many writers would use this as an excuse to make him a bad guy. He would turn against the team, become the villain, try to exact revenge on Reed – and to be fair, for a long time he was the grouchy and often antagonistic member of the Fantastic Four. But over the 63 years since the characters were created, the opposite has happened. He has become kinder, tender, a beautiful spirit. He could have been the monster, but instead, he is the knight in stony armor. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s compassionate, and he’s still never afraid to get his hands dirty when the situation calls for it. He made peace with his curse, reembraced his faith, found love, and in recent years has even become a husband and a father. The amazing thing about Ben is how he has persevered and grown despite his “curse.” I think writer Chris Claremont put it best in the Fantastic Four Vs. the X-Men miniseries from 1987, when Ben had his powers taken by the aforementioned Rogue. Claremont, perhaps the purplest prose penner whoever picked up a pen, describes the sensation thusly:
Instantly, as her body is flooded with the Thing’s awesome strength, her awareness is filled with the totality of his being – all he was and is and dreams/despairs of being. She thought she’d be attacking a toad. Instead, she’s touched the soul of a prince.
That’s actually Rogue on the left. She…had a standard MO.
Ben is one of the good ones, is what I’m saying.
Honorable mention goes to DC’s Firestorm. Firestorm has gone through several iterations over the years, but the original Firestorm was created when a nuclear accident (so, so many of those in superhero universes) fused two people together: physicist Dr. Martin Stein and teenage jock Ronnie Raymond. The accident merged them into a single, extremely powerful being who would go on to join the Justice League and then get sued by Ghost Rider for stealing his whole “flaming head” bit.
Clearly, this guy is miserable with his lot in life.
Here’s where the “cursed” part comes in: when Stein and Ronnie were originally fused together, Stein was unconscious. So whenever they merge into Firestorm, Ronnie is in charge and Stein becomes a voice in his head, offering advice but having no control. What’s more, in the early days of their partnership, Stein didn’t even remember being Firestorm whenever he and Ronnie were split, so he was constantly waking up with big chunks of his life missing and having no idea what happened. The reason it’s only an honorable mention is because the writers did away with that part relatively early, and I guess I can understand why. It must be hard to write around the fact that one of your main characters is constantly in fear of a blackout and the other has to find ways around it, and so Stein started retaining his memory of their partnership. Still, I think the idea of a superhero whose life keeps getting screwed up because he doesn’t KNOW he’s a superhero is pretty intriguing, and I bet somebody could do something really interesting with the concept.
Sidekicks
Jim MacQuarrie asks my favorite superhero sidekick. The sidekick is such a weird concept, isn’t it? Going back to the pre-superhero days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson (and certainly even earlier), the sidekick is a character who traditionally exists so that the hero has an audience surrogate to explain things to instead of having to talk to himself. For some reason, when the concept of the sidekick was incorporated into comic books, they got the idea that the best way to handle this was to make them all children or, at most, teenagers, thereby making a large number of superheroes guilty of multiple counts of child endangerment. Choosing a favorite sidekick is actually kind of tricky, because the best ones don’t usually become particularly compelling or interesting until they stop acting as sidekicks and become heroes in their own right – Dick Grayson is far more interesting as Nightwing than he ever was as Robin, Wally West is a better Flash than Kid Flash, and so forth.
I think the best of all time is Tim Drake, the third Robin. Part of it was because he had such a different motivation than his predecessors. Dick Grayson and Jason Todd each became Robins to help avenge their own personal tragedies, much as Batman did, but not Tim. Tim was, to put it simply, a Batman fanboy who figured out that Robin was Dick Grayson because they shared a move he saw Dick perform in the circus as a child. From there it was easy enough to figure out that Bruce was Batman, and he kept that secret until the death of Jason Todd, when he saw Batman begin to be swallowed by darkness and realized he needed a balance. Dick and Jason became Robins to avenge their parents. Tim became Robin to save Batman.
Of course, being a great sidekick basically makes you “the best of the rest.”
He’s also the smartest of the Robins, with Bruce conceding that he’ll someday be a better detective than Batman himself. The trouble is, ever since Grant Morrison introduced Bruce’s biological son Damian Wayne to continuity and made him Robin, writers have struggled with Tim. Damian has won me over, mind you – he’s become an interesting and entertaining character in his own right – but very few writers in the years since have really known what to do with Tim, including the current writers of the Batman-associated titles. And that’s a shame, because he was such a great character for such a long time.
Different Interpretations
We’ll wrap up this installment with a question by Hunter Fagan, who asked about my favorite heroes with drastically different interpretations in the main continuity. (In other words, like how Batman went from lighthearted and child-friendly in the 50s to dark and brooding in the 80s while ostensibly still being the same character.) I think my answer for this one is going to be Jennifer Walters, the She-Hulk. Jennifer was a lawyer who was injured in a gang shooting and had to get a blood transfusion from her only available relative – who turned out to be her cousin Bruce Banner, the Hulk. The result is…well, it’s right there in the name, isn’t it?
Comic books reached their peak in 1989. Change my mind.
In the early years, Jen was kind of bland. She wasn’t AS angry as the Hulk, she kept her wits about her better than he did, she beat up bad guys, repeat. After her book got canceled, she wound up joining the Avengers and started to become a more well-rounded character. She joined the Fantastic Four for a while, temporarily replacing the Thing (he was really mad at Reed Richards during this period) and became a favorite of writer/artist John Byrne, who brought her back to her own series in 1989. This new series was where the She-Hulk I love was fully formed: smart, funny, constantly winking at the audience and knocking down that fourth wall with all the strength that would be implied by a Hulk. (It should be pointed out that this was two years before Deadpool was created and even longer before he began breaking the fourth wall himself.) Since Byrne’s She-Hulk most writers have kept the lighthearted tone, although few of them have had her speaking to the writer or expediting her travel by having the reader turn the comic book page the way Byrne did. And say what you will, I thought Tatiana Maslany’s portrayal of the character in the titular Disney+ miniseries was spot on, and I still hold out hope that she’ll be brought back in some capacity.
And thus we end another installment of Playing Favorites, guys. I didn’t get to every suggestion – some of them were a little too similar to others, some I just didn’t have much to say about, and some I just ran out of room. But it’s always a blast to do one of these, so if you aren’t following me on Facebook or Threads (@BlakeMP25), you should do that! Because it’s only a matter of time before a new category comes to mind and I ask you all to help me Play Favorites again.
It’s time once again for PLAYING FAVORITES! It’s that semi-regular Geek Punditry mini-column in which I throw out a topic to you, my friends in the world of social media, and ask you to suggest different categories in which I discuss what I consider to be the best of the best. This time around, the topic is superheroes. Born in the pages of American comic books, but with roots in pulp magazines, myth, and thousands of other sources, the superhero is considered to be the modern mythology, with pantheons not only in comics, but in movies, TV, video games, and pretty much every other media you can name. And I am, it cannot be understated, a fan of the superhero. So what, then, are some of my favorites?
Legacy Heroes
Sandy Brophy is going to kick things off for us by asking for my favorite legacy heroes. A “legacy” hero, for those of you who may not have been reading comic books since you were six years old, is the term used when a superhero’s name and identity is passed on from one person to another. For example, in the early days of comics, the Flash was a college student by the name of Jay Garrick. After superheroes fell out of favor and stopped being published for a while, they were resurrected in the 1950’s with the creation of a brand-new Flash, this time a police scientist named Barry Allen. Barry was the Flash for a long time before dying in Crisis on Infinite Earths (it took longer than usual, but eventually he got better), and his nephew/sidekick Wally West, aka Kid Flash, took over as the new Flash.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
This also, by the way, is my answer to Sandy’s question. The Flash is undoubtedly my favorite legacy hero in comics. By the time I started reading comics Wally was the main Flash, and even decades later he’s still the one I feel is most compelling. He was young when he became the Flash, and thanks to the magic of comic book time I eventually caught up with him at the same time he was being written by Mark Waid, who turned him into a fully fleshed-out and wonderfully realized character in his own right. He got married, had kids, and he grew and matured. He was also – as Waid said – the first sidekick to “fulfill the promise,” in other words, to take over for his mentor. He’s also still, to the best of my recollection, the ONLY one to do so on a permanent basis. It’s true that Dick Grayson (the original Robin) became Batman for a while, and Captain America’s sidekick Bucky took up the shield when Steve Rogers was temporarily dead, but both of them reverted back to their other adult IDs (Nightwing and the Winter Soldier, respectively) when the original came back. Not so Wally. Barry returned and Wally stuck around, and although there’s been a lot of timey-wimey nonsense and attempts to sort of push him to the side, he’s bounced back. Wally is, again, the primary Flash, even in a world where Jay and Barry exist, and the nominal head of the Flash family. And he’s just the best.
There are other good legacy heroes, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the Jaime Reyes version of the Blue Beetle (although my heart will always belong to Ted Kord, himself the second Blue Beetle following Dan Garrett), and there are few who will argue that Kamala Khan hasn’t done more with the Ms. Marvel title than either of her predecessors, but Wally West is the ultimate legacy hero in my book.
Superhero Logos
My buddy Owen Marshall wants to know what some of my favorite superhero LOGOS are – those titles that splash across the cover of a comic book to (hopefully) let you know what you’re about to read. I’ll talk about what I think makes a good logo in general, then get into specifics. I think a great logo is something that stands out in a way that evokes the hero in question. The Superman logo, for instance, is relatively simple – his name, slightly curved, with drop letters that give it a sense of weight, of solidity. Any time you see that logo you think that somebody could just grab it off the cover – and, in fact, there have been many covers where that very thing has happened.
You can’t beat a classic.
Spider-Man’s original logo is great for similar reasons. It’s solid, but it’s also easy to partner up with a web in the background to help get across the idea that you’re dealing with a wallcrawler. And, like Superman, it’s a short enough logo that it’s very easy to add an adjective to the title (as in the AMAZING Spider-Man, the SPECTACULAR Spider-Man), but just as easy to drop a subtitle underneath (Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows). There have been many attempts over the years to create a new Spider-Man logo, but frankly, there’s never been one I like as much as the original, and it seems it’s never anything but a matter of time before they return to it.
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
The Avengers also have a fantastic logo. They’ve had several, of course, but I’m specifically talking about the most famous version, the one that Marvel Studios used for the basis of its movie design. It’s clean and bold, and the arrow in the letter “A” gives it a sense of forward motion that sort of plants the idea that these are heroes who are about to go out and DO something.
The arrow is in case you forget and try reading it right-to-left.
Green Lantern has had a great many logos over the years, many of which actually include a lantern, but my favorite doesn’t. I like the logo that premiered in 2005 with Green Lantern: Rebirth and which remained the primary version of the logo until just a few years ago. This version has that tilt to one side and a cool roundness to it that…okay, just hear me out on this…it makes me think of classic cars from the 50s. Smooth, sleek, fast…and those are words that apply to Green Lantern, especially the Hal Jordan version.
And it’s all spacey and stuff.
I could probably spend an entire month just going through different logos, but I’m just going to cap it off here by saying that there are hundreds of awesome logos and if you want to read more about them I highly recommend the blog of comic book letterer and designer Todd Klein, who frequently makes posts where he discusses the design and history of comic’s greatest (and worst) logos, which is like drinking mother’s milk to a nerd like me.
Superhero TV (pre-2000)
My old friend Patrick Slagle wants to know my favorite superhero live action TV shows. Well that’s easy! There have been SO many to choose from – Stargirl was great, and I was deeply enamored of Legends of Tomorrow, and then there was–
Oh, wait.
He specified shows from BEFORE the year 2000. Well. That makes it a lot more difficult. We’ve been in a superhero renaissance in the last decade or so, guys, with such an abundance of shows that even I haven’t gotten around to watching them all yet. (Peacemaker, for example, is still warming my “to-watch” list.) But if I’m going to restrict myself to the cultural wasteland that was 1999 and earlier, I guess there’s only the obvious choice.
Project: ALF.
If I don’t do this at least once in every Playing Favorites column the Don said he was gonna break my thumbs.
The superhero shows of my formative years…let’s be honest guys, they weren’t that great. The two most fundamental ones are probably the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk and Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. And while those are both good shows, neither of them were series I would watch on repeat, the sort of thing that makes a TV series worm its way into my psyche and become a part of the vast tapestry that is your friendly neighborhood Geek Pundit. And the truth is, a lot of the other shows of that era don’t hold up. Look at the 70s Amazing Spider-Man or Shazam! shows and try to convince me that these are fundamental pieces of Americana. The Greatest American Hero is a show I know I used to watch, plus it’s got the most earwormy theme song in superhero history, but I couldn’t relate the plot of a single episode after the pilot. It got better later, with the surprisingly decent Superboy TV series (mostly after Gerard Christopher took over the role from John Newton) and the “fun but fluffy” era of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
There are some wild swings in quality happening in this picture.
If I have to pick (and I do, it’s my damn game), I guess I’m going to have to give props to the two shows that I think launched the genre on TV: George Reeves in The Adventures of Superman and the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman show from 1966. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the West/Ward era. When I hit those peak teenage years of arrogance and knowitallitude that most of us go through, I began to actively dislike that show, blaming it for people treating comic books as childish and infantile for decades after it was off the air and tarnishing the reputation of the caped crusader. Fortunately as I got older, I got over myself, thus disqualifying myself from ever running for elected office, but at the same time getting a sense of perspective. Sure, it wasn’t MY Batman, but I learned to appreciate it for what it was. I’ve softened to the show now. I even watch the reruns on MeTV Saturday nights between Svengoolie and Star Trek.
There’s no school like the old school.
George Reeves, though, I’ve always appreciated. He was the Curt Swan Superman come to life – square-jawed, barrel-chested, friend to all the innocent. But at the same time, he had a wicked sense of humor, showing clear joy whenever he got to take down a bad guy and taking a sly sort of pleasure any time he thwarted Lois Lane’s attempts to one-up him. I love the Reeves Superman and I don’t think he gets the respect he deserves. DC has launched a series of comics featuring the Christopher Reeve Superman as Superman ‘78, and that’s great. I love ‘em. But am I really the only person who would pick up a comic book called The Adventures of Superman ‘52?
Superhero Animals
I really like Marvel’s Scarlet Witch. She’s had several costumes over the years, but the best is the one George Perez whipped up for her for the Heroes Return era. It was red, naturally, which helps you identify her via color-coding, but the design also drew on the character’s Romani heritage, with a rare long skirt and robes that make you think of a fortune teller. All of that builds together and links her to her mystical roots. I’m fairly certain that if I didn’t know who the Avengers were and someone asked me which one I thought was the Scarlet Witch, I’d say, “Well, gotta be the woman in red, and not the tiger girl in the bikini.”
Jim MacQuarrie asked for my favorite Super-Animal, while Lew Beitz wants to know my favorite Super-PET. These two categories are close enough that I’ll talk about them together. They’re not EXACTLY the same, but there’s plenty of overlap. The way I look at it, we can divide super-animals into two categories: the ones that serves as an animal sidekick to the main hero, such as Krypto the Superdog, and those that are distinct heroes in their own right, like Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. The former are characters in established universes, while the latter usually exist in a Disney-esque universe where there are no humans at all, but instead races of anthropomorphic animals running the show.
As far as super-pets go, the Superman family has the deepest – and weirdest – bench to draw from. Krypto the Superdog and Beppo the Supermonkey are both animals from Krypton who made their way to Earth and gained powers like Superman and Supergirl. Supergirl also has a cat named Streaky who gains and loses his powers on a rotating basis thanks to exposure to something called X-Kryptonite (it was the 50s, it was safe to give something a name like that because there was no internet). Then there was Supergirl’s horse, Comet, who was actually a centaur from ancient Greece named Biron that was cursed and trapped in the form of a full horse. He hung around for a couple of thousand years before he met Supergirl and started to assist her on her missions, fell in love with her, and learned he could briefly become human when an actual comet passed close to Earth, allowing him to date Supergirl without telling her who he really –
Stop looking at me like that, I’m not making this up.
Superman is surprisingly indiscriminate about who he gives a cape to.
Anyway, Krypto is kind of the gold standard of super-pets, but there are a few others outside of the Super-Family worth mentioning. Wonder Woman’s kangaroo, Kanga, for instance. Ace the Bat-Hound, who Batman gives a mask to cover the bat-shaped patch of fur on his face and thus protect his secret identity. Chameleon Boy’s pet Proty who, like Chameleon Boy, is a shapeshifter, and fully sapient, and who can and did occasionally impersonate full grown adults, which makes you ask where the hell the Legion of Super-Heroes gets off treating him like a pet. And of course Damian Wayne, the current Robin, has Bat-Cow.
The only superhero who’s a source of 50 percent of the food groups.
Then there are the other types of Super-Animals: anthropomorphic heroes in their own right. Everyone who has heard me talk for five minutes will know that my favorite of these is Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Created by Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw!, this 80s phenomenon was about a group of superhero animals who got powers from meteors that fell to (their version of) Earth. After meeting a dimension-hopping Superman, they were inspired to become heroes in their own right. The art is cartoony and the premise is silly, but what I’ve always loved about Captain Carrot and company is that their stories – at least in the 80s – weren’t played like cartoons. The plots were straight out of the pages of Golden and Silver Age comics, facing giant monsters and villains with cold-rays and all kinds of classic tropes. They were funny, sure, but not at the expense of the characters, as many of the modern writers who have tried to use Captain Carrot have forgotten. When I say I want a revival of the old-school Captain Carrot, I say it unironically and with love.
By contrast, there’s perhaps the most famous super-animal of the day, thanks to his starring role in an Academy Award-winning motion picture. I refer, of course, to Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. Spider-Ham’s comic hit JUST when I stared reading comics in earnest, and I devoured it. In this hilarious take on the Spider-Man story, Peter was the pet spider of mad scientist May Porker, who accidentally irradiated herself and bit him. The spider turned into a pig while maintaining his spider-powers. When May recovered from the radiation, her memory was erased and she thought she was just a kindly old lady and Peter was her nephew.
Move over, “The Boys,” the REAL heroes are back in town.
I’m not making this up either, but I wish I could take credit for it. The early Spider-Ham comics were a lot of fun, then he disappeared for decades before experiencing a renaissance in recent years. Like Captain Carrot, his modern adventures are sillier and more “cartoony” than the earlier ones, but UNlike Captain Carrot, the cartoony interpretation fits better, and has made him a better character.
My favorite Spider-Ham story, though, is not from the comics and not from the cartoons, but from the mouth of his creator, Tom DeFalco, when I met him at a convention a few years ago. He was signing reprints of the first appearance of Spider-Ham and his other great Spider character, Spider-Girl. I bought them both and told him how much I loved Spider-Ham when I was a kid, and he told how surprised he was when Marvel Comics sent him an invitation to the premiere of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He didn’t understand why he was getting an invitation, and someone said, “It’s probably because Spider-Ham is in it.” And DeFalco, shocked, exclaimed, “SPIDER-HAM is in a MOVIE?”
Timeless.
Favorite Superhero Costumes
My wife Erin, who always cuts the line because nobody else who submits questions has ever made lasagna for me, wants to know what my favorite superhero costumes are, both male and female. I think it was Alex Ross who said that the test of a good superhero costume is whether you could identify the character based just on the name, even if you knew nothing about them. Batman, for example. Green Lantern. Captain America. The 90s was an era where this consistently failed, especially in the X-Men comics and those later characters created by former X-artists. If you showed someone who knows nothing about comics pictures of Gambit, Cable, Maverick, Shatterstar, and Deadpool, then asked them to match the names to the pictures, any correct answers would happen purely because of the law of averages.
But anyway, when I read Ross’s definition, he also used that definition to argue that the greatest superhero costume of all time belongs to Spider-Man. It’s hard to argue with him. Nobody who saw a lineup of the Marvel Comics all-stars would have any difficulty telling that this guy is Spider-Man and not, for example, Wonder Man. And while that’s true of MOST of Spider-Man’s assorted costumes over the years, the original is still my favorite. The black costume is cool-looking, but the ol’ red-and-blues have a brighter, more optimistic tone that suits Spider-Man better. Spider-Man is a hard luck hero, to be sure, but he should never be a depressing, brooding character like Daredevil. (Are you listening, current Marvel editorial?) He’s the guy who should never give up and always finds it in himself to do the right thing, and the red and blue color scheme says that better than any of his other assorted looks.
I don’t even blame him for admiring his own reflection.
Using the same metric, I also think the Rocketeer has a phenomenal costume. He is literally a human rocket, with a rocket pack strapped to his back and a helmet that evokes the speed and energy of the burgeoning space age. The rest of the outfit, though, with the brown bomber jacket and the jodhpur pants brings in the idea of his aviator background and grounds him in the World War II era where he belongs.
This picture makes me want to make swooshy noises.
Honorable mention goes to the Flash, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan costume, although I have a soft spot for the one John Stewart wore in the Justice League cartoon) and Marvel’s Nova.
Erin also asked about my favorite female costumes, which I find is a little harder to do going by Alex Ross’s metric. Too many female costumes are designed more for titillation rather than actually identifying the character. And even those that DO clearly identify them often do so via a logo or symbol that marks them, such as Wonder Woman.
I think “Morgan” was the screenwriter of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
Harley Quinn is another one that is pretty obvious, at least in her original costume. The red-and-black color scheme, white makeup, and bangled headpiece brings up the notion of a Harlequin, which of course is the inspiration for the character. She’s changed her look several times over the past few years, and while some of her looks have been pretty good, none of them draw their inspiration from her roots the way her first look does. On the other hand, they’ve come up with a pretty solid justification for her changing her look – once she got over the Joker and dumped his homicidal ass, she doesn’t want to wear the costume that identifies her as his sidekick anymore.
Let’s face it, I could have posted a picture of a random duck here and you still could have pictured Harley’s get-up.
Then there’s Supergirl. She’s had a lot of costumes, the most iconic look being the basic Superman outfit, only with bare legs and a skirt. That’s not her best look, though. For me, my favorite Supergirl costume came from the 1970s, when she wore a loose blouse with a small S-shield over her heart rather than the full-size shield most superfolks wear. I love that look – it still clearly marks her as a member of the Super-family, but it’s very different from anything any of the others wear. Being loose instead of skintight like most superhero costumes, it’s got a freeing quality that speaks to a lighter version of the character in a period where she was working to get out of her more famous cousin’s shadow. It’s such a great look and I never stop wishing they would bring it back.
What can I say? She’s got the look.
That’s about it for this week, guys, but there are plenty of other questions I haven’t gotten to yet. So be sure to come by next week for Playing Favorites With Superheroes Part Two, and if you have a suggestion that I haven’t covered, go ahead and drop in in the comments. Up, up, and away!
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. He realizes he talks about the Superman family a lot whenever he gets on to a superhero discussion, but let’s be honest, people. It’s either gonna be this or Star Trek.
Blake M. Petit 