Month: May 2024

Geek Punditry #74: Playing Favorites With Summer Part Two

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It’s time for part two of Playing Favorites with Summer, folks! In case you missed part one, when I do a “Playing Favorites” column I ask my pals on social media to suggest categories related to a given topic, then I share what I think are the best examples of each from the worlds of movies, TV, books, and comic books. In part one of “Playing Favorites With Summer,” I talked about my favorite summer road trip movies, coming of age movies, and beach movies, as well as some of the best summer reads for students. Let’s delve into part two, shall we?

Baseball Movies

Lew Beitz wanted to know what I think are some of the best baseball movies out there. Although baseball season starts in the spring and ends in the fall, almost any great baseball movie will also qualify as a summertime movie, since that’s when most of the season falls and, frankly, we’ve all pretty much decided that baseball is the official sport of summer. Last week I mentioned The Sandlot when I was writing about coming-of-age movies, so let’s just take that one as a given.

Beyond that, there are plenty of great baseball movies out there. A League of Their Own is one that frequently comes up, for example. Penny Marshall directed this 1992 film loosely based on the real story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a  women’s baseball league that was founded during World War II, as too many of the male baseball players had joined the fight against the Axis powers to put on a baseball season. The league folded in 1954 because AAGPBL was far too unwieldy an acronym to compete with MLB, but the league still has its legacy today, by which I mean this movie. The film stars Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna as members of the Rockford Peaches, with Tom Hanks doing a great turn as a washed-up coach trying to redeem himself with the girls’ team. There’s something about sports movies that lends itself really well to the “dramedy,” that hybrid film too serious to call a pure comedy but too funny to be called a drama, and A League of Their Own is one of the all-time great examples of that.

It’s a shame Jeter never wore that uniform.

If you want something more dramatic, there are a pair of numeric “true stories” well worth watching. 42 is the story of Jackie Robinson, the man who famously broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American to play major league baseball. The late Chadwick Boseman is phenomenal as Robinson, bringing the same sort of strength and dignity that defined not only his most famous role as Marvel’s the Black Panther, but also defined the man himself. Also well worth watching is 61*, directed by Billy Crystal, about the year that Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) raced one another in an effort to beat Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Crystal’s love of baseball is legendary, and he really puts every bit of that love on the screen in this film. 

You know what makes a great baseball movie, right? Math.

But my all-time favorite baseball movie, one that I have never grown even the slightest bit tired of, is the 1989 fantasy film Field of Dreams. Kevin Costner plays an Iowa farmer who is persuaded by a mysterious voice to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. Although it seems crazy to risk his livelihood in such a fashion, once the diamond is finished, it becomes populated by the spirits of lost baseball players, miraculously brought back into the game. It’s a beautiful story, with great performances by Amy Madigan, Burt Lancaster, Ray Liotta and James Earl Jones. However, I would be remiss not to point out that this movie is, at its heart, a story about a father and a son. That didn’t quite resonate with me when I was 12 years old. But like a lot of other stories that I’ve revisited since my own child was born, it hits differently now. I hope I don’t sound like a broken record with this kind of thing, but there’s an emotional component to parent/child stories that I don’t know that anyone can quite understand if they aren’t a parent themselves. I know I didn’t get it before 2017. I get it now, and it makes the movie all the better for it.  

If you show it on HBO 492 times a month in the early 90s, we will watch it.

Summer Annual Crossovers

Cameron James asked me what some of my favorite comic book “summer annual crossover events” were. Here’s a quick history lesson, for those of you who aren’t comic book fans. Comics, historically, have come out once a month, twelve times a year. Fairly early on, though, publishers started releasing giant sized special issues once a year, hence “Annual.” In the early days, these were often reprints of popular stories, but later they started to produce original stories, bigger stories. The first Amazing Spider-Man Annual, for example, was the issue where his greatest enemies first banded together as the Sinister Six. 

For a time in the late 80s and early 90s, Marvel and DC Comics both observed a tradition of using those annual editions – traditionally published throughout the summer – for a special crossover event, with one story that threaded throughout all of them. Marvel started this in 1988 with a storyline called The Evolutionary War, but I’ve always found their BEST summer annual storyline to be 1989’s Atlantis Attacks. In this story, a despotic ruler takes over the undersea kingdom of Atlantis and plans a war against the surface world – at first in secret, but later openly – as part of a master plan to resurrect the ancient Egyptian serpent god Set. The story serves as a sequel to several older Marvel stories in which Set had played a part, and in addition to the main story each issue had a back-up feature re-telling the story of Set with art by Mark Bagley, who would later become one of my favorite Spider-Man artists of all time. The story itself was really good, and the back-ups gave a lot of interesting insight into classic Marvel history that was pretty cool for a 12-year-old Blake who hadn’t been born yet when a lot of those stories were told.

The funny thing is that the world nearly ended because a bunch of people were fighting over a hat.

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, DC followed suit in 1991 with their first – and, as it turned out best – annual event, Armageddon 2001. In a not-too-distant future, Matthew Ryder lives in a world controlled by a fascist dictator named Monarch who has shaped the world into his own Orwellian version of perfection. Nobody knows who Monarch is, although rumors persist that he was once one of Earth’s superheroes, before he killed the rest of them back in the year 2001. Ryder subjects himself to a time-travel experiment, gaining powers and taking the name Waverider. He travels back to the “present” of 1991, ten years before the rise of Monarch, to read the futures of DC’s heroes and stop the Monarch’s reign before it can happen.

He’s a 10 but he doesn’t use his power to see the future to tell you the Powerball numbers.

The practical result of this was that each issue told a story of a possible future for the hero, freeing the writers up to do wild stories free of the consequences of continuity. Like any crossover with lots of different writers taking part, the individual stories can be hit and miss, but I’ve always had a great affinity for certain ones in this crossover: the Flash retired and in the witness protection program, Batman incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, and Superman becoming President of the United States. The story was great, but the ending was derailed because somehow the identity of Monarch was leaked early. Fans found out that Monarch was going to be revealed as Captain Atom in the final issue of the story, and DC balked. It’s funny, since these days comic book publishers release spoilers to their OWN stories months in advance, but back in 1991 that was considered serious enough that they changed the ending, instead revealing Monarch to be Hank Hall, aka Hawk. The rationale here seemed to be that, since the comic Hawk starred in (Hawk and Dove) was being canceled anyway, no one would be upset. The problem, though, was that since Hawk wasn’t as popular as Captain Atom, it felt anticlimactic – not to mention confusing, since in the future that Waverider observed, Hawk was one of the few heroes shown to actively fight AGAINST Monarch, seeming to make it IMPOSSIBLE for him to be the despot. Every time I look back at that series I wonder what the original ending would have looked like.

The summer annual crossovers only lasted a few more years after that, although both DC and Marvel have brought them back every so often. With the modern compulsion to relaunch and renumber their titles every year and a half, though, it’s gotten pretty confusing to keep track of them all, and it’s just one of many things I’m going to fix when they all come to their senses and put me in charge of comics.

Summer Comedies

And finally, my wife Erin asked me to chime in with the best summer comedies. I knew I would have to save this for last because a lot of the best summer comedies also fall into one of the other categories that I’ve already covered. So let’s take it as a given that National Lampoon’s Vacation, Back to the Beach, The Sandlot, and A League of Their Own all belong on this list. 

That said, let’s get to some of the great summer comedies that haven’t already been covered in one of the other categories, shall we? And let’s start with the greatest summer comedy of all time, perhaps the greatest movie ever made, perhaps the yardstick against which all cinema – past, present, and future – shall invariably be measured. 

Project ALF.

The real Project ALF are the friends we made along the way.

My favorite summer comedy is, like many of the other movies on this list, a film that has been near and dear to me since my childhood: 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp. I unironically and unapologetically love this movie. Jim Varney’s “Ernest” character, created originally as an ad pitchman that was hired out to assorted companies for regional commercials across much of the south (I remember him originally as a spokesman for the Louisiana Gas Service Company) has his first great adventure as a handyman at a summer camp who gets his shot at a dream job of being a camp counselor for a group of troubled young boys. The film has a lot of the staples of 80s comedy: the “slobs versus snobs” mentality, the bad guy is an evil land developer, and there’s a startling lack of supervision for the children in this story…but at the same time, Jim Varney is charming and endearing as the most iconic goofball with a heart of gold since Gomer Pyle. The world just didn’t deserve a star as bright as his, did it? 

If he had been the counselor at Crystal Lake, Jason wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Ernest has achieved a nice sort of renaissance in recent years. People sincerely love many of his movies (especially the Christmas and Halloween films), the camp where the movie was filmed hosts an annual Ernest Day celebration every summer, and a documentary about Jim Varney and Ernest is in the works. When the temperatures soar and school lets out, this is a movie that I have to return to just as surely as I watch him save Christmas in December and see him Scared Stupid in October. 

Summer camp, of course, serves as the setting for a lot of great comedies, such as Meatballs (the beginning of what I think of as the Bill Murray Summer Trilogy along with Caddyshack and What About Bob?), and last year’s indie darling Theater Camp, all of which are summer comedies I greatly enjoy. Of course, in the interest of fairness, I should point out that summer camps are also a popular setting for horror movies, like Sleepaway Camp, the Friday the 13th series, and the truly gruesome Wet Hot American Summer. 

Moving away from camp, though, let’s take a look at some other great summer comedies. When Erin proposed that I write about this category, she specifically asked if I’d ever seen the John Cusack movie One Crazy Summer. I told her that, no, I hadn’t. She acted shocked. I told her, “Yeah, well, you still haven’t seen The Rocketeer.” And she said, “Yes I have!” And I shot back, “No, you fell asleep while I was watching The Rocketeer, that doesn’t count.” And there’s your little glimpse into married life for this week, kids. 

But Erin, you’ll be happy to know that I DID watch your precious One Crazy Summer in preparation for this column, and I found it to be…okay. In this 1986 comedy, Cusack plays “Hoops” McCann, a fallen high school basketball star who takes off after graduation with his pal George (Joel Murray, meaning we’ve pulled off the Murray Hat Trick if you count Brian Doyle-Murray’s appearance in National Lampoon’s Vacation) to spend the summer on Nantucket Island. Hoops winds up getting involved in the efforts of a local girl (Demi Moore) to save a family home from some land developers, because in the 80s a full 87 percent of movie villains were land developers (as opposed to a mere 79 percent of villains in real life). 

Am I the only one who thought the sun in this poster was supposed to look like Jack Nicholson?

Like I said, I thought the movie was okay, and I imagine that I would have much warmer feelings for it if I had seen it in its intended context (that being 1986). The thing is, it doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be. There are moments, especially during the Bobcat Goldthwait antics, where it seems to be treading the line with the kind of surrealist slapstick we get in movies like Airplane! or History of the World Part I, but if that’s the intention it doesn’t quite go far ENOUGH. If you’re going for surreal comedy, it kind of needs to be over-the-top to land. In One Crazy Summer, though, the first real hint that it may be that kind of humor is when George denies being lazy just before the camera pulls pack to reveal a dead Christmas tree strapped to the roof of his car (this is in June, remember), then it’s several minutes before we get anything else that feels like that brand of comedy (some girls making faces at George’s sister who get stuck that way). If you’re trying to party with the Zuckers or Mel Brooks, you’ve gotta go all-in, and with all due respect to the great Savage Steve Holland, he doesn’t quite reach that peak.

Okay, this column is already getting super long, so let me throw out two more summer comedies that couldn’t be more different than each other. The first is a movie that STARTS as a summer camp film before leaving the camp for other family summer activities, the 1961 Disney classic The Parent Trap. Haley Mills plays a pair of identical girls who happen to meet at summer camp and figure out that they’re twin sisters, separated by their parents when they divorced years ago, and hatch a scheme to force them back together. The sheer cruelty of doing that to a pair of siblings aside, this is a movie I DID grow up watching over and over again, and it’s always held a warm place in my heart. Aside from growing up with a crush on Haley Mills despite the fact that she was some three decades too old for me, the movie features Maureen O’Hara at her loveliest as their mother, while Brian Keith does his best John Wayne impression. I am aware of the Lindsay Lohan remake, and while it has its good points, this is one of those times that nothing will ever conquer the original. 

Sassy sister films.

And finally, let’s bounce ahead to 2010 for the Alan Tudyk/Tyler Labine comedy Tucker and Dale Versus Evil. Tudyk and Labine play a pair of good-hearted rednecks on a camping trip who run into a pack of college kids on their own vacation. The guys in the college group, showing a shocking lack of genre awareness, mistakenly believe that Tucker and Dale are Wrong Turn-style psycho killers and go on the offensive, only to find themselves on the wrong side of the fight. The movie is kind of a horror/comedy, with Tudyk and Labine giving hilarious performances in a movie that upends the “Killer Hillbilly” subgenre of horror by turning the usual victims into the bad guys. Both of our stars are so sweet and charming that it’s incomprehensible anybody could think of them as dangerous, and you quickly find yourself rooting for the snobs to get their goofishly gory comeuppance. I dearly love this movie and, frankly, I don’t think it’s too late to give us a sequel. Tucker and Dale Save Christmas, anybody?

There are so many great summer movies out there. While writing this column, I wound up putting together a Letterboxd list (because that’s what I do), and I would welcome anyone to fill in any omissions I may have. Summer is long, my friends, and there’s plenty of time to spend indulging in the greats of cinema and comics while we wait for the chill of autumn to hit the air. Have a great summer, and I’ll see you next time when, once again, I decide it’s time to Play Favorites.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. In response to his wife’s unspoken question, no, he hasn’t watched Better Off Dead yet, but he’ll try to get to it soon. Erin seemed to have a crush on young John Cusack that rivals Blake’s fondness for Haley Mills. 

Geek Punditry #73: Playing Favorites With Summer Part One

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We are, my friends, on the cusp of one of the most storied times of the year: summer! Time to hit the beach, go out on vacation, pull the kids out of school and spend a lot of time with a good book in your hand, longing for the days when such an activity would reward you with a personal pan pizza. And with the new season before us, we here at Geek Punditry Global Headquarters and Corrugated Cardboard Museum have decided to spend a couple of weeks PLAYING FAVORITES with summertime. For newcomers, Playing Favorites is that occasional feature in which I throw out a topic and ask you, the hive mind of social media, to suggest categories related to that topic so that we can discuss some of the best of the best. Let’s take a look at what you guys suggested in part one of this feature.

Beach Movies

Lew Beitz cut right to the chase and asked me for some of my favorite summer beach movies. This is the kind of thing we all think about when summer rolls around, isn’t it? Not just going to the beach, but entertainment regarding the beach. In the 60s it was an entire subgenre all of its own, with approximately 17,000 such films made during this decade starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello alone, sporting subtle titles such as Beach Blanket Bingo or How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. To be honest, I don’t really have a great affinity for those movies – they were well before my time and I didn’t really grow up with them. On the other hand, I do have a great deal of affection for Back to the Beach, the 1987 vehicle starring those two as a pair of midwestern parents who wind up returning to the beach of their youth. I think part of my appreciation for this bizarre little movie can be attributed to my mother, who was a fan of the original films and saw to it that this movie was on rotation in our house when I was young. But beyond that, there’s an inexplicably entertaining element to this movie. It was meta before meta was cool, acting not only as a sequel to the ol’ Frankie and Annette films, but as a parody of them as well. On the other hand, the humor IS pretty dated, with a lot of it requiring an awareness of old pop culture that modern audiences just won’t have. There are a lot of cameos from TV and movie stars of the 60s, for instance, and the joke about Annette’s obsession with peanut butter will just be baffling to anybody too young to remember that she did a series of commercials for Skippy back in the day. On the other hand, the scene of Pee-Wee Herman performing “Surfin’ Bird” is pretty timeless. 

If you don’t necessarily want your beach movies to be full of comedy, it’s hard to go wrong with Jaws. It seems sort of pointless to recap this movie – if you’ve seen it, you know that it’s great, and if you haven’t, no amount of pontificating from me is likely to change your mind. But the movie that made Steven Spielberg is practically a flawless film: tense, thrilling, and full of great characters and wonderful character moments. Even the things that may be technically flawed, such as the artificial nature of the shark, work to the movie’s advantage, as Spielberg was forced to minimize Bruce’s screen time and thereby making it far more effective than it possibly could have been if they put him on screen at every opportunity. It’s the film that made everybody afraid of the water! What better movie to get yourself into the mood for the beach?

These two movies should be all it takes to yet you to September.

Summer Reading

Rachel Ricks wants to know what I think are the best “summer reading books” for elementary, junior high, and high school. This is actually a tougher question than you would think, considering that I’m both a writer and a teacher, but the truth is I’m not 100 percent sure what it is the kids are reading these days. Not elementary or middle school, anyway. For my high schoolers, I see waves happen. There was a time where every kid was carrying a copy of Twilight, which gave way to The Fault in Our Stars, which in turn passed the torch to 13 Reasons Why. These days, the name I’m most likely to see from a kid who digs reading is Colleen Hoover. And the thing is, guys, while I am still a voracious reader (that streak I mentioned last week currently stands at 358 days) I haven’t made a huge effort to check out these particular books because…well…they just aren’t my type.

Anyway, the way Rachel phrased the question makes me think she’s speaking specifically about the sort of summer reading that is often required by schools: when a kid leaves at the beginning of summer with a list of books that they’re going to pretend to have read by the time they come back in the fall. Assigning a book to read is tough. You always know that a substantial portion of the class will do anything they possibly can to avoid actually having to crack the book open. And we’ve all heard those stories of people so discouraged by some required book that they give up on reading altogether. I can promise you, folks, that no teacher wants to assign a book that makes you never want to pick one up again.

I’m going to bow out of elementary school recommendations, as I have none. As far as middle school goes, you can’t go wrong with classics like The Giver or The Outsiders. And if you’re looking for a gateway drug to get a young reader into the world of Stephen King, I think that middle school is an appropriate age to introduce them to his fantasy (yes, fantasy) novel Eyes of the Dragon. I’m also a fan of a few more recent works for this age group, such as Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series or the other assorted spin-off series set in that same universe. 

If you haven’t read at least ONE of these books, then either you didn’t go to school in the United States, or you’re the reason Cliff Notes is a thing.

For your high schoolers, you shouldn’t be surprised to see The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird or Grapes of Wrath show up in their reading lists. And these are all good books, fundamental pieces of American literature and well worth reading. That said, these are books for people who are deeply into books already, and aren’t exactly casual reads. Try to hook a modern reader with things like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, or Twinkle Twinkle, book one of the Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars trilogy, now available both in print and as an eBook from Amazon.com! 

(You had to know I was going to work that in somewhere.)

Road Trip Movies

Tim Stevens wants to know what I think are some of the best summer road trip movies. The road trip is a classic subgenre, usually in comedy, although there are some great road trip dramas or dramadies (Little Miss Sunshine for example) as well. When you think of a summer road trip, though, the thing that comes to mind is vacation movies, and the king of them all is National Lampoon’s Vacation. While this 1983 Chevy Chase film has become heavily overshadowed by its Christmas-themed threequel, I think people forget how much fun the original is. Clark Griswold (Chase, of course) and his wife Ellen (the grossly underrated Beverly D’Angelo) load the family into a station wagon to take a road trip out to the legendary Wallyworld Theme Park, and all hell breaks loose along the way. It’s not the first road trip movie, of course, but I think it is the platonic ideal of the road trip as a slapstick comedy. A lot of the jokes are very 80s and may not land that well with modern audiences, but I still enjoy the movie. Honorable mention goes to the sequel, European Vacation, in which Clark and Ellen take two entirely different children with the same names as the previous pair to tour the continent on another wacky road trip. 

Not as well known but highly entertaining is the 2014 movie Chef, which was written by, directed by, and starred Jon Favreau. Favruea plays Carl Casper, a famous chef (duh) who boils over at a food critic and loses his restaurant job. With his zest for life gone, Carl and his son Percy (Emjay Anthony) buy a food truck and set off across the country to try to infuse themselves with the savory parts of existence. Just thinking about movies for this list makes me realize it’s been way too long since I devoured Chef – it’s such a great movie. It has some of the same flavor as City Slickers and Hot Tub Time Machine, films about men who have been diced and minced by the world and inexplicably discover ways to relish life again. But the added ingredient of Casper’s relationship with his son helps to separate from those other films, baking up not only a road trip movie, but also a film about a family learning to love one another again. 

To be honest, though, I don’t know that John Leguizamo was the best choice to take over the Beverly D’Angelo role.

Summer Glau Movies

Duane Hower asked me what my favorite Summer Glau movie is. I see what you did there, Duane, very funny. I bet you thought I wouldn’t entertain your joke suggestion, didn’t you? Well, the joke is on you, my friend, because we all know the right answer to this question. The best movie ever starring Summer Glau? Clearly.

Project ALF.

Can you imagine what Melmacian tanlines look like?

Summer Coming-Of-Age Movies

Duane also asked what the best summer coming-of-age movies are. (Jeffrey Lee, I should note, asked for summer “life lesson” movies, and I think that’s pretty much the same thing, so I’m going to combine those two suggestions.) Coming-of-age, like road trips, is kind of a subgenre all of its own, one that often (but not always) crosses over with summer movies in that ol’ venn diagram in our heads. And once again, I think the best example is also the obvious one. Stand By Me, the 1986 movie directed by Rob Reiner and based on the novella “The Body” by Stephen King, is one of those films that sort of codifies the trope for all films that come afterwards. Four young boys (River Phoenix, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman, and Wil Wheaton) discover that a missing boy from a nearby town has been found dead near a railroad track, but the discoverers don’t want to report the body because they found it while in a stolen car. The boys decide to set out on a hike to find the body on their own, and along the way, face the treacherous precipice between staying a kid and becoming an adult. This is the second time I’ve mentioned Stephen King in this week’s column, and in neither case was I talking about horror, have you noticed that? I mean yeah, the macguffin in this movie is a dead body, but that’s as close to being a scary movie as it gets. Instead, it’s a deep, meaningful, and powerful character study about these four boys that gives us glimpses of the men they will grow up to be. Reportedly, after Stephen King watched this movie he broke down in tears and told Reiner it was the best movie that had ever been made based on his work. (Admittedly, this was before Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, or The Green Mile, but that doesn’t change the fact that Stand By Me is an incredible film.)

The other great summer-specific coming of age movie, which again is a film that will probably say more about my age and the era of movies that was fundamental to me than anything else, is the 1993 movie The Sandlot. New kid in town Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) befriends a group of young boys that play a perpetual baseball game in a nearby sandlot. Smalls joins the game and becomes a member of the group during a summer that really feels authentic. While not nearly as serious or deep as Stand By Me, The Sandlot is a fun movie that feeds the sort of nostalgia that summer triggers in a lot of us, reminding us of bygone days without real responsibilities or anxieties that seem to be the fundamental building blocks of adult life.

One of these movies features a ghastly, bloodthirsty dog that terrorizes the boys of a small town. The other is based on a Stephen King story.

Okay, friends, I think that’s about enough for part one. I’ve got a few suggestions banked for part two of this segment next week but there’s room for more! If you’ve got an idea for a summertime topic from the worlds of comic books, movies, television, or books, I would LOVE to hear it! Post it in the comments, on the socials where you found the link to this column, or you can email it to me at info@blakempetit.com. See you next week, where we continue playing favorites!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. His REAL favorite Summer Glau movie, of course, is Knights of Badassdom. He knows you all expected him to say Serenity, but Joe Lynch’s horror/comedy deserves more love. 

Geek Punditry #72: They Call it The Streak

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My streaks, as I write this, are in mortal danger.

Last night, a nasty storm ripped through my part of Louisiana. Although my family is fine, no one was hurt, and we didn’t suffer any real damage, our power was knocked out at about 11:30 pm and, as of right now, they’re not estimating that it will be returned to my street until about midnight. We live in a weird nexus of energy, right near the parish line but connected to the grid in the neighboring parish, so when weather strikes it is not at all uncommon for us to lose power while the street on the other side of us still has theirs. When I left the house to go to work this morning, I saw that not only was the street to the west still juiced up, but so was the eastern territory to which we are ostensibly connected. In other words, it is literally JUST my street that is out of power.

So my streaks are in trouble.

It’s weird how many of us have started to carve away little corners of our lives in deference to keeping a streak intact. I kind of blame Wordle. Wordle didn’t start the concept of a streak, of course, but I think that the rush of popularity when that particular game was new and fresh is what kickstarted it. If you guys recall, back in 2021 the then-new Wordle game added a function that allowed people to share their results on social media. Suddenly, it became the hot thing, and everybody’s Facebook wall looked like they were showing screenshots of a Tetris game that only had blocks in green, gray, and gold. That’s what made Wordle catch fire, but I think one of the things that has kept that fire burning is the concept of the “streak.” How many days in a row can you play? How many days in a row can you WIN? Falling asleep at night without at least having attempted the day’s Wordle is unthinkable to the devoted. 

My Wordle for the day looks like a duckie.

Then came the Wordle imitators – the ones specific to different TV shows, sports, genres. Similar daily games started to crop up that asked you to guess movie box office totals from the past. Other games were based on Major League Baseball or the NFL. Then the New York Times bought Wordle and added it to their own growing accumulation of word games (they’ve got to do something to get people interested, no one is buying newspapers anymore), and each of those individual games has, of course, its own streak counter. And the streak CANNOT BE BROKEN. If your spouse suddenly leaps from bed at 11:45 and sneaks off downstairs, don’t worry. They’re not cheating on you, they just remembered that they haven’t done today’s “Connections” puzzle.

Besides the NYT word games, I have two other game apps where I’ve got a streak going that I admit I feel nervous to allow to lapse. It’s ridiculous, of course. There’s no practical benefit to maintaining said streak. There’s no prize or reward, except for the occasional in-game bonus, that makes it worth your while to be certain there’s five minutes carved out every single day for this particular game. And yet somehow, the idea of intentionally walking away and abandoning my streak gives me the same kind of anxiety I would have if I realized that I hadn’t eaten that day. Worse, actually, because Lord knows I could afford to skip a meal or two, but if I skip a day of playing Disney Magic Kingdoms I might not unlock Zeus in the all-new Hercules mini-event. It’s a terrifying thought.

The most inaccurate thing in Disney history is portraying these two as loving parents.

Other streaks give you little, silly awards like badges that you can only view in the app or share on social media. It’s not like they give you an actual prize, an actual medal, an actual award. I can’t walk into a coffee shop and claim a discount by flashing my Spirit Pegasus badge (believe me, I’ve tried). So why do it?

Because streaks help breed consistency, and while things like the Disney game are admittedly silly, there are other areas of my life in which consistency has real value. 

There are two streaks I’m on that I’m actually proud of, both of which are terribly close to reaching a solid year and both of which I feel I’m better off for having maintained. The first is in the Beanstack app, an app that I was introduced to last year when my wife Erin signed up the entire family for the library’s summer reading program. That particular challenge does have a few physical prizes – we got umbrellas last year for signing up, for example. We were to use that app to log our reading each day. Perhaps it’s the part of me that’s terrified to lose a streak, but of the three of us in the household, I am easily the one who used it the most. And when last summer ended, I realized I could continue to use Beanstack to track my reading, even though the summer reading challenge was over. I’ve always been an avid reader, but that reading fell off considerably after my son was born. My fear of losing my Beanstack streak has brought it back to me in force. As of right now I’ve read at least a few minutes (usually more, of course) every day for 353 consecutive days. I have logged 69 separate books at 11,822 minutes of reading time spread across 451 sessions. At this rate, I may well turn out to be the Joey Chestnut of licensed Star Trek novels, and I’m okay with that.

With summer approaching again, yesterday Beanstack let me know that my local library is once again participating in the summer reading challenge and asked me if I wanted to sign up for it again. I certainly did. Later that day, I got a text from my wife (whose email address is the one attached to the family Beanstack account) asking why she just got an email informing her that I had earned a free minitool that I can pick up at any library branch any time after June 1. That moment of confusion on her part, in and of itself, made the whole challenge worthwhile.

The other streak I’ve maintained comes from a website (not an actual app, oddly enough) called 750 Words. This is a site used to track not your reading, but your writing, with the goal of logging a minimum of 750 words a day. And guys, I’m ecstatic to announce that as of this column you are currently reading, I’ve hit 363 consecutive days, just short of a year. A lot of those words were generated via these very Geek Punditry columns I give to you every Friday. Many of them, up until January of this year, were in the service of Little Stars. There have been other assorted short stories and pieces of writing effluvia, and then a while back I started the new novel I’m working on (which I occasionally will update you on in my handy dandy newsletter). And on some days when I just plain have no juice and no energy for anything in a creative vein, I keep a journal. But whatever the case, I’ve gone almost an entire year writing at least 750 words a day, and I am quite proud of that. And yeah, I give the credit for that to me not wanting to break my dang streak.

Who knew that this would turn out to be the all-time writing motivator?

So to these last two streaks, at least, I owe a debt of gratitude. And I’m glad I live in an era where, even if there’s no power to my laptop computer, I can turn out 750 words on a tablet or phone, because it’ll still count, dang it. And I’ll play my silly little games. And I’ll read, if I have to, in the dark, to make sure that streak doesn’t die.

Because sometimes it’s the little things that make it all count. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He is currently on a 17,067-day uninterrupted streak of not wearing Crocs, and he has no intention of stopping that any time soon. 

Geek Punditry #71: Gimmie a Gimmick

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As you may have heard me mention once or twice, last weekend was the annual Nerd Bacchanalia known as Free Comic Book Day, one of my favorite days of the entire calendar year. And on this day, as they always do, my friends at BSI Comics were kind enough to allow me to set up a table and sell a few copies of my new book (which you should have ordered by now). From the vantage point of my table, I was facing a wall that displayed several back issues from those halcyon days of the 1990s, which were among the most formative years of my comic book consuming lifetime. The wall was adorned with lots of those flashy “Enhanced” covers that were so popular at the time – holofoil covers, embossed covers, chromium covers, glow-in-the-dark covers…you name a goofy gimmick, comic book publishers from the 1990s slapped it on the cover of a book. And as I spent hours there looking at those books, an odd realization slowly came over me.

I kinda miss those days.

I stared at these covers for eight hours on Saturday. It does things to a man.

It’s weird. During that time gimmick covers became a glut. They seemed to be coming at an ever-faster pace with ever-weirder gimmicks, and at the time I remember getting sick and tired of them. These days, however, they have become scarce. They’re not extinct, but you don’t see them nearly as much. Instead, modern publishers have decided to go with the business model of publishing 37 different variant covers for every issue. Some of them still slip in an enhanced cover in the mix, usually holofoil or “metallic” covers (for instance, DC recently did a run of metallic covers for various books with artwork featuring only the character’s symbol on a solid background). But they are not the exception, not the rule. 

I’m not going to try to get into a comprehensive history of the gimmick cover, but I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal experiences with them. The first cover enhancement I remember seeing was back in 1991 when DC Comics released their second Robin miniseries, Robin II: The Joker’s Wild, each issue of which had covers with holographic images. Holograms themselves weren’t anything new, of course – I even remember making them in my high school chemistry class – but this was the first time I saw one on the cover of a comic book. It was cool! It was new! It was fun! And it was – if I recall – only fifty cents more than the regular cover! SWEET!

The next time someone tells you they faked the moon landing, remind them that this was considered high tech in 1991.

Not to be outdone, the next year Marvel gave each of the four Spider-Man titles at the time a cover with a hologram to celebrate Spider-Man’s 30th anniversary. (If you, too, remember when these comics were published, don’t do the math. It’ll make you realize that Spider-Man is now in his 60s and make us all feel like that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan.) The holograms were more elaborate than DC’s, and each issue was a giant-sized extravaganza back in the days when such a thing actually meant something, so while they were more expensive than the issues of Robin, they were inarguably awesome. 

THIS technology, on the other hand, could have taken us to Mars.

Not long after that, there was another set of four Spider-Man covers with “holofoil” enhancements – the background of the artwork was metallic and shiny and you know how much we like shiny objects, so those were also a huge hit. And thus the floodgates were opened. Actual holograms became less common (as, if I remember from my chemistry class, they were more complicated to produce), but holofoil became a popular choice. Then other enhancements started to arrive. Die-cut covers, which had long been a popular choice in the paperback book market, started to show up. It made sense, too – have Wolverine’s claws slash through the cover of the comic book and you’ve got an obvious thematic connection. Similarly, embossed covers with artwork raised and stamped into the cardstock in a 3-D fashion made the transition from horror and sci-fi novels to comic books. Glow-in-the-dark, another mainstay of other marketing strategies, became used both for spooky books like DC’s The Spectre and goofy books like the Bongo Comics Simpsons spin-off Radioactive Man. 

Valiant Comics launched Bloodshot with what I believe was the first “Chromium” cover: artwork printed on a metallic backing with some sort of plastic covering. The first two books with this process had a chromium panel embedded in cardstock, then DC upped the ante with a full chromium front cover on Superman #82 (the book that concluded the Death and Return of Superman cycle). Eventually, somebody realized that it was easier to do an entire chromium cover – front and back- – instead of just parts of one, and most chromium covers after that became full wraparound covers, with art that extended from the front to the back in one large image that was no doubt easier to produce than a chromium front and a traditional back which then somehow had to be affixed.

Most people agreed that Image Comics’ “Enriched Uranium” covers went too far.

There were a couple of really weird enhancements, too. DC’s 1992 crossover event Eclipso: The Darkness Within focused on a demonic villain that possesses people infected by a magical black diamond. To kick things off, DC published a special with a cover featuring Eclipso holding up the diamond – which was an actual plastic diamond glued to the cover. Kind of cool, until the time comes to put the comic book in a bag and store it without splitting the mylar or putting divots in the back of whatever book it’s stored next to.

My personal favorite from this era, in terms of sheer weirdness, comes from Malibu Comics. Malibu was a hot publisher at the time, and their comic Protectors kicked off a new shared universe with revamps of several Golden Age characters that had fallen into the public domain. In the fifth issue of that series, the character Night Mask was killed in an effort to show early on that being a superhero would be a dangerous path and that the untrained or inexperienced would be in grave danger. Malibu chose to communicate this message with cover art that featured a bullet hole in the character’s chest that was punched through not only the cover, but the entire comic book. I’ve often wondered if this was a last minute decision, as the hole punched straight through the art on every page, in some cases even taking out a small piece of a word balloon and making you try to guess what the dialogue was supposed to be. It’s such a weird little thing, though, that even people who barely remember that the Protectors ever existed will likely remember the comic with the hole through it. (A few years later Malibu would launch their Ultraverse line, overshadowing the Protectors universe. The publisher was later purchased by Marvel, and all of their properties would fade into obscurity except for a little IP called Men in Black.)

Historians have determined that this is the point when the Comics Code just threw up their hands and surrendered.

As tends to happen, of course, good things went too far. Whereas these sort of enhanced covers started off being used for special events – first issues, anniversaries, major storylines and so forth – they quickly became overused. Instead of a holofoil cover for a 100th issue, we were getting foil covers because it was Wednesday. An issue of Fantastic Four in which the Human Torch lost control of his flame was printed with an entirely white cover, the artwork embossed into the cardstock and almost impossible to see. They’d repeat this trick with metallic Avengers covers and, of course, other publishers would soon follow suit.

With this oversaturation, fans eventually got turned off and stopped buying them, which no doubt at least partially contributed to the late 90s collapse of the comic book speculator market, and the flow of gimmicks was reduced to a trickle. Instead, as I said before, the focus for most publishers has shifted to producing variants – the same book with lots of different covers. And these have gotten ridiculous as well: while some variants have completely different artwork, others just change the color or remove the logo and trade dress or print the uncolored artwork as a “sketch” variant. For a relaunch of Justice League of America, DC put out over fifty covers with the same artwork featuring the team raising the American flag in an Iwo Jima-like pose.  For the variants, they switched out the US flag to that of each individual state and, I think, a few territories. Easiest way to sell one guy fifty copies of the same book EVER. Marvel did something similar with a series called U.S. Avengers, putting out a different cover for each state with a different Avenger, proclaiming them the official Avenger of that state. (Some of these made perfect sense: as Monica Rambeau is the only Avenger FROM Louisiana, she is the natural choice to be the Avenger OF Louisiana. But I’m still waiting for someone to tell me why She-Hulk is the official Avenger of Idaho, with an explanation other than “Well, SOMEBODY’S gotta be.”) 

And don’t even get me started on the fact that Spider-Man, the most New York hero in any multiverse, is the Avenger of New Hampshire.

Whatever the case, the result with the variant wave is the same: they’re counting on completists to buy every cover variant of the book they can get their hands on. Which I suppose helps them sell comics, but it also burns out regular readers and does absolutely NOTHING to attract a NEW readership, which is where American comics are having such a difficult time right now. I’m sure it costs less to print a traditional cover than one with a hologram on it, but I’m really not a fan of the business model that says “convince one customer to buy the same book two dozen times” instead of the business model that says “make a comic book good enough that two dozen people will want to buy it instead of one.” 

These days you still see holofoil and metallic covers, usually when a smaller publisher does a run with 75 different variants and then doubles it by making holofoil versions of each. Marvel and DC have also each done runs of lenticular covers (an image where the artwork changes if you tilt the page or look at it from a different angle) in the last decade or so. But there hasn’t been much else. When Superman married Lois Lane in 1996, there was a special edition cover embossed and designed to resemble a wedding invitation. When the Thing from the Fantastic Four finally married his longtime girlfriend Alicia Masters in 2019, we got a bunch of covers showing the couple from every conceivable angle, but not the slightest hint of foil, nothing that glowed in the dark, and certainly nothing that could be scratched and, subsequently, sniffed. 

I don’t care what anybody says, Stan Lee’s epitaph does NOT count as a cover enhancement.

I know that if the enhancements came back they would quickly become overdone all over again. I know that after three months of Green Lantern covers where one glows and the next has a lantern shape cut out and the third glows AND has a lantern shape cut out I would probably start to get irritated because they’re charging an extra buck for each cover. But they’re doing that for a lot of the variants NOW, and while I am not someone who usually buys variants, I admit that I would be more inclined to do so if there was a little bit of an enhancement to sweeten the pot. 

The hard part is not doing covers like these, it’s doing them in such a way that people don’t get sick of them. Reserve them for important occasions. First issues are acceptable. Anniversary issues are acceptable. The beginning or end of a major storyline is acceptable. 

“Wednesday” is not.

I know that my yearning for these covers is tainted by nostalgia, but that’s not always a bad thing. Nostalgia is the only reason X-Men ‘97 exists on Disney+, and people seem to be pretty darn satisfied with it. (I haven’t watched it yet, so no spoilers.) 

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just shouting into the wind and when you guys read this week’s column you’ll all think I’m crazy for feeling this way. Heck, even I think I’m a little crazy for feeling this way. All I know is this: when I go into BSI Comics to pick up some new books, I almost never want the variants…but once in a while, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on an enhancement or two. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If you go on eBay looking for some of these comics he’s talking about, don’t be fooled. The “coffee stains on page 17” variant is NOT an enhancement, no matter what the seller is telling you. 

Geek Punditry #70: How to Use Your Noodle

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Paramount clearly has no idea what they’re doing with Star Trek right now. They’ve announced the cancellation of Lower Decks, which scientific researchers at Harvard University have conclusively proven to be the best Trek series in the past 25 years. They still haven’t announced any plans for what to do with the crew of the Enterprise-G, as established in the fan favorite final season of Star Trek: Picard. They killed Star Trek: Prodigy only to surrender it to Netflix. They’ve announced a new movie set in the Kelvin timeline, only it’s a prequel, which doesn’t make a damn bit of sense since the timelines are supposed to be identical up until the day Jim Kirk is born. And they’ve gone ahead with a Starfleet Academy series that nobody seems to be interested in, except for those of us who were happy when it was announced that Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome was joining the writing staff. As you may expect, this irrational and erratic behavior has led to a lot of debate and hand-wringing on the internet, because that is exactly what the internet is for. People have launched dozens of (sadly competing) Save Lower Decks campaigns, people are begging for the further adventures of Captain Seven of Nine…all the things you would expect.

Today, my friends, we are all Boimler.

Until one guy on Facebook, in one of the trillion Star Trek groups I am a member of, loudly demanded a movie be made starring Worf and explaining the fate of the Enterprise-E. This ship, the main one used in the films Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis, was briefly alluded to in the final season of Picard when it someone made a comment that they obviously couldn’t use the Enterprise-E, then everybody turned to look at Worf, who gruffly proclaimed, “That was not my fault!” It was a hilarious moment in one of the most satisfying seasons of Trek in history, but what my fellow fan doesn’t seem to understand is that the thing that MAKES that moment satisfying is that we don’t know what happened. 

TV Tropes calls this sort of thing a “Noodle Incident.” This is an event from the past that the characters make a reference to without ever actually explaining it, forcing the audience to wonder. The term comes from Bill Watterson’s legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, in which there was a running gag where Calvin furiously denies that anything happened with the noodles at school or, alternately, doesn’t deny that it happened but claims it wasn’t his fault. The question that lingers with the readers, of course, is: what could have POSSIBLY happened with the noodles that would be THAT BIG A DEAL? And the answer is: we never know. When asked about it once, Watterson said he decided against explaining what the Noodle Incident was because he knew there was nothing he could put on the page that would be as satisfying or entertaining as what the readers were imagining in their heads. And Bill Watterson was absolutely right.

…and they never did.

Since that episode of Picard dropped, there has been a LOT of furious speculation about what could have happened to the Enterprise-E and why, specifically, Worf would have been blamed. Was it lost in battle? Fell into a wormhole? Destroyed in a freak transporter accident? Did it get “Tuvixed” with the ol’ Excelsior? Did Worf lose it in a poker game with a Ferengi? There are a million theories, each wackier than the last, and while I have no doubt that some day someone will write either a novel or a comic book series about the tragic end of this ship, I personally hope that the story of its demise is never officially canonized, because I think it’s more satisfying that way.

Noodle Incidents are a staple of comedy. On Home Improvement there would be allusions to disasters caused by Tim Taylor with the implication that they somehow even surpassed the ones put on screen. How I Met Your Mother had an episode where Ted wakes up to find a pineapple in his bedroom with no idea how it got there, and it’s one of the few minor details left unexplained at the end of the series. The Golden Girls milked this trope like an over productive cow. Rose’s half-told St. Olaf stories and Sophia’s vague yarns in which one is to “Picture it: Sicily” would often leave out details that forced the viewer to close in the gaps with their mind…and in every case these episodes were all the funnier without filling in the blanks. It’s almost like watching Rick and Morty on Adult Swim, where all of the swear words are bleeped out, versus watching it on MAX, where the profanity is allowed. The truth is, it’s actually funnier when you don’t hear the curse words, even if the word being hidden is obvious.

Turns out, the unedited St. Olaf stories are way, way filthier than anything on Rick and Morty.

Noodle Incidents aren’t only good for comedy, though. They work well in more serious work, too. In Casablanca, the reason Rick can’t return to the United States is never explained, nor are all of the details of his previous relationship with Ilsa. In The Dark Knight, the Joker loves to tell conflicting stories about how he got his scars, but we never find out the truth. And it’s pretty common in action movies – especially those with ongoing characters – to make a reference to a prior incident without giving us details. We don’t know what happened to Indiana Jones in Honduras, we don’t know the truth about the “Rome affair” that James Bond was mixed up in, and we’re never gonna know what happened to Hawkeye and the Black Widow in Budapest. 

And that’s probably a good thing.

It works on the same principle as hiding the monster in a horror movie. One of the things that makes Jaws so great is that you don’t actually get a good look at the shark until the very end. In this case, it was a practical consideration: they couldn’t get the mechanical shark to work properly. But the effect was solid. Similarly, in Alien, none of the original posters or marketing revealed the look of the creature, nor did it appear in full until the end of the movie. It made for one of the best haunted house movies of all time, set in outer space. By the time the sequel rolled around the appearance of the Xenomorph had become iconic and director James Cameron knew he couldn’t possibly duplicate the suspense, so he decided instead to make the second film less of a horror movie and more of an action film – and it worked very well.

“But Blake, doesn’t that suggest you may get more mileage out of the characters if you explored these blank spaces in their history?” No, no it doesn’t, because those reveals were always planned and were done for thematic effect, not plot reasons. Fans claim they want Noodle Incidents explored, but when they are, the result is invariably disappointing. I’m going to give you the most famous example in history:

Wolverine.

Turns out those things are actually made of pasta. Rotini, specifically.

When Wolverine first appeared in the comic books in 1974, he was an agent of the Canadian government sent to take on the Hulk. We found out later that he was a mutant, what his powers were, and that those claws of his were actually embedded in his hands as opposed to attached to his gloves (which was what the original creators had intended). But we didn’t know his past. As it turned out, Wolverine didn’t know his past either. He had been the subject of an experiment that bonded the indestructible metal Adamantium to his skeleton, but the process had essentially destroyed his memory. Every so often we would get vague flashes, such as an encounter with Captain America back in World War II, that seemed to indicate Wolverine was much older than he appeared, but we knew nothing specific.

And it was great. I would argue that the mystery is one of the things that made Wolverine such a popular character throughout the 80s and 90s. Then, in 2001, Marvel’s then Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada decided it was finally time for the story to be told in Origin. Quesada, Marvel vice president Bill Jemas, and scripter Paul Jenkins collaborated on a story that revealed Wolverine – who had always thought his name was “Logan” – was once James Howlett, a sickly child born to a wealthy plantation owner in 19th century Canada. The story shows James’s powers developing, including the first time painful time he extended his claws. It explored the backstory he shares with his arch-enemy Sabretooth. It even seems to offer a Freudian explanation for his obsession with redheads. And Origin was…well, it was okay.

Also the source of Wolverine’s legendary catch phrase: “OH MY GOD, THIS HURTS SO BADLY! AUGH! AAAAAAUGH! THIS IS SO MUCH MORE PAINFUL THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE! AAUGH! CUT OFF MY HANDS! PLEASE!”

But here’s the thing, folks: if you’re going to take away a Noodle Incident, the resulting story should be a hell of a lot more than just “okay.” There have been a lot of Wolverine stories told in the 23 years since his origin was revealed, but I can’t say that there have been ANY that were better stories BECAUSE I know his origin now. And if it doesn’t make the stories better, then what was the point?

Noodle Incidents, these holes in the past, are a fun bit of writing. (Those are NOT “plot holes,” however. That’s an entirely different thing that people on the internet don’t actually understand. We’ll talk about those some other time.) You can dump all kinds of weird stuff in there, and leaving them open invites the readers to do the same thing. It’s a narrative device that allows the writers to seem more clever than they actually are and in a way makes the reader or viewer a participant in the backstory of their favorite characters. Once you’ve thought about an unrevealed piece of backstory for a while, you’re never going to have a revelation that’s going to live up to what’s going on in your head. It’s best that we all remember it.

Just like I had to do that time in Kansas City with the ocelot and the caprese salad. It was a wild night.

SPECIAL REMINDER:

As I’m sure you heard on the social media, the news, billboards, that Goodyear Blimp campaign, and in the hidden track on Taylor Swift’s new album, I’ve got a new book out! Twinkle Twinkle, the first volume of the Little Stars trilogy, is now available in print or eBook, and you can get your copy by going over to Amazon and giving them a designated amount of dollars, a percentage of which will then be given to me.

Not an enormous percentage, mind you, but a percentage.

But – BUT – if you happen to be in the New Orleans area tomorrow, May 4th, you’ve got a chance to get a SIGNED copy from yours truly. Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day and I’ll be at BSI Comics in Metairie, Louisiana selling copies of the new book (plus all of the old ones). Come on down, say hello, meet the other great writers and artists who will be sharing a space with me, and get some free goodies as well. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He thinks there’s a certain irony in using 1700 words to explain the benefit of something that is best left unexplained, but he’ll leave the rest of that joke to your own imagination.