Year: 2024

Geek Punditry #59: The Crossover Question

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It was the kind of news that grinds the internet to a halt, sometimes for upwards of 17 seconds. After years, decades even, where some of the most sought-after comic books of all time were out of print and unavailable unless you wanted to pay crazy eBay prices, this week DC and Marvel Comics announced a pair of omnibus editions collecting most of the crossover comics that have been produced over the years featuring meetings between the two most famous superhero pantheons in the world.

This is not a drill, people!

I’m not sure if younger fans will realize exactly how big a deal this sort of thing is. From the moment that the two respective worlds solidified, there were fans who were anxious to see the Justice League meet the Avengers, the X-Men meet the Teen Titans, Brother Voodoo meet Brother Power: The Geek. It’s like when you have toys from multiple toy lines and try to play with them all together. I know that every kid my age, at some point, had their G.I. Joes face off against Darth Vader, the TransFormers clash with He-Man, and the Thundercats and Silverhawks grab a drink down at the bar. Those were the stories that spilled out of our imagination. But the idea of a “real,” “official” story in which such a thing happened was the stuff of dreams. So in 1975, when the two publishers announced their first joint venture, it was like a dream come true!

For Wizard of Oz fans, that is. Yes, because of some weird things like licensing agreements with MGM and the public domain status of the original novel, the first comic co-produced by Marvel and DC Comics was an adaptation of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, hitting the stands a scant 36 years after the film’s debut. I was only around for the last few years of it, guys, but it really seems like the 70s were a bizarre time.

The part where Wolverine rips out the Cowardly Lion’s entrails, in retrospect, may have been a tad overboard.

But that collaboration seemed to grease the wheels between the two publishers and, in 1976, fans got Superman Vs. the Amazing Spider-Man. Like the Oz book, this was an oversized treasury edition featuring the clash of the respective publisher’s two most popular characters, and it was a hit. In 1981 there was a second Superman/Spider-Man meeting, followed by Batman Vs. the Incredible Hulk (or, as I like to call it, “Battle of the Bruces”), and in 1982 we got The Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans. Then work began on an Avengers/Justice League crossover, a story that would surely be the crown jewel for the two publishers, but things kind of fell apart. Not only did that planned crossover never happen, but all crossovers between the two dried up for over a decade. 

Childhoods were defined in these books.

That changed in 1994, when the era of comic book excess was in full swing, and the two collaborated again with what would be the first of two Batman/Punisher crossovers. It wasn’t Bruce Wayne, though – this story took place during the Knightfall era, and the Punisher ran across the Jean-Paul Valley version of Batman. By the time the sequel rolled around, Bruce was back and Frank Castle learned what the real Batman is like. This pair kicked off a new wave of Marvel/DC crossovers including Batman/Spider-Man, Batman/Daredevil, Batman/Captain America – look, by the 90s it was clear who DC’s top seller was. But Superman got in on the fun too, meeting both the Hulk and the Fantastic Four. Green Lantern met up with the Silver Surfer, and then there was the villain-centric Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger by John Byrne. 

College years, on the other hand, were defined by THESE books.

The creme de la creme, of course, was 1996’s mega-event DC Vs. Marvel, where the two universes collided in a four-issue slugfest where the fans voted for the winners of the five top battles. This was a great gimmick from a sales standpoint but posed something of a creative challenge, as writers Peter David and Ron Marz had to figure out some way to have Lobo (an indestructible alien with Superman-level strength) lose a fight to Wolverine (a character who is considerably less powerful unless you count his mutant ability to sell a trillion copies and, in this case, garner a trillion extra votes). Their solution, hilariously, was to have the two of them duck behind a counter and only have Wolverine pop up, thereby avoiding the need to actually explain how he could possibly have won.

Nerds argued over this for almost 60 years before Marvel and DC decided to settle things. It didn’t stop nerds from arguing.

Specious battles aside (I also take issue with Storm of the X-Men beating Wonder Woman with a bolt of lightning and Batman beating Captain America because the latter got hit by a wave of water from a flooding sewer which threw off his aim), the book was a smash hit. It spawned two sequel miniseries, but the thing that fans remember most were the series of one-shots that came in-between issues three and four of the main storyline, the Amalgam Universe. Basically, the Marvel and DC Universes were merged, and we got 12 one-shots starring character mashups like Super Soldier (Superman fused with Captain America), Dark Claw (Batman and Wolverine), Speed Demon (Flash and Ghost Rider) and so forth. A year later there were another series of 12 one-shots, half of which were follow-ups to the original dozen and the other six introducing new mashups like the Lobo the Duck (Lobo and Howard the Duck) and Iron Lantern (Iron Man and Green La– look, do I have to spell out EVERYTHING?). 

The next time someone tells you that drawing doofy fan mashups won’t get you anywhere, show them this.

The Marvel/DC crossover craze ended in 2003 with the long-awaited JLA/Avengers crossover, and it came about in a sort of odd way. The legendary George Perez, whom everyone agreed was the only man alive who should draw this book, joined upstart publisher CrossGen Comics, and CrossGen made all of its talent sign exclusive contracts for the term of their employment. The only loophole allowed was in Perez’s contract, which stated he would be allowed to do JLA/Avengers if it ever happened. That seemed to be enough to get Marvel and DC to figure things out, and the four-issue miniseries finally came about. But that’s the last time any Marvel or DC characters met one another.

There were other crossovers in that era, of course. Marvel’s Iron Man met Valiant’s X-O Manowar, and Daredevil encountered Shi from Crusade Comics. DC and Dark Horse comics became besties: Superman crossed over with Michael Allred’s Madman, the Joker fought the Mask, and Batman met both Grendel and Hellboy (the latter with Starman in tow). But the two biggest games in comics stopped playing together at that point, possibly because of corporate chicanery and possibly because the always friendly rivalry between the two publishers became somewhat less friendly for a while. 

Marvel, in fact, seems to have quit crossovers altogether. A search on the Internet (which, as we all know, has never been wrong about anything) seems to indicate the last time Marvel characters crossed over with any other publisher was back in 2009, when the Avengers and Thunderbolts were featured with Top Cow Comics characters in a miniseries called Fusion. We’ve recently got a new crossover, though, with Wolverine fighting the Predator, but as both characters are now owned by the Walt Disney Corporation and IP Farm and Macaroni Grill, and therefore both published by Marvel, I don’t know that it technically counts. 

And it’s not like other publishers haven’t gotten into the game as well. Before Disney bought Fox, Dark Horse Comics held the rights to Aliens and Predator, and they fought EVERYBODY. Superman Vs. Aliens, Batman Vs. Predator, Green Lantern Vs. Aliens, Magnus: Robot Fighter Vs. Predator, WildC.A.T.S. Vs. Aliens, Archie Vs. Predator (no, I’m not kidding), Batman and Superman Vs. Aliens and Predator…it was a cottage industry.

Fellas, when THIS many people have trouble getting along with you, maybe it’s time to admit that the problem is YOU.

And their sparring partners often met other publishers’ characters as well. Archie Comics has crossed over with – among others – the Punisher, Batman ‘66, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, Vampirella and Red Sonja, and the Tiny Titans. They also crossed over with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when Archie was publishing THAT book, but since the Turtles have moved to IDW Publishing they’ve encountered the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (twice), Batman (four times), and the characters from Stranger Things, which has also crossed over with Dungeons and Dragons, which has also crossed over with Rick and Morty. The Power Rangers have also met both the Justice League and Godzilla, and the Justice League and Godzilla are currently meeting each other – along with King Kong – in a crossover with the Legendary Monsterverse. 

While Marvel has pulled out of the crossover game (which is something I largely suspect is an edict from Disney, although I have nothing to back that up, it’s just a gut feeling), DC has kept it up. Besides the aforementioned TMNT, Power Rangers, and Godzilla/Kong crossovers, the Justice League has met the characters from Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer, and enjoyed crossovers with corporate siblings the Looney Tunes and the Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. Batman and Scooby-Doo, who have met in cartoons many times, now share an ongoing children’s comic. DC has also partnered with IDW for Star Trek/Green Lantern, Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes, and an inventive crossover between DC’s Sandman Universe and Joe Hill’s Locke and Key. IDW seems to love crossovers, even with different licensed properties in their own stable. While they owned the licenses to these assorted properties, they crossed over TransFormers with Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and Star Trek: The Animated Series (making new Autobots out of the Ecto-1, the Delorean, and the Enterprise, respectively). Star Trek, by the way, also crossed over with the X-Men when Marvel owned that license, in two one-shot comics and a prose novel titled Planet X. And Valiant and Image Comics did the “universes merge” story three whole years before Amalgam Comics in a series called Deathmate, which is largely remembered today for the fact that Rob Liefeld’s issue of the series was hilariously late. 

IDW is the Nick Cannon of comic book crossover events. No, not musically.

In fact, there’s only one really major franchise that has significant comic book presence that – as far as I know – has never done an official crossover, and that’s Star Wars. Even before the Disney buyout and the comics moved to Marvel, Dark Horse never made an effort to have Luke Skywalker meet Barb Wire or something. The closest they’ve come was in an out-of-continuity story in the Star Wars Tales anthology comic from 2004, in which the Millennium Falcon gets lost in a galaxy far, far away and crash-lands on a primitive planet, only for the remains to be discovered centuries later by an archeologist strongly implied to be Indiana Jones. 

I know it can seem overwhelming if you’re a casual fan, trying to make all of these things work out. The good news is, you don’t have to. The vast majority of these crossovers are either considered non-canonical to the main properties or are of such little consequence to the ongoing story that they may as well be. There are rare exceptions (the WildC.A.T.S./Aliens crossover killed off several members of Wildstorm Comics’ Stormwatch team, for example), but for the most part, they can be read on their own, self-contained, without impacting the ongoing comics in any significant way.

So why do them at all?

Because they’re fun. They’re fun for the readers, who like seeing beloved characters interact, and they’re fun for the creators, who enjoy making them just as much. It’s true that there was a saturation point of crossovers in the early 2000s, but the solution to saturation is to slow down the flow, not cut it off entirely. 

So the announcement of the two DC/Marvel omnibus editions is welcome. The DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age omnibus will collect the DC Vs. Marvel miniseries, its two sequels, and 13 of the 24 Amalgam books. The DC Versus Marvel omnibus will collect most of their other crossovers. But the exclusion of the remaining 11 Amalgam books is surprising and a little frustrating, and the DC Versus Marvel omnibus will exclude JLA/Avengers, which was reprinted in a very limited charity run two years ago after George Perez announced that he was suffering from terminal cancer. The fact that it was once again Perez being on a deadline that got that book off to the printer is a sad sort of cosmic convergence. 

No joke here. George Perez was one of the greatest comic book artists ever to pick up a pencil, and he deserves all the love and respect he gets.

I hope that there are plans to reprint the rest of the Amalgam books at some point, but even if there aren’t, the fact that they’re doing the omnibus editions at all is encouraging. It’s something fans have wanted for a very long time and we didn’t really think would ever happen. It also, of course, has everybody asking a couple of pertinent questions. First, why now? What has changed in the Marvel/DC relations that allows these books to finally see print again? A lot of the people responsible for the bad blood between the publishers are gone now, and that may indeed play a significant role. And if THAT has changed, let’s just ask the most obvious question of them all:

Could this be a precursor to more?

As I said, it’s been over 20 years since the Marvel and DC Universes connected in any official capacity and a lot has changed. I think there are a lot of fans who would be interested to see Miles Morales meet Damian Wayne or have Kamala Khan interact with Jon Kent. How would the Titans of today – now DC’s premiere super-team – react to the X-Men in the age of Krakoa? And come on, fans have been pining for a Deadpool/Harley Quinn crossover for ages. Such a book would be as good a license to print money as Wolverine was in the 90s. 

I’m not saying it will happen. I’m just saying that if it DID, it would be cool. 

I’m also saying that the two omnibus books are coming out in August, which also happens to be my birthday month. I’m just. Sayin’. 

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 always wanted to write the Captain Carrot/Spider-Ham crossover that America deserves. 

Geek Punditry #58: Finding Movies at the Bookstore

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Not too long ago, I remember seeing a statistic that said among adults who read frequently, men are more likely to be nonfiction readers, whereas women are more likely to read fiction. When you consider just how prodigious the romance section of a bookstore can be, the idea that women read fiction makes perfect sense. (I’m not trying to indulge in gender stereotypes here, but let’s be honest, ain’t nobody marketing a Harlequin bodice-ripper to a male audience.) I’m a bit more confused about the men reading nonfiction, though. Sure, I suppose men are more likely to be into things like military history and other such subjects, but if I were single and looking to meet a woman in a bookstore, I would probably start hanging around the true crime section. And subsequently get arrested, now that I think about it. Dear God, I’m glad I’m married. Anyway, I suppose I’m a bit of an odd duck in that I very rarely read nonfiction. My shelves are stacked with novels and comic books, for the most part. And when I DO read nonfiction, it’s usually nonfiction that, in one way or another, is ABOUT fiction. In fact, my favorite nonfiction books are all about the movies.

It’s like if The Godfather were written by a sarcastic robot.

Back in 2002, Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni Kevin Murphy (a few years before the birth of RiffTrax) released his book A Year at the Movies. I bought it, mostly, because it was written by Tom Servo and I thought that was cool, but I was amazed at how utterly engrossed I was when I opened up the book and started reading. In the years after MST3K ended its initial run, Murphy had become – understandably – a bit disenchanted with the movies. For this book, he embarked upon a quest to rediscover them. His goal was to attend a public screening of a movie every day for an entire calendar year, and this book is a memoir of his experience.

And it’s great.

First of all, it’s funny. This should come as absolutely no surprise to anybody, that a book written by Kevin Murphy has plenty of knee-slapping moments. But it’s a lot more than that. Murphy doesn’t just go down to the local megaplex 365 times. He explores the world, going to film festivals and special events. He travels to the smallest movie theater in America, visits a theater built inside an ice hotel where the movie is projected onto a wall of snow, experiences a film festival in a country where the sun doesn’t set for months at a time. He takes Mike Nelson with him to watch Corky Romano. Reading about these adventures makes me want to go and join in.

In Kevin Murphy’s Odyssey, this is Scylla AND Charybdis.

And he talks about the movies, of course. The good ones, the bad ones, the ones in-between. The book is part film critique and part travelogue. And it should be mentioned that the year mentioned in the title happens to be 2001 – so fair warning, when you get to September, something happens that obviously is of far greater significance than Kevin’s little movie watching project, but nonetheless impacts his quest.

It’s a magnificent book and I’ve often wished Murphy would write a sequel. In this age of streaming and the massive changes that have undergone the movie theater business in the last decade, I’m wondering what his findings would be if he tried to do this again. Mr. Murphy, if you’re reading this, I know you’re pretty dang busy with RiffTrax, but I read this book probably every other year and I would LOVE to intercut it with a Part II.

The fact that I do re-read this book, on average, every two years or so, brings me to my next point. Obviously, this is the kind of writing that appeals to me. So I need more. I need more books ABOUT movies. Not just the making of movies (although there are obviously some excellent books written about that very subject matter), but books by people who love movies, about WHY they love movies, about HOW they love movies. So let me tell you some of my favorites that I’ve found in the years since Kevin Murphy inadvertently set me off on my own quest, then I’ll open the floor for recommendations from the audience.

Not THAT Showgirls. Except for the one part where he talks about Showgirls.

In terms of matching the flavor that Kevin Murphy brought to his project, the next best thing I’ve found is Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic’s Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made. Written by Michael Adams, this is a book whose subtitle lays out its premise exactly. Adams, at the time a writer for Empire magazine, was struck by the idea of trying to find the worst movie of all time. The book chronicles his journey of hunting down DVDs and old VHS tapes, categorizing them, brushing with fame, and the conclusions he has reached at the end. The amazing thing about this book – like most of the books I’m talking about here – is that even when he’s telling me how awful the movies are, Adams describes them in such a fun and charming way that I find myself adding many of them to my watchlist on Letterboxd.

Brian W. Collins had a similar project, his Horror Movie a Day blog, where he watched and reviewed a different horror movie every single day for a few years. Eventually he gave up on the “daily” aspect of the project, but he still publishes new reviews relatively often, and he put the best of them into Horror Movie a Day: The Book. In this one, Collins simply chooses some of his favorite reviews (not necessarily his favorite MOVIES) and divides them up into several categories. For horror movie fans, this is a fun way to find lots of movies you may never have heard of and get opinions on movies that you already have your own thoughts on. Collins is also a strong writer, and his style is entertaining to read in and of itself.

Of course, I don’t want to discount books about MAKING movies. There are three books by Dustin McNeill worth mentioning here, the first two co-written with Travis Mullins, all of which are about some of our favorite slasher flicks. In Taking Shape: Developing Halloween From Script to Scream, McNeill and Mullins do meticulous research and conduct lots of interviews with the principal writers, directors, actors, and other people involved in the production of the various movies in the Halloween franchise, beginning with the original in 1978 and going up to the most recent film at the time of publication, which was 2019. What I love about this book is that even though I’ve seen all of these movies time and again, there are a lot of things that went on behind the scenes that I never knew about. It’s not like some lame clickbait article with a headline like “20 things you never knew about Halloween III that turns out to be 17 things everybody knows and three things that are bullshit. This book gives serious, entertaining insight into the production of one of the most iconic horror franchises of all time.

It’s the Lord of the Rings of books about slasher movies, some of which were never actually made.

The sequel, Taking Shape II: The Lost Halloween Sequels, gives the same treatment to all the Halloween movies that were NOT made over the decades – the rejected pitches, the movies that started production but died on the vine and so forth. I liked this book even more than the first one, because it not only gives great insight into the way the movie business works, but it lands with a wealth of ideas for movies that never existed but that, in a few cases, really sounded a hell of a lot better than the movies that were actually made. 

Before either of those two, though, McNeill published Slash of the Titans: The Road to Freddy Vs. Jason. It’s the same conceit as the Halloween books, but focused solely on the project that ultimately became Freddy Vs. Jason. The movie was in development for many, many years, and McNeill breaks down all of the various iterations that it went through before finally landing on the one that made it to the screen. It, too, is a fascinating read. McNeill has several other similar books on his bibliography that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, but I want to, including another Mullins collaboration, Reign of Chucky, and a book co-written with J. Michael Roddy called Adventures in Amity: Tales From the Jaws Ride that sounds pretty darn interesting.

All of these books are well worth reading if you’re a fan of the movies in question or even just a fan of movies in general. I am, however, always in search of more. My question for you, guys, is simple: what are your favorite books ABOUT movies? Books that are similar to the ones I listed above, books that aren’t at all like any of them, I am open to all suggestions. Movies are one of the greatest forms of storytelling, and stories about that form of storytelling – be it from the perspective of an insider or an outsider – absolutely fascinate me. Hit me up with your favorite picks, and maybe in a few months I’ll come back and do a follow-up to this column evaluating what you guys recommend.

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. Has anyone ever written anything about that Star Wars movie? Seems like that would have been chronicled somewhere by now, right?

Geek Punditry #57: Guilty Reality

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I’ve never really been a fan of the term “guilty pleasure.” It seems inherently reductive to me. It’s announcing to the world that you’re ashamed of something you like, but I don’t think anyone should have to feel that way. If you’re a grown-up who’s into Squishmallows, so what? Get yourself a Squishmallow. Tell your friends so they’ll load you down with them on your birthday. Why would that be anything to be embarrassed about? Adult Fans of Lego? We’re a thriving community. And if anybody tries to tell me that Bluey is “just a kid’s show,” I will personally offer to help them look for the soul they have obviously misplaced.

Don’t call yourself a dad if you can get through this episode without a lump in your throat.

That said, I do UNDERSTAND the idea of a guilty pleasure. There are some things that you enjoy that, for one reason or another, you feel like maybe you shouldn’t. It’s not a matter of shame for me, though, it’s more a question of why does this one thing, this piece of pop culture that includes so many elements that I usually find reprehensible, for some reason not only hold my attention, but leaves me thirsting for more? It’s not a guilty pleasure for me, it’s a confusing one. And here, of course, I am referring to the Peacock “reality” competition series, The Traitors. 

It’s kinda like Knives Out, only the characters aren’t as likable.

I’m not a huge fan of reality competition to begin with. I watched the first few seasons of Survivor back in the day, the show that popularized (if not outright invented) this hybrid game show and docudrama, in which people in competition with each other are also forced to live together. The thing that makes this type of show stand out is that we aren’t solely watching the competition, but also the lives of these people in-between the events. The thing that made the format revolutionary, though, is also the thing that turned me off. Those day-to-day moments became much darker. The contestants started to turn into vile, backstabbing jerks to each other, and it became increasingly difficult to pull for anybody. It wasn’t long before the majority of shows in this category were wiped clean from my viewing slate. Most of the reality competitions I watch these days are the ones that focus solely on the “competition” part, like The Great British Baking Show, Masterchef, LEGO Masters, or Crime Scene Kitchen. Without the manufactured drama between games to make people hate each other, these shows are much more pleasant to watch. In fact, there are plenty of times on British Baking Show where one contestant will drop what they’re doing to help out one of their OPPONENTS in a moment of need, an act of kindness and goodwill that on a show like Big Brother would result in somebody’s spleen being removed and served to the group for dinner with a light balsamic glaze. 

“It was kind of you to help Jeannie with her tartlet, but I’m afraid we WILL have to feed you to the leopard now.”

But back to The Traitors. Based (as so many of these things are) on a British series of the same name, when I heard about the first season a year ago I thought it would be worth a watch. The concept reminded me a little of one of the few reality competitions that I DID enjoy, The Mole. In that show, contestants worked together on a series of missions, with each success adding to the prize pot that would be awarded to the final victor at the end. One of them, however, was a “Mole” working for the producers and actively attempting to sabotage the others. This was a fun show in that the viewer got to play along, analyzing the clues and observing the behavior of the competitors in an attempt to figure out who the Mole was. Netflix brought that show back in 2022 for a reboot which worked well, although a promised second season has not yet materialized.

The Traitors is similar. Again, the competitors are working together to win challenges, and again, the prize money for each challenge goes into a pot to be awarded to the winners at the end. But there are several major differences. First of all, rather than a single Mole, a small group of the competitors are secretly chosen in the first episode to be the Traitors. And their task is NOT to sabotage the missions – in fact, it is in their best interest to see the missions succeed, because at the end of the game the prize will be split among the winners. If the non-traitors, or “Faithful,” manage to eliminate all of the Traitors by the end of the game, they win and those that lasted to the end share the pot. However, if even ONE Traitor remains at the end, then the Faithful get nothing and the money is divided among the remaining Traitors. Like most shows, each night the Faithful vote someone out, hoping like hell that they get one of the Traitors and not one of their own. But afterwards, the Traitors are allowed to choose a Faithful to “murder” and eliminate from the game.

Unlike The Mole, the audience is aware of who the Traitors are from the very beginning. We watch as they are chosen and we watch as they plan and scheme against the Faithful. We also watch the Faithful’s attempts to weed them out, which feel increasingly bizarre and nonsensical to those of us on the outside who already know the solution to the puzzle and can’t figure out how they could be so egregiously wrong. 

The big thing about The Traitors, though, is that when I tuned in to season one last year, about half of the contestants turned out to be veterans from various other reality competition series like Big Brother. They hadn’t played THIS game before, but they played similar ones, and they think they’re savvy enough to carry through to the end. Not being a fan of those shows, the personalities were blanks to me, but they were frequently shown acting as though they were experts or major stars. I was even more alarmed in season two when it turned out virtually EVERY competitor was a reality show vet, including some dude who unironically calls himself “Johnny Bananas.” These were people who had actually turned appearing on these shows into a career. Would I be able to handle this level of ego on my television?

This is what it looks like to be famous for being famous.

To my shock and confusion, the answer seems to be yes.

The show is incredibly backstabby, and the competitors take it super personally. I get that there’s a lot of money on the line, but to hear them talk about the Traitors as if they were Nazi war criminals instead of people trying to win a game show seems a bit much. Are they lying? Sure – but in the context of the game I don’t really see that as any more unethical than bluffing at poker. Are they kicking out innocent people? Absolutely – because they have to do that in order to win the game. It’s in the DNA of the thing. And yet the Faithful seem to talk as though they were literal thieves and murderers. I want to go up to some of these competitors and ask them what they think THEY would be doing had they been chosen to be Traitors, and wait to hear them try to do ethical backflips to try to avoid conceding that they would behave precisely the same way. In both seasons so far (season two is only six episodes in, as I write this), I have found myself surprisingly rooting for the Traitors to win, because the level of rage and invective that comes from the Faithful actually makes the Traitors seem like far more agreeable people. Also because the Faithful are unbearably stupid.

I need to correct that. It’s not really fair to call them unbearably stupid. It’s the way these shows are made. The producers prod the contestants to say certain things and act certain ways, and then they take their performances and edit them down, taking whatever reality exists on the set and shaving it away to sculpt them into characters: this is the arrogant guy, this is the ditzy girl, this is the narcissist, this is the bitch. Actually, on The Traitors, they seem to sculpt multiple bitches. But the point is, I am aware that the figures I see on the screen are not the people that they really are, but rather who the producers of the show want me to THINK they are. So the accurate thing to say is that the producers want me to THINK the Faithful are unbearably stupid.

“Okay, Kate, tell us again how smart you are. But…maybe don’t try to spell it this time.”

I know it’s easy for me, from my perch on the couch knowing exactly who the “bad guys” are, to laugh at the wrong avenues the Faithful follow to try to capture them, but even without that filter, I just don’t see how a lot of their tactics make sense. In the first episode, the Traitors are selected duck-duck-goose style, blindfolded, as the host of the show walks around the room and taps the chosen on the shoulder. As soon as the blindfolds come off, before even the Traitors have a chance to find out who the other Traitors are, the accusations begin. “This guy breathed funny.” “I’m getting Traitor vibes from her.” “I’ve been suspicious of him since DAY ONE.” Dude, it’s Day Two. Stop acting like that’s impressive. 

Another contestant gets confused by one of the Traitor’s “victims” and, unable to figure out why they killed that person, declares that the Traitors must be really stupid. This person who has utterly failed to track down a single one of the Traitors and has voted out several innocent people in the effort, helping their cause all along, is calling THEM stupid. I wanted to throw something at the TV.

One contestant is determined that “The Traitor HAS to be an Alpha Male.” Why? Because other Alpha Males are among his “victims.” This is ludicrous for various reasons. First of all, the Faithful are aware that there are, in fact, multiple Traitors. Second, the whole “Alpha Male” concept in and of itself is a myth. Even the biologists who first coined the term among wolves later dismissed it, saying they had misinterpreted the data, but the idea lingers. I’ve always thought that anyone who refers to himself as an “Alpha Male” as some sort of badge of honor is someone not worth paying attention to, but I suppose I need to extend that policy to include anyone who uses the term “Alpha Male” in an attempt to identify a fake murder suspect on reality television.

So I watch each episode, worried that the Faithful will get dumber and dumber and hoping that the Traitors – who damn it all, I actually like – can pull it off. I watch as the strategies learned from being on Survivor and Big Brother and The Challenge and The Bachelor inevitably fail, I watch as assorted Real Housewives decide which clique they’re going to be in, I watch as the only people with common sense are targeted by the rest of the Faithful and voted off the show, and I ask myself why the hell I keep watching this?

Gotta be because Alan Cumming is the host.

I’m not saying that this guy not coming back is the REASON X-Men 3 sucked, but it sure didn’t help.

As another great fictional detective, Benoit Blanc, once observed, “It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though.”

There’s nothing else I can say to explain why I keep watching The Traitors.

Or why I can’t wait for season three.

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 about to start Tweeting at Netflix to find out when the hell The Mole is coming back.

Geek Punditry #56: The Pundy Update

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

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

That’s what I thought.

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

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

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

Comedy peaked in 1989.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. What about a Garfield/Star Trek/Spider-Man crossover? Would that be a thing? Could we make that happen?

A little star falling to Earth…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shows what I know.

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

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

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

So the question is…what now?

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

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

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

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

And then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the world as Kyrie Irving imagines it.

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

HO. HO. HO.

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

And yet, I loved every page.

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

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

See? Genius.

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

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

This image is different every time you look at it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geek Punditry #54: The Little City That Could

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

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

This was, indeed, my jam.

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

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

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

Admittedly, the ultimate evil could use more JPEGs.

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

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

And then, like an asshole, life happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week, that changed.

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

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

This is awesome.

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

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

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

Everything about this story is awesome to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“M…I…C…”
“See you in court!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you at Fan Expo New Orleans!

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

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