Last week brought us a pair of announcements about upcoming Superman books, both of which I’m happy about, although I’m slightly reserved about one of them.
First of all, Marvel Comics announced the creative teams for their half of the upcoming Spider-Man/Superman crossover. DC announced at the end of last year that Mark Waid and Jorge Jimenez will be doing the main story for their half, which comes out in March. Marvel’s side of the crossover will come out in April, and last week we learned that the main story will be by Brad Meltzer and Pepe Larraz, pitting the wallcrawler and the Man of Steel against Lex Luthor and Norman Osborn. I’ve been a fan of Meltzer for quite some time – I love his novels, I’ve shared his childrens’ books with my son, and I’ve always liked his comics. I was surprised, though, to discover that he’s done almost no work for Marvel in the past – save for a single page in 2019’s Marvel Comics #1000 special, I believe this will be his first Marvel work.
They also revealed the creators and characters that will appear in the back-up features. Dan Slott and Marcos Martin will team up the Golden Age Superman with Spider-Man Noir, Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman will pit Wonder Woman and the Jane Foster Thor against an army of symbiotes, Louise Simonson and Todd Nauck will turn John Henry Irons against the Hobgoblin, Joe Kelly and Humberto Ramos will chronicle a “campus crossover” between Gwen Stacy and Lana Lang, and Brian Michael Bendis will re-team with Sara Pichelli, with whom he co-created the Miles Morales Spider-Man, in a story where Miles meets Superman. The thing about that last one, though, is that I’m not actually sure WHICH Superman Miles is going to meet, Clark or Jon. The solicitation doesn’t make it clear, and there are variant covers featuring Miles with each of them. This is one of the many, many things that drives me crazy about aging Jon up, but I’m not going to belabor that point here. I’m excited about most of these stories, particularly to have Louise Simonson writing Steel again.
The second announcement that hit this week is for another project launching in April, a four-issue Bizarro: Year None miniseries, purporting to tell the “definitive, indefinitive” origin of Superman’s imperfect doppelganger. This one is going to be co-written by Kevin Smith and Eric Carrasco, with art by Nick Pitarra. I couldn’t think of a better team to do a Bizarro comic, and at the same time, I cannot help but be a bit trepidatious about this one. And anyone who’s familiar with Kevin Smith’s history in comics will know exactly why.
Look – I am a fan of Kevin Smith. I have been since 1999, when my buddy Jason introduced me to what was then still the “Jersey Trilogy” just in time for us to catch Dogma. And I’ve been into most of his comic book work too…when it actually gets finished. Once his film career was established, Smith broke into comics first with stories featuring his own characters, then on acclaimed relaunches of Daredevil and Green Arrow. In 2002, he came back to Marvel for a miniseries, Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do, which released three of six issues before it vanished. Smith got sidetracked on other projects, and it took three years before he came back and did the back half of that miniseries. But that’s nothing compared to Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target, a miniseries that also launched that year and never made it beyond a first issue. We’re sitting here 24 years later, and that story was never finished.
This became a bit of a theme for Smith. In 2009 he and artist Walter Flanagan (yes, that Walt Flanagan, if you’re a fan of Smith’s movies) produced the first six issues of what was supposed to be a 12-issue saga: Batman: The Widening Gyre. At the time, Smith promised that the second half of the story would be told after a brief hiatus. The hiatus is at 16 years and counting.
To Smith’s credit, he’s totally aware of the problems he had, and in more recent years he’s gotten a lot better about it. Whether it’s because of working with co-writers or just making certain that he has the scripts for an entire project finished before it’s even announced, his work in the past decade has not suffered from the George R.R. Martin-esque disappearances that plagued his comics back in the day. But as someone who’s still curious as to how, exactly, that gyre was supposed to finish widening, it’s hard to hear his name attached to a project without at least THINKING “here’s hoping he’s got all the scripts finished already.”
I think he has. All the same, the Bizarro miniseries is scheduled to run for four issues, starting in April. So here’s hoping we’ll have all four of them by the end of July.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
Arthur Hardy is retiring. For the majority of you reading this, that probably doesn’t mean anything, but if you’re from the New Orleans area that name has resonance and the knowledge that his era is coming to an end probably makes you a little bit sad. Hardy is a local historian who, for nearly 50 years, has also been the publisher of an annual Mardi Gras guide that has become a significant part of local culture. This annual magazine contains not only the routes and schedules for virtually every Mardi Gras parade in Southern Louisiana (and for those of you who’ve never done Mardi Gras, I’m telling you now, there’s probably a lot more of them than you think), but also detailed, entertaining, and informative writing about the history and traditions of carnival and the various Krewes, significant figures, and all the collected effluvia that comes with the season. Much like every kid in America used to sit around waiting for the annual Sears Christmas Catalog every year, here in New Orleans it just wasn’t carnival season until Hardy’s Mardi Gras guide showed up on the magazine racks in local gas stations and drugstores.
Farmers have their almanac. We have this.
I bring up Arthur Hardy because in his final season as the unofficial king of carnival, the local PBS station has produced a documentary about his life and career, Arthur Hardy: Our Mardi Gras Guide. If you’re in New Orleans and want to watch it, it’s going to air on Jan. 22 at 7:30 pm on WYES, with additional airings to follow, and it will also stream on the app. I’m excited to learn about this, not only because Hardy is a figure of great cultural importance to the most quintessentially New Orleans tradition there is, but also because I’m a sucker for a good documentary.
I love movies in general, of course, it would be impossible to read more than a couple of pages on this blog without that becoming abundantly clear, but there’s something about a great documentary that can be really compelling. To tell a true story and tell it accurately is an art form that even the greatest narrative filmmaker can struggle to pull off. Finding those bits and pieces of a person’s life and assembling them into a story isn’t easy, especially if the subject of said documentary is someone that the audience will likely already be familiar with. What can you say about this person that hasn’t already been said? What can you show that the fans don’t already know? And can you take the stuff they do know and present it in a way that’s both compelling and entertaining?
In the case of these biographical documentaries, I particularly find myself drawn to those that focus on somebody I’m already a fan of. Films like Jim Henson: Idea Man , Music By John Williams, or To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story all scratch that itch for me, giving me a deeper dive into the life of someone whose work I adore. That said, it’s not a requirement that I’m already intimately familiar with the subject of a documentary for me to enjoy it. For example, I’ve never been a wrestling fan and I knew virtually nothing about the life of Andre the Giant outside of his participation in The Princess Bride, but the Jason Hehir-directed Andre the Giant documentary moved me to tears. I’m just more LIKELY to watch a documentary if it’s a subject I’m already familiar with.
So in anticipation of the Arthur Hardy documentary, today in Geek Punditry I’m going to talk about five of my favorite “biodocs” from the last decade or so, five films that delve into the life of an artist or actor whose work is meaningful to me and why the documentaries land so well.
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (2024)
This is one of those moments where nobody who is even remotely familiar with my taste will find anything surprising. I am, of course, the biggest Superman fan that most people who meet me will ever meet, and I even made one of my (sadly) all-too-rare movie theater visits these days to catch this documentary during its limited Fathom Events screening when it premiered. I was born near the end of the 70s, reared in the 80s, and in my heart of hearts, Christopher Reeve is and always will be MY Superman.
The movie tells two stories in parallel: the story of Christopher Reeve from the beginning of his life through the growth of his career and his life as Superman, intercut with the story of the horseback riding accident that put him in a wheelchair and the unexpected direction his life took after that. The directors (Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui) go back and forth between these two periods, telling their individual stories more or less chronologically but bouncing between the two every few minutes. The result is the surreal experience of watching this young man – strong, talented, and determined – juxtaposed by the person he would become at his lowest point and how he managed to crawl back from that point to become something more. The story of him portraying Superman is presented side-by-side with the story of him actually proving what a real-world Superman can be.
The movie is, as is to be expected, heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. It’s a beautiful tale that everybody knows from the beginning will have a tragic ending. The filmmakers don’t try to portray Reeve as perfect either – they spend time (especially in his early years) putting on display his faults and some of the questionable choices of a young man who is propelled to stardom. The movie also spends a surprising amount of its runtime focusing on Reeve’s relationship with Robin Williams. It’s common knowledge that the two of them were good friends, but until watching this documentary I don’t think I ever realized just how deep that friendship was. If you aren’t crying at that point already, get ready for the moment where Glenn Close (one of many actors interviewed for the film) speculates that if Reeve hadn’t died, Robin Williams would still be with us today as well.
Hell, you might be crying right now and you haven’t even watched the movie yet.
The film is currently streaming on HBO Max, which means if you want to watch it you should probably hit “play” in the next 15 minutes before they do something else stupid and remove more content from the service that absolutely should still be there.
The Scrooge Mystery (2018)
Don Rosa is one of the most globally popular comic book creators of all time, but far too many American fans have never heard his name. That’s because the bulk of his career was spent chronicling the adventures of Scrooge McDuck, his nephews, and the assorted characters that have sprung up around him in the world of Duckberg. Rosa spent decades writing and drawing stories of Scrooge and Donald Duck, and while they have been published and enjoyed here in America, they have achieved rock star status in Europe, where Disney comics are among the biggest pop culture outlets there are.
Rosa’s life and career is the focus of this documentary by filmmaker Morgann Gicquel, and through its two hours you’ll see the story of a young comic book fan who fell out of the artform and found his way back by carrying on the mantle of the great Carl Barks, Scrooge’s creator. Rosa talks candidly about his career, including his interactions with various publishers around the world, which ones treated him better than others, and his relationship with the company that actually owns the characters that he has made even more famous through works like his masterpiece The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
The movie is entertaining, filling in blanks in Rosa’s life that even comic book fans (like myself) probably wouldn’t know, since the lives of cartoonists are not nearly as heavily covered by the media as those of actors and directors. As Rosa gives the filmmaker a tour of his home – including a gargantuan comic book collection that will make anyone who loves reading deeply envious – he comes across as a little awkward and eccentric, but endearing in the process. You’ll also get to see Rosa at work and feel your heart crumble a bit as he describes his deteriorating vision and how it is one of the things that caused him to retire. To look at some of the amazing, meticulously detailed artwork he’s created over the decades and know that the man whose pencils made those lines now has to practically press his face against the page in order to keep drawing is truly saddening.
I was one of the original Kickstarter backers for this movie back when it was in production, so I got a Blu-Ray copy of the film upon its release, which I was lucky enough to have Rosa to autograph last year when he came to Fan Expo New Orleans. Those of you who don’t already own the film may expect to see it on Disney+, but the odds of that happening are pretty slim. (Spoiler warning: although Rosa had good relationships with many of the publishers he worked with over the years, he makes it abundantly clear in this film that his feelings about the modern House of Mouse itself are far from kind.) Fortunately, it is currently available on several free streaming platforms, including Pluto TV, Hoopla, and Tubi. If you’re interested in Disney, comic books in general, or the marriage of the two, this is a great film.
For the Love of Spock (2016)
So far this list has turned out to be a chronicle of my own personal fandoms, hasn’t it? First Superman, then Scrooge McDuck, and now Star Trek. There have been a great many documentaries made about Trek over the years (one of the best movie theater experiences I ever had was watching Trekkies in a room full of like-minded nerds), but as far as films focusing on the life of a single person, I think this one is the best.
For the Love of Spock looks at the life of Leonard Nimoy and his sometimes tumultuous relationship with the character he brought to life. The film discusses those years when he tried to distance himself from the role and how he ultimately came around to embrace it. These are things that Trek fans, of course, are already intimately aware of. What makes this movie special is its director: Leonard Nimoy’s son, Adam. This is a very specific subcategory of documentary – films made by the family of the subject – that I always find intriguing. Adam Nimoy, as one would expect, has a very personal and unique perspective on the life of his father and what exactly Star Trek means – not only to Leonard Nimoy himself, but to the world at large. There are a lot of people who could tell the story of Leonard Nimoy, but it is doubtful that anybody else would tell it the same way as Adam Nimoy.
Nimoy passed away in 2015, while this movie was in production, so in a way it also serves as kind of a “last word” on him and the character. At least, as much as there will ever be a “last word.” Star Trek isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and Spock is one of the signature characters of the franchise, so this movie is never going to not be relevant. But it will always be, to quote Nimoy’s signature character, “fascinating.”
Like The Scrooge Mystery, this one is currently streaming on Pluto TV, Hoopla, and Tubi, as well as the Roku Channel.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2018)
Morgan Neville directed this film about the life and career of Fred “Mister” Rogers, a man who probably helped raise most of the people who are reading this column right now. For over three decades, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood came into the homes of the children of America and showed us things about creativity, imagination, kindness, and life. The question someone on the outside would likely ask, then, is how much of that was an actor playing a character and how much of that was the man himself.
This film puts forth the thesis that, when it came to Mr. Rogers, ol’ brother Fred was doing very little acting. The sweet, tender, and understanding soul that entertained us in the mornings of our formative years was the same soul Fred Rogers carried with him in his day-to-day life. The movie uses interviews with actors and crew from the TV show, Rogers’ wife Joanne, and others that were touched by him over the years to paint a portrait of an intrinsically good and humble man who never wanted anything other than to show children kindness.
That said, the movie isn’t totally saccharine either. It delves into the struggles of the creating the show, those periods where the real world was too harsh and how Rogers struggled how to deal with it, and the sort of existential crises that truly good people sometimes go through. Rogers was human, and not without his doubts. Towards the end, after his retirement, there’s a segment about how he struggled when asked to come back and make a short video speaking to children after 9/11, and the pain as he tries to figure out what to say is palpable. On the other hand, whereas many movies of this nature spend time looking at the failures or vices of its subject, this movie struggles to FIND any vices to put on the screen. It is particularly telling when Joanne reports that, as Rogers’ life was coming to an end, he was worried that he hadn’t done enough good for the world he was leaving behind.
Good grief. If Mr. Rogers wasn’t good enough, what chance do ANY of us have?
But the takeaway here should be that the doubt was only in his mind, that it is only the truly good among us that would ever worry about such a thing. And I am using the adjective “good” here rather than “great” very deliberately – if you don’t understand the distinction, you need to watch more Mr. Rogers.
This one is streaming right now on Amazon Prime Video
John Candy: I Like Me (2025)
The newest film in my top five came out just a few months ago. Directed by Colin Hanks, John Candy: I Like Me is a sweet dissection of the life and career of one of the funniest men of the 1980s, and to a degree, about how the world failed him. Hanks interviews Candy’s friends, co-stars, and family to give us an image of someone who was deeply kind and generous, but at the same time, wasn’t without his own demons. Hanks does his due diligence by showing those things, but it’s all through the perspective of interviews with people who obviously adore Candy and are in the business of preserving his memory.
This is a case where I don’t think there’s anything in the movie that’s particularly revelatory, but in which we dig more deeply into things we already knew. For example, Macaulay Culkin (who co-starred with him at the advanced age of eight) mentions how Candy was one of the first people who seemed to notice the toxic and abusive nature of Culkin’s father, and how he went out of his way to check in on and shield the boy on the set of their film Uncle Buck. Conan O’Brien’s remembrances of Candy came not as the host of a popular talk show, but from when he met the already-famous Candy when he was a college student, and how his interactions with the man shaped his career.
The movie is awash with interviews with the likes of Bill Murray, Catherine O’Hara, Mel Brooks, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, and many other people who seem to be lining up to tell the world that John Candy was a beautiful, kind, and talented man. If you’ve ever been a fan of his, I don’t think there’s anything in this movie that you’ll find shocking. But by the end of it, as you wipe the tears from your eyes, you’re definitely going to find yourself wishing that we had been lucky enough to have more of him before the ride was over.
This one is a Prime Video original, so go stream it there.
As always with these “Five Favorites” columns, my choices are inherently subjective and may change at any moment. There are a dozen other documentaries I can think of that would have fit into this list, and on any given day, may have bumped one of the ones that made the cut. But I’m always interested in more. If you know of a great biodoc, particularly one about a creative type like the five I’ve listed here, drop your own suggestions in the comments. I’d love to watch another one.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He cannot fathom why his Kickstarter for a documentary about American Idol alumni William Hung keeps getting flagged and taken down.
Last weekend was Fan Expo New Orleans. If you recall, during the full Year of Superman last year, I wrote about the Superman-related stuff I found at Fan Expo 2025. And right now, let’s all be grateful that was last year and not this year, because this year’s Fan Expo – I’m sorry to report – was kind of a bust. The big cons have been shedding comic and science fiction participation for years, that’s nothing new. The shows are becoming more and more focused on anime and photo ops. And look – it’s not like I think that everything has to cater to me personally. I know, I’m an old man and people need to chase the money young people are bringing to the table. But there are full-on anime cons out there. The convention culture was built around comic book and sci-fi geeks, such as myself, and it feels very much like we’re the ones getting left out in the cold. All of this is to say, after a Saturday afternoon of prowling the vendor floor, I probably spent less money at this year’s Expo than I ever have before.
Seeing as how this is “Superman Stuff,” I’m only going to run through the few related finds I got. I knew even before I got there that I was going to hit up one of the booths that sells custom LEGO-style minifigures, because I’ve got a display of Superman-related figures in my classroom and I wanted to add to it. There was a movie version of Superman and Krypto that I added to my display, but sadly, those were the only two Superman characters they had that I didn’t have already. (I did, however, pick up the movie Fantastic Four, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the core Heeler family from Bluey, so I came away satisfied.)
The comics were an even bigger bust. I like to hit the bargain bins – the dollar comics, the weird stuff. But I found only two such bins in the whole show. and I’m pretty sure there were only four or five comic book vendors TOTAL. I walked away with a handful of old Archie comics and some 80s Marvel goodness, but the only Superman comic that fell into my hands was a battered reading copy of Action Comics #342 from 1966, which I’m digging into today.
In “The Super-Human Bomb,” Brainiac is prowling space, trying to think of some way to defeat Superman, when he finds himself under attack by another alien named Grax, whose 20th level intelligence is obviously way above Brainiac’s mere 12th level. Grax has a beef with Superman as well, and has come up with a scheme to destroy him, but he needs a force field and somehow Mr. 20th Level can’t figure out how to make one, so he steals Brainiac’s. Grax tricks Superman with a missile that attaches a bomb to the man of steel, a bomb he claims is powerful enough to annihilate Earth, and it’s rigged to go off if Superman tries to remove it. Oh yeah, and just in case he gets any smart ideas about flying into space, Grax put Brainiac’s force field around Earth, trapping him here, with a 24-hour timer on the bomb.
I have to admit, inability to invent a force field notwithstanding, so far Grax is making a solid case for being eight levels smarter than Brainiac. He never got this far.
Superman spends the next 24 hours trying desperately to stop the bomb, but everything fails. He even offers to let Grax kill him if he will spare Earth, but Grax refuses. Minutes before the explosion, Brainiac messages Superman and tells him how to defeat Grax: build an enormous magnet (shaped like a horseshoe, because theming) and use it to draw Grax’s ship against the force field, trapping him in the blast radius of the bomb. Superman gets into Grax’s ship and hits the switch for the bomb, just as – in the most dramatic moment in comic book history – I realize that this $1 reading copy I purchased is missing pages out of the middle, so I can’t see how the story ends.
Incredible!
The back-up story, fortunately, is complete: Supergirl stars in “The Day Supergirl Became an Amazon.” College student Linda Danvers is on a trip to the South Pacific to gather specimens for the school aquarium, when their ship is struck by a heavy storm. Supergirl secretly guides the ship to an island, where the students casually decide to begin collecting their specimens rather than wondering about, y’know, getting rescued. But the island turns out to be occupied by an Amazon tribe that would later be sued by Themiscyra for trademark infringement.
The Amazons put Linda and her classmates in slave girl costumes because fun, and that night Linda puts her Supergirl costume on a bird so people will see it flying around and assume Supergirl is on a mission, and that may be one of the most confusing sentences I’ve ever written. The Amazons feed the girls a “nectar of strength” which doesn’t appear to impact Linda’s classmates, but she pretends that the nectar has given her super powers and starts wiping the floor with the Amazons in trial after trial. Eventually, Linda does such a good job of building a pyramid with the stones from the Amazon’s homes that the queen gets fed up with her and lets the girls go. The story is an absolute masterpiece, assuming that you don’t stop to wonder why Supergirl dropped their ship on the island instead of taking them to a safe place in the first place, why she felt it necessary to put her costume on a bird, or what Linda’s major was and what kind of college sends three random students to the South Pacific in a hovercraft.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
Before we start, I want to assure you that this column will NOT spoil the final season of Stranger Things. I do my best to avoid spoilers in general, but it will be particularly easy in this case because I have not yet watched the final season of Stranger Things. A lot of people around me have, though, and a lot of people have opinions about it. This week, as my students filtered back into my class after their Christmas break, I heard them discussing the series finale and I had to kindly request that they refrain from speaking about specifics in my presence. (I believe my exact words were “If you spoil anything for me I’m going to make it my mission to see to it that you never graduate.” It’s good to teach seniors sometimes.)
“These kids were in high school for ten years, don’t think I won’t do that to you, too.”
One of the non-spoiler things I heard them discussing, though, was something people were calling “Conformity Gate.” I don’t know exactly what this is a reference to or where the term comes from, other than the generic tendency ever since Nixon to append the -gate suffix to any sort of scandal or conspiracy because people are too lazy to come up with something original. From what I gathered, the “Conformity Gate” discussion centered around an internet theory that there was a SECRET NINTH EPISODE of the final season, that the episode that dropped on New Year’s Eve was NOT the actual series finale, and that on the evening of January 7th, Netflix would surprise us all by dropping the TRUE series finale of the epic and long-awaited sci-fi/horror series Stranger Things.
And I gotta tell ya, when I heard this theory, I lauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughed…
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard such a thing. Last fall, there was supposedly a secret episode of Peacemaker season two. At one point I recall hearing such a theory about Game of Thrones. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it for certain series of Doctor Who. And just like with those other series, Jan. 7 came and went and there was nothing except an announcement for the (previously-announced) Stranger Things animated spin-off series.
These theories are simply never true. And honestly, the way that TV and movie production is handled in this day and age, such a thing would be virtually inconceivable.
Not impossible. In fact, it would be relatively easy to do. It’s just that the studios would never let ’em do it.
Now I’m going to preface this by saying that these theories are almost always spread by people who are upset about the final episode and unable to accept that what they just saw was the “real” ending. It’s a stubborn, childish insistence, and even in those cases where I happen to agree that the final episode was disappointing, it’s kind of an insult to the people who actually made the show. (I can only imagine what would have happened had this sort of speculation been common when How I Met Your Mother wrapped.) I’m not saying that it’s unfair to be disappointed in how a show ends – that is of course a matter of personal taste and nobody has the right to tell you that you’re right or wrong for your tastes. But it IS pretty darn childish to have the attitude that what you watched was somehow SO bad that it MUST have been an intentional misdirect.
Think about it just for a second: is anyone who works on TV – writers, directors, actors, showrunners – ever going to DELIBERATELY make a bad episode? Would they take such a risk? That’s not anyone’s goal. They want to build interest and anticipation with each installment, and having people trash your work doesn’t do that. There’s an old adage that the only “bad press” is “no press,” and I’m here to tell you, that’s a straight-up lie. Just ask the people who made the Spider-Man quasi-spinoff Morbius.
If you didn’t share 19 “It’s Morbin’ Time!” memes were you even ON the internet in 2022?
That movie was the talk of the town. Everybody was discussing it, making memes about it, and pushing it to the forefront of the conversation…but the buzz, deserved or not, was all BAD. And then the movie came out and completely bombed. Then when people kept talking about it, Sony took a shot at re-releasing it, and it bombed AGAIN. I’m not saying that without the bad buzz the movie would have been a hit, but it’s undeniable that heavy internet chatter surrounding the film did NOTHING to help its numbers.
Then there’s the other reason that such a thing would be virtually inconceivable today: the studios who make movies and television shows are utterly adverse to surprise. Everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – has to be dumped out onto the public far ahead of time. Casting news, romantic subplots, climatic battles, full songs are all spilled out onto the internet weeks, months, even years before the movie or TV show actually makes it to your screen. Movie trailers have become particularly bad about this. I love a good trailer. Making a good trailer – essentially a short film intended to get an audience interested in watching the FULL movie – is an art form in and of itself. But the studios seem to have forgotten that, and rather than doing something artful to engage the audience and make people want to head to the movie theater, their strategy seems to be to just give away every surprise and plot point in the hopes that it will accomplish the same thing.
I get why they do this, of course. Whether you’re talking about a theatrical release or a streaming show, in the 21st century it seems like the only numbers that matter are those that we get in the first few days of a release. Let’s use the recent slate of Avengers: Doomsday trailers as an example. In the last few weeks, we’ve started to get teaser trailers that show a glimpse of a character or two, followed by the announcement that “Steve Rogers will return in Avengers: Doomsday.” Or Thor. Or the X-Men. And by the time you read this, there will probably be teasers with everyone from the Fantastic Four to Spider-Ham to Millie the Model.
This is the one that broke the Internet.
None of these (except Millie) would be much of a shock. Last year Marvel had a huge streaming event which amounted to showing us – one at a time – director’s chairs with the names of assorted cast members, their way of telling us who was going to be in the movie. Some of them were a surprise at the time, and that was (I admit) kind of cool. But wouldn’t it have been cooler if we had NO IDEA that Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammar were going to be back as Professor X and the Beast until we were in the theater, watching it, and then they showed up out of the blue?
I think so, anyway.
Would in-theater surprises get people excited? Would it make them engaged? Absolutely. If an audience is excited and energized about a movie, they’ll walk out talking about it, they’ll tell their friends they have to see it, and the movie can grow legs. But the problem is that the studios no longer CARE about legs. This strategy – keep it a surprise and build word of mouth – is the way to get people excited about a movie in the long-term. That’s not how movies are evaluated anymore, unfortunately. All that matters is that opening weekend in a theater or the first 48 hours of streaming. If you don’t get massive numbers up front, a movie is declared a failure. There was a time when a movie might not have had an enormous opening weekend, but positive word of mouth would allow it to stay in a theater for weeks or even months until it became what they called a “sleeper” hit.
The studios don’t care about that anymore. An ad that says “the number one movie in America!” is way sexier than one that says “we made back our budget in the fifth week of release!” So they do everything they possibly can do to frontload the audience and get everyone to see the movie right away. This, by the way, is one of the approximately 3,972 reasons that I’m very nervous about the prospect of Netflix buying Warner Bros. Netflix is a streaming platform, and the head of the company has frequently expressed outright disdain for the theatrical release model that I personally hold so dear. I’m very much afraid that if this deal is eventually allowed to happen, it will be the final chokehold on the already-dying movie theater experience.
But that’s a whole different topic. What does this have to do with “Conformity Gate” and the potential for another episode of Stranger Things? It’s simply this: Netflix (any studio, really, but we’re talking about Netflix specifically at the moment) would simply never take the risk of hiding such a thing. They are ADDICTED to telling you EVERYTHING. Remember, this is the studio that tells its writers that the characters have to ANNOUNCE WHAT THEY ARE DOING OUT LOUD because they assume that most of the audience will be scrolling on their phones instead of really paying attention when they’re watching a show. Do you honestly think they’ve got a high enough opinion of you to drop a surprise like that?
The tragedy of it is that I actually think it WOULD be a great thing to attempt, kind of like a hidden track on a CD. (Those don’t really exist anymore either, so kids, ask your parents.) It would be amazing if Netflix, or anybody for that matter, was capable of keeping a secret of this magnitude and then executing it. Now they obviously couldn’t do it all the time. It would need to be used sparingly, and only for exactly the right project, a story for which that kind of surprise ending would be both structurally and tonally appropriate. And let’s be honest here: they would not hide the existence of the episode right up until the moment it drops. It’s far more likely that the episode we EXPECT to be the finale to end with a “To be continued” card or something to that effect. But if executed properly, it could be a really thrilling moment.
The funny part is that Netflix actually did do something like this once. Anybody remember the Super Bowl in 2018? Like most Super Bowls, the biggest draw was the commercials. I was there to see what Doritos was up to, or Pepsi, or something dot com that probably doesn’t exist anymore. And most of all, I’m there for the movie trailers. As far as I’m concerned, every Super Bowl commercial should either be really funny, or a kick-ass movie trailer. In 2018, one of those trailers hit us with the Netflix logo, then scrolled into scenes from some sort of outer space thriller that we hadn’t heard of before. It wasn’t like getting a Marvel or Star Wars trailer, where we knew that the movie was in production and we were just hoping for our first glimpse. This was something totally new.
And at the end of the trailer, we got the title: The Cloverfield Paradox. Holy crap. It was the new Cloverfield movie, the one that had been rumored ever since 10 Cloverfield Lane. And it wasn’t going to theaters, it was gonna be a Netflix movie.
Then came the biggest shock: the announcement that the movie was NOW STREAMING. It wasn’t telling us that the movie was dropping in a year or a month. It was ON NETFLIX AND WE COULD WATCH IT RIGHT NOW.
“If it’s HALF as good as the first two Cloverfield movies, this is gonna change everything!”
I thought then – and still think now – that it was one of the most brilliant marketing moves Netflix could ever have done. It was an incredible surprise and it got me more enthusiastic about watching that movie that I think would even have been possible otherwise. And it’s a shame, really, that as a movie The Cloverfield Paradox turned out to be…well…not great. Because if it had been, that would have been checkmate. This could have been an annual thing. We could sit down for the Super Bowl every year, wondering what movie Netflix was going to announce during the game that we would have the option to watch as soon as the game was over (as opposed to the random episode of Matlock that they usually show for some reason).
But it didn’t pan out that way, and now Netflix is more risk-averse than anybody. Remember, this is the studio that cancels entire series if they aren’t a smash hit in the week after the first episode drops. Do you really think they’d take a chance at a whole surprise episode?
It would be cool, don’t get me wrong.
I just don’t see it happening.
So the next time you’re unhappy with the finale of a Netflix show and someone floats the idea that there’s a special “hidden” episode waiting for you, ask yourself if the streamer that killed The Santa Clarita Diet would actually do such a thing before you pass that rumor along.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He’s planning to start his own Stranger Things conspiracy theory. Now that Netflix has Sesame Street, they’re doing a miniseries that will reveal the hidden connection between Eleven and all her siblings to the terrifying and legendary Count Von Count. You heard it here first.
At the end of 2025, I made the decision to keep up my blogging about Superman. Unlike 2025, though, I’m not going to require myself to read or watch something literally every single day. That was a fun challenge, but the truth is, I know it’s not sustainable. I’ve got other writing to do, after all. But I’m going to aim to have some “Superman Stuff” for you roughly once a week. This might be a review of a comic book, a TV episode, or a movie. It might be a discussion of recent news or announcements. It might be talking about a new piece of merch or discussion of merch that I just WISH existed. I’m leaving the doors for this very open for me, because I want that freedom to take this in any direction that strikes me.
I call it…
To start this new, open-ended journey, I’m going to read a couple of the many books that were left over in my massive “Year of Superman” reading list, the first two issues of the 2016 DC Rebirth reboot, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year somehow. Following the divisive New 52 era, this version of Superman (by Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason) felt very much like a return to form – it was the post-Crisis Superman again, married to Lois Lane, raising their son Jonathan together. And oddly enough, it began with Superman – the classic Superman – mourning the death of his “brother,” the New 52 Superman, which had happened just months before.
The Kents are still living on a farm here, under the assumed identities that they were using to avoid the revamped universe’s Clark and Lois. The relative seclusion is also helpful for Jonathan, still learning his powers. At the beginning of this issue he gets a horrific reminder of just what he can do – when a bird snatches his cat, Goldie, Jonathan’s heat vision fires instinctively, annihilating both the bird AND the cat. To make matters worse, a neighbor girl witnesses his trauma. Jonathan snaps at his parents later, upset about having to hide who he really is and what he can do, and is sent to his room. As he sits in his room, his father gets a visit by Wonder Woman and Batman, both concerned about this “new” Superman and his family – particularly the ten-year-old boy with Kryptonian power.
In issue #2, Superman takes Jonathan out with him to watch as he helps a ship trapped in ice, only to find an enormous tentacled creature beneath the waves. As Superman battles the creature, he instructs Jon into how to use his heat vision to neutralize the monster and send it below the waves. To his surprise, Jon realizes it’s…kind of fun. That fun is shattered later when Jon is hanging out with Kathy – the neighbor girl who saw him use his heat vision – and takes a tumble from a tree. He’s unconscious, hurt far more than he should be, and Clark decides a trip to the Fortress of Solitude is in order, not knowing that a visitor is waiting there.
This was such a great era for Superman. The classic version is back, the family is back, and best of all, we get stories like this. Clark is teaching his son to use his powers, helping him slowly discover them and having sincere discussions about what it means to be a hero. The episode with the monster in the ice, for example, is entirely orchestrated by Clark. He knew that Jon used his heat vision on the cat (he could smell the traces of ozone left behind by a heat vision blast) and decided to pull the ol’ “get back on the bicycle before you’re scared of it” routine to put him in a position where he has to use his powers to HELP people.
Jonathan killing the cat, as awful as it is for him, is a great story beat. Superman’s “no killing” code is a fundamental part of the character, but it’s also a lesson that he had to learn. Jonathan gets to learn that lesson early, through an accident that is no less traumatic. It’s kind of emblematic of what being a parent is – you want your child to be better than you and learn from your mistakes, knowing full well that they’re going to wind up making mistakes of their own. Goldie’s death was a total accident, and Clark knew that Jonathan would take it to heart, so rather than punishing him or lecturing him, he turned it into a unique teachable moment. It was peak parenting.
This was the first time we were going to see Superman as a dad for an extended period, and Tomasi’s approach is great. In the first issue, shown mostly through Jonathan’s perspective, Clark is a little intimidating, the way kids can see their fathers. In issue two, that barrier is broken and we realize that the kind, caring nature of Superman extends to his nature as a parent. The scenes with Clark and Jon in this issue are note-perfect, and would be a hallmark of Tomasi’s run.
To be blunt, this is yet another reason I’ll never quite forgive DC for aging Jonathan up a few years later. There are hundreds of stories about teenage superheroes out there, and for the most part, they haven’t known what the hell to do with Jonathan since then. But stories of the greatest hero in the world fathering, tutoring, mentoring, TEACHING a super-powered child? Those are in very short supply, and they had only scratched the surface of the potential here before it was swept away.
At some point, I may try to find a reading order of all the Superman comics between Rebirth and Action Comics #1000, because that whole too-short two-year era calls to me as something well worth revisiting again and again. It was a great time for Superman. I just wish DC had realized it.
Blake M. Petitis a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive!Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
Yesterday, January 1st, was the first day since 2024 that I didn’t read, watch, or listen to anything related to Superman.
And I missed doing it.
Unless you’ve been living under a Kryptonite rock, you know that at the end of 2024, enthused for the then-upcoming James Gunn movie, I declared that 2025 would be my Year of Superman, and for the next 365 days I adhered to that. Every day for a solid year I read comics, watched movies and TV shows, listened to podcasts, and otherwise spent time with stories featuring my favorite superhero and his extended family. 52 blog posts later (all of which are archived right here, by the way) it’s time for me to look back and think about what it all means to me.
Nailed it.
To begin with, I don’t do this very often, but I’ve got to congratulate myself for actually accomplishing the goal. In that original column when I announced the project, I said that I would give myself grace, fully expecting that at some point in the year I would slip up and miss a day. And let me tell you, there were days in 2025 in which I didn’t want to read or watch anything. Bad days came and I didn’t want to do much more than retreat to my own Fortress of Solitude. But I didn’t. I made it without missing a single day. Let’s talk about what that means by the numbers. Over the course of 2025, the media I consumed included:
1 TV special (the Superman 50th Anniversary special)
And finally – are you ready for this? 1206 individual comic book issues that featured at least one story in which a member of the Superman family appeared.
That’s – and keep in mind that I’m referring to myself here – batshit insane. I don’t know if David Corenswet spent as much time in 2025 thinking about Superman as I did. So after all that…what does it mean? What have I learned about him?
The truth is, I find that the things I already believed were mostly affirmed. Superman has been around for nearly 90 years now, and in that time there have been many stories told about him and many different interpretations of the character. And that’s all fine. But let me tell you about MY Superman, what I get from the character, why he matters so damned much to ME.
In Man of Steel, Henry Cavill popularized to the mainstream something that had been part of the comics for a few years at that point, that the S-shield Superman wears, the emblem of the House of El (at least going back to the 1978 Christopher Reeve movie) was a Kryptonian symbol for hope. But what exactly does that mean? Is it just because Superman is so powerful? Is it because when you see that symbol, you know that the danger you’re in is only temporary, that somebody will be there to save you? Is that “S” just for “Superman,” or does it also mean “Savior?”
Yeah. That guy. Any of him.
Superman’s story has a lot of allusions to Christianity, with Marlon Brando’s Jor-El even referring to Kal-El as “my only son,” but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were Jewish and the story perhaps fits the concept of Moses even better. If you’ll forgive a brief moment of spirituality, Jesus was sent as the Savior of the human race in a direct way, and we get that whenever Superman saves someone falling from a burning building, leaps in front of a speeding bullet, or stops a locomotive to save the kid stuck on the tracks. Moses, on the other hand, was a less direct kind of savior, a leader, someone who GUIDES his people to a better world. And it is in this capacity that the parallels to Superman are stronger. Sure, Superman will save you from a flood, but more importantly, he’s there to show you that there’s a better way.
Let’s say it one more time: It’s not subtle.
It’s almost a cliche to say it at this point, but Superman’s greatest power is not his strength, his speed, his ability to fly or see through walls. His greatest power is his compassion, his unflinching belief in the goodness of people, and his ability to help others see things that way as well. Superman is the man who will never give up on you: no matter who you are or what you’ve done, he will always have faith in your ability to be better.
If you’re going to wear that shield, Kenan, you need to remember this.
In the climax of the new movie, David Corenswet tells Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor that his greatest strength is his humanity, and that he hopes for the good of the world that some day Luthor will realize the same thing about himself. From anybody else, that line would sound trite, pat, and cloying. From Superman, you believe it. The tragedy of Lex Luthor is not that he’s a criminal or a killer or anything else. That makes him a villain. What makes him a tragic figure, what Superman laments every time he faces him, is that he has a mind that could make the world a better place, but chooses to use it selfishly. And every time he faces Luthor, Superman hopes that this will be the time that Luthor sees the light. It’s even happened in the comics a few times, where Lex has turned good. It’s always been temporary, of course, except for in self-contained continuities like All-Star Superman, but we’ve seen time and again that even Lex Luthor has within him a seed of redemption. We’ve seen time and again that Superman is right. And if he’s right – if even LEX LUTHOR has the potential to be a better person tomorrow than he is today – then what does that mean for the rest of us?
Superman believes the best of you. And he inspires you to believe the best in others. In the final episode of Superman and Lois we see him in flight with his extended family of heroes, and we learn that he and Lois manage to change their world for the better. In Final Night, we are reminded that half the superheroes in the world look to him as inspiration (the other half, naturally, look to Batman). The whole point of The Iron Giant is that the Giant himself – an alien weapon – looks to the example of Superman and sees that he can make himself better.
The Giant gets it better than anybody on BlueSky.
We cannot bend steel in our bare hands. We cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound. We cannot change the course of mighty rivers, or freeze those rivers with our breath. We cannot fly through space unaided, travel through time, or crush a lump of coal into a diamond. Those things are beyond us.
But we can believe in the best of each other. And maybe, if we do enough of that, those others will actually begin to earn that trust. And maybe, if we do enough of that, we can learn to believe in the best of ourselves.
We should believe the best of ourselves.
Because Superman would.
Remind yourself, in those times where you’re dangling off the edge of that cliff and you think you’ll never make it, that Superman would believe in you.
And who are you to tell Superman that he’s wrong?
And don’t you forget it.
So now what?
Some people, after spending an entire year dwelling on a single character, would get tired of it. I…I’m not. I want more Superman. And there’s so much more to come. There’s the Supergirl movie coming out later this year, of course. And a new season of My Adventures of Superman is also scheduled to drop some time in 2026. Next year we’ll get Man of Tomorrow. DC Comics has announced some really interesting things for the ongoing Superman comics after the current DC KO event wraps up that I’m certainly going to want to talk about. They’ve also teased the return of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and come on, if Superman’s not involved with that in some way, what are we even doing? And let’s not forget that in March, after decades apart, Superman is finally going to meet Marvel’s friendly neighborhood webslinger again in a new Superman/Spider-Man crossover.
We’re back, baby!
Then there’s all the stuff on my list that I just didn’t get around to this year: John Ostrander’s amazing miniseries The Kents, Grant Morrison’s DC One Million event (which – let’s be honest – is a Superman story at its core), or the “world without Superman” Elseworlds series Justice League: The Nail. There are still several animated films I didn’t get to watch. I had hoped to do an entire week on fanfilms, but ran out of time. And I had stories picked out for weeks focusing on Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, Kong Kenan, and other characters that didn’t get scratched off the list.
The truth is, I don’t want to stop reading, watching, or writing about Superman. I just don’t want to HAVE to do it EVERY DAY.
So consider this my official announcement. Starting in 2026 and going on…well, as long as I wanna do it, I’ll be bringing you SUPERMAN STUFF right here on the blog. Sometimes it’ll be new comics, new movies, new TV shows. Sometimes it’ll be classic stuff that I haven’t talked about before. I’ll still endeavor to have at least one blog post a week, but they won’t be as long as they were in 2025 (you’re welcome) and they may not necessarily always be on a Wednesday.
The world of Superman is vast, and despite the mountain of stuff that I mentioned in the list above, there’s plenty more to dig into. The regular Geek Punditry blog here on Fridays won’t change. But I’m going to continue to devote real estate here to talking about the characters and stories that I love.
Because there’s something to be learned here. And it’s a lesson we can all use.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. To all the people who sent him messages urging him to make 2026 “The Year of Captain Underpants,” he considered it. A little.
Blake M. Petit 