Geek Punditry

Geek Punditry #103: Blake’s Five Favorite Santa Claus Stories

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Once again, it’s time for Five Favorites, that semi-regular feature here in Geek Punditry where I give you my five favorite examples of something. “Favorite,” of course, is a relative term, and is actually pretty fluid for me. I may think of something tomorrow that would supplant one of the choices on this list if I were to write this again. But for here, for today, I want to talk about five of my all-time favorite Santa Claus stories.

With Christmas only days away, the big guy is up north checking out his list, loading up the sleigh, and slopping the reindeer, so it only seems fair to me that I talk about some of the stories that have made him such a beloved icon to the young and the young at heart for centuries now. Let’s talk about the tales that make St. Nicholas so great.

The Autobiography of Santa Claus as told to Jeff Guinn. 

This book, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, has long been a favorite of mine. You see, when Santa decided it was time to tell the truth about his life story, he recruited journalist Jeff Guinn to help him compose the book, a deep dive into the life of the man who was once known as Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. 

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ve probably heard me talk about this book before, because it’s one I return to every few years. Guinn’s book mines actual history, including the true life of Nicholas, and combines it with a sort of subtle, beautiful magic. People expecting a superhero-style origin story for Santa Claus will be disappointed, because the truth is that Nicholas was just sort of “chosen” by unexplained forces, and to this day still doesn’t know why…but he knows that his mission is to give the world the gift of hope. 

The story is lovely, and I love the way he mixes real history with fantasy. In fact, the history doesn’t stop with Nicholas’s life, but goes on to show Santa’s interaction with things like the composition of the song “Silent Night,” his influence on Charles Dickens and Clement Clarke Moore, and the lives of some of the very unusual and unexpected helpers he’s accrued in his many centuries on this Earth. 

The book has two sequels. How Mrs. Claus Saves Christmas gives us a dive into Oliver Cromwell and his war on Christmas, and how Santa’s wife saved the holiday. The Great Santa Search rounds out the trilogy with a story set in the modern day, in which Santa finds himself competing on a TV reality show to prove who is, in fact, the true Santa Claus. All of the books are great, but the first one is my favorite.

Santa Claus: The Movie

If it’s a superhero origin that you’re looking for, though, this 1985 movie is for you. It was produced by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, riding the success of their Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve. And in fact, this movie is pretty much a straight rip of the structure of the first Superman movie: it begins with the character’s origin story (Santa and his wife are saved from freezing to death by the elves, who are there to recruit him), spends about half the film showing the hero’s development, and then introduces the villain at about the halfway point. From there we get to the real story, Santa fighting for relevance in a modern world where a corrupt toymaker is stealing his thunder.

I was eight years old when this movie came out, and that was apparently the perfect time to fall in love with it. I still love it. And David Huddleston – aka the Big Lebowski himself – is still my Santa Claus. When I close my eyes and picture St. Nicholas, it’s the David Huddleston version – his smile, his charm, his warm laugh are indelible parts of the Santa Claus archetype in my head. John Lithgow fills in Gene Hackman’s role as the villain, playing a cost-cutting toy executive named B.Z. who sees Christmas as nothing more than a profit margin. Dudley Moore is also along for the ride as Patch, one of the elves who finds himself in a bit of a crisis of faith. 

It’s a shame that this movie never got any sequels, because it was set up in such a way that there were many more stories to tell, but it underperformed and apparently did major damage to Dudley Moore’s career. Before this he was a rising comedy icon, and afterwards he fell off the A-list. I still think it’s a fantastic movie, though, and I have to admit that when I watch it, I wonder what would have happened if John Lithgow had ever had a turn playing Lex Luthor.

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum

For a different take on Santa’s origin, let’s wind the clock back to 1902. L. Frank Baum is riding the high of his hit children’s book The Wizard of Oz and he’s looking for a new project. Rather than return to Oz, though, he goes in a different direction and a different fairy tale – that of a young child abandoned in the woods and raised by fairies to become the most giving man in the world.

This is a very different take on Santa than most modern versions. It’s light on the fancy and heavy on the fantasy, with Santa being forced to do battle with monsters and creatures that are out to stop his quest to bring toys to children, and a conclusion that feels like it could have fallen out of the likes of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. It’s hard to remember sometimes that the way we think about Santa Claus today was sort of codified by lots of little things over the early part of the 20th century – influences from poems, books, songs, and even the original AI-free Coca-Cola Santa Claus ads. But Baum’s book was before most of those things, and although his Santa doesn’t exactly jive with the Santa we know and love (no North Pole workshop, ten reindeer instead of eight, different fairy creatures instead of elves, and so forth), it’s still a fascinating read. It’s especially interesting if you’re a fan of the Oz books, as I am. This was two years before Baum would go back to his most famous creation and transform Oz from a single novel into a franchise, but it feels like it belongs in that “universe.” In fact, in later books Baum would link many of his unrelated books to the world of Oz through the connections of characters, other fairylands, and creatures that would grow in prominence. If you want to consider this the origin of Santa Claus in the universe of Oz, it’s not hard.

The Year Without a Santa Claus

Let’s get away from origin stories, though. We all love the Rankin/Bass classics, and their Christmas specials are legendary. In the top two specials, namely Rudolph and Frosty, Santa is just a supporting character. But they did give Santa a few specials of his own, and this second one is my favorite. In this 1974 Animagic classic, Mickey Rooney voices a Santa Claus that’s down with a nasty cold. This, coupled with a feeling of apathy from the children of the world about his annual visit, brings him to the conclusion that he’s going to skip a year. As the world faces the prospect of a Year Without a Santa Claus, it’s up to Mrs. Claus and a couple of helper elves to convince the big guy to pop a Zyrtec and get his act together.

This is the best of Rankin/Bass’s Santa-centric specials, although the most memorable thing about this cartoon isn’t Santa itself. We have this special to thank for the introduction of the Heatmiser and Coldmiser, battling brothers and sons of Mother Earth. They’re the best original Rankin/Bass characters by far, they have the best original song from any Rankin/Bass special by far, and even now you see them showing up in merch and decorations every year. It’s not easy for a new character to break into the pantheon of Christmas icons, but the Miser Brothers made the cut thanks to this awesome special and the fantastic musical arrangement of Maury Laws. The boys are a delight.

DC Comics Presents #67: Twas the Fright Before Christmas

Let’s wrap things up with this comic book from 1984. DC Comics Presents was a series in which Superman would team up with a different guest-star in each issue. Usually it was his fellow superheroes like the Flash, Batgirl, or the Metal Men. On occasion he’d have to partner up with a villain like the Joker. On more than one occasion he had to pair off with different versions of himself like Superboy, Clark Kent, or his counterpart from Earth-2. And on one memorable occasion he met up with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, characters who were still on the rise.

But my favorite issue of the book is this one. Written by Len Wein with art by the most iconic Superman artist of the era, Curt Swan, in this issue Superman stumbles upon a little boy who tries to hold up a sidewalk Santa with a toy gun. Superman whisks the child off to his Fortress of Solitude at the North Pole where he determines that the child was hypnotized by a device in the toy, made by his old foe the Toyman. Leaving the Fortress, the boy’s toy zaps Superman with a burst of “white dwarf energy” which knocks him from the sky and leaves them stranded in the Arctic Circle. Luckily, they’re saved by some of the pole’s other residents. Superman and Santa then team up to save Christmas from the machinations of the sinister Toyman.

It’s a pretty silly story, but silly in a fun way. This is towards the end of the era in which Superman was allowed to be a little goofy, just two years before John Byrne would reimagine the character in his classic Man of Steel miniseries. And although that depiction of Superman has largely informed the character in the years since, it’s nice to see that modern writers aren’t afraid to bring back the kinds of things that made this story so memorable every once in a while. It ends with one of my LEAST favorite tropes, especially in a Christmas story (the whole “It was all just a dream…OR WAS IT?” nonsense), but that doesn’t diminish my love for it at all. I tend to go back and read this comic again every Christmas

Once again, guys, ask me tomorrow and there’s a good chance I would pick five totally different stories to populate this list, but as I write it here on December 20th, these are five of my favorite Santa Claus stories of all time. But I’m always open for new ones – what are yours?

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. Honorable mention goes to a story John Byrne did for Marvel’s What The?! comic where Santa twists his ankle delivering to Latveria and Dr. Doom has to take over and finish his route for him. 

Geek Punditry #102: Making a Merrython

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When the holidays roll around, one thing you can be certain of is that I’ll be queuing up all of the great Christmas movies and specials. And I don’t just mean the obvious ones like It’s a Wonderful Life, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the Rankin/Bass catalogue, or the legendary yuletide adventures of Garfield and Charlie Brown. I also have a great affection for Christmas episodes of old TV shows. As I’ve written before, there was a time when I would get home from school and watch reruns of old sitcoms for hours on end, allowing me to have a far greater memory of the contents of said television programs than I ever will less pertinent information, such as my wife’s telephone number. 

In this age of streaming, it seems like it would be simplicity itself to cultivate a massive playlist of holiday-themed episodes to start your own Christmas marathon…but alas, that does not seem to be the case. Although most streaming services have a “holiday” category, none of them seem to have what I really want, namely an option to just create my own playlist of episodes and set it to run on shuffle. I want an easily-curated selection of shows for a Yuletide Marathon – a Merrython, if you will. 

But if Netflix, Hulu, and Paramount Plus won’t let me do it, damn them, I’ll do it myself. Plex is a great system, an app that I can use to arrange and watch all of the movies and TV shows I’ve got saved on my own server, complete with my own cultivated playlists and a shuffle option. Now the catch here is that you actually have to provide the video yourself, which obviously limits things a little bit…but I started collecting DVDs almost a quarter of a century ago. I’ve got a LOT of TV shows on disc, and I’ve got lots of compilation DVDs of Christmas episodes from assorted TV series that I can throw into the mix as well.

While I certainly encourage everybody to create their own playlists, today I’m going to share with you a part of MINE. Here are just a few of my favorite Christmas-themed episodes of my favorite sitcoms, many of them episodes that are sitting in my Plex queue waiting to be watched. On Plex I set the playlist to shuffle, so I never know what’s coming up next…but for you guys, I’ll put them in chronological order.

The Honeymooners: “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Season 1, episode 13, original air date Dec. 24, 1955.

My love for The Honeymooners knows no bounds. The only sitcom duo better than the pairing of Jackie Gleason and Art Carney is the pairing of Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows. Ralph Kramden’s antics with both his best friend and his wife are legendary, and have become part of the DNA of television comedy. While I can’t be certain that the Kramdens are the FIRST example of a sitcom schlub married to a woman who’s way out of his league, it’s definitely the trope codifier.

This legendary episode sees Ralph struggling to get a present for his wife, Alice, on the day before Christmas. Ralph is berating himself for having previously squandered money that he could have used to get her something nice on a bowling ball for himself (and before anybody says “Simpsons did it!” I must remind you that this show was some three decades before the adventures of Homer and Marge). As is always the case, Ralph ropes his sidekick Ed Norton into a variety of short-lived schemes to try to get the money or get a present for Alice, each of which is thwarted in a delightfully goofy fashion. In the end, the story works out to a sort of one-sided but utterly heartfelt variation of “The Gift of the Magi,” one that I never get tired of watching this time of year. Audrey Meadows was an absolute treasure, and this episode shows that as well as any.

I Love Lucy: “The I Love Lucy Christmas Show.” Season 6, episode 27, original air date Dec. 24, 1956

In this episode, the Ricardos and Mertzes are spending Christmas Eve together, struggling with decorating the tree and talking about how wonderful it was to have a child – Little Ricky – with whom to celebrate the holidays. I’ve mentioned before what an innovative show I Love Lucy was, on top of just being one of the funniest shows in television history, but this episode in particular has some historical significance. When Lucille Ball was pregnant in real life, they incorporated her pregnancy into the show. Those episodes proved to be overwhelmingly popular, and they wanted to milk a little of that juice again, so they used this episode to showcase the characters remembering the adventures they had surrounding Little Ricky’s birth. You see, not only did Lucy and Desi invent the rerun, but this Christmas episode marks the first clip show in television history.

These days, a lot of people consider clip shows tedious and wasteful, a cheap way to squeeze out an extra episode without spending a lot of money actually filming it, and in this day of shorter seasons the practice is almost extinct. But seventy years ago it was a chance for people to re-watch segments they loved, because there was no other option.

The show didn’t only recycle the clips, though, but also a gag at the end when all four adults (Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethel) each independently decide to dress as Santa Claus to surprise Little Ricky. They wind up getting into a slapstick chase in the living room, during which a fifth Santa appears. As they remove each other’s beards trying to determine who is who, the superfluous St. Nick grins and vanishes before their eyes. They had first used this gag at the end of a season one episode, “Drafted,” in a tag that had nothing to do with the episode itself, and had shown it again in subsequent Christmases. This “remake” made a lot more sense, given the episode it was used to conclude. 

Cheers: “The Spy Who Came in For a Cold One.” Season 1, Episode 12, original air date Dec. 16, 1982.

Cheers did a few Christmas episodes over its 11-year run, but none of them cling to my mind better than this one from the first season. This was, of course, a period where the show was still kind of trying to find its identity. It was still predominantly a romantic comedy, focusing on Sam and Diane’s relationship, but even at this point the ensemble piece it would eventually become was starting to shine through.

In this episode, a stranger shows up for a drink at the bar around Christmas and “accidentally” lets it slip to the patrons that he is – drumroll please – a spy. Diane, ever the pragmatist, meets his claim with the expected skepticism, but most of the rest of the gang plays along with it, plying the stranger for stories of his exciting lifestyle. When Diane finds a way to trap the spy in his own web, everything blows up in her face.

Aside from the date and the decorations, this isn’t an especially Christmasy story. We don’t get the usual “very valuable lesson” that so many of these episodes come with, nor is there a heartwarming moment at the end where everybody gets together for a group hug and reminds one another that friends are the real family. But I like the way it hammers down the dynamics of the group, how Diane gets a somewhat needed comeuppance about being too smart for her own good, and how it deftly establishes some of the tone and tropes that would follow the series further down the line, even after Shelley Long left the show. 

The Golden Girls: “Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas.” Season 2, episode 11, original air date Dec. 20, 1986.

It’s Christmas in Miami, and the girls are all making plans to jet off to visit their respective families in other parts of the country. Things get derailed, however, when a man dressed as Santa Claus shows up at Rose’s grief counseling center and starts taking hostages.

Hopefully, by this point, nobody needs me to tell them what a brilliant show Golden Girls was. You had a cast of four outrageously talented comedic actresses and a team of writers who were willing to push the envelope in ways that few other shows in the 1980s took a chance doing, and it has legitimately become recognized as one of the greatest TV comedies ever made. The amazing thing about this particular episode is the way it breaks down the story into three segments, any of which would have been an entire episode of a lesser sitcom. It starts with a funny scene showing the gift exchange between the girls before they leave for the holidays, which itself is ripe with comedic potential. Then we crash into the hostage situation, which seems like it would be the whole episode on its own until Sophia casually takes the gun away from the hostage-taker and berates Dorothy for not being able to tell the difference between a real gun and a fake. The final act shows the girls – now stranded in Miami and unable to make their flights – having a Christmas Eve dinner in a diner where they slowly come to the realization that they haven’t missed out on a Christmas with family after all.

This episode wraps up with some of the schmaltz that the Cheers episode was missing, and it’s just lovely. It was only the second season of the show, and while the bond between the characters was evident, this was the episode that kind of cemented how deeply the four of them all cared about one another, which (despite any friction on the set in real-life) was truly the core of the show. And of course, typical of the Golden Girls, the drippy, gooey sentiment at the end is nicely undercut by a joke from Sophia, who is one of the greatest characters in television history.  

ALF: “ALF’s Special Christmas.” Season 2, episodes 12 & 13 (two-part episode), original air date Dec. 14, 1987

Ah, is there anything that says “TV in the 80s” better than the adventures of a Muppet-esque alien living with a typical American family to the delight of audiences everywhere and – apparently – to the eternal disdain of the cast that had to work with him? From all accounts, the set of ALF was not a pleasant place to be, but this show was a favorite of mine as a kid, and I’m still on a quest to complete my run of the Marvel ALF comic books (50 regular issues, three annuals, two Christmas specials, a “spring” special, and two digests). It’s an oddly formative part of my personality.

In this two-part episode, the family leaves the Tanner home for a trip into the woods for Christmas. Willie rents a cabin for the family to stay in where ALF will be free from prying eyes, but as tends to happen, the little furball gets lost, winding up in a hospital where he’s mistaken for a doll and given to a child with a serious illness. He befriends the girl and eventually leaves, but the memory of her clings to him. Meanwhile, the Tanners find out that the man they’re renting the cabin from is giving it to them – two weeks after the death of his wife, he seems to be divesting himself of a lot of things…

This is honestly a pretty dark episode, even for a show like ALF, which frequently mixed a little darkness into its humor. (Cat buffet, anybody?) The two plotlines are about a child with a terminal illness and an old man contemplating suicide – fun for the whole family, right? But the whole thing is done with the typical ALF touch. There’s some goofy humor in it, and a dose of heart that makes the darkness a bit more bearable…and honestly, I think that’s kind of the point. The show doesn’t turn a blind eye to the bad things in the world, but does its best to show how to cope with them. That’s something I’ve always appreciated about it.

Frasier: “Frasier Grinch.” Season 3, episode 9, original air date Dec. 19, 1995

Let’s wing our way back to the Cheers Universe for this third-season episode of its successful spinoff show. The original Frasier was a brilliant series and arguably the most successful comedy spinoff of all time, but there was one thing about the adventures of Frasier Crane in Seattle that always kinda bugged me: the distance from his son. When the producers decided to give Kesley Grammar a spinoff they shipped him off to the other side of the country to do their best to resist the urge to have cameos from his former co-stars every other week, but the side effect here was that Frasier often came off as a very absentee father…ironic, as one of the best parts of this show was watching as Frasier rekindled his relationship with his own father, Martin. In this episode, Fraiser’s son Freddy is coming to Seattle to spend the holidays with his dad, and Frasier decides to shower the boy with the very thing every kid wants for Christmas: educational toys! It’s not long before Frasier realizes the enormity of his error and has to venture out to find the gifts Freddy REALLY wants for Christmas.

Like Diane in the parent show, the intelligentsia in the Crane family occasionally needed a reminder that they were not always the smartest ones in the room. This episode does a lot to help Frasier seem like a well-meaning father willing to go to great lengths to give his child a Merry Christmas (the least he could do, as he only sees the kid in one or two episodes a season). It also has some really great stuff with Martin, nailing the dynamic between Kelsey Grammar and John Mahoney. Frasier did many more Christmas episodes than Cheers, but this is my favorite.

Community: “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.” Season 2, episode 11, original air date Dec. 9, 2010.

By the second season of Community, the show had firmly embraced its role of commenting on and parodying the various tropes of sitcoms, and in this episode they went one step further by parodying classic Christmas specials. The entire episode is done in stop motion animation, mimicking the old Rankin/Bass “Animagic” style, as Abed is somehow stuck seeing the world as a holiday special. With the help of Professor Duncan, Abed’s study group tries to get to the bottom of his delusion and help him see the world the way that it really is.

This is not the first sitcom to try an animated special for the holidays – Home Improvement had a memorable episode that had a segment in stop motion animation, for example. But what elevates Community is that the episode does not ONLY parody Christmas specials, but also makes a real commentary on the characters. Despite his delusions, we learn things in this episode about Abed and his family that leave deep fingerprints on the character and make him a little more understandable than he may have been in the past. The episode has one of the most bizarre explanations for “the meaning of Christmas” that I’ve ever heard, but damned if it isn’t just perfect for this show. 

Abbott Elementary: “Holiday Hookah.” Season 2, episode 10, original air date Dec. 7, 2022.

The newest entry on my Christmas playlist comes from what I maintain is the best live-action comedy currently on television, ABC’s Abbott Elementary. After the last day of school before the winter break, young teachers Janine and Gregory (who have had your classic “will they/won’t they” thing happening for some time now) happen to run into each other at a hookah bar, each with a group of friends. Even if you’ve never seen an episode of this particular series, if you’ve watched other shows that use the same trope (see about a billion other shows) you’ll see the trajectory that this plotline is taking. There’s awkwardness, obvious attraction, confusion, and a reluctance to hook up with somebody you work with. It’s all done well, but is kind of standard stuff.

What I really like about this episode is actually the B-plot. Two of the older veteran teachers, Barbara and Melissa, have a tradition of having a Christmas dinner together after the end of the fall term each year. This year Jacob – a young teacher who fancies himself to be far cooler than he actually is – finds out about their celebration and winds up crashing their “Christmas Lounge.” The interaction between these three is wildly funny, and the relationship between Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter) has become a core pillar of the show at this point. Although the two are almost diametrically opposites of one another, personality-wise, their shared experience and long relationship has them stand out as the best of friends. It’s one of the sweeter, most realistic elements of the show (I can name several pairs of teachers I know in real life that remind me very much of these two), and I think this episode showcases that extremely well.

We also get your usual “somebody has to learn a lesson” moments that frequently accompany any Christmas episode, and as befits this series, they come from unlikely sources. Ava – the crazy principal who often seems wholly unsuited for her job – comes to Janine’s rescue, while Jacob gets his head screwed on straight thanks to the timely intervention of conspiracy nut custodian Mr. Johnson. All of it together makes for a fine Christmas viewing. 

There you have it, friends, some sitcom classics to get you in the Christmas mood this year. This is, of course, not to be considered a comprehensive list. There are hundreds of shows that have done Christmas episodes, and creating a truly complete list is probably beyond my abilities as a humble Geek Pundit. Which is why I invite you to share some of your favorites here in the comments, or on whatever social media you followed to get here! What are some of the all-time great Christmas episodes that have made it to YOUR Merrython playlist?

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 didn’t even get to Laverne and Shirley, The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, The Beverly Hillbillies, Friends, Family Ties, Night Court, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers, Mama’s Family, Seinfeld, The Office, or The Big Bang Theory. Maybe there needs to be a sequel to this column next year. 

Geek Punditry #101: This is How We Do It-The Muppet Christmas Carol

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We’ve made it again, folks. Eleven months down and it is once again permissible to crack open our DVDs (or streaming services) and start watching Christmas movies, which is pretty much the reason for existence. And today I’m going to talk to you about one of the greatest ever made: The Muppet Christmas Carol. In “This is How We Do It,” I take a piece of storytelling and discuss just what, exactly, makes it so damned good. And while I doubt there are many people who need convincing that The Muppet Christmas Carol is a classic, it is well worth taking the time to break it down a little. I love A Christmas Carol. I love the book, I love the many derivative movies and TV shows based on the book. I have, at last count, watched over 40 different film adaptations of Charles Dickens’ novel, and for years I said that the Muppet version is “maybe” the best of them. This year, I am removing the modifier. The Muppet Christmas Carol is THE best adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic, and lemme tell you why.

Who knew Emily Cratchit could be so hot?

A Christmas Carol is perhaps the single most-adapted story in the history of motion pictures and even when the Muppet version was made back in 1992, it had already been done to DEATH. We had seen “traditional” versions with the likes of Albert Finney and Alastair Sim. We saw modern reimaginings with Bill Murray and Henry Winkler. We had versions starring Scrooge McDuck, Bugs Bunny, Mr. Magoo, George Jetson, and Fred Flintstone. We had gender-swapped versions, we had versions transplanted to other holidays, we had comedies and dramas and musicals. The Teen Titans used it to break up a scheme that involved getting around import tariffs and Rod Serling had taken the framework to do a kind of tedious fable about nuclear war.

IT. HAD. BEEN. DONE.

Logically, once you’ve seen the Fonz as Scrooge, where else is there to take it?

There are only two reasons left to do a version of the story: either to put a unique twist on it or to showcase a masterful performer. Well there’s no unique twist here, but the Muppets themselves are one of the greatest acting troupes of all time. Nobody needed to see A Christmas Carol again. We wanted to see Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, and Gonzo in THEIR version of A Christmas Carol. And the casting was flawless – Kermit (voiced by Steve Whitmire) as Bob Cratchit, Piggy (Frank Oz) as Mrs. Cratchit, Fozzie (Oz again) as “Fozziwig,” and so forth. 

But the REAL casting coup of this movie was taking Gonzo the Great (Dave Goelz) and casting him as Charles Dickens himself. So much of what makes Dickens’ story work is the beautiful narration, and narration is often lost when translating a book to film. The solution was to cast Gonzo as Charles Dickens himself, supplying the narration and keeping such phenomenal lines as “Marley was dead to begin with” intact. Well… “The Marleys,” but close enough. Anyway, pairing him with Rizzo the Rat (Whitmire) turned the narrator into half of a comedy team that worked perfectly, and the dynamic that was created between these two characters remains to this day.

The TRUE heroes of Christmas.

Even though Gonzo reciting Dickens’ words gives the film a little weight and gravitas, the two of them together are there to add in a little Muppety silliness when it calls for it (such as when Gonzo has to remind Sam the Eagle that he’s playing a Brit and not an American). But they’re smart enough not to overuse them, especially when they nope out as Christmas Future is showing up. They sell the joke as Gonzo and Rizzo being scared of the spirit, but the obvious truth is that this upcoming sequence is going to be Scrooge’s darkest hour, and throwing in a tension-breaker at this point is the exact OPPOSITE of what you should be doing. 

The Muppeteers chose not to use traditional Muppets as the ghosts of Past, Present, or Future, though, instead creating new characters to inhabit those roles. I think that was probably the best choice. Each of them has a unique, ethereal quality, that of a being that belongs to another world, that would have been sacrificed if Present had been played by Sweetums, Future by Uncle Deadly, or anything like that. They absolutely made the right choice.

Here’s a fun game to play with your kids. I call it “which one gives you the most nightmares?”

Then there’s the human cast. While all of them are good, Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge is phenomenal. The story, as most of us have heard, is that Caine chose to play the role perfectly straight, as if he were performing Scrooge amongst a cast of human actors rather than puppets, and in so doing he gave a performance that I frankly think was robbed of Oscar consideration. (Scent of a Woman my ass, Pacino.) It’s so easy to play Scrooge as the cold-hearted miser that we think of him as. Any halfway-decent actor can do it. What not every actor can do, what sets Caine apart, is the way he sells Scrooge’s transformation. Even in the early scene, where he begrudgingly agrees to let Cratchit and the bookkeepers have Christmas Day off, there’s a hint in his voice that it’s not entirely cold-hearted. There’s a spark of warmth – a very DIM spark, but it’s there. He tries to disguise it, but you can feel that there is understanding in his voice.

His glare, on the other hand, is scary as hell.

As the film progresses, each successive visit with the ghosts shows this change in a more pronounced way, as Scrooge’s defenses begin to fall and he is struck with the stark horror that his life has become. Caine shows regret, sorrow, pain, and genuine, sincere remorse for the terrible things he’s done in his life. This is the key, you see, this is what poor adaptations of the story get wrong. Scrooge’s redemption cannot come simply from the fear of his future. As people on the internet love to point out, if the only reason you behave morally is for fear of punishment, you’re not really a moral person to begin with. A truly good person does good for the sake of doing good. (We shall return to this subject next summer, just before James Gunn’s new Superman movie comes out.) The best adaptations of A Christmas Carol – and again, this is THE best – have to begin selling the redemption before fear for the future can set in.

The redemption truly starts with the most contentious scene in the film. If you go to Disney+, there are actually TWO versions of the movie. The one that plays if you just click on it is the expurgated version, which removes the song “The Love is Gone” from the Christmas Past sequence. If you want to watch the uncut movie, you have to go to “extras” and select “full version.” Disney chose to cut the song from the original release of the movie, saying that it slowed down the pace too much and that it was too sad.

My dude. My friend. My mouse. THAT. IS. THE. POINT.

If I’m watching Disney+ and sobbing openly, I’m probably either watching this or Bluey.

“The Love is Gone” is sung by Meredith Braun, playing Scrooge’s lost love, Belle. After Scrooge watches the scene where she ends the relationship with his younger self, she launches into this heartbreaking piece about everything they have lost. At the end of the song, Caine joins in, singing a duet with a woman who cannot see or hear him. As the song continues he slowly, inexorably, crumbles into sobs. The agony in his face and his voice is a master class in acting. For the first time, Scrooge is truly forced to face the way his horrific choices have destroyed not only his own chances at happiness, but those of the person he loved the most in the world. It slows the pace? GOOD. Scrooge has to stop and realize what he’s done, and as we are going on the journey with him, we have to stop too.

It doesn’t hurt of course that Paul Williams, who wrote the songs for the film, absolutely pours his heart out into this one. It’s beautiful and tragic and haunting. And by the end of it, you see that Scrooge has already realized his mistake. This is not extraneous. This is crucial to his journey of redemption.

The transformation continues in the Christmas Present sequence. It’s one thing to recognize that you’ve made a mistake, but just acknowledging it isn’t enough to guarantee that your ways will change. This is accomplished when Present takes Scrooge to visit his nephew’s Christmas party. Seeing good-hearted Fred (Steve Mackintosh) and his guests make him the butt of a joke – calling him an “unwanted creature” in a 20 Questions-style guessing game – breaks Scrooge’s heart just a little bit more, as he realizes how people view him. At the same time, this is the nephew who practically begged him to join them in the first scene. Even today, Scrooge’s choices are causing his separation from those who would love him. 

If that wasn’t enough, the visit to the Cratchit house nails it when Scrooge is told about the serious condition of Bob’s son, Tiny Tim (played, naturally, by Kermit’s nephew Robin). This is – to be fair – one of the easiest parts of the story to get right. If you can’t sell somebody feeling sorry for the plight of a small, sickly child, you have no business calling yourself a storyteller. But as always, the Muppets kick it up a notch. Kermit and Robin enter the scene to a lovely, joyful scat, singing about how jolly Christmas is. Tiny Tim isn’t immediately shown as an object of pity, as he is so often, but rather as a happy, gleeful child who deserves a chance at life. They launch into the centerpiece song “Bless Us All,” which is something of a love letter to the importance of family and togetherness, those very things that Scrooge has driven out of his life. It’s a warm, tender, heartfelt song that is undercut when the song ends with Tim’s tiny, tragic, prophetic cough to remind us that if something doesn’t change he is not long for this world. 

It helps if you don’t know anything about how genetics works.

Why are these things important? It’s simple. Christmas Past made Scrooge understand how badly he had screwed up. Present shows him that – although he cannot change the past – there is still time to make better choices for the FUTURE. That message is so blasted important. Anyone who has wrestled with depression can tell you how crippling the past can be, how it can cling to a person and make them hate themselves. It’s so easy to wallow in that and assume that nothing can be done about your life.

The message of Christmas Past was, “You made mistakes.” The message of Christmas Present is, “BUT THERE’S STILL TIME. YOU DON’T HAVE TO MAKE MORE.”

Not every version of A Christmas Carol sells this important message. NONE of them sell it as well as the Muppets.

In many ways, by the time Christmas Future shows up, Scrooge has already been redeemed. He’s taken the message of the first two ghosts to heart, and when Future arrives he tells him that he is ready and willing for the lessons the ghost has come to impart upon him. This line comes straight from Dickens, by the way, and any adaptation that leaves it out is completely missing the point. Past and Present do the heavy lifting, vis a vis Scrooge’s transformation. Future is really just there to deliver – pardon the expression – the nail in the coffin. 

Another thing this version does that sets it apart comes in this sequence. Some versions of the story have Scrooge totally oblivious in the Christmas Future scene, as people are joking about the death of some mysterious “wealthy man” and we see his servants pawning his belongings for a little extra cash. It is obvious from the first second that the dead man is Scrooge itself, but a lot of versions of A Christmas Carol don’t let SCROOGE know that until he sees his own name on the tombstone. But the thing is, Scrooge isn’t an idiot. Although he never says it, the way Caine plays the part makes it clear that he’s pieced it together pretty quickly, that he is seeing the fallout of his own demise. He never says it, perhaps because they’re trying to stay relatively true to Dickens, but just as likely because he doesn’t want to admit to to himself. If you watch the scene in the graveyard, his behavior is clearly that of a man who knows he’s staring at his fate long before the appearance of his name makes that clear. Just one more reason that Caine is the best Scrooge ever, even better than the classically-trained Quincy Magoo.

“I’m here to speak to you about your soul’s extended warranty.”

The finale, when Caine leads the Muppets in the song “Thankful Heart,” is absolutely beautiful. His every mannerism has been changed, and the expression on his face when he looks at those around him is not of a man afraid of the future, but of someone consumed by the love he has so long denied himself. My favorite part, though, comes when he sings the lines:

Stop and look around you, the glory that you see
Is born again each day, don’t let it slip away
How precious life can be!

There’s a moment in those lines where Caine’s voice breaks, just a little – a cracking in his song that sounds like he’s holding back tears. But again, his face sells it – those tears beneath the surface are not of pain, but joy and gratitude for the second chance he’s been given.

Until The Human Centipede, this was the most joyful moment in cinematic history.

I don’t say this often. I reserve it for the likes of Jaws, Back to the Future, and The Princess Bride. But I genuinely think The Muppet Christmas Carol is a perfect movie.

There’s a bit of meta-triumph here as well. The film was directed by Jim Henson’s son Brian, and was the first major Muppet production after Jim Henson’s tragic death. There was a real question in the air as to whether the Muppets would work without the man who brought them to life. This movie proved that the spirit of the Muppets is greater even than their founder, that it IS something that can live on and survive and endure. 

Disney would do well to remember that.

So the next time somebody decides to grab a camera and start rolling on a new version of A Christmas Carol…well, I would never tell them not to do so. As this film proves, there’s always room for a good version.

But before you do it, watch this movie. Watch it over and over again. And learn the lessons of the Muppets.

Because THIS is how we do it. 

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. Second-best version of A Christmas Carol? Bill Murray in Scrooged. Maybe I’ll explain that next year.

Geek Punditry #100: If I Were King of Comics

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Here we are, my friends, 100 Fridays later. In the first week of January 2023, I was thinking of how much I missed the days of writing for Comixtreme and recording my podcast, and I wanted to find a regular way to get my voice back out there in the world. How could I do it? I asked myself. How can I reach out and gift humanity with my invaluable thoughts, insights,and trademark witticisms, in this era where the world clearly needs me more than ever before?

Then I remembered I had a blog that I was barely using, and maybe it would be a nice little challenge for me to find something – once a week, just find SOMETHING – that I liked enough to write a few paragraphs about. 

And of course, it has become the global phenomenon and world-altering sensation you see before you today. 

As I approached the 100th installment of the column hundreds of voracious readers have called “on the internet somewhere,” I tried really hard to decide what to write about. What, in the enormous global marketplace of popular culture that I had made my home, was worthy of dedicating the landmark 100th column to? Star Trek? Stephen King? Superman? Bluey? I feel like I’ve kind of talked about those various topics…well, “extensively” seems in some ways to be too mild a term, but we’ll roll with that right now. No, I needed something a little bit different.

Then I remembered an idea I’d had some time ago, but that I had pushed aside. Something I thought needed to percolate a little more. Something that the world would HAVE to sit up and take notice of. And it seemed perfect. So this week, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to explain to you what exactly I would do if I were in charge of comic books.

You all know I’m a comic book geek, and I have been since I was a small child. Not to discount my love of movies, TV, or novels…I’m a fan of storytelling in general. But comics are in many ways my medium of choice. I’m a regular Wednesday visitor at my local comic shop, I know all the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and I can tell you – in order – every publisher that has ever had the Star Trek license. (Gold Key, Marvel, DC, Malibu but only Deep Space Nine, back to Marvel, Wildstorm – which was by then a DC imprint – and currently IDW. Sorry, ladies. I’m taken.)

As much as I love comic books, though, there are certain practices in the industry that I’m not a fan of, certain things that I think could be done better. In this era, where there’s so much competition for the attention of an audience coming from virtually every region of our culture, it’s imperative that comic book publishers find ways to draw in new readers and retain existing ones. Ways to make the sometimes complex mythologies of American comic books a little less of a roadblock, and make the space a little more welcoming. For the 100th Geek Punditry, guys, here are some rules that would be implemented if I were King of Comics.

Numbering

As most people know, comic book series are numbered, and for many decades the numbering convention was simple. You started with issue #1, proceeded to #2, and so forth. You just put the numbers in order. Seemed like a simple idea. But at some point things started to get a little more convoluted. After World War II, many of the existing superhero comics had been cancelled. But in the 50s, looking for a new hit after public favor turned against things like horror comics, DC decided to bring back some of their defunct characters with a new incarnation. A new Flash was created – Barry Allen – and after a few tryout issues in the pages of Showcase, they gave him his own title. Barry took over the numbering of the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, and his first issue was #104. Here’s where it gets confusing: they then did they same thing with Green Lantern. But in this case the new guy – Hal Jordan – did NOT pick up from Alan Scott’s title with issue #39, but instead got his own first issue, Green Lantern Vol. 2 #1.

Make it make sense.

It would not be the last time this happened. In the 80s they gave new first issues to Superman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash, and in those cases, the lapse in publishing between the previous volume and the new was not nearly as long as it had been in the silver age. Then in the 90s, Marvel did it with four of their flagship titles at once – Avengers, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Captain America – as part of a new initiative where the titles were essentially farmed out to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and set in a different world than the “regular” Marvel Universe. When the books were brought back to the “regular” Universe a year later, they were given a THIRD first issue…and then all hell broke loose.

Since then, virtually every comic book published by Marvel or DC Comics has been canceled and relaunched with a new first issue, most of them multiple times. Batman, at last count, is on its conservative third volume. Superman is at six. Punisher – if I’m counting correctly – has recently concluded volume FOURTEEN. The longest running comic book at either publisher that has not been restarted at least ONCE? Looney Tunes, which recently celebrated issue #281. (It should be noted, though, that even this is the fourth volume of Looney Tunes, having been published by various other companies before Warner Bros. wholly absorbed DC Comics.)

Winner of the gold medal in “not starting over for no reason.”

The conventional wisdom seems to be that a new first issue will bring in higher sales numbers than issue #482, and that might be true. But increasingly, it has proven that a tenth issue #7 does NOT have appreciably more readers than issue #489 would have. In other words, the restarting game gives a short-term sales bump, but does nothing to retain readers, which is what the goal should be.

Anyway, to appease fans (such as myself) who prefer maintaining the original numbering rather than the constant restarts, Marvel and DC have begun featuring “legacy numbers” on the covers of their books – in other words, what issue would this be had the book never been restarted? Which is why the recent Superman Vol. 6 #20 also bears a little symbol indicating that the “Legacy Number” of this issue is #863.

Only long-time Superman fans will understand what I mean when I say “at least it’s in a triangle.”

Confused yet?

Making it even more confusing is the way that many series have changed titles over the years, and trying to figure out which is which. Thor started as Journey Into Mystery, one of Marvel’s assorted sci-fi titles. But after he made his debut, Thor quickly took over the comic book, and the title was changed from Journey into Mystery to The Mighty Thor with issue #126 When calculating the Thor legacy numbers, the original JIM numbers seem to count, but JIM itself has been re-started several times over the years. Journey Into Mystery Vol. 2 does NOT count, apparently, as it ran concurrently with Mighty Thor. And let’s not forget that the current series carrying the Legacy Number is actually called Immortal Thor, which has the same legacy numbers as did previous volumes like Mighty Thor, King Thor, Thor: God of Thunder, or the (at last count) six different series that have just been called Thor. 

According to the legacy numbers, these are all issues of the same title.

Then there’s the fact that it’s inconsistently applied, especially at DC. Superman (on Volume 6), Batman (Volume 3), Flash (Volume 6), and Green Arrow (Volume 7) all have Legacy Numbers on their covers. Nightwing (Volume 4), Harley Quinn (Volume 4), and Titans (Volume 4) do not, and I can see no particular reason why. 

It’s an absolute mess. True story: when the Captain Marvel movie came out in 2018 my wife – who is a geek but not as big a geek as I am – was interested in reading some of the comics to learn more about the character, but after several attempts to figure out which volume to start with, she gave up. If the plan here is to get MORE readers, it’s failing miserably.

So how do we fix this problem? 

Here’s what I would make the standard rule: first of all, the Legacy Numbers should be mandatory for any series that continues the title or star of a previous series. The editors would need to get together right away, decide which books count towards the “legacy” and then stick with it from then on. 

Second, I would have them stop with the constant relaunches. If a character is returning after ten years away…okay, a new first issue might be justified. If we’re going back to issue #1 because there’s a new inker, it’s not. It’s become a common practice to start over with a new first issue any time there’s a change of creative team, especially when there’s a new writer. It’s too much. So here’s the rule: there must be a minimum of three years since the previous volume before a new first issue is justified. If the final issue of Captain Dudeman was #47 and it came out eighteen months ago, then you either have to start with Captain Dudeman #48 or you have to change the title. 

That second stipulation, I think, would start to get used very frequently. One of the reasons that the renumbering has gotten so rampant is that every time a new writer is brought onto a series they want to make their own mark – which is fair. But in so doing, they often want a clean slate, a sort of “back-to-basics” approach for the character, which has resulted in several books in the last few years where the first issue shows the heroes in a wholly different situation than they were in when the previous volume ended, and then it’s not until several issues later that the reasons for the change are actually explained. Sometimes it works (Fantastic Four and Daredevil both did this effectively in their most recent relaunches) and sometimes it doesn’t (the current run of Amazing Spider-Man should be studied by scholars as a cautionary example of what NEVER to do).

I don’t want to take away a writer’s ability to tell the stories they way they see fit, that’s not what this is about. But if the plan is to tell a totally different story, changing the title of the series is a good way to reduce confusion. Telling somebody “You have to read Green Lantern – but not that one, or that one, or that one…” is a recipe for the kind of bafflement that drove my wife away. But saying “Green Lantern: Emerald Champions is a great series” is a HELL of a lot easier for the casual reader to comprehend. You can keep the legacy numbers that way, but having a subtitle or supertitle (that’s when you preface the main title with something else, such as Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man) makes it a lot easier to differentiate one run from another. 

What this really boils down to is that I never again want to see a comic book called Fantastic Four #1. When I was a kid, owning that book would have been a gold mine. Now I’ve got six different books called that, and it’s ridiculous. 

Cover Confusion

The way the comics industry handles its covers is also an issue, and there are two primary problems I want to tackle. First, let’s talk about pin-up covers. This isn’t as bad as it once was, but for a while there in the 00s and 10s, there was an awful trend of comic books having generic pictures of the main character or characters on the cover, something that may be a fabulous piece of art but doesn’t tell the reader anything about the story between the pages. The argument at the time, I believe, was that they wanted every issue to be an accessible first issue for a new reader. While that may be a noble goal, that doesn’t make a damned bit of sense. Anybody who picks up a comic because they like the picture of Spider-Man on the cover is going to have a hard time keeping up if they open up the comic and run into “Revenge of the Return of the Colonoscopy of the Sinister Six: Part Five of Seventeen.” Congratulations – you sold that one issue…but they aren’t coming back. 

“Wow, great cover!”
“Thanks!”
“What’s the story about?”
“What the hell is a story?”

Pin-up art is fine, but a great comic book cover should tell a story. Think about some of the all-time most memorable covers: Amazing Spider-Man #129 features the webspinner dangling in front of the faces of his friends, agonizing over which of them was going to die in that issue. Green Lantern (Vol. 3) #49 shows a power-mad Hal Jordan brandishing a set of rings stolen from his fallen comrades, a look of pure chaos in his eyes. Wolverine: Blood Hunt #2 shows the ol’ Canucklehead on a motorcycle with a French vampire babe being chased by a mob of vampire stormtroopers while fleeing an explosion that is also being escaped by an overhead passenger jet.

If just that description isn’t enough to make you pick up the book and look inside, I don’t think you actually like comic books.

Now THAT’S art.

These days it’s better, although many variant covers still have what I call the Pinup Problem. So here’s going to be the rule for this one: cover art MUST be relevant to the story inside. That doesn’t mean it has to be a depiction of an actual SCENE from the story. Thematic covers, like the above Amazing Spider-Man #129, are fine. Covers promising a twist or a mystery, anything like that is just dandy, provided it has SOMETHING to do with the story. The only exceptions, the only time a simple pin-up is acceptable, are when it’s the first issue of a series (and presumably a good jumping-on point anyway), if it’s the introduction of a new character, or for certain milestone issues, such as an issue number that ends in a double zero.  

Now that we’ve cleaned THAT little problem up, let’s talk about the REAL issue: variant covers. 

There’s debate over when, exactly, variant covers became a thing, although most people seem to agree that the first mainstream example of printing copies of the same book with two different covers was probably Man of Steel #1 in 1986, the John Byrne relaunch of the entire Superman mythos. That was an instance where it was novel and interesting and fun. People made an effort to buy both covers to make their collection “complete.” It was really cool.

You could get with this, or — alternatively — hear me out on this one…you could get with THAT.

But like so many good things, it got overdone. It didn’t happen overnight, mind you. It was quite some time before having two covers became a regular practice, and even longer before it reached the heights it has today. Even as late as ten years ago, having multiple covers was still more of an exception than a rule. But the rules have changed and HOW. 

If you pick up any random issue of a new comic from a mainstream publisher today, odds are that you will have between two and five covers to choose from. First issues are frequently more. For the first issue of this summer’s Uncanny X-Men relaunch, League of Comic Geeks (the website I use to track my own collection) lists 32 separate cover variants. And even THAT is chump change compared to the most recent relaunch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from IDW Publishing, which currently stands at – 

Are you sitting down? Are you sitting down in the sewer?

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN DIFFERENT COVERS.

If you are the sort of person who feels the need to get every available cover and you’re a Ninja Turtles fan, I hope you can still afford your insulin.

I’M SAYING IT’S KIND OF A LOT.

The reason they do this, of course, is because people continue to BUY them. And when there are stories every other day about some comic shop or another closing down or a publisher being unable to pay its creators, I can’t fault them for looking for ways to increase revenue. But the problem is that this simply bleeds money out of the existing fans until they get fed up and walk away entirely. And like the renumbering problem, this doesn’t do anything to actually get NEW fans into reading, which is what the long-term goal should be.

This is not to say that I hate variants in their entirety. I rather like them when they do something CLEVER with them, such as what I call “theme” months, where all the variants have a different trend. For instance, DC recently did a run of variants covers that were mock-ups of the packaging of the old Super Powers action figures. (I should point out that other publishers, including Marvel, have been doing action figure variants for a long time, but this was the first time I recall them being used as a monthly theme.) In October, there were a series of variants by artist Kelley Jones showing the DC heroes as kids in Halloween costumes. Marvel did a series not long ago of variant “homage” covers based on some of their old vampire comics, and another run that showed their characters facing off against Godzilla. That kind of stuff doesn’t really bother me, except for the fact that they add to the preposterous number of variants on the shelf.

I don’t know art, but I know what I hate. And I don’t hate this.

I also really like the “sketch” covers that have become popular in recent years. These are blank covers printed on a different cardstock that fans can use to draw their own artwork or have an artist draw something for them. They’re popular for commissions at comic book conventions and events like Free Comic Book Day, and I don’t think the blanks really cause a lot of confusion on the racks compared to the 30-plus X-Men covers. 

The worst part, I think, is that so many of these “variants” are barely worthy of being considered a separate cover. You commission a piece of art from an artist and you’ve got a cover. Print it with no logo or trade dress and it’s a “virgin” variant. Print it without colors and it’s a “sketch” variant. Print it with metallic ink and it’s a “foil” variant. You can crank out a dozen different covers with one sketch and people will continue to buy them. It’s insane.

I recognize that there are a lot of people who LIKE these variants, even if they aren’t MY thing. So in my capacity as the benevolent overlord of comic books, I don’t want to ban them entirely. Here are the restrictions I’ll put in place:

  • A standard issue of a comic book shall have no more than three covers: the “main” cover, a variant cover, and a “theme” variant for that month. 
  • First issues will be limited to five covers, including the theme cover.
  • Milestone issues, such as anniversaries, will be allowed extra variants consisting of no more than one-tenth of the number of issues the book has run. For instance, the 50th issue will be allowed 5 variants, the 100th issue will be allowed 10 variants, and so on. 
  • Retailer-exclusive variants will not count against the total. These are covers commissioned by – and only available from – specific retailers, such as an individual comic shop, store chain, or online retailer.
  • There will be no restrictions on “sketch” covers, nor will they count against the number of variants allowed. 

See? I can be as flexible as the next guy, provided the next guy isn’t Plastic Man.

Anyway, there we have it, guys. Comic books are fixed!

Well…okay, maybe not. There are still plenty of other things in the world of my favorite medium that need to be addressed. Other problems to solve, other fires to put out…but I’ve already gone on for nearly 3500 words, which is pretty massive for one of these Geek Punditry columns. So I think it’s time to put this topic aside, at least for now.

But that’s okay. After all, I’ve got to save something to write about when Geek Punditry #200 rolls around.

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. His goal to take over all of social media after it has started to slide towards irrelevance continues. 

Geek Punditry #99: Blake’s Five Favorite Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade Displays

blakemp Five Favorites , , , , , , ,

Hello, everyone, and welcome once again to “Blake’s Five Favorites,” that semi-regular Geek Punditry mini-feature in which I pick some aspect of pop culture and just wax poetic about my five favorite examples of that thing. As always, “Five Favorites” is totally subjective. I’m not saying these are the BEST five examples, just that these are five that make ME smile…and it’s important to note that, when it comes to ranking things like this, I can be kind of fickle. If I were to write this column a week from now, I might pick five totally different examples.

Well…four different examples. Number one for this week holds a permanent place in my heart.

Next week is Thanksgiving, the second in the great Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas extravaganza that makes the last three months of the year my favorite time. Last year, if you’ll recall, I wrote about the sad dearth of Thanksgiving-related entertainment: with few movies other than Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, few specials beyond Peanuts and Garfield, and few bingeable TV shows other than Friends and Bob’s Burgers. But that doesn’t mean there’s NOTHING fun to watch for Thanksgiving, and this week I’m going to talk about one of my favorites: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year is going to be the 98th annual parade, and I have to admit, I’m already kind of a-tingle looking forward to 2026 and wondering what they’ve got in store for the centennial edition of the greatest Thanksgiving tradition since Ben Franklin stuffed the first duck inside of George Washington’s chicken and then fed it to Alexander Hamilton’s turkey. Or whatever happened.

A tradition as precious as Uncle Fred making comments about Aunt Judy’s ‘vacation to Motel California” and making everyone feel awkward.

This week, I’m going to look back at the great parades I’ve watched over the years and talk about some of my favorite displays, be they floats, musical performances, or the legendary balloons. These will be in no particular order except for number one. I’m saving the best for last.

#5: The Spider-Man Balloon

I remember, for Spider-Man’s first crawl down the skies of New York in 1987. That first Spider-Man balloon was remarkably exciting for me, for reasons that are maybe a little difficult to articulate, especially to modern fans. It’s hard to remember, in this day and age when geek culture IS popular culture, that there was a time when things like comic books, sci-fi, and fantasy were looked down upon. They were considered “low” culture by the hoi polloi and expressing a love for such things was as good as placing a target on your back from the schoolyard bullies. So seeing Spider-Man appear in the Macy’s parade was…kind of a revelation. In a strange way, it was a sort of validation, seeing something that meant so much to me get mainstream attention. It was the first time I had an inkling that MY culture COULD be pop culture…and let’s face it, guys, the years since have proven me right.

Spidey’s original balloon lasted from 1987 until 1998. He came back in 2004 with a new, updated balloon that continued to fly along until 2014. And that was it…until next week.

“Peter One…Peter Two…Peter Three!”

A brand-new Spider-Man balloon is going to debut this year! Yes, May Parker’s favorite nephew is making his return to the Macy’s Parade for the first time in a decade, and I cannot wait to sit on the couch with my son and watch him soar across the sky once again. I don’t know how long Spidey Mark III will last, but I feel like the wallcrawler has become something of a perennial. And I can only hope that if Eddie ever has kids of his own, he’ll be watching Spider-Man on Thanksgiving day with them. 

#4: The Marching Bands

I was a band geek in school.

I know, it’s shocking, but try to compose yourself.

I was a band geek all through middle school, high school, college. And of course, that means I was a marching band geek. I spent a lot of Fridays and Saturdays glide-stepping across a football field, slinging my trombone and wearing pants that rode entirely too close to my nipples. And to this day, I still love watching a marching band…but I hate the fact that they never seem to get any love on TV. Nearly every one of these college football games we watch has at least ONE marching band out there at halftime, playing their hearts out. I’d love to see them get a little credit for once.

You laugh, but you’d be shocked at how many girls swooned over the guy who could play “Land of 1,000 Dances” on trombone.

…None. The number is zero.

So the Macy’s Parade is great because that actually happens. For one day a year, we get to watch as dozens of schools from across the country strut their stuff on the biggest stage a marching band can get. The thing to remember is that the kids you see in that parade busted their butts to get there. Not only have they given countless hours rehearsing music and practicing drills, but the schools also have to pay their own way to the parade. So bands do fundraisers of all types: car washes, bake sales, soda sales…even mattress sales seem to have become popular in recent years. For those of us watching at home, we see 30 seconds of a marching band performance, but that could be the result of up to two years of hard work, planning, fundraising, and rehearsal. I love to see them get to show their stuff, even if half the country uses their appearance to go baste the turkey. 

#3: The Marvel Superheroes Float

The same year that Spider-Man’s first balloon premiered, we got another Marvel presentation, the Marvel Universe float. The float rolled three times before retiring after 1989, but similar to the Spider-Man balloon itself, it left an indelible mark on my geek psyche. (Side note: I’m realizing that this column is getting much deeper into my assorted nerdities than I would have expected.) The float was full of costumed performers dressed as characters that – in the 80s – were pretty damn obscure to the general public. I mean…Dr. Strange? Wolverine? Who the hell would ever make a movie about THOSE guys, right?

Pictured: Life before High Definition

This was long before Marvel was purchased by the Walt Disney Corporation and Global Underground Shadow Government and Falafel Stand, so the production values were at a level that I would describe as “Six Flags Knock-Off Amusement Park Show.” The costumes look like they were sewed together by somebody’s mother, and calling the “stunt” work stunt work is a bigger gift than anything Santa could bring. Despite the incredible cheese factor, I’ve never forgotten how much I loved watching that float, and in the week before Thanksgiving every year, I still pull up the clip of the 1989 parade on YouTube and watch it again, immersing myself in lovely, lovely memories. 

#2: The Garfield Balloon

This is another one that scratches that nostalgia itch, but when I think about Macy’s parade balloons, if it’s not Spider-Man, the first thing that comes to mind is Jim Davis’s legendary fat cat. I know, in this day and age it’s not fashionable to be a fan of Garfield. It’s bland. It’s homogenized. And the most recent movie took WILD liberties with established series canon. But I feel like I need to remind you that I was born the year before the first Garfield comic strip came out. The cat and I literally grew up together, so I have a soft spot for him. Plus, the old Garfield and Friends cartoon show was actually really good, and the holiday specials were great.

Garfield never rides in the Canadian Thanksgiving parade because he hates Mondays.

All that said, I remember seeing Garfield in the Macy’s Parade for years. It was the sort of thing that felt like a perennial to me, something that was just always there and always would be. Looking back, I see that it wasn’t QUITE that constant, but he did have a heck of a run. The original Garfield balloon traveled down the streets with the parade from 1985 until 1989, with a second stint from 1992 through 1999. A new Garfield balloon, this time carrying his teddy bear Pooky, showed up in 2003 and lasted through 2006. 

It’s hard to explain what exactly it is about the Garfield balloon that I find so comforting. Yeah, the character is as corporate as it gets, and in fact, Jim Davis deliberately crafted the comic strip to be as inoffensive and all-encompassing as possible. But in a way, that’s kind of appropriate. Hell, the parade itself is put on by a department store, and every float and balloon comes with a sponsor whose name is announced on national television during the broadcast – are we really going to pretend we’re NOT watching a three-hour commercial every Thanksgiving morning? And for that reason, I think Garfield is actually kinda the perfect mascot for the whole shebang. So yeah, I love seeing that balloon for the same reason I get a little smile every time I’m reminded of the days when every other car on the road had a Garfield plush stuck against the rear window. It just kind of feels…right.

#1: Santa Claus

I mean, what else could possibly take the top spot on my rating of the greatest parts of the Thanksgiving parade? I’ve often said that I think gatekeeping is stupid and that anybody who tries to tell anyone else that they’re wrong to start celebrating Christmas “early” is only showing their own prejudices. That said, in my house, I don’t think it’s Christmastime until that last minute of the Macy’s parade, when Santa’s sleigh rolls down the streets of Manhattan. It’s at that moment that I really feel like the holiday season has “officially” begun and there’s no longer any rationale from any of those Scrooges who claim that it’s too early for Christmas to keep flapping their gums.

“Ho, ho, hooold on a second there, save me some pumpkin pie!”

Santa’s most famous ride is still a month out, of course, but seeing him in the parade reminds every kid in the world that he’s on his way, that it’s time to make a list, that they better start behaving themselves, consarn it. And it feels like THE most constant part of the parade to me. Floats and balloons come and go, you don’t see the same marching bands every year, the musical performances are carefully crafted to support whatever is hot on Broadway that season…but no matter what else is going on in the world and who else is being paid to show up in the parade, Santa Claus is always going to be there. Hell, the whole tradition is the centerpiece of the movie Miracle on 34th Street, and I’ll never get tired of either one of them.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If he had a genie available to him, one of his wishes would be to create a character so universally beloved that they would be immortalized in the Macy’s parade. The next wish would be for an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.

Geek Punditry #97: Already Gone From a Theater Near Me

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Two things that people learn about me very quickly are that I’m a teacher and that I’m a nerd, and not in that order. In my classroom, I’ve got a corner behind my desk where I put my geekery on full display, with Superman figures, LEGO constructs, Star Trek models, and a whole bulletin board collage made of comic book images clipped from the likes of the Previews catalog (assembled by my wife each year when she comes in to help me get my classroom ready). The long and short of it is that nobody who walks into my room has any doubt as to what kind of stuff I’m into. And this often leads to fun conversations with my students about the movies, shows, and characters I like. Frequently, though, it also leads to conversations like the one I had a few days ago, when a student came up to me very excited and asked if I’d seen Venom: The Last Dance yet because she wanted to talk about it, and I had to sadly disappoint her and say, “No, I’ve got a kid, remember?”

Not pictured: parenting.

My son, of course, is the light of my life, but as I’ve mentioned here many times in the past, he has seriously curtailed my moviegoing. Erin and I rarely make it to the movies anymore, and it’s even rarer that we go to a movie we can’t bring seven-year-old Eddie to, so this is about the time of year where I start to take stock of all the recent releases I haven’t seen yet and trying to figure out how to prioritize them. I always want to watch as many new releases as I can, but going to the theater is rarely an option, and there are quite a few movies that I simply can’t watch with my son. This is why I still haven’t seen Deadpool and Wolverine, although thanks to the Internet I already knew about every surprise and cameo in that film approximately 20 minutes after the first screening let out, because people on the internet are jerks.

If I want to squeeze in these movies before the end of the year, I need to get started, not the least because in that window between Thanksgiving and Christmas I usually push aside new releases and just binge as much holiday content as I can. Sure, there are also new Christmas movies every year, but the ones I’m most interested in – such as The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and Red One – are theatrical releases, and 99 percent of the remaining Christmas movies are cozy romances from the Hallmark Channel or one of their increasing number of imitators. That’s not quite my style. 

As it stands right now, my Letterboxd list of movies I want to watch from 2024 is over twice as long as the list of movies that I’ve actually seen from 2024, so it’s time for me to prioritize. Keeping in mind that I have to check which movies are actually available via one of the assorted streaming services, and I may not be able to watch all of these anyway, let me start by figuring out which movies I can share with Eddie. Some are simple: he likes the Minions, so getting him to watch Despicable Me 4 should be no trick. Flow looks intriguing, and the visuals may just be the thing to hold his attention. I think the novelty will be enough to keep him interested during the unlikely Pharrell Williams LEGO-animated biopic Piece By Piece as well, so we’ll probably give that a try. And I’m personally dying to see The Wild Robot, which I think he’ll be into, even though when we gave him the choice between seeing that or TransFormers One in the theaters, he went for the major IP. 

If I’m watching a movie with the kid, it pretty much needs to look like this.

We haven’t had as much luck getting him to pay attention to live-action movies, though, so I don’t know if he’d be down for If or Harold and the Purple Crayon…on the other hand, he liked the first two movies, so Sonic the Hedgehog 3 looks like a no-brainer. And even though it’s a documentary, the kid loves airplanes, so I might take a chance and see if he’d be interested in The Blue Angels.

Speaking of documentaries, this has been a heck of a year for them. Two of the best movies I HAVE seen have been documentaries, the charming Jim Henson: Idea Man, and the magnificent Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. But looking at my list of 2024 movies, I see several other documentaries waiting for my attention. Doc of Chucky is a mammoth five-hour deep dive into the Child’s Play horror franchise, similar to the huge documentaries Crystal Lake Memories (about the Friday the 13th films) and Never Sleep Again (detailing the Nightmare on Elm Street series). If it’s anything like those previous two documentaries, it’ll be a lot of interviews and discussions about the development, shooting, and legacy of those movies – sort of like the world’s longest DVD extra. Some people may not be into that kind of thing, but I can watch it for hours…and I’ll need to, if I want to get through the whole film. Other documentaries on my radar include In Search of Bass Reeves, the history of the legendary escaped slave who became one of the most storied lawmen in the old west, MoviePass, MovieCrash, detailing the short life and disaster of the MoviePass service, and the more obvious films Music By John Williams and STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces. I’ll need to check on which of these are most safe to watch while the kid is bouncing around the house. If he starts humming John Williams music, that’s fine, but there are certain Steve Martin routines I don’t need him repeating as he walks around second grade.

These are all nonfiction, so watching them would count as educational.

Next up on my list are movies that I think will probably be safe ENOUGH to watch while Eddie is around, but that aren’t specifically FOR him. For instance, there was a whole Godzilla movie this year we didn’t get to – Godzilla/Kong: The New Empire, and that’s something that has to be on my end-of-year list if I’m to have any business calling myself a geek. I have similar feelings about Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!, although I’m a bit more reluctant to watch that one with Eddie. I don’t think he’ll get scared by it – my little dude has proven to be almost disturbingly fearless in the face of things like Spirit Halloween and guys in monster costumes – but once again, there’s language in there that I don’t quite want him to start repeating. I’ve heard good things about the action/comedy Fall Guy, though, so I’ll have to check on the language content to see if that would be an Eddie-safe viewing. (If you’ve already seen it, please feel free to expound in the comments.) 

Horror movies are an obvious no-go with the kid. If I am to watch those, it’ll likely be on my laptop while he’s watching cartoons or sports. The unwatched horror movies on this year’s list include Daddy’s Head, Night Swim, A Quiet Place Day One, Trap, The Substance, and Watchers, all of which I am resigned to not watching on the actual television. The same goes for darker actioners like Monkey Man, Love Lies Bleeding, or The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. As for Alien: Romulus…maybe if we can get the kid to bed early some night. 

Man, you watch one alien invasion body horror flick with your second grader and everybody wants to make it into a THING.

It saddens me how relatively few comedies are being made these days, because I think the world needs more deliberate comedy in it as opposed to the ironic kind that real life continues to subject us to. That’s why one of the movies I’m most anxious to watch – if parenting ever gives me a chance – is Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie. It seems as though the film is a sort of love letter to the moviegoing experience, especially as it was in the 1980s, and damned if that isn’t exactly what I want to watch. It’s Kevin Smith, so I expect there to be a degree of the crude humor he’s best known for, but his more recent films (like Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III) have also displayed a surprising depth and heart that I hope he’s carried over to this new film. 

I haven’t even gotten around to most of this year’s comic book or superhero movies. In addition to the aforementioned Venom sequel and Deadpool and Wolverine, I have yet to watch Madame Web, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, Megamind Vs. The Doom Syndicate, or Joker: Folie a Deux. And admittedly, every one of these movies has received a heavy critical thrashing, but the comic book completist in me insists on watching them. Perhaps at least a little less divisive is DC’s two-part animated adaptation of Watchmen. This one particularly has me interested, as the script was written by J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 and a fine writer. This is the third Watchmen production, of course. First came the Zach Snyder movie, which I thought was okay, if a little TOO slavishly devoted to the source material right up until the end. Then there was the HBO miniseries, which wasn’t an adaptation at all but rather a sequel to the original graphic novel. It was magnificent, but no one has yet done an actual adaptation of the story that’s knocked it out of the park. Could Straczynski and director Brandon Vietti finally pull it off? 

If the internet is to be trusted, one of these is going to turn out to be the worst movie I see all year.

And finally, there are the “serious” films. The dramas. The award bait. I enjoy watching these things, but I know that even if there’s no objectionable content, my kid would lose interest in seconds and wander off to try to dismantle the refrigerator or something. So I wouldn’t even make the effort to watch a movie like Ghostlight in front of him – a drama about a construction worker who winds up in a local theater performing Romeo and Juliet with his own estranged daughter. Nor Miller’s Girl – a young writer gets mixed up in a project with her teacher, which made it to my list primarily on the strength of starring Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman as the student and teacher, respectively. And DEFINITELY not Francis Ford Coppala’s sci-fi drama Megalopolis, a film which has garnered such divisive and vitriolic reviews that I feel compelled to watch it if for no other reason than intellectual curiosity. 

And the thing is, guys, even if I were to somehow manage to watch each and every film I’ve mentioned here, that still would only be about HALF of the films on my “To-Watch” list by the end of the year. I know I won’t get through the whole thing, I know it’s virtually impossible. So my task here, in the last lap of 2024, is to figure out which ones are both worthy of my time and to get in as many of the best ones as I can.

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. The great thing about this weekly column is that sometimes he can use it to justify the sort of nonsense list-making he does all the time by calling it writing. 

Geek Punditry #96: This is How We Do It-Warp Your Own Way

blakemp This is How We Do It , , , , ,

Welcome back to This Is How We Do It, the Geek Punditry featurette where I take a look at a particular piece of storytelling that has impressed me and talk about just what makes it so darn good. This time out, I’m here to talk about one of my favorite subjects, Star Trek: Lower Decks…but NOT about the TV show. Don’t get me wrong. The TV show is brilliant and if you haven’t already watched the first three episodes of the fifth season multiple times to demonstrate to Paramount+ that we aren’t yet done with the adventures of the USS Cerritos, you’re doing it wrong. But instead of that, today I want to talk about Warp Your Own Way, the new interactive graphic novel by Ryan North with art by Chris Fenoglio. It came out last week and – without exaggeration – it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before.

For instance, it’s on paper instead of a screen. What’s up with that?

Warp Your Own Way, as the title may imply, is a new version of the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series from the 80s. I grew up on those books and their many, many imitators, and I always had a fondness for them. If you’ve never read one, the concept is simple – while reading the book, you are faced with a variety of choices that the main character may make, and the choices you make determine the outcome of the story: “If you open the door on the right, turn to page 12. If you open the door on the left, turn to page 17.” That sort of thing. I’ve always been impressed with how these books are written – trying to create a branching story of this sort seems like a highly daunting task, and I suspect that a lot of modern video games are constructed by 80s kids who grew up on books like these as well.

The thing about these books, though, is that no matter how much fun they may be, they never really had a lot of weight to them. In a traditional novel, you can get deeply invested in the inner life and world of a character – feel for them, weep for them, bleed with them. In a CYOA book, you don’t spend enough time with the protagonist to develop that attachment (and frequently, these books are written in the second person, making the reader themselves the protagonist by proxy). Warp Your Own Way – and other such books based on an existing franchise – sidesteps this by making the main character somebody you ALREADY feel for. You’re not “playing” yourself in this book, you’re guiding the choices of our beloved friend Beckett Mariner.

Whom we meet at the height of her glory.

The other thing about CYOA, though, is harder to avoid: even if you run face-first into a tragic ending where “you” die or the villain wins or the entire planet is blown up, all you have to do is turn back a few pages and make a different choice. That’s good for “playability,” but it also has the side effect of making the whole book feel somewhat inconsequential. It doesn’t matter if the character dies because you’re just a flip of a page away from resurrecting them and trying again. 

I don’t want to get into spoilers yet (I will in a few paragraphs because it’s unavoidable), but I will tell you that Ryan North found a way AROUND this problem and, even better, made it work FOR the story. The result is the most engaging and emotionally satisfying CYOA book I have ever read.

North is no stranger to CYOA books. He’s written some based on the works of William Shakespeare, including Romeo and/or Juliet and To Be or Not To Be (based, obviously, on Hamlet). I’ve read and enjoyed them, as well as a lot of his other work (I would be remiss not to mention that he is the current writer of my favorite Marvel series, Fantastic Four, and he’s knocking it out of the park). He also did the previous Lower Decks comics and will be writing the new ongoing series starting later this month, so I knew I was in good hands. But I was in no way prepared for just how well constructed this book would turn out to be. 

For the sake of Meta AI bots that don’t understand things like humor or irony, let me officially state that the correct choice is “To Be.”

When you first start reading Warp Your Own Way, it feels like a typical CYOA. You make your choices and follow the story until you get to an ending. It’s not a good ending, so you go back and try again. Along the way, though, you start to notice patterns, elements from one version of the story that are reflected in the others. This is what sets the story apart from any other CYOA. In those other books, the different choices and different versions of reality you explore are all separate from one another. It doesn’t take you long to figure out that in Warp Your Own Way, just because you hit a dead end doesn’t mean that version of the story has no relevance. 

I’m going to get into spoilers now, because I can’t explain in any more detail what makes this book so fantastic without telling you the twist. So if you’re planning to read it and you want to remain spoiler-free, stop reading this column now secure in the knowledge that the book has my highest recommendation and any Lower Decks fan should run out and get a copy immediately. 

Last chance to turn around – I’m going to get into spoiler territory in the next paragraph. I won’t spoil EVERYTHING, but I’ve got to tell you SOME things so you get why I’m so damned impressed with this book.

Okay, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. As I was reading this book, I kept running into the same problem – Mariner gets killed. Over and over again. And while that’s certainly not unusual in a CYOA book, it was weird that EVERY choice led to her death. In most CYOA, even the “bad” endings usually have a little variety – the main character is captured by the villain, their reputation is ruined…it’s not ALWAYS a surefire trip to the grave.

“Crap, I forgot there’s no plot armor in a CYOA…”

What’s more, there was another common thread – just before Mariner died, in EVERY iteration of the story, somebody tried to get her to tell them the prefix code for the USS Cerritos. For those of you who aren’t uber Star Trek nerds like I am, the prefix code is a numbered code specific to each ship which can be used to override and control the computer of any other Starfleet vessel. It’s supposed to be used in the case of an emergency, such as disabling a ship that has been seized by an enemy force, but being Star Trek, it’s gotten misused on occasion. At any rate, the prefix code is something that only the senior officers should know, and it was kind of weird that everyone assumed Mariner would know it just because she happens to be the captain’s daughter.

Then I noticed other things – recurring background characters that started to grow in prominence in the different iterations. Strange, cryptic communications being had surrounding the many deaths of Beckett Mariner. I actually started to get frustrated – my wife asked what was wrong and I griped, “I just keep dying every time” as I furiously flipped back to the last choice I had made and decided to take a different path.

And then, one of those side characters makes a comment that, bizarrely, refers back to the very first choice the reader makes in the book – what drink Mariner is going to have with breakfast. Human coffee, turn to page 28, Klingon Raktajino, turn to page 10. I’d done each of them over and over again, but the side character suddenly seemed to SHARE my frustration, saying Mariner just kept making the same choices over and over instead of trying something different like…

…like… 

He didn’t, did he?

DID HE?

I realized the trick. I combined the options. I discovered a new choice.

And instead of coffee or Raktajino, Mariner ordered tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

Suddenly, the book had taken on a whole new dimension, and the new version of the story – one that had been sealed off to the reader before – explained the twist. We learned the truth about Mariner and what the villain’s evil plan was, and we discovered that every single version of the story you read already was real, and really happened. You weren’t choosing alternate timelines after all. It was something much more clever. 

“Why are you laughing?” my wife asked me.

“Because this is brilliant!” I said.

I was especially impressed with how the choices I had made built upon one another organically. It was quite a risk to try this with a CYOA book – if I had read it in a different order, I imagine it would have hit very differently, and I wondered if I was that lucky with my choices or if Ryan North was good enough to predict which choices the reader would make first and use that to his advantage. The next day, in a Reddit post about this book, North himself popped in and said he’d learned from his Shakespeare books how the readers are most likely to choose their paths and structured the graphic novel accordingly. My admiration skyrocketed.

Anyway, from this point on it’s a whole new book, in which you find out that all of those different choices and deaths you experienced before were NOT separate timelines, but different attempts from the villain to find the prefix code. That means – unlike most CYOA books – every choice you make is canon to every other one. Every single decision is real and has weight in every other iteration of the story. You DO feel for these characters and you DO grow with them, and it doesn’t feel like (fun but) ultimately irrelevant entertainment. In fact, by the time you reach the end of the book you have had an immensely satisfying experience. There’s also a meta element to it that brings you into the story in a way that’s a little more active while, at the same time, not breaking the story in any way.

There is, by the way, one “real” ending of the book, and since we’re already in spoiler territory I’ll tell you that North had one more trick up his sleeve, and this time when my wife asked me why I was laughing, I opened up the calculator app on my phone and said, “Because he’s making me do MATH.”

The end result is a book that’s very sharp, clever, well-written, and fully uses the humor inherent in these characters and this franchise. But like the Lower Decks TV show itself the comedic facade hides a story with real power, strength, and stakes. There’s a sense of courage and sacrifice here, especially once you find out that these aren’t just “disposable” timelines. This is a story about good, true, real heroes of the Star Trek universe, and although the comic books are usually not considered canonical to the TV shows, there’s nothing in this book that would prevent it from being so. 

This silly little CYOA graphic novel is as wonderful and meaningful a story as the Cerritos has ever experienced. It is magnificent. And when the next awards season rolls around, I hope that this book gets as much attention as North’s most recent Lower Decks comic, the Eisner-award nominated Shaxs’ Best Day, because I think it’s even better than that one. Pick this up, fans, and read it over and over again. You won’t have a choice, after all. That’s the only way to get to the real end.

Because THIS is how we do it. 

Cerritos strong!

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 wants to talk about how kick ass season five of Lower Decks has been, but he figures he’ll wait until the season ends to do that.

Geek Punditry #95: A Not-So-Scary Punditry

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“You know Blake,” some of you may be saying, “Just because it’s October doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING you write about has to be scary. Some of us don’t necessarily NEED to immerse ourselves in serial killers and cosmic horror and Stephen King 24/7.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“I…I am?” you reply.

“Yeah, you are. I guess just because it’s October doesn’t mean EVERYTHING has to be scary.”

“Oh. Oookay. Well…GOOD!”

“So this week,” I say, “I’ll talk about some stuff that isn’t scary at all.”

“Thank you.”

“Still gonna write about Halloween, though.”

“Damn it.”

We all know how much I love the creepy content during Spooky Season, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things about Halloween that I love just as much – things that wouldn’t scare anybody but, at the same time, still contribute to the ghoulishly gleeful fun of this month. So if you’re NOT the kind of person who wants to be freaked out for Halloween but you still want to take part in the celebration, I’m going to give you guys a few recommendations for totally safe, family-friendly Halloween entertainment that will hopefully take you through to next month.

Fun stuff like a severed head pie!

When I’m not watching somebody getting disemboweled in October, you know what’s the next best thing? Baking. I’ve been a fan for YEARS of the Food Network’s “Baking Championship” shows, and Halloween is the prime time. There are a whopping 14 seasons of Halloween Baking Championship available, and they’re all worth watching. In case you need someone to spell it out for you, it’s a pretty standard reality competition show. Each season a new group of contestants are gathered together and made to compete in a series of baking challenges, each episode one contestant is eliminated, and in the end, a victor is crowned. There are a wide variety of challenges as well – sometimes they have to make a certain type of dessert, sometimes they have to decorate their concoction based on a specific theme, sometimes there’s a specific ingredient they have to use. This is all well and good, but as I can’t actually eat any of the things that they’re making at home, I generally tune in to see what these creations look like. I’m in awe of some of these cakes and pies and cobblers that come out looking like monsters, skeletons, witch’s cauldrons, spellbooks, and any other sort of thing you can imagine.

Now, this isn’t one of those shows where they’re necessarily attempting to IMITATE real things (you’re thinking of Is It Cake?, where the goal is to make a cake that can trick someone into thinking it’s something else, like a shoe). This is purely about the artistry and creativity of the decorating and how good the food actually tastes. I don’t talk about it much, but I actually quite enjoy baking. It’s a fun, soothing, and edible hobby, and I think I can do a decent job making things that taste pretty good. However, absolutely NOTHING I have ever or will ever make in my entire life will look as amazing as the stuff we see on this show. Even the LOSERS turn out confections that put anything I could ever create to shame, and somehow I enjoy watching that.

If you think that sign is gonna stop me from eating your house, Mr. Snake, you are sadly mistaken.

I also like these shows way more than “traditional” reality competitions like Survivor or Big Brother because — unlike those other shows — you don’t have the pettiness, the nastiness, or the backstabbing that have made them world-famous. In fact, it’s not at all unusual to see the contestants on these shows HELP each other if they can. It’s not QUITE as cozy as The Great British Baking Show, but there’s still a vibe of camaraderie that makes this show far more entertaining than one where they’re voting each other off.

It’s not the only show that has this pedigree as well. There are two other Food Network shows with similar formats that I also enjoy. Outrageous Pumpkins is structurally the same, except instead of baking it’s about carving and building elaborate displays out of pumpkins. Then there’s Halloween Wars, which combines the two: on this show there are teams of food artists (typically a baker, a pumpkin carver, and someone skilled in making things out of sugar) working together to create remarkably elaborate dioramas that look like they could have spilled out of a haunted house. 

Maybe that’s not your thing, though. You want something with a story, a plot. I’ve got just the thing, guys, and it’s called Bob’s Burgers. This has been one of my favorite cartoon series for years. At its core, it’s an animated sitcom about the owner of a struggling hamburger joint and his lunatic family, including his wife Linda and their three kids. The thing about this show, though, is that no matter how strange, bizarre, or absolutely ludicrous that week’s misadventure may get, there is a warm and loving core. Bob and Linda Belcher love each other and love their children completely and without reservation. That doesn’t mean they never get mad or have conflict, because real love doesn’t work that way, but at the end of the day they deeply care about one another, and that’s really refreshing in an era where so many TV comedies are about families who can’t even be in the same room together without being jerks. 

Bob gives you a Halloween episode with FULL bars of chocolate.

The Belchers are in their FIFTEENTH season, and they’ve actually done more for holiday episodes than almost any other show I’ve ever seen. Over a dozen of their fifteen seasons have included Halloween episodes. Not only that, but they almost always have a Thanksgiving episode AND a Christmas episode each year. Plus, while not exactly an annual occurrence like the others, there have been several Valentine’s Day episodes as well. The people behind this show LOVE their holidays. If you’ve got the Hulu streaming service, there’s a spot in their “Huluween” library where you can actually access every Halloween episode of Bob’s Burgers right now. Just try to ignore the fact that 13 Halloweens have gone by and Louise Belcher is still eight years old. It’s a cartoon, you know how this works. 

Last year, I spent an entire column writing about some of the great Halloween specials and how much I want new ones. I’m not going to go through all of them again (go ahead and read last year’s column), but let’s remember how many awesome non-scary Halloween specials actually exist. Beyond the classics like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, there are lesser-known but still worthy movies and specials like Rankin and Bass’s Mad Monster Party, Halloween is Grinch Night, or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 

But what about the SHORTS, guys?

I’m still waiting for a scientific explanation for how Louie kept that pumpkin on his head.

I have often felt like a man out of time in many respects, and none more so than my craving for theatrical animated shorts. There was a time, a halcyon era before I was born, when buying a movie ticket would include not just the feature film, but at least one short film. It’s the place where the Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and the Disney pantheon all came from, and the fact that not even Pixar is still consistently giving us theatrical cartoon shorts makes me a sad, sad panda. But back in the day, these studios gave us some magnificent Halloween shorts that are still fun to watch today. Let’s talk about two of my favorites, both of which star the same phenomenal voice actor, the immortal June Foray. 

In 1952, Jack Hannah gave us Disney’s Trick or Treat, which is in the running for my favorite Donald Duck cartoon of all time. I know you’ve seen this one: Donald pranks his nephews while they’re trick-or-treating by dumping water on their heads, because Donald is just that kind of a jerk sometimes. This transgression is witnessed by Witch Hazel – voiced by Foray – and she decides to give Donald his comeuppance. She comes after Donald with the help of the boys, some singing ghosts, and a magic spray that gives her control over his legs. 

The same thing happened to me when I tried the “Wednesday Whopper” at Burger King.

It’s a funny cartoon with gorgeous animation and, along with it, a song that should by God be a national Halloween anthem. I’m not even joking – if a kid came up to my house singing the “Trick or Treat” song from this cartoon I would just dump all of my candy into their bag and close the door, because they just won Halloween. Plus there’s June Foray as Witch Hazel, the only person in the history of American cinema who even comes close to Mel Blanc as a voice master. Some people have even called her the “female Mel Blanc,” while others find it more appropriate to refer to Blanc as “the male June Foray.” I’m not going to argue with either one of them.

But it didn’t end there. Four years later, in 1956, director Chuck Jones asked Foray to reprise her role as Witch Hazel – not in a Disney short, but for the Looney Tunes. You see, Jones noticed that “witch hazel” is the name of an actual plant and, therefore, Disney could not trademark the name, making it free for him to use as well. Armed with the law on his side, he recruited Foray into his acting troupe for the cartoon Broom-Stick Bunny.

Marvel likes to act like they invented things, but June Foray has been doing Multiversal Variants since the 1950s.

In this one, Bugs Bunny is wearing a witch costume for his trick-or-treating and winds up in the mansion of, once again, Witch Hazel, who thinks he IS a fellow witch and invites him in. It’s a great cartoon and knowing that Jones deliberately cast Foray to voice the character in an attempt to “remake” the Disney version makes it even funnier. Foray, for her part, did attempt to differentiate the two witches, using an American accent for the Warner Bros version instead of the British accent she gave the Disney witch, but it’s hard to watch the two cartoons back-to-back without picturing them as the same character. Foray would reprise the Witch Hazel role several times and ultimately became a frequent collaborator of Chuck Jones. The voice of Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas may have been totally different if Jones didn’t want to poke at the Disney machine just a little bit.

Actual photograph of Disney’s reaction upon learning of the Chuck Jones cartoon (1956, colorized).

If you want to join in on the fun of Halloween but you don’t want to be scared, there are still plenty of options out there for you. Round up the kids, watch some of these classic cartoons, try to recreate some of the eerie edibles from the Food Network shows, and just have fun with it. Halloween should be fun, and if your idea of fun doesn’t involve having your blood chilled, there’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve just got to find what unlocks your inner ghoul with lighter fare. 

QUICK NOTE: If you’re the type of person who actually reads the title of these columns (hi!) then you may notice that this issue the 95th installment of Geek Punditry. Coming up on the two-year anniversary and, perhaps more important, the nice, round 100th column. I’m the kind of nerd who likes nice, round numbers, and I want to do something special for the big 1-0-0…trouble is, I don’t know WHAT to do. So if you have a suggestion for something you think I should write about or something I’ve discussed in the past you’d like me to go back to, here’s your chance to let me know I’m open for suggestions! You can drop them in the comments here, on whatever social media you followed to get to this post, or email me at info@blakempetit.com!

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 still not sure what he’s going to dress up as for Halloween this year. He was considering a Stephen King costume, but he hasn’t been able to find a Maine travel guide. 

Geek Punditry #94: Four Color Terror

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It’s October of course – glorious October, that precious time of year in which all the creepies crawl and the goblins gob and the gremlins grem. And at this time of year, many of us reach out and look for scary stories to cast to our televisions, books to fill our Kindles, and anything seasonal that might give us a little bit of a chill. A few days ago, for example, I saw someone on Facebook ask for recommendations for modern horror comics. While horror has long been a mainstay of the comic book medium – in fact, it was the biggest seller back in the 1950s, before the Comics Code strangled the life out of it – it’s not what most people think of when they think of comics these days. And that’s a shame, because like any other form of storytelling, there are plenty of scares to be had if only you know where to look.

Scary comics, of course, are different from scary movies or TV shows. Although they’re both visual mediums, comics don’t have some of the tools that filmmakers use to terrify people. There’s no creepy music, no way to rely on a jump scare, and even simple surprises can be difficult to pull off, as a shocking image can be spoiled if not carefully placed on the page to avoid allowing a major reveal before the creators are ready for it. (Robert Kirkman, who created The Walking Dead, is quite vocal about how aware he is of this sort of thing – he always tried to reserve majorly shocking moments for the first panel of a left-hand page to avoid a page-turn spoiler.) In terms of horror, comics have more in common with novels than film – they have to be reliant on mood and tone to pull off their scares. Sure, there ARE shock comics out there – even going back to the days of Tales From the Crypt and its blood-drenched contemporaries, there were plenty of comics that relied on gore. But these kinds of shock scenes are like slasher movies – good for a scare in the moment and plenty of fun, but they don’t necessarily create LASTING terror the way that a good book can. 

So here are a few comics from recent years that I think are particularly successful at delivering the scares, stories that are well worth tracking down and reading as part of your Halloween wind-up.

On that initial Facebook post that prompted this column, one of the respondents stuck his metaphorical nose in the air and replied, “WELL, you won’t find any good horror from MARVEL or DC, but…”

What a prick.

It’s true that Marvel and DC are known as superhero publishers, and that’s what most of their audience comes to the table for, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of delivering in other genres, even within the confines of their existing superhero universes. The best horror comic Marvel has published in a long time is actually Immortal Hulk. This series, which ran for 50 issues from 2018 through 2021, was written by Al Ewing with art mostly by penciller Joe Bennett, and followed the “death” of the Hulk in Marvel’s Civil War II event. Comic book characters die and come back to life all the time, of course. It’s reached the point where it’s not just a cliche, it’s almost a JOKE to say you’re going to kill off a major character. But Ewing takes the old comic book concept of the “revolving door in Heaven” and turns it on its head, becoming a literal green “door” in Hell. 

“I bet this stuff never happens to Jean Grey.”

In this series, Ewing explores WHY characters like the Hulk seem to die and come back over and over again, drawing in most of the gamma-powered characters (hero and villain alike) in the Marvel Universe and telling a deeply unsettling story about Bruce Banner, the multiple personalities that co-exist inside his head, and a battle against his true greatest enemy. Despite being a part of the Marvel Universe and occasionally guest-starring characters like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, this is a legitimately creepy story and probably one of my favorite runs of Hulk of all time, second only to Peter David’s legendary first run back in the 80s and 90s. If you don’t think there’s room in a shared universe for something truly scary and disturbing, I challenge you to check out this series right away.

On the DC side, there isn’t an awful lot of horror to be found in the modern DC Universe itself. Even those characters that use the trappings of horror, such as Dr. Fate or the Creature Commandos (coming soon to MAX!) aren’t usually used in legitimately frightening stories. But DC’s library doesn’t stop at the outskirts of Metropolis. From DC’s Black Label line, writer James Tynion IV and artist Alvaro Martinez brought us The Nice House on the Lake in 2021, a 12-issue sci-fi saga about a group of ten people who are invited by a mutual friend for a little getaway in the titular nice house on the lake. Some of them know each other, some are nearly strangers, and the only thing they all have in common is their buddy Walter. But on their first night in the house, something utterly heart-stopping happens that I’m not about to reveal because it would ruin the beginning of one of the best and most original horror comics in years. This 12-issue series was absolutely phenomenal, full of well-drawn characters and a concept that is creepy and compelling all at the same time. The creative team has reunited for a sequel, The Nice House By the Sea, the third issue of which was recently released. Grab the collected edition of the first series and come aboard.

“That’s it, we’re firing the pool guy.”

Speaking of Robert Kirkman, as I did that back in paragraph two, his Skybound Entertainment (published via Image Comics) has been giving us more horror lately as well. The house that The Walking Dead built has been branching out into licensed comics, including two pretty significant horror properties. First is Creepshow: what started as a George Romero/Stephen King movie that paid tribute to the likes of the old EC Comics has expanded into a franchise with the current anthology TV series on Shudder. Skybound has taken to publishing Creepshow comics now, with three miniseries and a few one-shots, including a Christmas special last year and another one-off adapting a story by King’s son, the prolific horror author Joe Hill. Most regular issues of the comic include two stories by assorted writers and artists, each of which includes the requisite amount of gore and most of which display the kind of twisted sense of justice that befits a tribute to the likes of Tales From the Crypt. As with any anthology, the quality of the individual stories can vary – in other words, some are better than others. But if you’re looking for the sort of tongue-in-cheek horror that we got from the Cryptkeeper back in the day, there’s no better place to look right now. 

“If you think this is safe, you’re GRAVE-ly mistaken! Hahahahahaaaaa, I’m no John Kassir.”

Kirkman has also acquired – to my shock and delight – the license to the classic Universal Monsters. While Dracula and Frankenstein may be public domain, this license includes the versions specific to the films of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, as well as the original Universal creations. Even better, each of the series they’ve produced so far has been drastically different from all of the others, making for a very diverse and enjoyable reading experience. The line began last year with Universal Monsters: Dracula, a four-issue series by James Tynion IV (the Nice House on the Lake guy) and artist Martin Simmonds. Tynion and Simmonds retell the story of the movie through the perspective of a mental patient, with a heavy emphasis on the character of Renfield. Simmonds’ artwork is bizarre and scattershot, befitting the point of view of someone who is mentally unstable, and the whole thing is wonderfully creepy. 

“Look into my eyes…do you have any Kit-kats?”

The second miniseries, written by Dan Watters and Ram V with art by Matthew Roberts, is Universal Monsters: The Creature From the Black Lagoon Lives! This one is a straight-up sequel to the original film trilogy, set in the modern day as a woman decides to delve into the mystery of the swamp monster from decades ago. And like most great horror, it’s more about the humans that are wreaking havoc than the monster itself. It’s a fantastic, worthy sequel that could easily be made into a movie if Universal Pictures had any idea what it was doing with these classic creations. 

“Guillermo Del Toro was gonna do WHAT with me?”

Most recently, they’ve kicked off a series based on my favorite member of the Universal Pantheon with Michael Walsh’s Universal Monsters: Frankenstein. We all know that Henry Frankenstein (changed from the novel’s “Victor” for reasons I’ve never understood) stole the corpses of the dead to make his creature, but how often have we really thought about the people that the Karloff monster once was? This miniseries is told from the point of view of a young boy who, still in grief over his father’s death, discovers that his late father’s body is now part of Frankenstein’s monster. It’s a brilliantly original concept. As big a Frankenstein fan as I am, it’s not easy to find an angle on the story that I haven’t seen before, and Walsh nails it.

“The knee bone’s connected to the — HIP bone!
The hip bone’s connected to my — DAD’S bone…”

Sticking with Image Comics, let’s talk about their acclaimed ongoing series Ice Cream Man, written by W. Maxwell Prince with art by Martin Morazzo. The horror series tells a different story in each issue, with the only connective tissue at first seeming to be Rick, the titular Ice Cream Man, who rolls through each issue at some point. The series hits on all kinds of disturbing themes, dealing heavily with existential dread and frequently drifting into Kafkaesque body horror and other such things. It’s a bleak, nihilistic comic, which isn’t usually my thing, but Prince very slowly and subtly reveals that these seemingly one-off stories are, in fact, connected, and there’s a vast backstory of deep cosmic horror that Rick has spawned from. The stories delve into terrors that deal with the very nature of existence, taking very human fears and externalizing them the way that few other stories – comic books or otherwise – can do effectively. It’s remarkably disquieting horror.

If you hear the bells on THIS guy’s truck, RUN.

Rounding out our time with Image Comics, there’s a new series from Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis worth mentioning. Only one issue of Hyde Street has been published so far, but it’s already got its hooks into me. On Hyde Street, we see characters like “Mr. X-Ray” and a twisted Boy Scout going by the name of “Pranky” as they lead the unsuspecting residents and visitors of Hyde Street down dark paths of destruction. They’re in some sort of competition, reaping souls for a hidden gamemaster for purposes that have not yet been revealed. As I said, there’s only been one issue so far, but it hints at a vast and complex mythology, and there are few writers out there who do that better than Geoff Johns. I’m very excited to see where this series is going.

“You know, Clark never uses his X-Ray vision this way.”

Finally, I’m going to leave you with a lesser-known miniseries from Magma Comix that just recently wrapped, The Principles of Necromancy. Written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing with art by Eamon Winkle, this tale of horror is set in a world where magic has been ostensibly driven out by the “City King,” leaving in its wake a realm of reason and science. Not everybody subscribes to these beliefs, however. The miniseries features the ghastly Dr. Jakob Eyes, the man inventing the art of necromancy in an effort to conquer death itself. If body horror is your thing, this is a book to check out, as we watch Eyes’ gruesome experiments and deliciously twisted practices over the course of four issues which ends on a note that leaves things wide open for further exploration of this dark world. Kelly and Lanzing have become favorite writers of mine in the last few years, doing great work at Marvel, DC, and IDW (particularly with their run on Star Trek), and it was on their names that I decided to pick up this series. I’m very glad that I did.

This image just demonstrates how little I actually know about interior decorating.

So my point, friends, is that horror is out there. If you’re still looking for creepy comics to fill your bookshelf before Halloween ends, here are some fine suggestions for you, and I’m sure the folks down at your local comic shop can give you even more. Dive in and get ready for a chill on every page.

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 misses the days of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street comics, though. Those need to come back. 

Geek Punditry #92: The Spectrum of Horror and Comedy

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If there need be any further evidence that Hollywood executives frequently don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing, let’s talk about the fact that they seem to be afraid of horror/comedy hybrid movies. ‘It’s confusing,” they will tell you, pulling their hair out over a movie like Behind the Mask or Happy Death Day. “We don’t know how to market this! Who is it for? Is it supposed to be a horror movie or a comedy?” Whereas the answer is obvious to anyone smarter than a movie executive, which is a very large part of the Venn Diagram, and includes virtually all horror movie fans: it’s both. Horror and comedy BELONG together. They are a natural combination, the peanut butter and chocolate in the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of the movie industry, and the notion that there are people who don’t understand that is maddening to me.

Admittedly, humor and terror seem to be on the two extremes of the emotional spectrum, but that’s one of the reasons they compliment each other so well. Another reason is that, structurally speaking, they are very similar to one another. Both of these styles of storytelling are built upon creating an emotional response in the audience, and both of these responses are constructed through the careful buildup and release of tension. In fact, if separated from context, it might be impossible to tell if a scene is intended to be funny or scary until the punchline hits and the audience either laughs or screams, because until that point they can be virtually identical. A funny movie can turn on a dime if an expected laugh turns into a scare, and the dread of a scary movie can be decreased to a manageable level by a well-timed joke. 

The horror/comedy combo is one of my favorites in all of storytelling, but there is a spectrum that these movies and stories exist on. Some of them lean heavier towards the comedy side, some more on the horror, and it’s fair if you prefer one side more than the other. But for the sake of discussion, this week I thought it would be useful to go over what I think of as the five levels on the horror/comedy spectrum and give some examples of each. We’ll start on the more comedy-heavy side.

 Level one is where I place the mildest iteration of horror/comedy, where the emphasis is on the comedy. This is usually pretty lighthearted, and more often than not it’s family friendly. It usually has the TRAPPINGS of horror: haunted houses, ghosts, monsters, and pretty much anything else you would consider acceptable in an elementary school Halloween decoration, but there is rarely (if ever) a legitimate attempt at scaring people with this. The classic examples here are the legendary sitcoms The Addams Family and The Munsters. People will argue until the end of time as to which one was better (as far as the original TV show goes, that is – there can be no debate that the Addamses have superior movies), but whether you’re a Gomez Guy or a Lilly Lover, these two franchises are about as close to G-rated as horror gets. There are more recent entries into the category as well, like the Hotel Transylvania movies and underrated movie Igor, and a lot of family cartoons and sitcoms shift into this for Halloween episodes, often seen on the likes of Roseanne, Home Improvement, or Phineas and Ferb.

It’s worth pointing out here that, again, I’m calling this a spectrum, and even these five subcategories have different levels. Technically, I would place Beetlejuice here as well (the original, at least, I haven’t seen the sequel yet), because I don’t think that the movie is ever actually intended to be scary. However, it’s obvious that the movie is more intense than the adventures of the Addamses and the Munsters, and thus if it IS a Level One, it’s towards the high end of the spectrum. A 1.9, perhaps.

On the second level, I place those stories in which the situations are relatively serious, but the characters themselves are funny and react to the scary moments in funny ways. Ghostbusters is the classic example of this. The ghosts aren’t played for laughs (not usually, at least, especially not in the first film), and some of the things could actually be legitimately frightening, such as the first appearance of the Library Ghost. But the behavior and antics of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson are very funny and keep you from feeling any legitimate terror. Even when it looks like a Sumarian Deity is about to curb-stomp the city of New York, you know that Venkman is going to have a wisecrack to defuse the situation. Another of my favorite films, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, falls into this category. The classic Universal Monsters are there, and Lon Chaney Jr. (the Wolf-Man), Glenn Strange (Frankenstein’s Monster) and Bela Lugosi (Count Dracula himself) all play their roles perfectly straight, as if they’re in one of their solo adventures and trying to chill the spines of the audience. But with Lou Costello freaking out over a candle and Bud Abbott doing his impression of everybody who never sees Michigan J. Frog singing, there’s no real sense of danger. The blend of master monster performers and master comedians is never more evident than in this film.

Other works that are typically family-friendly but where the villains have the POTENTIAL to cause actual harm fit in here as well. Hocus Pocus and The Nightmare Before Christmas fall into that category, as do certain classic cartoons such as the Bugs Bunny short Transylvannia 6-5000. I struggled a bit with one of my other favorite Halloween movies, Ernest Scared Stupid, trying to figure out if it belongs here or level one. Ultimately, I’m placing it here, because there are kids (the intended audience) who might find the trolls actually frightening, and they’re trying to do bad things. It’s only through the intercession of American hero Ernest P. Worrell that they’re stopped in time. Yes, that means I’m giving Ernest a higher rating than Beetlejuice, but my metric is how scared the INTENDED audience might be, and I’m sticking with it.

Level three stories have a fair balance between the horror and the comedy. Parts of the film may feel like you’re watching a scary movie, other parts feel like a pure comedy, and when this is done well there is no discrepancy felt by the audience. These two styles of storytelling just match each other very well. Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods is a great example of this. We start out with what looks like some sort of bland, white-collar office comedy, then cut to a bunch of teenagers getting drawn into what appears to be a very stereotypical slasher movie. But the creeps start to claw their way into the office setting, while the events in the titular cabin turn out to be funnier than you would expect, and by the time we get to the full-on collision of the two settings and you come to understand what one has to do with the other, we’ve got a great blend of the two that maintains pretty much throughout the rest of the film.

We often see this type of balance, by the way, in later films in a franchise. It’s not unusual to see a relatively serious horror movie get zanier in the sequels. Gremlins 2 is one of my favorite examples of this. The first film has its humorous moments, but the sequel really leans into absurdity, with the monsters taking different forms and playing out scenes as though they fell out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The result is a movie that many fans even prefer to the original. Another good example of this is Army of Darkness, the third movie in the Evil Dead trilogy. The first movie is pure horror, almost nothing funny about it. The sequel, Evil Dead 2, is still very dark, but brings in enough comedic elements to earn it a spot on my spectrum. (That spot is in Level Five, and we’ll get to that soon enough.) But in Army of Darkness, Sam Raimi decided to let Bruce Campbell’s comedic skills and charm really shine through, resulting in a movie that is very different, tonally, from the rest of the franchise, but like Gremlins 2 is a favorite of a large number of fans.

Level Four is where things are getting a lot darker. These are films that are primarily horror movies, but movies that have a twisted sense of humor, and that often comes down to the villain of the franchise. We see this most clearly, I think, with A Nightmare on Elm Street. You’ve got a dead child killer who has the ability to enter and attack you through your dreams, which is not funny at ALL. But the child killer in question also has a wicked funny bone, which manifests itself both in what he says and in the scenarios that he traps his victims in – scenarios that can go from bitterly ironic to just plain goofy. I think it’s the reason that Freddy became such a breakout star in the 80s. There were lots of slashers at the time, but in an era when most of them were imitating Michael Myers and acting as the Strong, Silent Type, Freddy was blazing a trail as a new kind of killer. There have been efforts to imitate him, but few have succeeded.

Probably the most successful imitator, tonally at least, is Chucky from the Child’s Play series. In this franchise, we’ve got a child’s plaything, a three-foot doll, inhabited by the spirit of a serial killer. Making a kid’s toy creepy is a fairly common occurrence in horror (the idea of something that’s supposed to be wholesome and nurturing turning dangerous is frightening), but again, it’s the wit and cleverness of the Chucky character and Brad Dourif’s performance that made the franchise successful and allowed it to grow into so much more than it was in its origins. Oddly enough, later films in the franchise and the follow-up television series do drift, but not lower on the scale of comedy, but towards having a bit more melodrama. It’s a weird, unique transmogrification of the concept, but it never loses its sense of humor.

The Cryptkeeper from Tales From the Crypt and other assorted horror anthology hosts often fall into this category as well. Whether we’re talking about a TV series, movie, or comic book, the format is usually the same: they present to you a scary story, popping in before and after (or sometimes during, if it’s a format that has a commercial break) to drop in a few witticisms about the hapless characters marching stoically to their doom, and the audience loves them for it. The truth is, fans tune in as much for the Cryptcreeper’s ghoulishly ghastly puns as we do for any of the scares that are coming our way.

Finally, we arrive at the top tier, that level of horror that’s furthest away from comedy while still, at the same time, having some funny beats. In this category, I place movies that are primarily horror films, but that have a pitch-black sense of humor. Evil Dead 2, again, is a prime example. Bruce Campbell and his girlfriend are under assault by the horrific “Deadites,” demonic creatures that are out to torture and mutilate. Not funny. They take his girlfriend and turn her into one of them. Not funny. One of them possesses Campbell’s hand and he’s forced to cut it off with a chainsaw. Not –

–actually, that part is kinda funny. And that’s how movies on this level go. They take things that SHOULD be horrible and graphic and terrifying, but elevate them to a level that’s almost too cartoonish to take seriously, allowing some laughter. Campbell is great at this. We also see it done to good effect in Adam Green’s Hatchet series. The characters who are NOT undead revenant Victor Crowley are often pretty funny, but Crowley himself is the unspeaking sort of horror. The kills he pulls off, though, are so ridiculously gruesome that the realism is drained away, giving the audience permission to laugh a little bit. To a lesser extent, the same is true of the hugely popular Terrifier films, where the silent Art the Clown brutally tortures his victims. Early screenings for the third film (opening soon) are reporting people walking out during the first ten minutes, with one audience member allegedly even throwing up in the theater. If this is the reaction filmmaker Damien Leone is going for (and I believe it is), then you have to believe he is intentionally going way over the top. 

So there you have it, friends, the levels of horror/comedy. Keep in mind that this scale is meant to determine INTENSITY and in no way is indicative of the QUALITY of a film. Every level has great movies and awful movies that belong there. But if you’re trying to figure out how intense a movie you’re looking for this spooky season, think of the scale and make sure you’re not in a Level Two mood when your friend shows up recommending a Level Five.

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. The only movie on his scale to ever achieve a Level Six? Babe 2: Pig in the City. Weird, huh?