As you may have heard me mention once or twice, last weekend was the annual Nerd Bacchanalia known as Free Comic Book Day, one of my favorite days of the entire calendar year. And on this day, as they always do, my friends at BSI Comics were kind enough to allow me to set up a table and sell a few copies of my new book (which you should have ordered by now). From the vantage point of my table, I was facing a wall that displayed several back issues from those halcyon days of the 1990s, which were among the most formative years of my comic book consuming lifetime. The wall was adorned with lots of those flashy “Enhanced” covers that were so popular at the time – holofoil covers, embossed covers, chromium covers, glow-in-the-dark covers…you name a goofy gimmick, comic book publishers from the 1990s slapped it on the cover of a book. And as I spent hours there looking at those books, an odd realization slowly came over me.
I kinda miss those days.
I stared at these covers for eight hours on Saturday. It does things to a man.
It’s weird. During that time gimmick covers became a glut. They seemed to be coming at an ever-faster pace with ever-weirder gimmicks, and at the time I remember getting sick and tired of them. These days, however, they have become scarce. They’re not extinct, but you don’t see them nearly as much. Instead, modern publishers have decided to go with the business model of publishing 37 different variant covers for every issue. Some of them still slip in an enhanced cover in the mix, usually holofoil or “metallic” covers (for instance, DC recently did a run of metallic covers for various books with artwork featuring only the character’s symbol on a solid background). But they are not the exception, not the rule.
I’m not going to try to get into a comprehensive history of the gimmick cover, but I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal experiences with them. The first cover enhancement I remember seeing was back in 1991 when DC Comics released their second Robin miniseries, Robin II: The Joker’s Wild, each issue of which had covers with holographic images. Holograms themselves weren’t anything new, of course – I even remember making them in my high school chemistry class – but this was the first time I saw one on the cover of a comic book. It was cool! It was new! It was fun! And it was – if I recall – only fifty cents more than the regular cover! SWEET!
The next time someone tells you they faked the moon landing, remind them that this was considered high tech in 1991.
Not to be outdone, the next year Marvel gave each of the four Spider-Man titles at the time a cover with a hologram to celebrate Spider-Man’s 30th anniversary. (If you, too, remember when these comics were published, don’t do the math. It’ll make you realize that Spider-Man is now in his 60s and make us all feel like that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan.) The holograms were more elaborate than DC’s, and each issue was a giant-sized extravaganza back in the days when such a thing actually meant something, so while they were more expensive than the issues of Robin, they were inarguably awesome.
THIS technology, on the other hand, could have taken us to Mars.
Not long after that, there was another set of four Spider-Man covers with “holofoil” enhancements – the background of the artwork was metallic and shiny and you know how much we like shiny objects, so those were also a huge hit. And thus the floodgates were opened. Actual holograms became less common (as, if I remember from my chemistry class, they were more complicated to produce), but holofoil became a popular choice. Then other enhancements started to arrive. Die-cut covers, which had long been a popular choice in the paperback book market, started to show up. It made sense, too – have Wolverine’s claws slash through the cover of the comic book and you’ve got an obvious thematic connection. Similarly, embossed covers with artwork raised and stamped into the cardstock in a 3-D fashion made the transition from horror and sci-fi novels to comic books. Glow-in-the-dark, another mainstay of other marketing strategies, became used both for spooky books like DC’s The Spectre and goofy books like the Bongo Comics Simpsons spin-off Radioactive Man.
Valiant Comics launched Bloodshot with what I believe was the first “Chromium” cover: artwork printed on a metallic backing with some sort of plastic covering. The first two books with this process had a chromium panel embedded in cardstock, then DC upped the ante with a full chromium front cover on Superman #82 (the book that concluded the Death and Return of Superman cycle). Eventually, somebody realized that it was easier to do an entire chromium cover – front and back- – instead of just parts of one, and most chromium covers after that became full wraparound covers, with art that extended from the front to the back in one large image that was no doubt easier to produce than a chromium front and a traditional back which then somehow had to be affixed.
Most people agreed that Image Comics’ “Enriched Uranium” covers went too far.
There were a couple of really weird enhancements, too. DC’s 1992 crossover event Eclipso: The Darkness Within focused on a demonic villain that possesses people infected by a magical black diamond. To kick things off, DC published a special with a cover featuring Eclipso holding up the diamond – which was an actual plastic diamond glued to the cover. Kind of cool, until the time comes to put the comic book in a bag and store it without splitting the mylar or putting divots in the back of whatever book it’s stored next to.
My personal favorite from this era, in terms of sheer weirdness, comes from Malibu Comics. Malibu was a hot publisher at the time, and their comic Protectors kicked off a new shared universe with revamps of several Golden Age characters that had fallen into the public domain. In the fifth issue of that series, the character Night Mask was killed in an effort to show early on that being a superhero would be a dangerous path and that the untrained or inexperienced would be in grave danger. Malibu chose to communicate this message with cover art that featured a bullet hole in the character’s chest that was punched through not only the cover, but the entire comic book. I’ve often wondered if this was a last minute decision, as the hole punched straight through the art on every page, in some cases even taking out a small piece of a word balloon and making you try to guess what the dialogue was supposed to be. It’s such a weird little thing, though, that even people who barely remember that the Protectors ever existed will likely remember the comic with the hole through it. (A few years later Malibu would launch their Ultraverse line, overshadowing the Protectors universe. The publisher was later purchased by Marvel, and all of their properties would fade into obscurity except for a little IP called Men in Black.)
Historians have determined that this is the point when the Comics Code just threw up their hands and surrendered.
As tends to happen, of course, good things went too far. Whereas these sort of enhanced covers started off being used for special events – first issues, anniversaries, major storylines and so forth – they quickly became overused. Instead of a holofoil cover for a 100th issue, we were getting foil covers because it was Wednesday. An issue of Fantastic Four in which the Human Torch lost control of his flame was printed with an entirely white cover, the artwork embossed into the cardstock and almost impossible to see. They’d repeat this trick with metallic Avengers covers and, of course, other publishers would soon follow suit.
With this oversaturation, fans eventually got turned off and stopped buying them, which no doubt at least partially contributed to the late 90s collapse of the comic book speculator market, and the flow of gimmicks was reduced to a trickle. Instead, as I said before, the focus for most publishers has shifted to producing variants – the same book with lots of different covers. And these have gotten ridiculous as well: while some variants have completely different artwork, others just change the color or remove the logo and trade dress or print the uncolored artwork as a “sketch” variant. For a relaunch of Justice League of America, DC put out over fifty covers with the same artwork featuring the team raising the American flag in an Iwo Jima-like pose. For the variants, they switched out the US flag to that of each individual state and, I think, a few territories. Easiest way to sell one guy fifty copies of the same book EVER. Marvel did something similar with a series called U.S. Avengers, putting out a different cover for each state with a different Avenger, proclaiming them the official Avenger of that state. (Some of these made perfect sense: as Monica Rambeau is the only Avenger FROM Louisiana, she is the natural choice to be the Avenger OF Louisiana. But I’m still waiting for someone to tell me why She-Hulk is the official Avenger of Idaho, with an explanation other than “Well, SOMEBODY’S gotta be.”)
And don’t even get me started on the fact that Spider-Man, the most New York hero in any multiverse, is the Avenger of New Hampshire.
Whatever the case, the result with the variant wave is the same: they’re counting on completists to buy every cover variant of the book they can get their hands on. Which I suppose helps them sell comics, but it also burns out regular readers and does absolutely NOTHING to attract a NEW readership, which is where American comics are having such a difficult time right now. I’m sure it costs less to print a traditional cover than one with a hologram on it, but I’m really not a fan of the business model that says “convince one customer to buy the same book two dozen times” instead of the business model that says “make a comic book good enough that two dozen people will want to buy it instead of one.”
These days you still see holofoil and metallic covers, usually when a smaller publisher does a run with 75 different variants and then doubles it by making holofoil versions of each. Marvel and DC have also each done runs of lenticular covers (an image where the artwork changes if you tilt the page or look at it from a different angle) in the last decade or so. But there hasn’t been much else. When Superman married Lois Lane in 1996, there was a special edition cover embossed and designed to resemble a wedding invitation. When the Thing from the Fantastic Four finally married his longtime girlfriend Alicia Masters in 2019, we got a bunch of covers showing the couple from every conceivable angle, but not the slightest hint of foil, nothing that glowed in the dark, and certainly nothing that could be scratched and, subsequently, sniffed.
I don’t care what anybody says, Stan Lee’s epitaph does NOT count as a cover enhancement.
I know that if the enhancements came back they would quickly become overdone all over again. I know that after three months of Green Lantern covers where one glows and the next has a lantern shape cut out and the third glows AND has a lantern shape cut out I would probably start to get irritated because they’re charging an extra buck for each cover. But they’re doing that for a lot of the variants NOW, and while I am not someone who usually buys variants, I admit that I would be more inclined to do so if there was a little bit of an enhancement to sweeten the pot.
The hard part is not doing covers like these, it’s doing them in such a way that people don’t get sick of them. Reserve them for important occasions. First issues are acceptable. Anniversary issues are acceptable. The beginning or end of a major storyline is acceptable.
“Wednesday” is not.
I know that my yearning for these covers is tainted by nostalgia, but that’s not always a bad thing. Nostalgia is the only reason X-Men ‘97 exists on Disney+, and people seem to be pretty darn satisfied with it. (I haven’t watched it yet, so no spoilers.)
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just shouting into the wind and when you guys read this week’s column you’ll all think I’m crazy for feeling this way. Heck, even I think I’m a little crazy for feeling this way. All I know is this: when I go into BSI Comics to pick up some new books, I almost never want the variants…but once in a while, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on an enhancement or two.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If you go on eBay looking for some of these comics he’s talking about, don’t be fooled. The “coffee stains on page 17” variant is NOT an enhancement, no matter what the seller is telling you.
We’re back again, folks, with the second round of PLAYING FAVORITES with superheroes. For those of you who are new, in “Playing Favorites” I choose a topic and ask my friends on social media to suggest categories for me to discuss my favorite examples. This time around the topic is superheroes, and in the first installment I discussed my favorite legacy superheroes, superhero logos, superhero TV shows, super-pets, and superhero costumes. This time I’m dipping into the list of suggestions and pulling out a few more topics to ramble about. Join me, won’t you?
Origin Stories
Lew Beitz is back, this time asking what my favorite superhero origin stories are. I’m running with this because it gives me a chance to share with you my personal feelings on origin stories, which are thus: in this day and age, origin stories are largely unnecessary. In the early days of the superhero, before all the tropes were codified and the rules established, it may have been a requirement to explain how Alan Scott became the Green Lantern or where that humanoid robot called the Human Torch came from, but when’s the last time you saw a truly ORIGINAL origin story? Most of them, even with good characters, are remakes and rehashes of origins we’ve seen before. As early as 1962 Stan Lee recognized that it was getting hard to come up with an origin that hadn’t already been done, so he just decided these five kids he was writing about were all BORN with their powers and called them the X-Men. This, of course, turned out to be a decision of almost obscene serendipity, which would also be a great name for a rock band.
“Metaphor, schmetaphor, I’m just out of ideas.”
Furthermore, in a world where even someone who’s never touched a comic book is intimately aware of superhero tropes through movies and TV, does it really matter anymore? Think about this – one of the best superhero movies ever made was Pixar’s The Incredibles. It’s a great film. It’s a great SUPERHERO film. But do you know how Mr. Incredible and Elasti-Girl got their powers? No. Do you care? No. No more than it matters what compelled every single character on a medical drama to be a doctor or every officer on a police procedural to become a cop. I’m not saying that we should never tell an origin story again, I’m just saying that unless you’ve got a really interesting and compelling take, do it away with it via a line or two of expository dialogue. The origin is almost never a character’s best story, and if it IS, then that’s not a character who’s going to be around very long.
All that is to say that, like with the costume, Spider-Man probably has the best origin story in comics. Earlier characters usually had very clean origins – Superman is an alien from a dead planet, Captain America became a super-soldier through a government experiment, etc. Others had good motivation, like Batman wanting to avenge the deaths of his parents or Plastic Man being a criminal whose life was saved through an act of kindness and decided to join the side of angels. But with Spider-Man, the origin took a new level. No, not the part about being bitten by a radioactive spider – that’s how Peter Parker got his POWERS, that’s not what made him Spider-Man. What made him Spider-Man was the death of his uncle, Ben Parker. I don’t think I need to recount how it happened (there are three stories that NEVER need to be filmed again, no matter how many reboots happen: the explosion of Krypton, the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne, and the murder of Ben Parker), but WHY it happened matters. Ben died because his nephew did not take the opportunity to do the right thing when it was presented to him, and Peter has been trying to atone for that original sin ever since. Sure, there are a lot of heroes who are motivated by the death of a loved one, and I can’t even say for certain that Spider-Man was the FIRST hero who bore a personal sense of responsibility for his loss, but he is certainly the most notable.
The leading cause of death for male actors age 65-80 is “Playing Ben Parker.”
Incidentally, this is also the reason I think the Tom Holland trilogy of Spider-Man movies in the MCU is nearly perfect. Even though we never see how Pete got his powers in the MCU, the three movies do the job of the emotional component of his origin beautifully. In the first film, he has to learn what it really means to be a hero. In the second, after Tony Stark’s death, he has to learn how to be his OWN kind of hero. And in the third, which pulls a fantastically unexpected twist on the traditional Spider-Man origin, he learns the COST of being a hero. It’s not until the final moments of No Way Home, Tom Holland’s sixth film wearing the costume, that he truly, fully becomes Spider-Man.
Publisher Jump
Duane Hower asked an interesting question about my favorite superheroes who have changed publishers over the years. This has happened more often than you might think. There have been a lot of characters who have moved from one publisher to another, often because their original publisher went out of business and sold or licensed their characters to somebody else. DC Comics, for example, has absorbed the heroes from lots of defunct publishers, including Quality Comics (Plastic Man being the most notable of their characters), Charlton Comics (giving them the likes of Blue Beetle and the Question), Jim Lee’s Wildstorm (featuring the WildC.A.T.s and Gen 13) and Fawcett Publishing (original home of the Shazam family). Marvel has done this as well, buying the heroes of Malibu Comics, especially their Ultraverse line, but unlike DC they buried their purchase and still show no signs of doing anything with them nearly 30 years later.
If you go to the Marvel Comics commissary this picture appears on all of the milk cartons.
My favorite character from this category, aside from Shazam and the Blue Beetle, is probably Magnus: Robot Fighter. Originally published by Western Publishing’s Gold Key imprint, Western shut down their comic publishing in the 80s (although they have recently resurrected the brand, with a new Boris Karloff horror anthology now being published and a new kids’ comic in the crowdfunding stage). In the 90s, they licensed some of their characters to Valiant Comics, who used Magnus and Solar, Man of the Atom, as the cornerstones for their own superhero universe. Magnus was a hero from the distant future of 4000 A.D., a world where sentient robots were beginning to run wild and had to be battled, which means ChatGPT got here nearly 2000 years early. I loved that book, and when Valiant itself went under the license for Magnus and the other Western characters began to bounce to various publishers, including iBooks, Dark Horse, and Dynamite. None of those ever had the zing of the Valiant version, though. I don’t know who currently owns the license, but I kind of hope that now that Gold Key exists again, they’ll make an effort to bring back the original.
Pictured: The moderators of every comic book group on Facebook that’s trying to stop members from posting AI art.
The other way a hero can bounce publishers is if it is not owned by the publisher itself, but rather the creator, who moves to different publishers over time. For example, Matt Wagner’s titles Grendel and Mage were originally published by Comico, but after that publisher died he took them to Dark Horse and Image, respectively. Kurt Busiek’s Astro City started at Image Comics, moved to Jim Lee’s Wildstorm (published via Image), then moved to DC when DC bought Wildstorm. It was published under the Wildstorm imprint for years before moving to DC’s Vertigo line (perhaps the worst fit possible), and recently bounced back to Image.
But the best hero to play the publisher mambo is Mike Allred’s Madman, a character published by Tundra Comics, Dark Horse, Image, and Allred’s own AAA Pop over the years. Madman is a modern take on the Frankenstein story (he even uses the name “Frank Einstein”), a hero who was brought to life in a reanimated corpse and doesn’t remember his previous existence. The book is full of wild sci-fi concepts and can go from hilariously funny to deeply philosophical at the turn of a page. It’s been too long since there was a new Madman story, so if you’re listening, Mr. Allred, please bring him back. I miss him.
I know it’s hard to believe, but this comic is even cooler than it looks.
Cursed By Their Powers
My uncle Todd Petit, who gave me some Green Lantern and Legion of Super-Heroes comics when I was a kid and thus is largely responsible for half the things I write about, asked who my favorite characters are with powers that are “as much a curse as a blessing.” It’s an interesting trope, isn’t it, to have superpowers that ruin your life? It’s an idea that gets used again and again, because when it’s done well, it works like nobody’s business. The Hulk is probably the most well-known example, a man who transforms uncontrollably into a manifestation of his own Id and breaks tanks. Then there’s Rogue of the X-Men, whose power makes it impossible to have physical contact with another human being without stealing their powers, their memory, and potentially (if the contact is prolonged) their lives. It really makes Halle Berry’s Storm seem tone deaf in the first X-Men movie when she tells Rogue there’s nothing wrong with her, and every time I watch it I hope for the deleted scene where Anna Paquin tells her, “The hell there isn’t.”
Anyway, I think there’s one story that expresses that concept better than any other. And that story?
Project: ALF.
If I ever go through a whole “Playing Favorites” column without posting this, consider it a signal that I have been abducted and am being held hostage.
No, of course, my favorite “cursed by his own powers” hero is Benjamin J. Grimm, the Thing, of the Fantastic Four. Put yourself in Ben’s position for a minute. Your best friend convinces you to help him steal a rocketship he built. He ropes his girlfriend and her kid brother into coming along for the ride. The four of you are bombarded with space-rays that give you all amazing powers, but transform your bodies as well. The kicker is, unlike your three teammates, you can’t turn your powers off. Reed Richards can stop stretching, Sue can become visible, and Johnny can quench the flames of the Human Torch, but Benjy is trapped in an orange rock shell 24/7. If anybody in comics has the right to complain that he lost the superhero lottery it’s him.
Instead, he became the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed idol o’ millions.
Too many writers would use this as an excuse to make him a bad guy. He would turn against the team, become the villain, try to exact revenge on Reed – and to be fair, for a long time he was the grouchy and often antagonistic member of the Fantastic Four. But over the 63 years since the characters were created, the opposite has happened. He has become kinder, tender, a beautiful spirit. He could have been the monster, but instead, he is the knight in stony armor. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s compassionate, and he’s still never afraid to get his hands dirty when the situation calls for it. He made peace with his curse, reembraced his faith, found love, and in recent years has even become a husband and a father. The amazing thing about Ben is how he has persevered and grown despite his “curse.” I think writer Chris Claremont put it best in the Fantastic Four Vs. the X-Men miniseries from 1987, when Ben had his powers taken by the aforementioned Rogue. Claremont, perhaps the purplest prose penner whoever picked up a pen, describes the sensation thusly:
Instantly, as her body is flooded with the Thing’s awesome strength, her awareness is filled with the totality of his being – all he was and is and dreams/despairs of being. She thought she’d be attacking a toad. Instead, she’s touched the soul of a prince.
That’s actually Rogue on the left. She…had a standard MO.
Ben is one of the good ones, is what I’m saying.
Honorable mention goes to DC’s Firestorm. Firestorm has gone through several iterations over the years, but the original Firestorm was created when a nuclear accident (so, so many of those in superhero universes) fused two people together: physicist Dr. Martin Stein and teenage jock Ronnie Raymond. The accident merged them into a single, extremely powerful being who would go on to join the Justice League and then get sued by Ghost Rider for stealing his whole “flaming head” bit.
Clearly, this guy is miserable with his lot in life.
Here’s where the “cursed” part comes in: when Stein and Ronnie were originally fused together, Stein was unconscious. So whenever they merge into Firestorm, Ronnie is in charge and Stein becomes a voice in his head, offering advice but having no control. What’s more, in the early days of their partnership, Stein didn’t even remember being Firestorm whenever he and Ronnie were split, so he was constantly waking up with big chunks of his life missing and having no idea what happened. The reason it’s only an honorable mention is because the writers did away with that part relatively early, and I guess I can understand why. It must be hard to write around the fact that one of your main characters is constantly in fear of a blackout and the other has to find ways around it, and so Stein started retaining his memory of their partnership. Still, I think the idea of a superhero whose life keeps getting screwed up because he doesn’t KNOW he’s a superhero is pretty intriguing, and I bet somebody could do something really interesting with the concept.
Sidekicks
Jim MacQuarrie asks my favorite superhero sidekick. The sidekick is such a weird concept, isn’t it? Going back to the pre-superhero days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson (and certainly even earlier), the sidekick is a character who traditionally exists so that the hero has an audience surrogate to explain things to instead of having to talk to himself. For some reason, when the concept of the sidekick was incorporated into comic books, they got the idea that the best way to handle this was to make them all children or, at most, teenagers, thereby making a large number of superheroes guilty of multiple counts of child endangerment. Choosing a favorite sidekick is actually kind of tricky, because the best ones don’t usually become particularly compelling or interesting until they stop acting as sidekicks and become heroes in their own right – Dick Grayson is far more interesting as Nightwing than he ever was as Robin, Wally West is a better Flash than Kid Flash, and so forth.
I think the best of all time is Tim Drake, the third Robin. Part of it was because he had such a different motivation than his predecessors. Dick Grayson and Jason Todd each became Robins to help avenge their own personal tragedies, much as Batman did, but not Tim. Tim was, to put it simply, a Batman fanboy who figured out that Robin was Dick Grayson because they shared a move he saw Dick perform in the circus as a child. From there it was easy enough to figure out that Bruce was Batman, and he kept that secret until the death of Jason Todd, when he saw Batman begin to be swallowed by darkness and realized he needed a balance. Dick and Jason became Robins to avenge their parents. Tim became Robin to save Batman.
Of course, being a great sidekick basically makes you “the best of the rest.”
He’s also the smartest of the Robins, with Bruce conceding that he’ll someday be a better detective than Batman himself. The trouble is, ever since Grant Morrison introduced Bruce’s biological son Damian Wayne to continuity and made him Robin, writers have struggled with Tim. Damian has won me over, mind you – he’s become an interesting and entertaining character in his own right – but very few writers in the years since have really known what to do with Tim, including the current writers of the Batman-associated titles. And that’s a shame, because he was such a great character for such a long time.
Different Interpretations
We’ll wrap up this installment with a question by Hunter Fagan, who asked about my favorite heroes with drastically different interpretations in the main continuity. (In other words, like how Batman went from lighthearted and child-friendly in the 50s to dark and brooding in the 80s while ostensibly still being the same character.) I think my answer for this one is going to be Jennifer Walters, the She-Hulk. Jennifer was a lawyer who was injured in a gang shooting and had to get a blood transfusion from her only available relative – who turned out to be her cousin Bruce Banner, the Hulk. The result is…well, it’s right there in the name, isn’t it?
Comic books reached their peak in 1989. Change my mind.
In the early years, Jen was kind of bland. She wasn’t AS angry as the Hulk, she kept her wits about her better than he did, she beat up bad guys, repeat. After her book got canceled, she wound up joining the Avengers and started to become a more well-rounded character. She joined the Fantastic Four for a while, temporarily replacing the Thing (he was really mad at Reed Richards during this period) and became a favorite of writer/artist John Byrne, who brought her back to her own series in 1989. This new series was where the She-Hulk I love was fully formed: smart, funny, constantly winking at the audience and knocking down that fourth wall with all the strength that would be implied by a Hulk. (It should be pointed out that this was two years before Deadpool was created and even longer before he began breaking the fourth wall himself.) Since Byrne’s She-Hulk most writers have kept the lighthearted tone, although few of them have had her speaking to the writer or expediting her travel by having the reader turn the comic book page the way Byrne did. And say what you will, I thought Tatiana Maslany’s portrayal of the character in the titular Disney+ miniseries was spot on, and I still hold out hope that she’ll be brought back in some capacity.
And thus we end another installment of Playing Favorites, guys. I didn’t get to every suggestion – some of them were a little too similar to others, some I just didn’t have much to say about, and some I just ran out of room. But it’s always a blast to do one of these, so if you aren’t following me on Facebook or Threads (@BlakeMP25), you should do that! Because it’s only a matter of time before a new category comes to mind and I ask you all to help me Play Favorites again.
It’s time once again for PLAYING FAVORITES! It’s that semi-regular Geek Punditry mini-column in which I throw out a topic to you, my friends in the world of social media, and ask you to suggest different categories in which I discuss what I consider to be the best of the best. This time around, the topic is superheroes. Born in the pages of American comic books, but with roots in pulp magazines, myth, and thousands of other sources, the superhero is considered to be the modern mythology, with pantheons not only in comics, but in movies, TV, video games, and pretty much every other media you can name. And I am, it cannot be understated, a fan of the superhero. So what, then, are some of my favorites?
Legacy Heroes
Sandy Brophy is going to kick things off for us by asking for my favorite legacy heroes. A “legacy” hero, for those of you who may not have been reading comic books since you were six years old, is the term used when a superhero’s name and identity is passed on from one person to another. For example, in the early days of comics, the Flash was a college student by the name of Jay Garrick. After superheroes fell out of favor and stopped being published for a while, they were resurrected in the 1950’s with the creation of a brand-new Flash, this time a police scientist named Barry Allen. Barry was the Flash for a long time before dying in Crisis on Infinite Earths (it took longer than usual, but eventually he got better), and his nephew/sidekick Wally West, aka Kid Flash, took over as the new Flash.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
This also, by the way, is my answer to Sandy’s question. The Flash is undoubtedly my favorite legacy hero in comics. By the time I started reading comics Wally was the main Flash, and even decades later he’s still the one I feel is most compelling. He was young when he became the Flash, and thanks to the magic of comic book time I eventually caught up with him at the same time he was being written by Mark Waid, who turned him into a fully fleshed-out and wonderfully realized character in his own right. He got married, had kids, and he grew and matured. He was also – as Waid said – the first sidekick to “fulfill the promise,” in other words, to take over for his mentor. He’s also still, to the best of my recollection, the ONLY one to do so on a permanent basis. It’s true that Dick Grayson (the original Robin) became Batman for a while, and Captain America’s sidekick Bucky took up the shield when Steve Rogers was temporarily dead, but both of them reverted back to their other adult IDs (Nightwing and the Winter Soldier, respectively) when the original came back. Not so Wally. Barry returned and Wally stuck around, and although there’s been a lot of timey-wimey nonsense and attempts to sort of push him to the side, he’s bounced back. Wally is, again, the primary Flash, even in a world where Jay and Barry exist, and the nominal head of the Flash family. And he’s just the best.
There are other good legacy heroes, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the Jaime Reyes version of the Blue Beetle (although my heart will always belong to Ted Kord, himself the second Blue Beetle following Dan Garrett), and there are few who will argue that Kamala Khan hasn’t done more with the Ms. Marvel title than either of her predecessors, but Wally West is the ultimate legacy hero in my book.
Superhero Logos
My buddy Owen Marshall wants to know what some of my favorite superhero LOGOS are – those titles that splash across the cover of a comic book to (hopefully) let you know what you’re about to read. I’ll talk about what I think makes a good logo in general, then get into specifics. I think a great logo is something that stands out in a way that evokes the hero in question. The Superman logo, for instance, is relatively simple – his name, slightly curved, with drop letters that give it a sense of weight, of solidity. Any time you see that logo you think that somebody could just grab it off the cover – and, in fact, there have been many covers where that very thing has happened.
You can’t beat a classic.
Spider-Man’s original logo is great for similar reasons. It’s solid, but it’s also easy to partner up with a web in the background to help get across the idea that you’re dealing with a wallcrawler. And, like Superman, it’s a short enough logo that it’s very easy to add an adjective to the title (as in the AMAZING Spider-Man, the SPECTACULAR Spider-Man), but just as easy to drop a subtitle underneath (Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows). There have been many attempts over the years to create a new Spider-Man logo, but frankly, there’s never been one I like as much as the original, and it seems it’s never anything but a matter of time before they return to it.
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
The Avengers also have a fantastic logo. They’ve had several, of course, but I’m specifically talking about the most famous version, the one that Marvel Studios used for the basis of its movie design. It’s clean and bold, and the arrow in the letter “A” gives it a sense of forward motion that sort of plants the idea that these are heroes who are about to go out and DO something.
The arrow is in case you forget and try reading it right-to-left.
Green Lantern has had a great many logos over the years, many of which actually include a lantern, but my favorite doesn’t. I like the logo that premiered in 2005 with Green Lantern: Rebirth and which remained the primary version of the logo until just a few years ago. This version has that tilt to one side and a cool roundness to it that…okay, just hear me out on this…it makes me think of classic cars from the 50s. Smooth, sleek, fast…and those are words that apply to Green Lantern, especially the Hal Jordan version.
And it’s all spacey and stuff.
I could probably spend an entire month just going through different logos, but I’m just going to cap it off here by saying that there are hundreds of awesome logos and if you want to read more about them I highly recommend the blog of comic book letterer and designer Todd Klein, who frequently makes posts where he discusses the design and history of comic’s greatest (and worst) logos, which is like drinking mother’s milk to a nerd like me.
Superhero TV (pre-2000)
My old friend Patrick Slagle wants to know my favorite superhero live action TV shows. Well that’s easy! There have been SO many to choose from – Stargirl was great, and I was deeply enamored of Legends of Tomorrow, and then there was–
Oh, wait.
He specified shows from BEFORE the year 2000. Well. That makes it a lot more difficult. We’ve been in a superhero renaissance in the last decade or so, guys, with such an abundance of shows that even I haven’t gotten around to watching them all yet. (Peacemaker, for example, is still warming my “to-watch” list.) But if I’m going to restrict myself to the cultural wasteland that was 1999 and earlier, I guess there’s only the obvious choice.
Project: ALF.
If I don’t do this at least once in every Playing Favorites column the Don said he was gonna break my thumbs.
The superhero shows of my formative years…let’s be honest guys, they weren’t that great. The two most fundamental ones are probably the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk and Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. And while those are both good shows, neither of them were series I would watch on repeat, the sort of thing that makes a TV series worm its way into my psyche and become a part of the vast tapestry that is your friendly neighborhood Geek Pundit. And the truth is, a lot of the other shows of that era don’t hold up. Look at the 70s Amazing Spider-Man or Shazam! shows and try to convince me that these are fundamental pieces of Americana. The Greatest American Hero is a show I know I used to watch, plus it’s got the most earwormy theme song in superhero history, but I couldn’t relate the plot of a single episode after the pilot. It got better later, with the surprisingly decent Superboy TV series (mostly after Gerard Christopher took over the role from John Newton) and the “fun but fluffy” era of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
There are some wild swings in quality happening in this picture.
If I have to pick (and I do, it’s my damn game), I guess I’m going to have to give props to the two shows that I think launched the genre on TV: George Reeves in The Adventures of Superman and the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman show from 1966. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the West/Ward era. When I hit those peak teenage years of arrogance and knowitallitude that most of us go through, I began to actively dislike that show, blaming it for people treating comic books as childish and infantile for decades after it was off the air and tarnishing the reputation of the caped crusader. Fortunately as I got older, I got over myself, thus disqualifying myself from ever running for elected office, but at the same time getting a sense of perspective. Sure, it wasn’t MY Batman, but I learned to appreciate it for what it was. I’ve softened to the show now. I even watch the reruns on MeTV Saturday nights between Svengoolie and Star Trek.
There’s no school like the old school.
George Reeves, though, I’ve always appreciated. He was the Curt Swan Superman come to life – square-jawed, barrel-chested, friend to all the innocent. But at the same time, he had a wicked sense of humor, showing clear joy whenever he got to take down a bad guy and taking a sly sort of pleasure any time he thwarted Lois Lane’s attempts to one-up him. I love the Reeves Superman and I don’t think he gets the respect he deserves. DC has launched a series of comics featuring the Christopher Reeve Superman as Superman ‘78, and that’s great. I love ‘em. But am I really the only person who would pick up a comic book called The Adventures of Superman ‘52?
Superhero Animals
I really like Marvel’s Scarlet Witch. She’s had several costumes over the years, but the best is the one George Perez whipped up for her for the Heroes Return era. It was red, naturally, which helps you identify her via color-coding, but the design also drew on the character’s Romani heritage, with a rare long skirt and robes that make you think of a fortune teller. All of that builds together and links her to her mystical roots. I’m fairly certain that if I didn’t know who the Avengers were and someone asked me which one I thought was the Scarlet Witch, I’d say, “Well, gotta be the woman in red, and not the tiger girl in the bikini.”
Jim MacQuarrie asked for my favorite Super-Animal, while Lew Beitz wants to know my favorite Super-PET. These two categories are close enough that I’ll talk about them together. They’re not EXACTLY the same, but there’s plenty of overlap. The way I look at it, we can divide super-animals into two categories: the ones that serves as an animal sidekick to the main hero, such as Krypto the Superdog, and those that are distinct heroes in their own right, like Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. The former are characters in established universes, while the latter usually exist in a Disney-esque universe where there are no humans at all, but instead races of anthropomorphic animals running the show.
As far as super-pets go, the Superman family has the deepest – and weirdest – bench to draw from. Krypto the Superdog and Beppo the Supermonkey are both animals from Krypton who made their way to Earth and gained powers like Superman and Supergirl. Supergirl also has a cat named Streaky who gains and loses his powers on a rotating basis thanks to exposure to something called X-Kryptonite (it was the 50s, it was safe to give something a name like that because there was no internet). Then there was Supergirl’s horse, Comet, who was actually a centaur from ancient Greece named Biron that was cursed and trapped in the form of a full horse. He hung around for a couple of thousand years before he met Supergirl and started to assist her on her missions, fell in love with her, and learned he could briefly become human when an actual comet passed close to Earth, allowing him to date Supergirl without telling her who he really –
Stop looking at me like that, I’m not making this up.
Superman is surprisingly indiscriminate about who he gives a cape to.
Anyway, Krypto is kind of the gold standard of super-pets, but there are a few others outside of the Super-Family worth mentioning. Wonder Woman’s kangaroo, Kanga, for instance. Ace the Bat-Hound, who Batman gives a mask to cover the bat-shaped patch of fur on his face and thus protect his secret identity. Chameleon Boy’s pet Proty who, like Chameleon Boy, is a shapeshifter, and fully sapient, and who can and did occasionally impersonate full grown adults, which makes you ask where the hell the Legion of Super-Heroes gets off treating him like a pet. And of course Damian Wayne, the current Robin, has Bat-Cow.
The only superhero who’s a source of 50 percent of the food groups.
Then there are the other types of Super-Animals: anthropomorphic heroes in their own right. Everyone who has heard me talk for five minutes will know that my favorite of these is Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Created by Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw!, this 80s phenomenon was about a group of superhero animals who got powers from meteors that fell to (their version of) Earth. After meeting a dimension-hopping Superman, they were inspired to become heroes in their own right. The art is cartoony and the premise is silly, but what I’ve always loved about Captain Carrot and company is that their stories – at least in the 80s – weren’t played like cartoons. The plots were straight out of the pages of Golden and Silver Age comics, facing giant monsters and villains with cold-rays and all kinds of classic tropes. They were funny, sure, but not at the expense of the characters, as many of the modern writers who have tried to use Captain Carrot have forgotten. When I say I want a revival of the old-school Captain Carrot, I say it unironically and with love.
By contrast, there’s perhaps the most famous super-animal of the day, thanks to his starring role in an Academy Award-winning motion picture. I refer, of course, to Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. Spider-Ham’s comic hit JUST when I stared reading comics in earnest, and I devoured it. In this hilarious take on the Spider-Man story, Peter was the pet spider of mad scientist May Porker, who accidentally irradiated herself and bit him. The spider turned into a pig while maintaining his spider-powers. When May recovered from the radiation, her memory was erased and she thought she was just a kindly old lady and Peter was her nephew.
Move over, “The Boys,” the REAL heroes are back in town.
I’m not making this up either, but I wish I could take credit for it. The early Spider-Ham comics were a lot of fun, then he disappeared for decades before experiencing a renaissance in recent years. Like Captain Carrot, his modern adventures are sillier and more “cartoony” than the earlier ones, but UNlike Captain Carrot, the cartoony interpretation fits better, and has made him a better character.
My favorite Spider-Ham story, though, is not from the comics and not from the cartoons, but from the mouth of his creator, Tom DeFalco, when I met him at a convention a few years ago. He was signing reprints of the first appearance of Spider-Ham and his other great Spider character, Spider-Girl. I bought them both and told him how much I loved Spider-Ham when I was a kid, and he told how surprised he was when Marvel Comics sent him an invitation to the premiere of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He didn’t understand why he was getting an invitation, and someone said, “It’s probably because Spider-Ham is in it.” And DeFalco, shocked, exclaimed, “SPIDER-HAM is in a MOVIE?”
Timeless.
Favorite Superhero Costumes
My wife Erin, who always cuts the line because nobody else who submits questions has ever made lasagna for me, wants to know what my favorite superhero costumes are, both male and female. I think it was Alex Ross who said that the test of a good superhero costume is whether you could identify the character based just on the name, even if you knew nothing about them. Batman, for example. Green Lantern. Captain America. The 90s was an era where this consistently failed, especially in the X-Men comics and those later characters created by former X-artists. If you showed someone who knows nothing about comics pictures of Gambit, Cable, Maverick, Shatterstar, and Deadpool, then asked them to match the names to the pictures, any correct answers would happen purely because of the law of averages.
But anyway, when I read Ross’s definition, he also used that definition to argue that the greatest superhero costume of all time belongs to Spider-Man. It’s hard to argue with him. Nobody who saw a lineup of the Marvel Comics all-stars would have any difficulty telling that this guy is Spider-Man and not, for example, Wonder Man. And while that’s true of MOST of Spider-Man’s assorted costumes over the years, the original is still my favorite. The black costume is cool-looking, but the ol’ red-and-blues have a brighter, more optimistic tone that suits Spider-Man better. Spider-Man is a hard luck hero, to be sure, but he should never be a depressing, brooding character like Daredevil. (Are you listening, current Marvel editorial?) He’s the guy who should never give up and always finds it in himself to do the right thing, and the red and blue color scheme says that better than any of his other assorted looks.
I don’t even blame him for admiring his own reflection.
Using the same metric, I also think the Rocketeer has a phenomenal costume. He is literally a human rocket, with a rocket pack strapped to his back and a helmet that evokes the speed and energy of the burgeoning space age. The rest of the outfit, though, with the brown bomber jacket and the jodhpur pants brings in the idea of his aviator background and grounds him in the World War II era where he belongs.
This picture makes me want to make swooshy noises.
Honorable mention goes to the Flash, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan costume, although I have a soft spot for the one John Stewart wore in the Justice League cartoon) and Marvel’s Nova.
Erin also asked about my favorite female costumes, which I find is a little harder to do going by Alex Ross’s metric. Too many female costumes are designed more for titillation rather than actually identifying the character. And even those that DO clearly identify them often do so via a logo or symbol that marks them, such as Wonder Woman.
I think “Morgan” was the screenwriter of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
Harley Quinn is another one that is pretty obvious, at least in her original costume. The red-and-black color scheme, white makeup, and bangled headpiece brings up the notion of a Harlequin, which of course is the inspiration for the character. She’s changed her look several times over the past few years, and while some of her looks have been pretty good, none of them draw their inspiration from her roots the way her first look does. On the other hand, they’ve come up with a pretty solid justification for her changing her look – once she got over the Joker and dumped his homicidal ass, she doesn’t want to wear the costume that identifies her as his sidekick anymore.
Let’s face it, I could have posted a picture of a random duck here and you still could have pictured Harley’s get-up.
Then there’s Supergirl. She’s had a lot of costumes, the most iconic look being the basic Superman outfit, only with bare legs and a skirt. That’s not her best look, though. For me, my favorite Supergirl costume came from the 1970s, when she wore a loose blouse with a small S-shield over her heart rather than the full-size shield most superfolks wear. I love that look – it still clearly marks her as a member of the Super-family, but it’s very different from anything any of the others wear. Being loose instead of skintight like most superhero costumes, it’s got a freeing quality that speaks to a lighter version of the character in a period where she was working to get out of her more famous cousin’s shadow. It’s such a great look and I never stop wishing they would bring it back.
What can I say? She’s got the look.
That’s about it for this week, guys, but there are plenty of other questions I haven’t gotten to yet. So be sure to come by next week for Playing Favorites With Superheroes Part Two, and if you have a suggestion that I haven’t covered, go ahead and drop in in the comments. Up, up, and away!
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He realizes he talks about the Superman family a lot whenever he gets on to a superhero discussion, but let’s be honest, people. It’s either gonna be this or Star Trek.
It was the kind of news that grinds the internet to a halt, sometimes for upwards of 17 seconds. After years, decades even, where some of the most sought-after comic books of all time were out of print and unavailable unless you wanted to pay crazy eBay prices, this week DC and Marvel Comics announced a pair of omnibus editions collecting most of the crossover comics that have been produced over the years featuring meetings between the two most famous superhero pantheons in the world.
This is not a drill, people!
I’m not sure if younger fans will realize exactly how big a deal this sort of thing is. From the moment that the two respective worlds solidified, there were fans who were anxious to see the Justice League meet the Avengers, the X-Men meet the Teen Titans, Brother Voodoo meet Brother Power: The Geek. It’s like when you have toys from multiple toy lines and try to play with them all together. I know that every kid my age, at some point, had their G.I. Joes face off against Darth Vader, the TransFormers clash with He-Man, and the Thundercats and Silverhawks grab a drink down at the bar. Those were the stories that spilled out of our imagination. But the idea of a “real,” “official” story in which such a thing happened was the stuff of dreams. So in 1975, when the two publishers announced their first joint venture, it was like a dream come true!
For Wizard of Oz fans, that is. Yes, because of some weird things like licensing agreements with MGM and the public domain status of the original novel, the first comic co-produced by Marvel and DC Comics was an adaptation of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, hitting the stands a scant 36 years after the film’s debut. I was only around for the last few years of it, guys, but it really seems like the 70s were a bizarre time.
The part where Wolverine rips out the Cowardly Lion’s entrails, in retrospect, may have been a tad overboard.
But that collaboration seemed to grease the wheels between the two publishers and, in 1976, fans got Superman Vs. the Amazing Spider-Man. Like the Oz book, this was an oversized treasury edition featuring the clash of the respective publisher’s two most popular characters, and it was a hit. In 1981 there was a second Superman/Spider-Man meeting, followed by Batman Vs. the Incredible Hulk (or, as I like to call it, “Battle of the Bruces”), and in 1982 we got The Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans. Then work began on an Avengers/Justice League crossover, a story that would surely be the crown jewel for the two publishers, but things kind of fell apart. Not only did that planned crossover never happen, but all crossovers between the two dried up for over a decade.
Childhoods were defined in these books.
That changed in 1994, when the era of comic book excess was in full swing, and the two collaborated again with what would be the first of two Batman/Punisher crossovers. It wasn’t Bruce Wayne, though – this story took place during the Knightfall era, and the Punisher ran across the Jean-Paul Valley version of Batman. By the time the sequel rolled around, Bruce was back and Frank Castle learned what the real Batman is like. This pair kicked off a new wave of Marvel/DC crossovers including Batman/Spider-Man, Batman/Daredevil, Batman/Captain America – look, by the 90s it was clear who DC’s top seller was. But Superman got in on the fun too, meeting both the Hulk and the Fantastic Four. Green Lantern met up with the Silver Surfer, and then there was the villain-centric Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger by John Byrne.
College years, on the other hand, were defined by THESE books.
The creme de la creme, of course, was 1996’s mega-event DC Vs. Marvel, where the two universes collided in a four-issue slugfest where the fans voted for the winners of the five top battles. This was a great gimmick from a sales standpoint but posed something of a creative challenge, as writers Peter David and Ron Marz had to figure out some way to have Lobo (an indestructible alien with Superman-level strength) lose a fight to Wolverine (a character who is considerably less powerful unless you count his mutant ability to sell a trillion copies and, in this case, garner a trillion extra votes). Their solution, hilariously, was to have the two of them duck behind a counter and only have Wolverine pop up, thereby avoiding the need to actually explain how he could possibly have won.
Nerds argued over this for almost 60 years before Marvel and DC decided to settle things. It didn’t stop nerds from arguing.
Specious battles aside (I also take issue with Storm of the X-Men beating Wonder Woman with a bolt of lightning and Batman beating Captain America because the latter got hit by a wave of water from a flooding sewer which threw off his aim), the book was a smash hit. It spawned two sequel miniseries, but the thing that fans remember most were the series of one-shots that came in-between issues three and four of the main storyline, the Amalgam Universe. Basically, the Marvel and DC Universes were merged, and we got 12 one-shots starring character mashups like Super Soldier (Superman fused with Captain America), Dark Claw (Batman and Wolverine), Speed Demon (Flash and Ghost Rider) and so forth. A year later there were another series of 12 one-shots, half of which were follow-ups to the original dozen and the other six introducing new mashups like the Lobo the Duck (Lobo and Howard the Duck) and Iron Lantern (Iron Man and Green La– look, do I have to spell out EVERYTHING?).
The next time someone tells you that drawing doofy fan mashups won’t get you anywhere, show them this.
The Marvel/DC crossover craze ended in 2003 with the long-awaited JLA/Avengers crossover, and it came about in a sort of odd way. The legendary George Perez, whom everyone agreed was the only man alive who should draw this book, joined upstart publisher CrossGen Comics, and CrossGen made all of its talent sign exclusive contracts for the term of their employment. The only loophole allowed was in Perez’s contract, which stated he would be allowed to do JLA/Avengers if it ever happened. That seemed to be enough to get Marvel and DC to figure things out, and the four-issue miniseries finally came about. But that’s the last time any Marvel or DC characters met one another.
There were other crossovers in that era, of course. Marvel’s Iron Man met Valiant’s X-O Manowar, and Daredevil encountered Shi from Crusade Comics. DC and Dark Horse comics became besties: Superman crossed over with Michael Allred’s Madman, the Joker fought the Mask, and Batman met both Grendel and Hellboy (the latter with Starman in tow). But the two biggest games in comics stopped playing together at that point, possibly because of corporate chicanery and possibly because the always friendly rivalry between the two publishers became somewhat less friendly for a while.
Marvel, in fact, seems to have quit crossovers altogether. A search on the Internet (which, as we all know, has never been wrong about anything) seems to indicate the last time Marvel characters crossed over with any other publisher was back in 2009, when the Avengers and Thunderbolts were featured with Top Cow Comics characters in a miniseries called Fusion. We’ve recently got a new crossover, though, with Wolverine fighting the Predator, but as both characters are now owned by the Walt Disney Corporation and IP Farm and Macaroni Grill, and therefore both published by Marvel, I don’t know that it technically counts.
And it’s not like other publishers haven’t gotten into the game as well. Before Disney bought Fox, Dark Horse Comics held the rights to Aliens and Predator, and they fought EVERYBODY. Superman Vs. Aliens, Batman Vs. Predator, Green Lantern Vs. Aliens, Magnus: Robot Fighter Vs. Predator, WildC.A.T.S. Vs. Aliens, Archie Vs. Predator (no, I’m not kidding), Batman and Superman Vs. Aliens and Predator…it was a cottage industry.
Fellas, when THIS many people have trouble getting along with you, maybe it’s time to admit that the problem is YOU.
And their sparring partners often met other publishers’ characters as well. Archie Comics has crossed over with – among others – the Punisher, Batman ‘66, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, Vampirella and Red Sonja, and the Tiny Titans. They also crossed over with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when Archie was publishing THAT book, but since the Turtles have moved to IDW Publishing they’ve encountered the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (twice), Batman (four times), and the characters from Stranger Things, which has also crossed over with Dungeons and Dragons, which has also crossed over with Rick and Morty. The Power Rangers have also met both the Justice League and Godzilla, and the Justice League and Godzilla are currently meeting each other – along with King Kong – in a crossover with the Legendary Monsterverse.
While Marvel has pulled out of the crossover game (which is something I largely suspect is an edict from Disney, although I have nothing to back that up, it’s just a gut feeling), DC has kept it up. Besides the aforementioned TMNT, Power Rangers, and Godzilla/Kong crossovers, the Justice League has met the characters from Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer, and enjoyed crossovers with corporate siblings the Looney Tunes and the Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. Batman and Scooby-Doo, who have met in cartoons many times, now share an ongoing children’s comic. DC has also partnered with IDW for Star Trek/Green Lantern, Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes, and an inventive crossover between DC’s Sandman Universe and Joe Hill’s Locke and Key. IDW seems to love crossovers, even with different licensed properties in their own stable. While they owned the licenses to these assorted properties, they crossed over TransFormers with Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and Star Trek: The Animated Series (making new Autobots out of the Ecto-1, the Delorean, and the Enterprise, respectively). Star Trek, by the way, also crossed over with the X-Men when Marvel owned that license, in two one-shot comics and a prose novel titled Planet X. And Valiant and Image Comics did the “universes merge” story three whole years before Amalgam Comics in a series called Deathmate, which is largely remembered today for the fact that Rob Liefeld’s issue of the series was hilariously late.
IDW is the Nick Cannon of comic book crossover events. No, not musically.
In fact, there’s only one really major franchise that has significant comic book presence that – as far as I know – has never done an official crossover, and that’s Star Wars. Even before the Disney buyout and the comics moved to Marvel, Dark Horse never made an effort to have Luke Skywalker meet Barb Wire or something. The closest they’ve come was in an out-of-continuity story in the Star Wars Tales anthology comic from 2004, in which the Millennium Falcon gets lost in a galaxy far, far away and crash-lands on a primitive planet, only for the remains to be discovered centuries later by an archeologist strongly implied to be Indiana Jones.
I know it can seem overwhelming if you’re a casual fan, trying to make all of these things work out. The good news is, you don’t have to. The vast majority of these crossovers are either considered non-canonical to the main properties or are of such little consequence to the ongoing story that they may as well be. There are rare exceptions (the WildC.A.T.S./Aliens crossover killed off several members of Wildstorm Comics’ Stormwatch team, for example), but for the most part, they can be read on their own, self-contained, without impacting the ongoing comics in any significant way.
So why do them at all?
Because they’re fun. They’re fun for the readers, who like seeing beloved characters interact, and they’re fun for the creators, who enjoy making them just as much. It’s true that there was a saturation point of crossovers in the early 2000s, but the solution to saturation is to slow down the flow, not cut it off entirely.
So the announcement of the two DC/Marvel omnibus editions is welcome. The DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age omnibus will collect the DC Vs. Marvel miniseries, its two sequels, and 13 of the 24 Amalgam books. The DC Versus Marvel omnibus will collect most of their other crossovers. But the exclusion of the remaining 11 Amalgam books is surprising and a little frustrating, and the DC Versus Marvel omnibus will exclude JLA/Avengers, which was reprinted in a very limited charity run two years ago after George Perez announced that he was suffering from terminal cancer. The fact that it was once again Perez being on a deadline that got that book off to the printer is a sad sort of cosmic convergence.
No joke here. George Perez was one of the greatest comic book artists ever to pick up a pencil, and he deserves all the love and respect he gets.
I hope that there are plans to reprint the rest of the Amalgam books at some point, but even if there aren’t, the fact that they’re doing the omnibus editions at all is encouraging. It’s something fans have wanted for a very long time and we didn’t really think would ever happen. It also, of course, has everybody asking a couple of pertinent questions. First, why now? What has changed in the Marvel/DC relations that allows these books to finally see print again? A lot of the people responsible for the bad blood between the publishers are gone now, and that may indeed play a significant role. And if THAT has changed, let’s just ask the most obvious question of them all:
Could this be a precursor to more?
As I said, it’s been over 20 years since the Marvel and DC Universes connected in any official capacity and a lot has changed. I think there are a lot of fans who would be interested to see Miles Morales meet Damian Wayne or have Kamala Khan interact with Jon Kent. How would the Titans of today – now DC’s premiere super-team – react to the X-Men in the age of Krakoa? And come on, fans have been pining for a Deadpool/Harley Quinn crossover for ages. Such a book would be as good a license to print money as Wolverine was in the 90s.
I’m not saying it will happen. I’m just saying that if it DID, it would be cool.
I’m also saying that the two omnibus books are coming out in August, which also happens to be my birthday month. I’m just. Sayin’.
January is kind of a stale month, pop culture-wise. There aren’t any huge movies out to discuss. The holiday backup has us all in its grip as we spent the month recovering from frivolity by trying to get everything back in order, so we don’t have as much time to indulge in the things we love in the first place. The playoffs are a thing. And this year especially, although the writer and actor’s strikes are over, the delay in new material has us rather struggling to find decent TV worth watching. Yes, friends, it’s a quiet time here in the Geek Punditry Global Media Hub. I don’t have a ton of things to say a lot about.
So instead of choosing a topic that doesn’t quite fit into a full column and stretching it out unnecessarily, this week I’m going to do a little bit of an update. I’ll scroll through columns from the past and give you a bit of new information to tell you how those topics are going, how I feel about them now, whether or not anything has changed since I last wrote about them. It’s this or another mailbag. What do you say?
That’s what I thought.
Item One: Last April, I wrote about the magic of the show I Love Lucy and how Lucy, in many ways, codified the sort of serialized storytelling that is commonplace on television today. (See Geek Punditry #15: How Lucy Gave Us the Arc.) In that column, I also spent a little time talking about the greatness of Pluto TV. This is an app on your smart TV that gives you free access to hundreds of channels of specialized content. There’s one channel that just shows the entirety of I Love Lucy, another devoted to The Carol Burnett Show. Others bring us RiffTrax, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Top Gear, Bar Rescue, Unsolved Mysteries, and hundreds of others. I know there are other apps, like Roku TV and FreeVee, that have similar features. Some of them even have the same specific channels. But Pluto TV is the one we use most often, so it’s the one I’m talking about.
I’m just saying, there are worse ways to spend a weekend.
Not long ago, while trying to find something appropriate for my son to watch that wouldn’t make me want to gouge my own eyeballs out, I stumbled upon Pluto’s Garfield and Friends channel, and I left it on. Eddie soon became hooked. He now specifically requests Garfield on most occasions when I let him pick what to watch unless there’s a football or hockey game on. (My kid is a sports nut, which probably makes people who knew me in college snort milk out of their noses laughing. Even if they aren’t drinking milk at the time.) I watched this show when I was a kid and I enjoyed it, but this is the first time I’ve really sat down and paid attention to it in quite some time, and can I tell you something folks? As comedy, Garfield and Friends legitimately holds up.
Comedy peaked in 1989.
While the Garfield comic strip is often criticized for being somewhat bland in its comedy, pushing no boundaries and having as much of an edge as a donut, the show is actually quite the opposite. The scripts are littered with sharp puns, sarcastic humor, and the occasional slightly more adult reference you know the writers were just hoping would slip past the censors. The fourth wall on this show is less of a rule and more of a vague suggestion, and the propensity for overly-long jokes is the kind of thing that I’ve always found hilarious. Part of the credit has to go to head writer Mark Evanier, a longtime TV and comic book writer who perhaps is best known these days as the co-writer of Sergio Aragones’s sword-and-sandals parody comic Groo the Wanderer. Evanier had spent a lot of time working on cartoons where the kind of stale, inoffensive storytelling we criticize the Garfield comic for was the norm, and apparently he went into full-on rebellion against the form.
There are a lot of episodes of this show with kind of a downer ending, if you really think about it. Jon Arbuckle is a perennial loser and he’s treated as such. Garfield’s relationship with Penelope (who replaced the comic’s Arlene for reasons that still aren’t clear) is completely selfish, with him only loving her because her owners have an Italian restaurant. Evanier even introduced the maddening Buddy Bears specifically to mock the shows he had worked on before – the Buddy Bears’ credo is that you are never allowed to disagree with anything and you must always get along, and thus they are portrayed as completely insane. The US Acres (or Orson’s Farm segments in certain countries) similarly have a slyness to them that most cartoons of the time couldn’t touch, and few cartoons specifically for children do today. If you haven’t watched Garfield and Friends in a couple of decades, click over to Pluto TV and give it a watch. The show is still great. And if not, it’s at least better than whatever is on Disney Jr. right now.
Item Two: Back in November, I wrote about Marvel Comics announcing a new version of Ultimate Spider-Man, featuring an adult Spider-Man married to Mary Jane Watson and with two kids. (See Geek Punditry #44: What’s Wrong With a Spider-Family?) Having spent the better part of two decades complaining about Marvel Comics’s refusal to tell stories about an adult Spider-Man with a wife and a family, I felt it would be somewhat hypocritical of me not to try the new series by Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto. The first issue came out a couple of weeks ago and, I’m happy to report, it’s even better than I hoped. It may well be the best single issue of a Spider-Man comic that I’ve read in twenty years. I am not exaggerating that number, friends.
This is what a Spider-Man comic book ought to be, people.
I’m going to explain what makes it so great, but I can’t really do that without getting into spoilers for that book, as well as the miniseries that launched this new Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Invasion. So if you haven’t read either of those and are trying to stay spoiler-free, just leave it at knowing that I really liked this book and jump down to Item Three. Deal?
Ultimate Invasion was about the Maker, the Reed Richards of the original Ultimate Marvel Universe (the one that gave us Miles Morales), which was destroyed during the 2015 Secret Wars event, also written by Hickman. Miles and the Maker were the only two survivors, and migrated to the main Marvel Universe. In Invasion, the Maker decides to recreate his original universe, but with “tweaks” this time, eliminating the events that created many of that world’s superheroes and manipulating the one that remain, so we are given a world that is quite different from the Marvel Universe we’re used to. Most relevant to this book, the Maker prevented the genetically altered spider from ever biting Peter Parker, thus denying this world its Spider-Man.
Ultimate Spider-Man #1 picks up that story in the present day, where an adult Peter is married to Mary Jane and has the aforementioned kids. But the book is loaded with many more surprises than that, such as when we find out that the editor of the Daily Bugle is, in this universe, Peter’s uncle Ben Parker. You never think about it, but in this world where Pete never becomes Spider-Man, his uncle is never murdered. Then a few pages later we learn that Ben is a widower, and that in this world it is MAY Parker who died from violence, during a terrorist attack carried out by Howard Stark (read Ultimate Invasion for that sentence to make sense).
Aside from the surprises, I’m utterly in love with the way Hickman is writing the Peter/Mary Jane dynamic. Peter is deeply dissatisfied with his life because of this horrible, gnawing void in his stomach. He knows something is missing, but he doesn’t know what. Too many writers – too many BAD writers – would play this for drama at the expense of Peter and Mary Jane’s relationship: MJ would take his dissatisfaction personally, thinking it has something to do with her, a rift would form between them, drama would ensue. Hickman’s MJ, however, is both smart and kind enough to realize that’s not the case, and while something is missing from her husband’s life, it’s not about her and he doesn’t blame her for it. THIS Mary Jane is deeply supportive and believes in her Peter. So when he gets a message from a kid calling himself TONY Stark, claiming that the universe is messed up, Peter was supposed to be one of this world’s greatest superheroes, and there’s something in this package that can fix things, MJ is the one who encourages him to do it. And then he opens up the case and finds a vial with an itsy-bitsy spider…
This book is just gold. Hickman has built new versions of very familiar characters that feel truer to the spirit of the ones we love than any version we’ve seen in ages. I know this first issue did blockbuster numbers, but that’s not a surprise. Hickman is a hot writer, it’s launching a new universe, and it has a billion and twelve variant covers, all of which translate to sales. The key will be to see if people keep buying it six months from now. I hope they do.
Item Three: One of the consequences of this fallow period in television is that, among all of the other things that aren’t happening right now, there’s no new Star Trek for me to enjoy at the moment. I’ve mentioned my affection for Star Trek in the past (See Geek Punditry #1-55), but it occurred to me that I’ve never mentioned exactly what happened to draw me so deeply into Trek fandom over the last few years. I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was a kid, growing up on the original series and reruns of the animated series on Nickelodeon. I got into The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine pretty heavily, and in high school and my early college years, I was a major fan. But as you get older you get into more things and different things, and my passion started to wane. It never died – I still liked the shows and I’d watch every new movie, but it wasn’t so much a lifestyle choice for me.
In 2017, my sister told me about a podcast she was listening to called Star Trek: The Next Conversation. Hosted by TV writers Matt Mira and Andy Secunda (Mira also being podcast veteran from shows like Nerdist, James Bonding, and approximately 400 others), the concept was that Andy was a Trek fan who had never watched The Next Generation for some reason, so hardcore fan Matt would walk him through the series an episode at a time as they broke down and dissected the storytelling from the perspective of TV writers. I’d listened to several of Matt’s shows before and Andy won me over immediately. There’s a friendship and chemistry between the two of them, which is probably the single most important element to making a successful podcast. Their thoughts and insights on the show are solid and interesting, and their wild tangents (the second-most important element in a successful podcast) are crazy entertaining.
Don’t tell Paramount about the logo, though. I don’t know if there’s a copyright thing going on here.
What’s more, listening to these two guys geek out about Trek made ME geek out more about Trek. Since then, I’ve been watching every episode of Star Trek along with them, even shows I didn’t care for, because listening to these two guys talk about it has been my reward. They finished The Next Generation in May of 2022, and since then they’ve been going through my favorite series, Deep Space Nine. And if you’re willing to jump into their Patreon, they also cover Voyager, Enterprise, and all of the live-action new Trek series as new episodes drop. (They do not cover my beloved Lower Decks, sadly, because as comedy writers they feel like their nitpicking of Lower Decks would not be as entertaining as the other episodes…and honestly, based on their commentary on the Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover episode, I think they’re right.)
But not only has this show made me start watching more Star Trek, my fandom has increased as well. I find myself hunting down and reading the old comic books and novels. I’ve gotten more shirts and nicknacks. I slowly began to assemble a collection of the miniature Eaglemoss Enterprise models, only to rush and get the last few when Eaglemoss went under. What I guess I’m saying is that Matt Mira and Andy Secunda are responsible for making me an even bigger nerd than I already was, and I thank them for it.
Item Four: I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who reads the little blurbs at the end of every one of these columns, but if you are, you know that I’ve worked in a bonus joke in the last line of every one. Good for you. If you rearrange the letters in them you’ll get a secret message.
More importantly, though, that blurb has also always had a pitch for my Kindle Vella series,Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. The language of that blurb is going to have to change beginning this week, though. I’ve always called it my “Current” writing project. As of this week, it will now be my “most recent” writing project. After two and a half years, I’ve finally finished this epic story. I talked more about it on this blog a few days ago, so I won’t get into detail about it right now, but if you’re the kind of person who likes superheroes and adventures and absolute doorstoppers of storytelling I’d like to invite you to check it out. I’m immensely proud of the story I told, and I’m hoping that you’ll enjoy it too.
Come on, people, how often do I ask you for anything?
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. What about a Garfield/Star Trek/Spider-Man crossover? Would that be a thing? Could we make that happen?
In the first week of January, 2023, I was in a funk. You see, I realized that I’m happier – in general – when I’m spending time talking about those things I enjoy, an itch I used to be able to scratch through various online outlets. But the rise of Facebook had strangled the forum-based websites I used to write for, the demands of parenting had forced a retirement of my podcast, and none of the alternatives I had tried since then seemed to stick. Then, like a miracle, a voice from above spoke to me:
Hey, dumbass, you have a blog.
So I challenged myself to spend 2023 writing a new piece once a week about something in the world of pop culture that I loved: comic books, movies, television and more. And I’m proud to say that as of this week, Geek Punditry #52, I will have successfully met that goal. And I enjoy doing it, and I have every intention of continuing it in 2024. But the question, then, was how to tie off my first year of blogging about those things I enjoy? The answer was obvious. I’d end the year by talking about my favorites from that year. So this week, my friends, get ready for the inaugural edition of the PUNDIE AWARDS!
Yeeeeeas, that’s right, the Pundie Awards, my hopefully-annual review of those things in pop culture that brought me the most joy over the past 12 months. The categories are entirely decided by what will allow me to talk about what I want to talk about. The winners are determined by a democratically-administered voting process including an electoral body consisting of myself. This ain’t fair or unbiased – this is just me talking about the things that came out in 2023 that I loved the most.
Ready? Let’s do movies first!
Blake’s Favorite Superhero Movie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
As much as I loved Into the Spider-Verse, I couldn’t believe how much better the sequel turned out to be. An incredible team of writers, animators, and performers managed to elevate the story of Miles Morales by opening up the multiverse concept from the first film to incorporate not just a handful of Spider-people, but hundreds of them from remarkably disparate worlds. Not only that, but the different worlds often had wildly different animation styles from one another, all of which somehow managed to mesh perfectly.
None of that would have mattered, however, if the movie didn’t have a worthwhile story to go with it. Miles Morales has been somewhat lonely since his last adventure with the Spiders of other worlds, and when he encounters them again it seems as though his dreams are being answered, but the discoveries he makes in this film call into question his entire role in the Spider-Verse. There’s serious character drama mixed up with the superhero action in this movie, and it’s all as compelling as anything I saw on the screen this year. The tragedy is that the writer and actor strikes delayed production on the third film in the trilogy, Beyond the Spider-Verse, and we’re all left dangling from the film’s cliffhanger with no idea how long it’ll be before it is resolved.
Blake’s Favorite Horror Movie: No One Will Save You
I’ve gotta preface this by saying there are several horror movies that I wanted to see this year that I haven’t gotten around to yet, including Evil Dead Rise, The Boogeyman, Saw X, and several others. Out of those I have seen, however, No One Will Save You takes the top spot for the innovative way writer/director Brian Duffield told his story. The movie (a Hulu original, if you haven’t seen it) stars Kaitlyn Dever in a home invasion film where the invaders turn out to be from another world. What makes the film stand out though, is that it is told with almost no dialogue. The film relies on the visuals and the performances of the actors – Dever in particular – to tell the story, including unraveling the secret of why she is separated from the town in which she lives. The reveals in this movie are handled really well, and the ending is one of those conclusions that seriously screws with your brain. If that’s the kind of movie you’re looking for, look no further.
Blake’s Favorite Comedy: Renfield
Some may argue that this should have been included in the “horror” category, but my response to this would be that it’s honestly NOT that scary, it’s VERY funny, and these are MY awards, you jackass, and if you don’t like it, go write your own blog.
Anyway, Renfield. Future Lex Luthor Nicholas Hoult plays the titular character, long-suffering assistant to the king of darkness, Dracula himself (played by Nicolas Cage in a performance that chews so much scenery they must have had to reinforce the walls in the set). The concept of making a comedy about Dracula’s human minion set in modern-day New Orleans is funny in and of itself, but what elevates it is the way it handles the material. The script – written by Ryan Ridley and Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman – takes the story of Dracula and Renfield and uses it as a metaphor for people trapped in an abusive relationship. Not to say that abusive relationships are funny, of course, but it’s one of those stories that uses humor to shed light on a serious situation by making it seem absurd. Looking at the dynamic between Renfield and Dracula is actually helpful in exploring how someone may need to deal with their abusers, and perhaps help the audience find their way to sympathize with victims of such a situation.
I feel like I’m not making it clear how funny this movie is. Trust me. It’s really funny. It just has a serious point to make in-between the laughs and the vampire shenanigans.
Blake’s Favorite Drama: The Holdovers
Paul Giamatti plays a teacher at a prestigious boys school in 1970. Stuck on the wrong side of the headmaster, Giamatti is forced to spend Christmas with a group of “holdovers” – students who, for one reason or another, are unable to return home during Christmas break. The movie turns into a pretty deep character study between three leads. Giamatti plays a bitter and heavily-disliked teacher, Dominic Sessa is one of the students that is justifiably outraged at being left behind so his mother and her new husband can take an unexpected honeymoon, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph is the school’s head cook, a grieving mother who herself is spending Christmas alone.
Each of these three, at the beginning of the film, seems to be a fairly stock character: the nasty teacher, the troubled student, the above-the-nonsense side character. But the forced proximity between the three of them slowly reveals depths to each, and by the time the movie ends we’re left feeling like we have watched three real, fully-developed people. Each of them is flawed, each of them has problems, but we understand them in a way that is undeniable and makes us love each of them just a little bit. Each of the three actors I mentioned here give a master’s performance in this movie, and it’s absolutely something worth watching.
The Most Delightful Surprise of 2023: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
This is the fourth attempt at a live-action Dungeons and Dragons film, and the problem with the previous three efforts is that they have all – and here I’m going to use a term from the Book of Leviticus – blown chunks. There was no real reason to expect Take Four to be any different.
And yet…damned if it wasn’t a really fun movie. Chris Pine plays the same kind of charming but slightly rough edged character he usually does, although this time it’s a new character instead of James T. Kirk or Steve Trevor, and he leads a group of ne’er-do-wells including Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, and Sophia Lillis in a quest to steal an ancient and powerful relic. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons (which I have, although it has been a very long time since I was in a campaign), the plot feels pretty standard. What makes the movie work, though, is the humor, the characters, and the way they react to the fantasy situations that surround them. Their behavior, frankly, feels very authentic to the way that people playing the game would really behave in those situations, and while the movie doesn’t really go meta in the way that description may imply, it still delivers on pretty much every level. I wouldn’t necessarily place this on any “best of 2023” lists, but in terms of expectation versus reality, there’s not a single movie this year that over-delivered more than this one.
Let’s shift gears a bit now and talk about some of my favorite comic books of the year. I know that not everybody reading this is necessarily into comics, but y’know, maybe pay attention anyway. You might find something worth looking into. And if not, skip down to the bottom where I talk about television, by which I mean a lot of Star Trek.
Blake’s Favorite Ongoing DC Comic: Batman/Superman: World’s Finest
Written by Mark Waid with art by Dan Mora (who I said last week is probably the best Superman artist working in comic books right now), this is the most entertaining ongoing series DC is putting out, and they’ve been on a pretty big upswing this year. Set in the early days of the characters’ friendship, this story explores not only Batman and Superman themselves, but also the characters that surround them. Over the course of this year we’ve seen Superman lose a sidekick we never knew about, a murder mystery in which the primary suspect was Bruce Wayne himself, a return to the world of Waid’s classic Kingdom Come, and a fantastically entertaining one-off story about the original Robin (Dick Grayson) going on a date with Supergirl and pretty much everything going wrong.
The book is often funny, always entertaining, and takes characters we have loved for decades and makes them fresh and fun again. And that’s just Waid’s writing. The artwork is also top-notch, with Mora handling most issues and drawing the characters in a way that feels classic and powerful. I keep harping on his Superman, but there’s a reason for that: it’s so damned good. When you see a Superman by Dan Mora, you see a guy that you would find equally believable going toe-to-toe with Darkseid and then turning around and getting a cat unstuck from a tree.
It’s already spun off another book, World’s Finest: Teen Titans, featuring the early days of Robin’s own superhero team, and also written by Waid. This is a brand that DC absolutely needs to run with, because it’s as good as it gets.
But like I said, DC has really upped their game this year, so without getting into detail, I also wanna hand out some honorable mentions. Also worth reading this year from DC are Shazam! (another Waid book), Superman, Nightwing, Green Lantern, Titans, and the recently-rebooted Wonder Woman.
Blake’s Favorite Ongoing Marvel Comic: Fantastic Four
Admittedly, I am biased here. Everybody knows that the Thing is my favorite Marvel character and my second-favorite superhero of them all, right after Superman, so any book with him in it gets at least another two points on a scale of one to ten automatically. So with his bonus two points, Ryan North’s run on Fantastic Four gets, roughly, an eleven.
North’s run began in November of 2022, so most of his story came out in 2023. In the first few issues of the book, we see a Fantastic Four that has been run out of New York City and dispersed to the four winds (pun intended), and perhaps most horrifyingly of all, are without their children. The book launches with a mystery; we are not told immediately what happened to place them in this situation. But unlike certain other Marvel comics I could mention (I’m callin’ you out, Amazing Spider-Man) the mystery was revealed in issue FOUR, and was done in a way that was very satisfying and very in-character. Without getting into any spoilers, I want to say that the reason the FF left New York and the reason the kids are all missing makes perfect sense (unlike another certain book where the long-delayed revelation went against not only years of characterization but also just common freaking sense). At the same time, it changed the status quo in a way that is inherently temporary, but still paved the way for a year of very old-school sci-fi adventures. In other words, Ryan North found a way to take the FF back to the kind of crazy stories the book featured in the early days without getting rid of the modern trappings entirely or invalidating the feelings of the fans who enjoy those trappings. And now that we’re at a point where that storyline is being resolved, I’m really anxious and excited to see what North has planned next.
Blake’s Favorite Ongoing Image Comic: Radiant Black
This isn’t the first time this year I’ve mentioned how much I love Radiant Black, written by Kyle Higgins with art by Marcelo Costa. The title that launched Image’s “Massive-Verse” line (which also includes entertaining books such as Rogue Sun, No/One, and The Dead Lucky) is a superhero story about a young man, Nathan, who finds an alien artifact that gives him incredible power…until he’s hurt and put into a coma, with his best friend Marshall taking over. When Nathan wakes up, the two friends share the power until they’re forced to choose which of them gets to keep it.
Aside from just being a well-written comic with great art, Higgins and Costa do really interesting and innovative things with how the story is told. In one issue, in which Radiant Black encounters a crew making a fanfilm about him, we’re given a QR code that takes us to YouTube and shows us the actual film. Issue #25 though, the issue in which Nathan and Marshall are given their choice is the one that really elevates things when the readers are instructed to vote for which of the two of them becomes the permanent Radiant Black. The BIG shock, however, came when fans walked into comic shops to pick up issue #26 only to find two different versions: one in which Nathan took over and one in which Marshall got the job. During the currently-running “Catalyst War” storyline, there are two versions of the story, and it’s NOT just a case of penciling in a different face for each version. The two of them are different people, make different choices, and have different consequences, and it’s not until the story ends that the result of the fan vote will be revealed and one of the two timelines will be declared the “real” one.
I like good art and I love great writing, but if you REALLY want to make me go to bat for your comic book, pull some risky moves with how you tell the story and you’ll have me on your side for life.
Blake’s Favorite Comic Book Reboot: Skybound’s Energon Universe
Robert Kirkman, mentioned back in the Renfield entry, loves to surprise his audience. He didn’t announce ahead of time that issue #193 of The Walking Dead would be the last issue of the series. He didn’t tell anyone that there would be an Atom Eve special for his Invincible cartoon until it appeared on Prime Video. And earlier this year he launched a new comic, a sci-fi space opera, called Void Rivals. Nobody was really talking about this book much until the day the first issue reached the stands and, towards the end, fans were shocked to find an appearance by the Autobot Jetfire. This is how we learned that Void Rivals was not merely a new series, but the launch for a new shared universe including Void Rivals and the two classic Hasbro properties TransFormers and G.I. Joe.
There have been a lot of crossovers between TransFormers and G.I. Joe over the years, and the previous license holder IDW Publishing even tried to create a shared universe including those two and other Hasbro properties like M.A.S.K., ROM, and Micronauts. None of those efforts have ever really worked, though, because once these properties are already established, it’s too difficult to mesh them together. If the G.I. Joe team has already been around for 75 issues, why the hell have they never before referenced the giant robots that turn into oil tankers that have been fighting in downtown Las Vegas? You can’t explain it. What Kirkman and his team have done is the only real way to make a shared universe from these properties: tie them together from the inception.
So Void Rivals launched this “Energon Universe,” and it’s exploring space and some of the other alien races classic to the TransFormers franchise. The line continued with a new TransFormers book by Daniel Warren Johnson, which begins the story of how the war between the Autobots and Decepticons first spills over onto Earth. This is being followed up by two miniseries written by Joshua Williamson, Duke and Cobra Commander, which show the origins of the respective hero and villain teams of the G.I. Joe corner of the universe, and link those origins to the appearance of robot aliens on planet Earth. Void Rivals is pretty good, but TransFormers has been great, and the first issue of Duke – which came out this week – really blew me away. I’m totally on board for this universe, and I’m so happy with what Kirkman has put together.
Side note: Kirkman also gets bonus points for continuing Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, the original series that was started by Marvel Comics back in the 80s and resurrected by IDW. It’s the classic G.I. Joe continuity, still in the hands of the man who basically created the incarnation of the franchise that we all grew up with, and I couldn’t be happier that it’s still out there.
Well that was a fun dip into the world of comic books. Let’s wrap up this look back at 2023 by discussing some of my favorite TV shows of the year, shall we?
Blake’s Favorite Star Trek Series: Lower Decks
I have made no secret of my love of Star Trek: Lower Decks. I wrote a whole column about it not too long ago, so I don’t want to spend a lot of space rehashing what I said then, but it would be disingenuous of me to write about my favorites of the year and NOT bring it up again. You can go back and look at that previous column if you want details, but it’s a show that is not only outrageously funny, but incredibly clever and truly loving towards the history behind the franchise. If you’re a fan of any incarnation of Trek and you haven’t been watching it, you’re making a mistake.
Blake’s Favorite Star Trek Series that isn’t Lower Decks: Picard, Season Three
With all due respect to Strange New Worlds – which had a phenomenal second season – the final season of Star Trek: Picard told a story we’ve been waiting to see for two decades now. The first two seasons of that show were no great shakes, it’s true, but the last season brought back the entire main crew from Star Trek: The Next Generation and gave them one last, grand adventure together, which they never really had. The finale of the TV show was never intended as their final story, since they were immediately rolling into production of the movies. The last movie in that franchise was not intended to be the last movie, and so it didn’t really give us closure either. But this story brought back everybody we loved and told a story that was exciting, heartfelt, and absolutely engaging from the first episode to the last. What’s more, it also laid the groundwork for a new generation of Trek, bringing in a new crew with a mixture of familiar and brand-new characters that fans warmly embraced. The executives at Paramount are absolute fools if they don’t capitalize on this and bring this crew back together again for more adventures.
Blake’s Favorite Comedy Series that isn’t Lower Decks: Abbott Elementary
Sometimes I need to remind myself that there are TV shows with live actors that aren’t set in outer space. Abbott Elementary is a wonderful way to do so – it’s a fantastically funny show that, at the same time, is really down-to-Earth and realistic in certain ways. The quick pitch behind this show is to call it “The Office, but in an elementary school.” It carries over the same sort of mockumentary style, and a lot of the characters seem to fit similar templates, such as the ridiculously inept boss (the principal, played by Ava Coleman), the hardass veteran (fantastically played by Barbara Howard) and the young, adorkable “will they/won’t they” couple (played by Tyler James Williams and show creator Quinta Brunson).
The thing about this show is that, while it IS very funny and the characters ARE very compelling, it also works very well as a look into the working of a real elementary school. Not ALL of it, of course – it’s a comedy and like many comedies it will often sacrifice realism for the sake of a joke. But the show deals with issues that, as a teacher, I see every day: funding difficulties, student behavior issues, intrusive parents and so forth. There are a lot of movies and TV shows set in schools, but this is the first time I’ve ever watched a show about a school that actually makes me believe that someone in the writing room might actually have been a teacher at one point.
It’s a great show with no weak links, and every time I hear about it getting an award in writing, directing, acting, or anything else, I just nod and say, “Yep. Nailed it.”
Blake’s Favorite Horror Series: Fall of the House of Usher
Writer/director Mike Flanagan has produced several films and TV shows for Netflix, and he finished up his contract this year with a miniseries kinda-sorta based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Kinda-sorta. Truth be told, when I watched Fall of the House of Usher, I described it to people as “Mike Flanagan bought all of the Edgar Allan Poe LEGO kits, threw away the instructions, and then built his own brand new thing out of all the pieces.”
This is not a criticism. The show is great.
The framing sequence features Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher, telling inspector C. Auguste Dupin (another Poe character played by Carl Lumbly) about the tragic deaths of his adult children, all of which happened in the past few weeks. What follows is a long, winding, generational tragedy, beginning in Usher’s childhood and leading up to the moments before the series actually begins. The cast is amazing, including several of Flangan’s usual troupe of actors like Carla Guigno, Henry Thomas, Kyliegh Curran, and Kate Siegel, and giving Mark Hamill perhaps the best dramatic turn of his entire career. The stories that unfold also tie into not just “Fall of the House of Usher,” but several other works of Poe as well. Episode titles, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, include “The Masque of the Red Death,” “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Raven.”
If you go into this show expecting a faithful adaptation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you look at it as someone using Poe as inspiration to create something entirely new, it’s a fantastic, engaging, and really disturbing series that goes right up there with the best horror on TV.
Flanagan is currently working on an adaptation of Stephen King’s epic The Dark Tower series, which previously fell flat in a movie in 2017. If there’s anyone out there who I feel has the skill and vision to make that book series – one of my favorites of all time – into a SUCCESSFUL show, it’s Mike Flanagan.
And that’s about all, guys. Out of all the new stories I read or watched in 2023, these are the ones I enjoyed the most. This isn’t comprehensive, of course: there are hundreds of movies, TV shows, and comic books that I never got around to this year. So if one of your favorites wasn’t included in this little retrospective, just comfort yourself by saying, “Well, Blake obviously didn’t watch Oppenheimer yet, so he couldn’t include it.” Because it’s either that or I DID see it and I didn’t like it as much as you, which is especially the case if your favorite movie of the year was Flamin’ Hot. Ugh.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse back at 2023, and furthermore, I hope you’ve enjoyed spending a year with me talking about the stories and storytelling that I love. That’s what Geek Punditry has really been about since day one, a chance for me to get out there and talk about these things again. And while I may not have TMZ knocking down my door begging to do commentary for them, writing this column every week has made me feel good and I’ve enjoyed doing it. So come back on the first Friday in January, and we’ll begin Geek Punditry Year Two.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s trying to remember: in “Year Two,” is that the one where he finally tracks down the mugger who killed his parents in an alley, or is he thinking of something else?
Last week in a shocking announcement, Marvel Comics revealed it will be publishing a new Spider-Man series in which Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are (hold your horses, folks) – married.
I know, that’s probably a total stunner to you, possibly because you think it’s impossible to tell compelling stories with a married couple. Perhaps it’s even MORE shocking when you find out that they will have children, because as we all know, anybody who is married or a parent is clearly too old to be an engaging protagonist. No, these characters are now either relegated to supporting roles as their offspring take over as the primary character, or they must be made the subject of a traumatic domino chain that is the emotional equivalent of watching all 10 Saw movies in immediate succession, possibly preceding it with The Human Centipede as an aperitif. After all, the only characters capable of maintaining an interesting narrative are young and have no familial attachments, with the possible exception of an aunt whose death is a foregone conclusion that may be teased and waved in front of our hero for years as an additional piece of mental torment.
It would only be logical if that were your reaction. After all, that’s been more or less the official stance of Marvel Comics for a couple of decades now.
🎵”Spider-Dad, Spider-Dad, Don’t you tell him his jokes are bad…”🎵
Okay, at this point I imagine the regular comic book readers out there are all nodding their heads in understanding, while those of you who only know Spider-Man as Tom Holland (or possibly Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire) are somewhat confused, so for the sake of that latter group, let me explain. First of all, the comic in question is a new version of Ultimate Spider-Man, written by Jonathan Hickman and explicitly set in an alternate universe than the mainstream Spider-Man. That’s right, thanks to the marvels of the multiverse, we can have that book coexisting with the “normal” Spider-Man, whose adventures will continue to be chronicled in The Amazing Spider-Man, where he remains childless, spouseless, joyless, and probably has had a puppy taken away from him in the last 15 minutes just to make sure he is constantly being beaten up by the universe.
The thing is, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson were married once, and for a long time. Their wedding took place in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, published in 1987, and it was the status quo for my formative years. I was a child when they married. I was a teenager when I read the books voraciously. And although I never once, in all that time, thought it was difficult to relate to a character who had a wife and stable family life, apparently former Marvel Comics Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada disagreed with me. Quesada spent years after becoming Marvel’s EIC in 2000 teasing fans, talking about his distaste for the marriage and expressing his belief that it “aged” Spider-Man too much. Finally, after 20 years of having Peter and MJ as a married couple, Quesada gave us “One More Day,” a storyline in which Peter traded his marriage away to Mephisto, Marvel’s equivalent to Satan, in exchange for May Parker’s life.
You only imagined this. It’s a Mandela Effect or, like that black and blue/gold and white dress or something.
This will require a little more explanation, so buckle up: the reason Aunt May’s life was in jeopardy in the first place was because of the Civil War storyline, written by Brian Michael Bendis. This was one of those crossover storylines that involved virtually every Marvel comic being published at the time, but a lack of communication among the other writers about what was actually going on made it a garbled mess. In this story some of the Marvel Heroes began supporting a “Superhero Registration Act,” requiring superheroes to register with the government or become outlaws. Despite nearly 40 years of stories showing heroes standing up against measures such as this, many characters sided with the Pro-Registration side, led by Iron Man, as opposed to the Anti-Registration side, fronted by Captain America.
Let’s take a moment to try to parse the fact that anybody – any damned person – in the Marvel Universe would for even a split second side with Iron Man over Captain America in any question of an ethical nature, let alone a question of government overreach. Let’s parse that.
Spider-Man, for reasons, took Iron Man’s side. Then, just to prove how much he agreed with the Pro-Registration side, he revealed his secret identity to the world. This proved how great Registering was, even though several books specifically said that nobody who registered would be forced to reveal their identities to the public. Even though it said that. Spider-Man did it anyway. To support the government.
Parse that too.
And then, after 40 years of stories demonstrating that superheroes revealing their identities to the world would put their loved ones at risk, Spider-Man’s revelation shockingly put his loved ones at risk, and May Parker was shot by a bad guy.
If only someone could have predicted such an outcome.
Spider-Man being confronted by the consequences of his own actions (2007, colorized).
Finally, in order to save his aunt’s life – something that apparently was beyond medical science, the machinations of Dr. Strange, or even Disney’s in-staff physician Doc McStuffins – Peter cut a deal with Totally Not Satan: save May’s life and make everyone forget his secret identity. In exchange, Mephisto didn’t even want Pete’s soul. He just wanted to make everyone in the world forget that Peter and Mary Jane had ever been married. Even Peter and Mary Jane themselves. He wanted this for reasons.
If this whole story sounds unfathomably stupid to you there’s a good reason for it: it was. Even J. Michael Straczynski, the writer tasked writing with the story, tried to have his name taken off it. Although to be clear, he was still willing to write a story that would wipe out the marriage, he just thought this particular method of doing it was weak. I’m sure that his version would have been better, even if I personally find the planned outcome distasteful, because Straczynski is a great writer. And certain elements clearly COULD have worked, because the movies Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: No Way Home both borrowed select elements of that storyline and made great movies, disproving the old adage that you can’t polish a turd.
Anyway, fans were not happy, but Marvel has persevered with this new status quo. Over the years since then Peter and Mary Jane have been together and been apart, but the marriage has never been restored. Dan Slott, who wrote Spider-Man for a long time in this period, has said that people higher up the corporate chain than even Quesada (who is no longer with the company) don’t want Peter and Mary Jane to be married again, ever. And while that may be true, that just makes it crueler how often assorted writers have teased a reconciliation over the years. This teasing even included an earlier alternate reality series, Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, which was good, but has been somewhat forgotten.
This, however, is totes canon. Well, somewhere in the Spider-Verse, anyway.
The most recent run of Amazing Spider-Man ended with Peter and Mary Jane together again (if not married) and it left them in a good place. Then came a new writer for the current run, which started with a six-month timeskip, everybody hating Spider-Man for reasons that went unexplained for a year, and Mary Jane having school-age children with another man. I stopped reading the book at this point, something I had only done once before: after “One More Day.” I have not returned, although I’ve read the explanation for everything we didn’t know in the timeskip, and the explanation this time is so egregiously stupid that it makes “One More Day” almost seem quaint by comparison.
I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m ranting, but this is important. Spider-Man is an iconic character, one that means a lot to a lot of people, including myself, and the way Marvel seems bound and determined to make him permanently miserable is, frankly, a source of real frustration to me. That’s why I was so excited when I heard about Hickman’s new Ultimate Spider-Man series. The fact that it’s set in a different universe is barely even significant at this point, as Multiverses now shoot out in pop culture like candy from a Pez dispenser. It’s a married Peter and MJ,something I have wanted to see return for 16 years. It would almost be hypocritical of me to not read this series.
Hickman is probably my favorite writer who has done consistent, long-running titles at Marvel in the past decade or more, but he’s never done a long run with Spider-Man before. Giving him the character, even as part of the new Ultimate Universe, is something that excites me. That doesn’t mean I expect the book to be all sunshine and rainbows – Hickman is too good a writer for that. But I am hoping for stories that use the dynamic of a family to tell compelling, interesting stories that use the family as part of the tapestry instead of viewing it as a nuisance that needs to be brushed aside.
But the existence of this book still doesn’t address the fundamental problem – this baffling notion that there are no good stories to be told with a family. DC Comics ran into a similar stumbling block with Superman and Lois Lane, who married in 1996 after nearly 60 years of courtship. (Pete and MJ had a comparatively brief 20 years before they tied the knot.) In 2011, as part of the “New 52” relaunch, the characters were made younger and the marriage was dissolved. It only took DC a few years to realize the mistake, though, as fans were vocal about preferring the Lois and Clark dynamic. DC eventually played along by not only restoring the marriage to canon, but by giving Lois and Clark a child, Jon.
Plenty of heroes have had long relationships. Barry Allen (the second Flash) and Iris West were together and married for quite some time before Iris’s death (which was later reversed). His protege Wally West, a character who had been around for about three years when Peter Parker was created, married Linda Park and they recently welcomed their third child. Both Flashes have had their relationships wax and wane and occasionally disappear via comic book-style reboots, but they’re back these days. (Well, Barry and Iris aren’t currently married, but they are together.) The first Flash, Jay Garrick, has similarly been married for decades, and DC even recently introduced his own daughter as part of a group of new characters who were previously “erased” from the timestream, opening up new avenues for storytelling. Elongated Man and Sue Dearbon-Dibney were a married couple for decades before falling into comic book limbo – and hey, DC, bring ‘em back. We love them. And of course, over in Marvel Comics we have Reed and Susan Richards, the prototypical comic book parents, with their children. They’ve been married for nearly 60 years now.
I mean, who wants to read about a married superhero anyway?
But the argument, I suppose, is that having a family makes a character seem “older,” and most of these previous characters I mentioned were already older than Spider-Man. Fair point, but my contention that new, exciting stories can still be told with them as married couples still stands. In fact, adding Jon Kent to the Superman mythos gave the characters a welcome new dynamic that produced some fantastic stories before Civil War’s Brian Michael Bendis took over the series and screwed it up. Wally West’s children are pretty much co-leads of his comic book, and his daughter Irey has even become besties with Maxine Baker, daughter of Wally’s sometime Justice League teammate Animal Man, yet another married superhero. And let’s not forget about Batman – while no one has got him down the aisle yet (he almost took that walk with Catwoman, but she bailed), he’s been a dad pretty much since he adopted the first Robin back in 1940. And in recent years, it’s been literal, with the addition of Damian Wayne to the family.
And the thing is, the Clark and Jon stories are nothing like the Bruce and Damian stories, and neither of those have anything in common with the stories about Wally and his kids Irey and Jai (or the newborn Wade). Because – here’s the shocking part – children are people. They’re not all identical. And when you put an interesting, developed individual into the mix with another interesting, developed individual, you’re going to get an interesting, developed story. This isn’t even counting the thousands of stories outside of comic books that have successfully told tales of parents with children.
But what about the other argument, that being married or a parent it makes it difficult for young readers to “relate” to Peter Parker? Let’s say that, just for a second, I actually believed that. (Spoiler: I don’t.) The thing is, there are two important factors that make that argument irrelevant.
First: the notion that an older Spider-Man might be a turnoff for young readers is dumb because there aren’t any younger readers. American comic books are in something of a crisis. Older readers have always drifted away, but in the past newer readers would come in and fill the void. That isn’t happening now, at least not in numbers significant enough to concern ourselves with. It’s absurd, because thanks to the success of Marvel Studios over the last decade and a half, Marvel characters are more popular than ever. But there has been approximately zero success at drawing in the kids watching those movies and getting them to read the comic books. Meanwhile, many of the strategies they’ve employed in an effort to get new readers (such as constant reboots or replacing classic characters with younger “legacy” versions) have only served to drive off the readers who have been around for years. It’s been a lose/lose situation, and comics have to admit that those “fixes” aren’t working before anything else they do is going to matter. This is a major problem in the industry, and it’s worth discussing, but preventing Spider-Man from growing as a character is not the solution.
Pictured: new comic book readers
Second: if the goal actually is to have a Spider-Man that younger readers can relate to, MARVEL ALREADY HAS ONE AND HIS NAME IS MILES MORALES. Miles is one of the few new “legacy” characters that has actually taken off and found mainstream popularity, being the star of two incredibly successful and extremely well-made animated movies. Hell, Miles Morales’s first movie won the Oscar for best Animated Feature. If Marvel’s argument is “we need a young Spider-Man,” congratulations! You’ve got him! Do the “young guy” stories with Miles and stop torturing Peter by trying to force him back into a box he outgrew in the 1980s!
(In the interest of total fairness, I should point out that Miles Morales was co-created by Brian Michael Bendis.)
“Heard of me, Marvel? I won a friggin’ Academy Award.”
I no longer harbor any hope for the “mainstream” Peter Parker and Mary Jane actually getting a happy ending, at least not until the next editorial overhaul at Marvel. That’s the thing about comics, everything is cyclical. The people in charge now won’t be in charge forever, so if you’re unhappy with the direction of a book, there are two things you can do. Cross your fingers and hope the next creative team is better, and – far more importantly – stop buying it. And since there seems to be a Spider-Man on the horizon that does seem a better fit for my tastes, I choose to support that book, rather than the one that leaves a sour, spidery taste in my mouth.
Help us, Jonathan Hickman. You’re our only hope.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He realizes that he may have some of the behind-the-scenes details incorrect in his dissertation on comic book history, but in his defense, he’s never pretended to be a journalist in this column. Which frankly gives him far greater integrity than anybody working – for example – at the New York Times.
Blake M. Petit 