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

November 1, 2024November 1, 2024 blakemp This is How We Do It Chris Fenoglio, comic books, IDW Publishing, Ryan North, Star Trek, Star Trek: Lower Decks

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

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

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

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

Whom we meet at the height of her glory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…like…

He didn’t, did he?

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

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

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

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

“Because this is brilliant!” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

Because THIS is how we do it.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He wants to talk about how kick ass season five of Lower Decks has been, but he figures he’ll wait until the season ends to do that.

Geek Punditry #83: The Simple Way to Save the Day

August 2, 2024August 2, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Amazon, physical media, Piracy, Star Trek, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy

The truth is, I kind of blame myself. The very first Geek Punditry column I ever wrote was to extoll the virtues of Star Trek: Prodigy on Paramount+. Then, like a thief in the night, the Paramount bigwigs decided to cancel the show, despite the fact that the second season was nearly finished, and even removed the previous season from the service. A few months later, at the conclusion of Star Trek: Picard, I made a powerfully compelling case (if I do say so myself) for using it as the launchpad for showrunner Terry Matalas’s proposed Star Trek: Legacy project. And yet here we sit, over a year later, with no movement on that front. You would think I would have learned my lesson, but no – upon the conclusion of season four of Star Trek: Lower Decks, I wrote about what makes it the best Star Trek series of the century so far. I may as well have signed its death warrant myself.

“WHY? Why would he TELL THEM he likes us?”

It’s enough to make a guy consider pretending to like crap just to get it off TV.

But no, I refuse to compromise my principles like that. I’m going to keep talking about those things I love, damn the consequences. The word from Paramount+ is that the Lower Decks will end after the upcoming fifth season, but consarn it, this show deserves more. Sure, some people point out that it’s ending after five seasons, same as Discovery, and while there certainly HAVE been “save Discovery” campaigns, they haven’t caught fire or gained traction like the Cerritos fans. I think what you have to remember here is that, as a half-hour animated series, a ten-episode season of Lower Decks only gives us five hours of content, a total of 50 half-hours. A season of Discovery would have as many as 13 episodes, with a runtime usually between 45-60 minutes, totaling 65 episodes at the end of the run. That’s far more than twice the Disco, comparatively. Or to put it in even clearer context, back in the 90s a season of Next Generation or Deep Space Nine could go on for 26 episodes. With commercials, that’s 26 hours of Trek. Lower Decks will end with five five-hour seasons – altogether the entire run of the show will be less than a single season of any of those series we grew up with. It’s simply not time for this show to end.

The good news is, it ain’t over yet. Netflix swept in and saved Prodigy, giving both the first season and the new season a home, and that second season has garnered immense critical and audience acclaim. Matalas still talks about Legacy in a way that doesn’t say “never gonna happen,” but rather, “not at this time.” And then last week, at San Diego Comic-Con (which, as you may recall, I was unable to attend), Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan talked about the future of Lower Decks in a way that seems somewhat hopeful. Specifically, McMahan was quoted by several sources as saying “You’re getting a closure that feels like the end of a chapter, but you’re not getting a closure on the Cerritos or these characters.” In other words, he does not see the final episode of this season as the final word on our pals Beckett Mariner, Brad Boimler, Sam Rutherford, and D’Vanna Tendi. And that’s great, because these are amazing characters with the potential to have more and more adventures for many years to come.

But perhaps even more encouraging than McMahan’s statement was one made by Alex Kurtzman, the sometimes-controversial figure who is in charge of the entire Star Trek franchise these days. After McMahan suggested that fans “watch the hell out of this season when it airs,” Kurtzman further added, “Watch it twice because, actually, it does register. Finish it, and then watch it again… Guys, your petitions are incredible. They’re incredible. Look what you did for Prodigy. Do it again.”

“That’s right, people! It ain’t over ’till the fat Horta sings!”

If this doesn’t ring in your ears as a call to action, I don’t know what will. Talking to the fans, to the actors, to the creators, to the producers, it doesn’t seem like ANYBODY wants Lower Decks to end, with the exception of the boardroom guys at Paramount. THOSE are the people who have to be convinced. One theory I’ve heard – and one that I think has merit – is that they feel like Lower Decks has too limited a potential audience. To be fair, the show is VERY continuity-heavy and a lot of the stories rely on the audiences’ familiarity with the various incarnations of Star Trek. Paramount would rather focus on projects with an easier entry point for new fans. I get that. I think it’s stupid, but I GET it.

The sad truth is that the “business” part of “show business” is often what makes the creative decisions, and the only way to convince the boardroom guys that a show is worth saving is to give them numbers that indicate such a thing. So yeah, that means watching the show, RE-watching the show, and doing it as soon as possible when it drops, because something else they look at very carefully is how QUICKLY an audience engages with the provided content.

And this is why it drives me absolutely CRAZY when I see fans talk about how angry they are at Paramount+ (I get that), how they don’t trust Paramount+ to give the show the love it deserves (I get it) and how, rather than paying for Paramount+, they’re just going to download the show illegally (you blithering idiots).

“That’ll show ‘em!” they say. “I’m not gonna give those evil corporations one thin dime, but I’m STILL going to reap the benefits of what they make!” Swell! And in so doing, you’re putting the nail in the coffin of those things you love.

“For your information, MANY Orions haven’t pirated any movies or TV shows for over FIVE YEARS!”

I’m not going to sit here and debate the morality of pirating TV and movies with you guys. I know I’m not going to change your mind. But I AM going to point out that if you really want a series like Lower Decks to continue, pirating it is one of the WORST things you can do.

Like I said, the studio looks at the viewership numbers. And to be certain, some of you will point out that large numbers of illegal downloads demonstrate that there’s a demand for a series. Sure, that’s true. But it’s even MORE true that the studio doesn’t give one flying fig for your download numbers because they do not make any money off of those numbers. In fact, every number that rings up for an illegal download is a number that they consider a loss.

“It’s not a loss,” you say, “because I wouldn’t have paid for it anyway.”

My favorite argument.

I want to put yourself in my position for a moment, guys. You know that I’m a writer. I write books and then I try to convince people to buy them. I am not particularly GOOD at that part, but I try anyway. I’ve even got a little Facebook page where occasionally people talk about them. And there is, I believe, exactly ONE person who is blocked from that page, someone who had read one of my books and liked it, and that’s swell. And then she made a comment about how she downloads all her books to “beat” the big companies like Amazon. And I gotta tell ya, it feels GREAT to know that she swindled Jeff Bezos out of his cut of MY book when I’ve got to buy my kid school supplies with a royalty check that looks like a soccer score. But it’s okay because you wouldn’t have read it anyway? You know, I think I would have preferred that you didn’t instead of you popping onto my page and telling me how proud you are of getting away with something.

Independent authors are eating ramen noodles, but at least Lex Luthor had to settle for only six yachts this year.

But that’s getting back into the morality of it again, and I’m sure nobody wants to hear that, because it may force you to question your judgment. Let’s get practical. The guys in the boardroom look at the pirate numbers and ask – surprisingly logically – “why should we keep spending money to make something that these people are going to watch for free?” The point of a business – ANY business – is to make money, and to continue spending money making a product that loses money is foolishness.

The way to save Lower Decks – to save ANY television show that’s on the cusp – is to convince the studio that keeping it alive makes financial sense. That means buying the DVDs, getting the t-shirts, snagging the merch, pre-ordering the comic books, supporting the sponsors, and (and this is the part that’s going to make some people angry) WATCHING IT ON A LEGAL PLATFORM. Whether that’s a paid subscription like Paramount+ or a free ad-supported platform like the Roku Channel, these are the ways that the creators of the shows make their money. If you want them to keep making the shows, you need to keep making money for them.

Plus, you’ll still have the physical media if the studio decides to remove it from the app as part of their plan to commit tax fraud.

By the way, I’m talking about TV shows because Lower Decks is the current show that’s sending out the S.O.S. signal, but this is all true of movies and any other form of media as well. Everyone wants to complain that Hollywood has “no new ideas,” that all they make are sequels and spin-offs and remakes. Guys, look at the top movies for the past decade. How many of them are sequels or spin-offs or remakes? Hell, look at the box office receipts for THIS year! As of this writing, the top TWELVE movies for 2024 are all sequels or spin-offs or remakes. You don’t get an original idea (John Krazynski’s imaginary friend fantasy IF) until spot number THIRTEEN. Now ask yourself how many lower-tier movies – movies that AREN’T sequels or spin-offs or remakes – have been downloaded.

I took a screenshot in case it’s changed by the time you read this. *Inside Out 2* totally deserves that spot, by the way.

If you love Lower Decks – and if you’ve bothered to read this far I believe that you do – you need to heed McMahan and Kurtzman’s call to watch it, watch it a lot. But if you don’t watch it the right way, it doesn’t matter at all. If you don’t, then our pals on the Cerritos will join the likes of Trelane, Beverly Crusher’s husband that Picard got killed, and those salamander babies Tom Paris and Janeway had – a vibrant afterlife on Memory Beta, but in canon, merely a remembrance of something golden.

RED ALERT: UPCOMING PLAYING FAVORITES!

Well, friends, back to school is creeping up on us. Whether your kids go back next week like mine or if you still have a free chunk of August, the time is approaching…so I’m going to celebrate with another PLAYING FAVORITES! In “Playing Favorites,” I throw out a topic and ask YOU to give me categories to cover in an upcoming “Geek Punditry” column. For instance, when the topic was “Christmas,” I was asked for my favorite songs written for a Christmas movie. With the “Superhero” topic I was asked my favorite sidekicks. In the “Summer” topic I talked about my favorite beach movies, and so forth.

This time the topic is SCHOOL. I’m looking for categories that apply to the usual Geek Punditry quadrants: movies, TV, books and comics. As always, I’ll pick my favorite suggestions and give my picks. Let the nominations begin!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He really wants you to think about a creative parent having to explain to their kids why they have to get Rose Art crayons instead of Crayola the next time you download something. Jerk.

Geek Punditry #82: I’m Going to Go Back There Someday

July 26, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry 1776, Comic-Con, comics, Conventions, DC Comics, Don Rosa, James Gunn, Marvel Comics, Movies, San Diego Comic-Con International, SDCC, Star Trek, star wars, superman, television

It’s that time again, friends. Every year, as July races to a close, kids sharpen pencils for school, and teachers spend an inordinate amount of time and money getting their classrooms suitable to post on Instagram, the geeks of the world converge on San Diego, California for the annual bacchanalia officially known as Comic-Con International. And every year I sit here in Louisiana, gazing to the west, and wishing I could be there with ‘em.

It’s a bucket list thing for me, guys. Some day, at least ONCE, I want to go to San Diego Comic-Con. I’ve got a lot of friends who have been – heck, with the pals I have who work in comics, I’ve got a lot of friends who go pretty much every year. I see the posts and I gaze at the photos shared on social media and I think about what it would be like to be there, even though I know it’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s expensive, first of all. Admission to the convention aside, I think about the costs of airfare, food, car rental or Ubers to get around, and hotel rooms (some reportedly going for over $1000 a night on this particular weekend) and I know there’s no way this can be swung on a teacher’s salary in the current economy. Then there’s the kiddo – making this trip would either require my wife to take time off work to stay home with our son or her take off work so all three of us could go together. Going together is my preference, but not really feasible at the moment. So it stays on that bucket list, unchecked, right next to “Play Benjamin Franklin in a production of 1776.”

“Ah, it’s okay Blake,” say some of my friends. “Comic-Con isn’t what it used to be anyway.” And that, at least, is true. It’s been a really long time since Comic-Con was actually about comic books. The media empires have taken it over – movie and TV studios are the stars of the really big panels, and video game companies flock there to shill their upcoming games. And while I don’t begrudge any of them, comics are my real jam, and are what I’d really want to see. I’d rather go to a DC Comics panel than a Warner Bros. panel most days…although if it were James Gunn and company talking about the upcoming Superman movie, it’d be a heck of an internal battle.

Still wanna go, though.

It also doesn’t seem to be quite as big in terms of making news as it used to be. For years in these waning days of July, I would refresh my web browser all day long, waiting for news reports coming from San Diego to tell me what was going to happen over the next year in the world of entertainment. Marvel would unveil whole slates of films there back when such a thing seemed like a wise thing to do, and fans like myself would teeter on the edge of Firefox to see what was coming next. I don’t feel like that happens as much anymore. Studios are so desperate to stay relevant that they squeeze out announcements all year long, often prematurely, very often promising things that wind up never happening. It’s frustrating, to be sure. But in terms of what it does to Comic-Con it’s even worse, as so many of the “big” panels have changed. There’s no longer an opportunity to blow our minds with announcements of what’s to come, but rather just a recap of the announcements that have been made since the last time they recapped their announcements.

Yet I still wish I was there.

It’s not like I’ve never been to a convention, of course. When I was young, I went with my Uncle Todd to a few Star Trek conventions (these don’t really exist anymore, as Comic-Con and its many imitators have become a catch-all for pop culture and cons specific to a single franchise have become much rarer). When the Chicago Comic-Con was still a big deal I did a road trip with my buddies Mike and James. I’ve been to Philly and Houston, and many Wizard World-turned-Fan Expo shows here in New Orleans. And I’ve been to dozens of smaller shows, which are honestly better when it comes to the comic book side of things. Back in April, Erin and I took Eddie to a small show in Covington (right across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans) and it was honestly the BEST show I’ve been to in YEARS when it comes to the number of vendors selling comic books and comic paraphernalia, as opposed to thousands of headshots you could get signed by whatever actors are in attendance. I loved that little show, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Observe the Native North American Geek in his natural habitat.

But I still feel that COMPULSION to go to the BIG one.

Why?

Because in a weird way it feels like home.

I don’t know if younger readers will get this, because the stigma about being into “nerdy” stuff seems to have largely gone away. With Marvel and Star Wars being so mainstream and things like Game of Thrones and The Boys becoming media juggernauts, things that we used to consider niche entertainment have become dominant parts of the cultural zeitgeist. But when I was in high school in the 90s, I was always made to feel like I didn’t belong because I read comics and watched cartoons. I clung to the things I loved, but often felt the need to hide them, lest I become even more of an outcast than I already was. I’d even quit Disney and Archie comics not because I didn’t like them anymore, but because I let people put it in my head that if I was in high school and reading Uncle Scrooge something must have been wrong with me. If I was seen with a Star Trek novel or an X-Men t-shirt, the reaction quite clearly elicited the same response every time: you do not belong here. High school was a bitch of a place, guys.

I’ve got a core memory of a time in 1993 when Superman: The Man of Steel #22 came out. This was during the whole “Death and Return of Superman” storyline, and John Henry Irons IMMEDIATELY became my favorite of the four potential heirs to the throne. I brought the comic to school with me and, on a break outside, I sat on a bench to read it. And within seconds, a jerk from my PE class yanked it out of my hands because I was such a “nerd,” threw dirt into the die-cut cover, and stomped away laughing.

I can’t help but feel that John Henry would have known how to deal with it.

I don’t remember the guy’s name. I couldn’t pick his face out of a lineup. But I’ll never forget what he did, because you CAN’T forget anything that makes you feel that small.

I look at my own students, and I don’t see that anymore. Oh sure, there are still cliques and groups, there will ALWAYS be cliques and groups, but they aren’t really based on things like what kind of pop culture a kid is into anymore. I see a lot of kids who read Manga (not enough into western comics, but that’s a separate issue), but I never see anyone get bullied for that. You want to pick on a kid for playing video games? Dude, that’s a club whose membership is EVERYBODY. Things have changed and, in this respect at least, have very much changed for the better.

But I come from a time BEFORE those changes, when I only knew two or three other kids in my school who were openly comic book fans, and most of them wound up moving away before we graduated. It was a lonely time.

The first time I walked into a comic book convention, it was like I had finally found my tribe. There were people here who not only wouldn’t MOCK me for reading Superman, but would join me in a spirited debate over the credentials of the Man of Steel, Cyborg, Superboy, and Eradicator, and which of them (if any) were the real deal. There were people here who could ALSO explain why some crew members on the Enterprise wore red while others wore gold or blue. There were people who not only wouldn’t mock me for loving Uncle Scrooge comics, but they would join me in line to get a print and comics signed by Don Rosa, perhaps the greatest artist ever to draw the Laird of the Clan McDuck. (Yeah, I love Carl Barks too, but I said what I said.)

If my house caught on fire I would save my son, and then this. My wife is faster than me, she’s already outside at this point, that’s why I didn’t mention her.

Nobody should ever have to feel the way I felt on that day back in 1993, certainly not because of what they like to read or watch. But I wish that EVERYBODY could have that experience of walking into a room and suddenly feeling like that’s where you’ve belonged all along.

I still get that when I walk into my local comic shop (BSI Comics in Metairie, Louisiana – and I’ll never be shy about giving them the shout-out). I feel that way on Free Comic Book Day, when hundreds of like-minded folks come together to see what’s new. And I feel that way when I attend a show full of people selling, drawing, reading, and talking about comics and movies and TV shows. And even the people who aren’t into the same comics and movies and TV shows as I am are still part of the same tribe, because we know that even if I’m into Star Trek and you’re into Star Wars, we’re still more alike than we are different.

Not like that Stargate weirdo.

So why would I possibly want to go to the big, bloated, past-its-glory-days Comic-Con International in San Diego?

Because in a way that I don’t know if you can understand if you’re lucky enough to never have felt like an outcast, it’s where I feel like I belong. With my people. With my tribe. Just because I’ve never been doesn’t mean it doesn’t call to me like home.

Ah well. Maybe next year.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He believes the Great Gonzo said it best when he sang, “I’ve never been there, but I know the way,” and a tip of the hat to Steve J. Rogers for putting that bug in his ear.

Geek Punditry #70: How to Use Your Noodle

May 3, 2024May 3, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Calvin and Hobbes, Home Improvement, How I Met Your Mother, Marvel Comics, Noodle Incidents, Star Trek, The Golden Girls, TV Tropes, Wolverine, X-Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s probably a good thing.

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

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

Wolverine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPECIAL REMINDER:

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

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

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

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

Geek Punditry #67: What Is Literature?

April 12, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry books, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hamlet, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Huckleberry Finn, Literature, Liu Cixin, Mark Twain, Star Trek, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, The Princess Bride, Three Body Problem, William Shakespeare

When you’re a high school teacher and spend most of your day around teenagers, you will overhear their conversations whether you like it or not. You hear about the TikToking, and you know who is dating who, and on frequent occasions you learn more about the way these kids spend their weekends than you ever want to know and you contemplate duct-taping your own children to a pool table from the time they’re 13 until they turn 27 or so. And on rare, extremely rare occasions, you’ll hear them discuss things that are actually relevant to your class. Earlier this week, for instance, I overheard a few girls talking about why so many people are using The Great Gatsby as themes for parties and dances these days.

As always happens when there’s a conversation worth joining, I jumped in. “There are three reasons,” I said. “First of all, it’s the 20s again, so people are playing with that. Second, the book went into public domain a few years ago, so nobody has to pay to use these things. And third, there are a lot of people who think the movie is fun and didn’t actually pay attention when they were supposed to be reading the book.”

“Ain’t no party like a Gatsby party, ’cause a Gatsby party ends with three people dead and a complete loss of faith in the American dream!”

The Great Gatsby is, of course, a seminal work of American literature. It’s one of the best books ever written in this country, and it paints a complex and gripping narrative in a relatively short number of pages, but the book is about the unsatisfying nature of a decadent lifestyle and how pursuit of material things is shallow and destructive. Anybody who comes away from that book thinking that these characters are something to aspire towards is – and I’m going to be kind here – an utter moron.

I talked about this conversation with some of my English teacher friends (of course I have English teacher friends – we sit around and conjugate each other’s verbs and talk about which infinitives we’re crushing on) and discussed the fact that there aren’t a lot of books that we teach that provide role models or, for that matter, happy endings. Let’s face it, most books that are complicated enough for a really deep literary analysis tend towards tragic – or at best, bittersweet – endings. The least-depressing book I’ve ever used in my classroom is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that book BEGINS with the complete destruction of the planet Earth. And one of my friends in this chat commented that this is why she sticks to reading lighthearted stuff on her own time – “literature” is too depressing.

Whaddaya gonna do? You’ve got to build bypasses.

I’ve always thought it was odd to use the word “literature” as a genre, the way I would “science fiction” or “horror.” What, exactly, qualifies something as a work of literature? Every time I walk into a bookstore with a “literature” section, I want to ask somebody who decides which books go on those shelves and which ones do not? Isn’t the very existence of a “literature” section sort of a low-key insult to all of the other books in the store that got shelved somewhere else? Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea goes on the literature shelves whereas William Goldman’s The Princess Bride doesn’t, but I could write you a whole dissertation on which one is a better book, and it ain’t the Hemingway.

One of these is one of the most incredible stories ever conceived by the human mind and the other one is what happens when Ernest Hemingway doesn’t go to therapy.

Is it just the age of the work? Everyone would agree that Lord of the Flies from 1954 is a great work of literature. But what about Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo, published in 1947? It’s not only a book that doesn’t enter the “great literature” discussion, it’s not even usually part of the conversation when you talk specifically about the work of Robert Heinlein. We got George Orwell’s 1984 in 1948, nearly twenty years after the first Nancy Drew novel, The Secret of the Old Clock, but nobody is citing the works of Carolyn Keene in the conversation of great writers. And that’s not just because she didn’t actually exist.

Is it just about the complexity of the work? Must a work deal with heavy ideas and deep themes to qualify? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gets my personal vote for the greatest American novel ever written (sorry, F. Scott Fitzgerald). Set 20 years before the Civil War but written about 20 years afterwards, the novel is a deep and fascinating analogy about the changes the country went through during that time period. Whereas Mark Twain’s earlier book with these characters (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) was a simple boy’s adventure story, Huckleberry Finn is about a child struggling with the ethical quandary of whether it is morally right to help his friend Jim escape from slavery. Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, has taken care of Huck, and in the eyes of the law he is betraying her by helping in Jim’s escape. But eventually, he comes to the conclusion that he’s going to be loyal to his friend, even if it goes against the law, even if it goes against what he has been taught is morally right. The book deals with the destructive nature of bigotry, ignorance, and hypocrisy, and Huck himself becomes symbolic of the moral transmogrification that the United States was beginning to undergo. In other words, literature.

The thing is, though, a lot of these same ideas and themes can also be found in random episodes of Star Trek. If I pull out Oliver Crawford’s script for “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” I can get into a deep conversation about the folly of racism as we watch two aliens whose species has hunted itself to extinction because some of them are black and white whereas others are white and black. It’s a legendary episode, but could I justifiably call the script for it literature the same way I would Huck Finn or – to use the other best-known example of anti-racist literature – To Kill a Mockingbird? Most people would say no.

“I dunno, Frank, are you sure the analogy isn’t too subtle?”

I posed this question, this “what is literature” question, to my English pals, and one of them said she once looked it up herself and read one of the characteristics that makes something literature is a focus on character and their development rather than plot. Does that really work, though? Gatsby is a very deep examination of the characters, but none of them actually CHANGE. By the end of the book, they (the ones that survive, anyway) are all the same shallow, soulless people they were when the story began and only the narrator – the criminally bland Nick Carroway – has shown any development at all, that development being disgust at the people around him. It’s like you’re left feeling when you watch the final episode of Seinfeld.

On the other hand, my friend pointed out, the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey seems to change by the end of that series, becoming actually devoted to the narrator. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion as to whether this qualifies as development or not, I haven’t read Fifty Shades. But if there’s one thing everyone in our English chat can agree on, it’s that Fifty Shades of Grey does NOT qualify as literature.

I want to be clear here: I haven’t seen the movies, nor read most of the books. I’ve read exactly one page, the first one, in a bookstore. I was curious as to what the big deal was, and after reading one page I said – out loud – “Oh good LORD,” and put it down. It’s not that the book is smut. If you want to read smut, go right ahead, I don’t judge you for it at all. I will, however, judge you for reading such POORLY WRITTEN smut when there is smut of much better quality readily available. I’m not telling you not to read Fifty Shades because it’s explicit, I’m telling you not to read it because you deserve better smut.

Not pictured: Literature.
Or believable characters, genuine titillation, or a functional understanding of the culture it purports to depict.

Is it the fact that something is “highbrow” what makes it literature? Well that comes with the same problem as designating something literature in the first place: who decides? To pull the Shakespeare card again, my students are ALWAYS intimidated when we start reading Hamlet because they think of Shakespeare as something for “thinky” people. Sure, that may be the way he’s considered today, but in his own time, Shakespeare was a popular writer. He was turning out play after play for the masses, and because he knew exactly what the people wanted, he loaded them with sex and violence. He was the J.J. Abrams of the 16th century. The kids don’t get that, though. If you understand what he’s actually saying, Hamlet’s line “Do you think I meant country matters?” is just as raunchy (and way more clever) than anything E.L. James wrote, but in all my years of teaching the play I’ve never had a student pick up on the subtext. Only a few of them get the later, more obvious line when Claudius is seeking Polonius’s corpse and Hamlet tells him Polonius is, “in heaven…if your messenger find him not there, seek him i’th’other place yourself.” Every so often I have a kid who asks, “Did he just tell the king to go to Hell?” and that student automatically becomes my favorite.

“I don’t look thoughtful enough. Give me 20 percent more confetti.”

The bar can’t be whether something makes you think. Last week I finished reading Liu Cixin’s novel The Three Body Problem, and that’s one of the thinkiest dang books I’ve ever read. The book follows a large cast of characters who discover a secret organization attempting to prepare Earth to be conquered by extraterrestrial invaders. This is, I must stress, an extremely barebones description of the plot, and deliberately so. This story is far deeper and more complicated than my pitiable attempt to summarize it. In fact, if someone tried to argue that it’s the best science fiction novel of the 21st century so far, I will have absolutely no ammunition with which to disagree with them. This Chinese novel was originally serialized in 2006, published as a novel in 2008, and first published in English in 2014, so no matter which edition you’ve read, it’s less than 18 years old. As such, it’s not something that I hear come into the conversation when people discuss “literature.” Not YET, anyway. Come back in 20 or 30 years and that may well change. But is it only the relative youth of the book that keeps it off the table?

Not pictured: Literature, but ask me again in 2056.

Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things. Maybe “literature” has to be deep AND intelligent AND kind of old. Maybe all these things that we now call “literature” are only in that category because they’re the best examples of their time period and we’ve forgotten 90 percent of the utter crap that was written around the same time. That’s not only possible, I think the further back in the history of storytelling you go it becomes almost undeniable. The poet W.H. Auden once said,“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered,” and by this I think he was trying to tell us that people will hopefully still be reading The Three Body Problem in the year 2100, whereas by then hopefully the only people who remember 50 Shades of Gray will be literary historians who cannot figure out why readers were so temporarily obsessed with a piece of mediocre Twilight fan fiction.

Increasingly, when it comes to the question of literature, I find myself using the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s description of “obscenity.” Unable to actually define the term, he simply said, “I know it when I see it.” That’s how I feel about literature, too. But my opinion, of course, doesn’t count for more or less than anybody else’s.

Except for that guy shelving the “literature” section at Barnes and Noble. He apparently holds a little more sway than the rest of us.

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 doesn’t know if anyone would ever call the new trilogy version of that series, beginning with Little Stars Book One: Twinkle Twinkle, “literature,” but he DOES know it will be available in both paperback and ebook beginning on May 4, and he is CRAZY excited about it.

Geek Punditry #65: Howard the Hero?

March 29, 2024March 29, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry comic books, Green Hornet, Green Lantern, harry potter, Howard the Duck, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, James Bond, Lone Ranger, Scarlet Pimpernel, Star Trek, star wars, superheroes, The Phantom, The Shadow, Zorro

I am kind of a nerd. I know, I know, I hide it well, but the truth is that I have certain areas of interest about which I am extremely passionate. And one of the aspects of my nerdity that one must be aware of is the fact that I’m a little obsessed with making lists. I’ve been doing it at least since middle school, when I distinctly remember making a paper bookmark upon which I kept a list of every book I read, a list which quickly became too large for a bookmark that fit in anything less than an unabridged dictionary. The list-making obsession hasn’t changed, only the medium. I’ve often said that there are four “quadrants” of pop culture I mostly talk about here in Geek Punditry: movies, TV shows, books, and comics. It should not surprise you that I have a separate app in which I track my activity and make ridiculously detailed lists for each of these quadrants. (That would be Letterboxd, Trakt TV, Goodreads, and League of Comic Geeks, respectively. If you’re on any of those platforms, feel free to follow/friend me.) My wife says that this list-making thing is because of an inherent desire to create some semblance of order and control because in most areas of my life I feel like everything is in a state of permanent chaos and there’s nothing I can do about it. I reply by telling her to shut up, which she understands to mean, “I love you and you’re right, now stop it.”

Anyway, on Letterboxd a few years back, I decided to whip up a list of every superhero movie I could find, part of my desire to eventually watch them all. You would think that this would be a relatively non-controversial endeavor, assuming that you’ve never been on the internet. Those of us who HAVE been online at some point, however, are acutely aware that there is NOTHING online so benign that you can’t find SOMEBODY ready to argue about it. In the comments of my list, some people complained that I decided to skip non-English language films (because odds are I’ve never heard of those and I don’t want to dedicate my entire life to tracking them down), fanfilms (because for some reason those are frequently deleted and re-added to the Letterboxd database and I don’t want to have to keep putting the same movies back on again), and “adult” films (because make your own list, you weirdo).

But what took me by surprise is when someone decided to complain that I left off the movie Howard the Duck. The exclusion had nothing to do with quality, mind you. I included every superhero movie I am even vaguely aware of, even the worst one ever made, by which I mean the Josh Trank Fantastic Four. No, I skipped Howard because – despite the fact that the movie is based on a Marvel comic book – Howard the Duck is not a superhero. He’s a comedy character, usually used in satirical stories, and while he does have adventures and has been known to interact with other inhabitants of the Marvel Universe, that doesn’t make him a superhero any more than it does Peter Parker’s Aunt May. The person who disagreed with me told me that the title of the film in his native country (Brazil) translates in English to Howard the Superhero, which he says indicates that it should be considered a superhero movie, whereas in reality it just made me question what’s wrong with the Portuguese word for “Duck.”

Never forget that THIS was the first theatrical movie based on a Marvel comic book, nerds.

So I decided that, in order to quell debate (note: this is impossible), I should probably come up with an actual definition of “superhero.” This turned out to be more difficult than it seems. You would think it’s obvious – get five different people to make a list of 100 superheroes and chances are 75 names would appear on at least four of the lists. But what MAKES a superhero? I decided to check with Merriam-Webster, which gives me two totally useless definitions. The first is “a fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers,” which fails as a definition because it excludes Batman, and nobody is ever allowed to exclude Batman. The other definition is “an exceptionally skillful or successful person,” which seems kind of dumb because, arguably, Genghis Khan was exceptionally successful at what he did. And let’s not get into John Wayne Gacy.

“Behold! A superhero!”
“Put a sock in it, Diogenes.”

I needed something broad, but not too broad. I pondered, and I eventually came up with not a SINGLE definition, but a list of criteria. I would consider a character a superhero, I decided, if they fit at least TWO of the following criteria:

Superhuman powers and abilities. These abilities need not be inherent, mind you. Green Lantern has no actual super powers, but he has a ring that gives him superhuman abilities, so he counts.
A double identity, although this identity need not be secret. Everyone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man – his ego wouldn’t allow them not to – but he still HAS that second identity.
An identifiable (and toyetic, let’s not forget toyetic) uniform or appearance. This is, I admit, somewhat subjective. What’s identifiable to one person may not be identifiable to someone else. Think of it this way: if someone is cosplaying as a character and that cosplay is easily recognizable to someone familiar with the IP, that character probably meets this criteria.
Fights crime or battles the forces of evil.

What I like about this list is that none of these criteria make somebody a superhero by itself, but each time they’re combined you get closer to that superhero line. It also makes it easy to include anybody that I want, such as Zorro. People often say Superman (who first appeared in 1938) was the first superhero, and he is certainly the character who named the genre, but I don’t think it’s true that he’s the first. He was preceded by several characters who meet many of the criteria I’ve listed. Zorro (1919), the Lone Ranger (1933), and the Green Hornet (1936) all meet categories 2-4. The Shadow (1931) and the Phantom (also from 1936) meet all four. Even the Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) hits categories two and four. If anything, Superman is the first comic book superhero, and I’m sure even that is open for debate. As such, I included all of these “proto-heroes” on my cinematic superhero list.

Fun Fact: Canonically, the Lone Ranger is the Green Hornet’s great-uncle.
Less Fun Fact: Both of these movies are embarrassments that should never have been made.

Of course, even my criteria leaves a lot of room for debate. There are plenty of characters that one usually doesn’t think of as superheroes that fit at least two of the criteria. Harry Potter, for instance, has magical powers, fights evil, and has a very distinct appearance. The same can be said for Luke Skywalker. One could even argue that any Star Trek character from a race with psychic or shapechanging abilities would qualify. Are Spock, Odo, and Counselor Troi superheroes, or do their powers not count since they’re not unusual for members of their respective species? There are certainly people who would argue that all of these are superheroes, and while I wouldn’t put them on my personal list, I don’t know that I could effectively argue against their inclusion either.

What about Indiana Jones? He fights evil. He’s easily cosplayable. And his real name is Henry Jones, Jr. Does his nickname qualify as a second identity? How about James Bond? He fights evil all the time. The uniform is a little harder to quantify – the most iconic Bond look is a tuxedo, but anybody can put on a tuxedo. And the second identity…does being Agent 007 count? Back in the day there was the fan theory that “James Bond” itself was a pseudonym passed down to whomever was Agent 007 at the time, which was a theory I liked and would most certainly qualify, until the film Skyfall quashed that theory for good.

Some people may ask what difference it even makes. We’re talking about fictional characters, after all. Who cares which ones do and do not count as superheroes? To those people I say, “Oh good for you, you’re far more well-adjusted than those of us who debate these sorts of things on the internet, please stay that way.”

For the rest of us, I know that my attempt to define the term has probably caused more debate than it stopped. Sorry about that. If you’ve got a better definition than I do (or than Merriam-Webster does) I would love to hear it. And I’d even like to hear some unusual characters that you would say meet the criteria. But in the meantime, the only thing I can really say is that when it comes to a superhero, I know one when I see one.

And Howard, I’m sorry, it ain’t you.

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 looked up the Portuguese word for “duck.” It’s “pato.” Why didn’t Brazil just call the movie “Howard o Pato”?

Geek Punditry #64: Classics Are Better Big

March 22, 2024March 22, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Alfred Hitchcock, cinema, Doctor Who, film, Gene Wilder, jaws, movie, Movies, RiffTrax, Star Trek, star wars, theater, Trekkies

With all due respect to films like Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie is the Jimmy Stewart thriller Rear Window. In this taut little drama, Stewart plays a photographer who was injured in a car crash and is stuck in a wheelchair while he recovers. Unable to leave his apartment, he takes to observing the activities of his neighbors through the windows as a sort of perverse entertainment – entertainment that takes a chilling turn when he thinks he sees one of his neighbors commit murder.

“Mr. Gower, no! No, what are you doing?”

Sure, there are some elements that are kind of icky – Stewart is literally spying on his neighbors for most of the film, which isn’t exactly kosher. And how anyone could be so interested in what’s going on across the way when your girlfriend is Grace Kelly and she’s at your house every fifteen minutes seems almost beyond belief. But hey, it’s a movie. Suspension of disbelief is a thing. The thing that makes Rear Window so great is that virtually the entire film takes place in a single room, and despite that, Hitchcock is able to amplify the tension even more than when he had Cary Grant dangling from Mount Rushmore five years later. A single-room thriller is very difficult to pull off, but he did it TWICE, both in this masterpiece and in the underrated Rope.

Pick up your pulse without ever leaving the room.

The reason I’m talking about Rear Window today, though, is not because I’m going to give you a list of confined space thrillers worth watching (Wait Until Dark, Phone Booth, Buried – that’s enough of a list to get started), but because I noticed a few days ago that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the film and, lo and behold, Fathom Events is holding a nationwide anniversary screening on August 25. This, of course, is a date of monumental significance because it also happens to be the birthdate of several notable figures, namely Sean Connery, Tim Burton, Regis Philbin, Billy Ray Cyrus, and myself. (Incidentally, if this doesn’t completely disprove astrology once and for all, I don’t know what will.) Anyway, whilst I’m sure I’ll be occupied with the customary parades, speeches, and address to the nation, the idea of seeing my favorite Hitchcock movie on my birthday IN A MOVIE THEATER is enticing as hell.

Not long ago, I saw a Facebook conversation in which one person expressed an interest in an upcoming screening of Shrek at his local theater, and somebody else began to chastise him for buying a ticket to watch a movie he can watch at home for free. This is an all too common attitude, of course, especially with younger audiences. I know I’m about to sound like a curmudgeonly old man (because I, like Tim Burton and Billy Ray and our fellow August 25th baby Claudia Schiffer, AM a curmudgeonly old man). My high school students are perfectly happy watching everything on their phone screen. Of course, they’re also incapable of paying attention to anything longer than 37 seconds in length, which I assume is the maximum amount of time you can spend watching a film intended to be projected onto a 70-foot screen on a device smaller than a slice of bread. I wholeheartedly believe that a screen as small as a smartphone is a terrible way to watch any sort of longform entertainment and that is part of the reason that younger generations have such an abysmal attention span and, furthermore, I would like to invite you all to get the hell off my lawn.

I know it sounds like I’m blaming TikTok for this, but there’s a good reason for that: I am.

That aside, though, the larger question seems to be why one would pay for movie theater prices to see a movie that you’ve already seen. That, at least, is an argument I can comprehend. My answer to that, though, is that I’m not lining up to rewatch Mac and Me, I want to see Rear Freaking Window. As I wrote last year, I sincerely believe that every movie is more enjoyable if viewed in a theater with a receptive and enthusiastic audience. That’s true whether I’ve seen a movie five thousand times or zero times (and, truth be told, I bet that watching Mac and Me could actually be a hoot if you have the right people in the theater with you).

Having the proper audience is important, of course. With new movies, this is a crapshoot – the studios tend to make every movie look as homogenous as possible to draw in every quadrant, and nobody knows for sure if what they’re going to watch is any good or not. I always HOPE a movie is going to be good, of course. I don’t understand “hatewatching.” I can honestly say I’ve never walked into a movie theater WISHING for a movie that disappoints me. But when it’s a movie that no one has ever seen before, you’re rolling the dice.

That said, the right audience is essential. My wife Erin and I saw this firsthand when RiffTrax did their live theater screening of the Doctor Who serial, The Five Doctors. RiffTrax, if you don’t know, is put on by classic cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they carry on the mission of cracking jokes at movies. It’s a blast, if you’re a fan.

IF you’re a fan.

If you don’t know what you’re getting into this poster is very confusing. Mathematically speaking.

When we arrived at the theater, we encountered a couple wearing heavy Who regalia who were very excited about a theatrical screening of the legendary story. They took a seat behind us and began to excitedly chatter…but in that chatter, it became quite obvious to Erin and I that while these two were major fans of Doctor Who, they didn’t seem to know WHAT RIFFTRAX IS. As the presentation started, the riffers launched into a short film about safety around electrical wires, cracking their usual jokes about the absurdity of the film, and I heard the man behind us tell his wife, “I hope they don’t do this during the whole movie.”

I turned into that emoji with the clenched teeth. 😬

They lasted about 15 minutes into the Doctor Who serial and left, clearly irritated at the irreverence with which their beloved Doctor was being treated. And I felt bad for them, because they obviously didn’t know what they were getting into…but once they were gone, the rest of us had a grand old time.

It’s about being with the right crowd. One of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater was when the Star Trek documentary Trekkies was released back in 1997. The film is a glimpse into the lives of Trek fans from across the country, a particularly niche subject matter, and it didn’t get a wide release. However, someone I knew happened to have a connection at the local UPN affiliate (home of Star Trek: Voyager) and scored some free passes to a screening they were hosting. The result was an entire theater full of people who LOVED STAR TREK, and there is no better atmosphere in which to watch this movie. We laughed at the people who went a little too far. We cracked jokes about the woman who dressed up her poodle as Spock. And we collectively shed a tear when James Doohan shared the beautiful (and now oft-told) story of how his connection with a fan saved them from committing suicide.

AND he was shot six times on D-Day! The man didn’t need to go to outer space to be a hero.

That “right crowd” mindset works very well when going to see a classic movie in the theater. Odds are, the majority of the audience HAS seen the movie before and is excited to see it with a crowd, and those that HAVEN’T seen it before are there because they want to join in the fun. It’s the reason that interactive screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have endured for such a long time. To give another example: Erin’s favorite movie is Jaws, and as it was released before either of us were born (we’re old, but we ain’t THAT old), when a special screening was announced at a Movie Tavern within an hour’s driving distance, we decided to make it a date night. (It goes without saying that this was before Eddie was born, although Erin was pregnant at the time.) Near us sat a father with his daughter, who I guessed was about 13 years old and who clearly had never seen the movie before. She was doing fine right up until the scene where Richard Dreyfuss finds Ben Gardner’s decapitated head drifting in the shipwreck underwater, at which point she jumped into her dad’s lap and stayed there for the rest of the movie. It was amazing.

After Gene Wilder died, there were special screenings of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Blazing Saddles, and we did a double feature. Saddles is – and I say this with firm conviction and damn the mobs who want to piss on everything older than 2008 – one of the funniest movies ever made, and seeing it for the first time in a theater was fun. But Wonka was downright magical. The screening was full of parents with kids, many of whom had never seen the movie before. Those kids were mesmerized, drawn into the magic and swept up in this 50-year-old film in a way that the 15-year-old remake by my birthday buddy Burton couldn’t hope to match.

Betcha he never would have used AI and charged kids fifty bucks for a half a lemonade, either.

And you know, I don’t think those kids would care if they HAD seen the movie before. Seeing it on the screen is DIFFERENT. It’s only adults that are too stupid to push that aside. If my son can watch the same YouTube video of the 2017 Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop 47 times in a row, he sure as hell isn’t going to walk into a screening of Despicable Me and say, “Daddy, I’ve seen this before.”

When I was a kid, Disney used to frequently re-release their classic movies. I got to see films from decades before I was born like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Sword in the Stone. With the exception of one-night or short-term engagements, that doesn’t happen anymore (possibly because Disney is afraid people will remember how much better the original versions of these movies are than the lifeless remakes they’re turning out lately). But damn it, it should. My family doesn’t get to the movies much these days, but if I was at a movie theater right now and given a choice between seeing Fast and Furious 11 for the first time or watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the twentieth time (but the first time in a theater), it wouldn’t even be close.

With movie theater attendance struggling, there’s a desperate effort to create content that fills seats, but I feel like theaters are missing out on an obvious opportunity here. Doing a revival screening of Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz may not sell as many tickets as a Marvel movie, but it also costs a hell of a lot less to put back into theaters. Give us more classic family movies! Give us more events! When the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy hit theaters in the 90s, we fans came out in FORCE (pun intended), not because we wanted to see Greedo shoot first, but because we wanted to see him in a room the size of a house and full of other people who loved the movie as much as we did.

These screenings DO happen. Like I said, Fathom Events does anniversary and event screenings a lot. There was the aforementioned Gene Wilder double feature. And Disney just announced an all-day nine movie marathon of the Star Wars films on May 4th. But I don’t want to have to wait for an anniversary that ends in a 5 or 0 or for somebody to die before I get to see a classic.

I wish there were a nearby, easily-accessible theater in my area that frequently did revivals or special screenings of classics, but alas, there aren’t a ton of options, especially if you don’t have a lot of opportunities to go into New Orleans proper. So I keep an eye on Fathom events and I cross my fingers for special screenings and I long for the day when the cinematic community figures out how to make this happen.

And I hope to see Hitch’s cameo the way it was meant to be seen: big enough to fall into his nostrils.

Geek Punditry #63: The TV Land Pet Sematary

March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry cheers, ducktales, frasier, night court, Star Trek, Star Trek: Picard, television, tv

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new season of Night Court airing right now. Now that may surprise you if you, like most of us, remember the show going off the air back in 1992. But it may be slightly less shocking if I tell you that the new series, like approximately 75 percent of television these days, is a reboot.

We live in the age of reboots on TV, and I think there are few obvious reasons for that. First of all, the people who fell in love with shows like Night Court during their formative years in the 80s and 90s are now largely the ones calling the shots at the networks, contributing greatly to the already-cyclical nature of pop culture. If you loved something once, it’s not unnatural or unusual to want to reclaim it and bring it back again, so when that kid who grew up watching DuckTales was given a shot at pitching an animated series to Disney, you damned well better believe he was gonna pitch a new DuckTales.

The other reason, of course, is that the TV world in utter chaos as ratings for broadcast television drop like Wile E. Coyote strapped to an anvil and nobody knows how to interpret what little data we get from streaming services. It’s considered a safer bet to hitch your star to an older series that might bring its older audience along for the ride. It’s why we got shows like The Connors, Fuller House, Girl Meets World, Quantum Leap, Animaniacs, Raven’s Home, One Day at a Time, And Just Like That, and, for the kiddos from the aughts, iCarly. It’s why every couple of months somebody floats the idea of a new version of The Office and why Bryan Cranston likes to tease us to say he’d totally be down to resurrect Malcolm in the Middle. Reboots are here and they’re not going anywhere. It’s like all these old shows were buried in the TV Land Pet Sematary, and sometimes they come back VERY wrong.

More shambling corpses than 10 season of *The Walking Dead.*

The truth is, like any other wave in entertainment, there are good and bad attempts, and I think one of the things that contributes to how well a reboot is accepted is the adherence to the original. It’s bizarre how often a studio will bring back an old show and then change everything about it, sometimes resulting in something as appalling as Thundercats Go! (the Gage Creed of the TV Land Pet Sematary). The logic of the producers is usually something along the lines of “We’re trying to get new fans, not old ones.” My response to this is, “if you’re not trying to get the old fans, why the hell did you call the show Walker: Texas Ranger?”

One of the most interesting examples of both a failed AND a successful reboot is Star Trek: Picard. When the first season was launched, the idea was to focus solely on Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard character, with only sparse appearances from some of his old castmates. They didn’t want to just make season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The problem, of course, was that the fans just wanted season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So after two seasons of – I’m going to be kind here – dubious quality, for the third and final season they threw away most of the elements that weren’t working, got the crew of the Enterprise-D on the phone, and made one of the most entertaining and warmly-regarded seasons of TV in Trek History.

I’m never gonna get tired of this picture.

But back to Night Court. The new series is set in the same courtroom as the original, and it is a continuation rather than a full continuity restart such as Charmed, which I for one prefer. The head of the new ensemble is Melissa Rauch (of The Big Bang Theory) as Judge Abby Stone, daughter of the character played by the late Harry Anderson in the old series. While many of these reboots make an effort to have a cast that frequently blends the old and the new, there isn’t a ton of cross-pollination in Criminal Court Part Two, and for a fair enough reason: most of the original cast is no longer with us. Night Court, tragically, has suffered a far greater attrition rate than most other shows of the 80s. Of the entire original main cast, only three of them were still alive when the reboot was announced, and one of them (the great Richard Moll, who played Bull Shannon) passed away after season one without ever agreeing to make an appearance. Marsha Warfield, touchingly, has made two appearances, and Brent Spiner (who played a recurring character for a few years on the original) has shown up as well, but fans looking for familiar faces will be disappointed.

The only original cast member that’s a regular on the new version is John Larroquette, whose Dan Fielding is almost unrecognizable as the same character. 80s Dan was sleazy, lascivious, and somebody that wouldn’t last ten minutes in a modern courthouse without getting “Me Too”ed into oblivion, which is probably the reason for the drastic change. Modern Dan is old, curmudgeonly, a combination of Oscar the Grouch and Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace. I’m not saying that I need a sleazeball character for a show to be enjoyable, but considering how it was his defining characteristic, it seems ridiculous that his bed-jumping past is almost completely ignored in favor of this somewhat lonely man that Dan has become. I don’t even mind that he’s changed, I just wish there was a clearer path of transition, because they don’t talk about his past at all. He’s mentioned the death of his wife, which is implied to have triggered this change in his personality, but HELL, that’s a story I want to know! Tell me about the woman who changed Dan!

I just want someone to make this make sense.

The show isn’t quite as wacky as the original either. Oh sure, the classic series didn’t start wacky, but it spun wildly out of control and by the final season it was practically a live-action cartoon. In fact, in one memorable episode, a defendant in a one-scene gag turned out to be the fully-animated and aforementioned Wile E. Coyote. The reboot occasionally makes a flailing grab at bringing that sensibility back, but it usually feels forced. So far the most authentic thing about the series is ditching the actor playing the Court Clerk and replacing him between the first two seasons.

Anyway, the new Night Court is okay. It’s not great, it’s okay, and that’s how I feel about most of the reboots that I’ve watched. Fuller House drew most of its charm by reminding the viewers about the cheese of the original series. The Animaniacs relaunch gave me a few laughs, but there was nothing that came even close to the genius of the Anvilania episode of the classic.

And then there’s Frasier.

The show that gave the world tossed salads and scrambled eggs.

I’ve written before of my love for Cheers and how I consider it one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, and that love extends to its spinoff. In fact, I would say that Frasier and Better Call Saul belong on a special shelf labeled “spinoffs as good as and sometimes even better than the original.” It is a very, very exclusive club. Laverne and Shirley keeps petitioning for admission but is denied on the grounds of the Cindy Williams-less last season. And because I loved Frasier so damned much, I was wary of the reboot when the first season dropped last fall. I finally worked myself up to give it a watch and…

…be surprised by this…

…it’s okay.

Let me tell you a little bit about the new set-up. In the original Frasier, Kelsey Grammer’s character from Cheers moved from Boston to Seattle where his father Martin (John Mahoney) wound up moving in with him. Frasier, of course, was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist with more than a little bit of pretension, whereas his father was a retired cop who liked beer and basketball. The Odd Couple style dynamic between them provided a lot of the fuel for what was one of the greatest comedies in television history (and that’s not even bringing up the brilliance of the rest of the cast). In the reboot, Frasier moves back to Boston and moves in with his son, Frederick (played by Jack Cutmore-Scott) who has inherited both his father’s intelligence and his grandfather’s working-class sensibilities. The original show gave us a long and rewarding arc of Frasier and Martin reconnecting and forging a sincere and touching bond. In perhaps the reboot’s most interesting twist, Frasier deliberately moves in with his son in an attempt to recreate this father/son bond following Martin’s death.

“I’m confused. Which one of them is supposed to be the new Chopper Dave?”

Cutmore-Scott and Grammer work well together, mirroring the Frasier/Martin dynamic but reversing the archetypes of the characters. The rest of the cast, though, isn’t as engaging, and I don’t think there’s anybody who watches the reboot who isn’t waiting for Niles and Daphne to show up. Obviously the late John Mahoney can’t make an appearance, but his specter hangs over the first season of the reboot and it makes for one of the most authentic elements of the show. It’s telling, though, that the two best episodes of the first season are the ones that guest-starred Bebe Neuwirth (as Frasier’s ex-wife and Freddy’s mom Lilith) and Peri Gilpin (as Frasier’s old radio producer Roz Doyle). Supposedly David Hyde Pierce and Jane Leeves, who played Niles and Daphne in the old show, were approached to appear in the reboot but declined. I’ve probably heard a half dozen explanations for why they turned the offer down, and since I have no idea which if any of them is correct, I’m not going to speculate or point fingers. All I’m going to say is the show has a much better chance of getting a season three if they find a way to get Pierce and Leeves to show up in season two.

If you’re going to bring back something from the past, you need to keep in mind what people loved about it in the first place. That doesn’t mean it needs to be exactly the same. In many cases – be it because of changing societal values or the loss of beloved performers – it can’t be. But if you don’t at least identify the spirit of the original and do your best to bring it back in the reboot, then what the hell is the point?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s waiting with baited breath for the reboot of Mama’s Family now that Vicki Lawrence is actually age-appropriate to play Mama.

Geek Punditry #56: The Pundy Update

January 26, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry comics, Garfield, Garfield and Friends, marvel, Marvel Comics, pluto tv, Spider-Man, Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Conversation, Ultimate Spider-Man

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.

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?

See you at Fan Expo New Orleans!

January 4, 2024 blakemp News Fan Expo, New Orleans, Star Trek, Star Trek: Picard

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

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