superman

Geek Punditry #88: Blake’s Five Favorite Superhero Movie Scenes

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It’s time for a new Geek Punditry feature: Blake’s Five Favorites! In Five Favorites, I’m just going to talk about something that’s been on my mind and discuss my…well…my five favorite examples of that thing. Now keep in mind that this list is inherently subjective and not at all comprehensive. You may disagree with my choices, and that’s fine. And there may be other examples out there that I’d like even better, but I haven’t seen them yet. And if we’re being totally honest, if you asked me again tomorrow, my list may be totally different. I’m funny that way. But for now, as of the time I’m writing this, I want to tell you about my five favorite scenes from superhero movies. This is NOT a list of my five favorite superhero movies (although there would definitely be overlap), but a list of the five individual scenes in the history of superhero cinema that make me feel the happiest, proudest, most excited, or most touched. And obviously, these are going to be FULL of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen these movies by now, you may want to skip. Let’s see if any of your favorites make the list.

#5: James Gordon Lives (The Dark Knight, 2008)

Very few superheroes can really do their job alone, and those that try usually wind up learning early on that attempting to do so is a mistake. And for all his talk about being a lone wolf, decades of storytelling have built up a sizable contingent of heroes surrounding Batman. He’s got sons (biological, adopted, AND surrogate), daughter-figures, father-figures, friends, allies, lovers, and even frenemies. And of all the characters that have taken up arms with the Batman during the years of his crusade, my favorite is police commissioner James Gordon. There’s something inspiring about the one good cop trying to clean up a filthy, corrupt department and forging an alliance with an agent outside of the law to do it. I don’t really care for any version of Batman that casts Gordon as an incompetent, which is perhaps the most unforgivable of the many sins in the Joel Schumaker movies. 

Of all the actors who have played Gordon, Gary Oldman in the Dark Knight trilogy is hands-down my favorite. He really sells Gordon as a good man who recognizes that things are out of control and takes the necessary steps to set things right, and I absolutely LOVED how this film showed the pact between Gordon, Batman, and Harvey Dent that worked so well for all characters in The Long Halloween.

“I believe in Crystal Lig–I mean, Harvey Dent.”

So I was pretty darn startled when, partway through the film, Gordon is killed. I was shocked. I was stunned. And although the large part of me didn’t believe it could be true, I also recognized that director Chris Nolan had already taken some liberties with canon and I couldn’t be TOTALLY sure that he wouldn’t make that big of a turn. A while later, Batman and Dent hatch a plan to trick the Joker into attacking a convoy. The plan works, the Joker winds up on the ground with a gun to his head, and the cop holding that gun whips off his mask to reveal Gordon, alive, his faked death revealed to be all part of the plan.

Gordon: I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.
Me, in the back of the theater, screaming: YEEEAAH, YOU DO!!!

It is a testament to the love of my girlfriend at the time that, after I jumped and CHEERED in that movie theater, she still agreed to marry me. Someday I hope our son gets as thrilled at this scene as I am every time I watch it.

#4: You Are Who You Choose to Be (The Iron Giant, 1999)

Let’s get this out of the way before we go any further: Hell YES, The Iron Giant is a superhero movie. A childlike creature of immense power comes to Earth from outer space and chooses to use his powers to help people. There is no adequate definition of the term “superhero” that can justifiably exclude Brad Bird’s gargantuan guardian. As if that weren’t enough, the Giant befriends a young boy, Hogarth, who teaches him about being human using what is arguably the greatest possible source material: Superman comic books. (The argument, by the way, is whether or not these are a better source than Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, but the movie is set in 1957 and Schulz’s greatest philosophical work was still ahead of him.)

Plus, this looks a lot better than painting a zigzag stripe around his midsection.

Lost on Earth and with no memories, the giant goes through the usual sort of mishaps that ETs usually get into, only with fewer Reese’s Pieces, while the military picks up on his trail and tries to chase him down. Late in the film, the Giant’s true nature is revealed: he was created by some distant alien civilization as a weapon. As he struggles against his own programming, a panicked government agent orders a nuclear attack on the robot, one that will destroy not only the Giant, but an entire town of innocent people. The Giant, however, overcomes his programming and remembers something Hogarth told him earlier in the film: “You are who you choose to be.”

The Giant makes his choice. He is not a weapon. He is not a gun.

He blasts into the sky to intercept the missile, choosing to sacrifice himself to save the town full of innocents, and in the last second before impact, he whispers the name that he has chosen.

“Superman…”

If you can watch this scene without tears, I don’t know if I want to talk to you.

You can’t tell me that Clark wouldn’t be proud to see this guy wearing his shield.

In this scene the Giant proves he understands sacrifice, he understands selflessness, he understands choosing to believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity. He understands what being a hero actually is.

He understands Superman.

A hell of a lot better than most other people, I would argue.

#3: Peter One, Peter Two, Peter Three (Spider-Man: No Way Home, 2021)

Tom Holland, as I’ve often said, is my favorite of the actors who have played Spider-Man on the big screen. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a fondness for the other two, Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield. And it was immensely satisfying to me to see the three of them share the stage together in the final act of Spider-Man: No Way Home. In this film, the MCU version of Spider-Man has screwed up badly, breaking a spell Dr. Strange was trying to cast to wipe memory of his secret identity from the public, and drawing in people from alternate realities, destabilizing the very fabric of the multiverse back before people were doing that every other week. The whole thing builds to a battle against the nastiest rogue any live-action Spider-Man has ever faced, Willem DaFoe’s Green Goblin, who ups the ante in this film by (last time I’m warning you against spoilers) murdering Peter’s Aunt May. 

While the MCU never showed us Holland getting bitten by a radioactive spider or the death of Ben Parker, they found a different way to demonstrate Peter’s character development by spreading it across three films. Homecoming was about him learning how to be a hero. Far From Home was about him learning to be his OWN kind of hero, separate from Tony Stark. This film is about learning the COST of being a hero. It’s May’s death, not Ben’s, that really hammers that home for us all. 

But Holland doesn’t have to learn this lesson alone, because the multiversal rift hasn’t only brought in villains. Holland’s Peter finds himself allied with his previous incarnations, Maguire and Garfield, each of whom has some baggage to bring to the table, and each of whom is essential to the full development of Holland’s character.

“Wait, you’re the youngest, why are YOU Peter One? This is worse than when Barry Allen called Jay Garrick’s universe ‘Earth-2’.”

While Holland wrestles with his own failures, he sees Maguire, who is implied to have found a sort of stability and love with his version of Mary Jane Watson. In Maguire, Holland sees that there is hope for the future, even in the wake of seemingly unsurmountable tragedy. Garfield, meanwhile, has tortured himself over the death of Gwen Stacy ever since the end of Amazing Spider-Man 2 and become a darker, more broken Spider-Man because of it. But in perhaps the greatest moment of this movie, Garfield saves the MCU version of MJ from suffering the same fate. The look of simultaneous anguish and relief on Garfield’s face is tectonic: he has atoned for his failure. He hasn’t failed again. In him, Holland sees the hope for redemption.

We should all have a moment where we can find that kind of peace.

When the girl who just FELL OFF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY has to ask if YOU’RE okay, it’s an emotional moment.

Seeing what the other two have gone through and how they came out the other side is perhaps the most important part of Tom Holland’s journey in this movie, guiding him to the new life he has to lead at the end with no family and no friends who remember his existence. He’s striking out on his own – lonely, yes, but with the knowledge that hope and redemption are real and possible. And no matter what movie he shows up in next or who directs it, if Tom Holland swings again, that’s the Spider-Man I want to see…the one shaped by the lessons of his multiversal brothers. 

#2: Avengers…Assemble (Avengers: Endgame, 2019)

You want to know what makes Avengers: Endgame so great? You know what it does that so many other attempts at a “cinematic universe” (and even much of the MCU in the years since then) have failed at? Payoff. What’s the point in a cinematic universe if not to introduce long-term story threads that eventually are brought together in a satisfying way? Endgame pulled together the threads of eleven years of storytelling and almost two dozen movies to put together a finale that served as a powerful conclusion for every part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, provided you pretended that there weren’t any TV shows that were related to it.

And the best part of that film, for me, was the final battle scene, probably the most thrilling such scene in the history of superhero movies. The Hulk has undone the “snap” from the end of the previous film, bringing back all of the people Thanos killed five years ago, and as he launches his attack on the broken Avengers, their friends start to filter in. 

It starts with “On your left.”

We remember this signal from the Falcon – one of the lost – and the rest of the heroes begin to arrive. The Avengers who were dusted in Wakanda. The Guardians of the Galaxy, along with Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, brought back from the far reaches of space. The armies of Wakanda, the acolytes from Wong’s temple. The battlefield is populated with more heroes than we’ve ever seen in a superhero movie before, and Captain America kicks it off with the words that fans have been waiting a DECADE to hear: 

Me, squeezing my wife’s arm: He’s gonna say it, HE’S GONNA SAY IT…

“Avengers…assemble.”

But even that wasn’t the greatest part of the scene, wasn’t? Oh, no, as fantastic as that was, there’s still one more bit of payoff to come, when Thor and Thanos grapple on the battlefield and suddenly the mad Titan is struck by Thor’s hammer Mjolnir, scavenged from the past along with the Infinity Stones. The hammer smashes into Thanos’s face, flying through the air, hurtling back to the hand that threw it…but if not Thor, whose hand is guiding it?

It returns to the hand of Captain America, and the movie theater EXPLODED. At least, the theater where I was sitting did. In all my life, I have NEVER heard such an outpouring of cheers and excitement from a movie audience as I did in that moment, and I seriously doubt I ever will again. This, my friends, this was payoff for the entirety of the franchise. As we all know, Mjolnir is enchanted, and can only be lifted by someone who is “worthy.”

“I KNEW IT!!!” Thor shouts.

We all did, Thor. We all did.

I mean, this scene was amazing, but you know the Iron Giant could lift the hammer too, right?

#1: You’ve Got Me? Who’s Got You? (Superman, 1978)

But my favorite scene, guys…my single favorite scene in superhero movie history, the scene I would ask to have playing on the screen if they were strapping me down on one of those tables from Soylent Green, comes from the first Richard Donner Superman movie. We’ve spent half the film watching baby Kal-El become Clark Kent, watching him grow up into Christopher Reeve, watching him shape the persona he’s going to wear as a mild-mannered reporter, but we have not yet seen HIM. We have not yet seen more than a glimpse of the title character. Until Lois Lane – of course – is involved in a helicopter accident. The whirlybird falls and Lois falls OUT of it, and it’s curtains for the Daily Planet’s star reporter.

Until she falls harmlessly into a pair of waiting arms.

This strange visitor, this proud figure in red and blue, lifts Lois in one hand and catches the helicopter in the other, and he reassures her that everything will be fine by simply saying, “I’ve got you.”

And Lois, flabbergasted, shouts, “You’ve got me? Who’s got YOU?”

How anybody can call Romeo and Juliet a love story while this scene exists in the universe is beyond me.

I think we take for granted, in superhero stories, the miraculous things that these characters are supposed to be capable of. We’ve seen so many movies, read so many comic books with people who can fly and shoot lasers from their eyes and walk through walls that we forget how astonishing these things would be in the real world. But Superman was the first movie to attempt such a thing on this scale, and in-universe, it’s something that has never existed before. Up until this point, the world of this film is ostensibly our own. The astonishment that Margot Kidder brings to that moment is absolutely perfect, as is Christopher Reeve’s reaction. He gently places her (and the helicopter) back on the roof, but before he can leave, Lois asks him who he is.

And he gives the only answer that matters:

“A friend.”

There are two things, I think, essential to the character of Superman. One is the protector, the defender, the man who will stop at nothing to save the lives of everyone around him. The Iron Giant showed us that side of Superman. The other side, though, is the man of infinite compassion and kindness, a belief in the better angels of human nature if only there is someone to guide them. Superman is the hero who never gives up on anyone, even his bitterest enemy, because somewhere inside of them he KNOWS there is a flicker of good waiting to be fanned into a flame. Batman tries to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. Superman is there to show us all that there is a better way. 

And when he looks at you like this, can’t you actually BELIEVE it?

I’ve got high hopes for James Gunn and David Corenswet, but it’s hard to believe that anything they can do could ever capture that essence as simply and perfectly as the two words, “a friend.”

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. Next time: his five favorite McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches! (Spoiler alert: steak, egg, and cheese bagel.)

Geek Punditry #86: This is How We Do It Presents…Absolute Power

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to This is How We Do It, the latest Geek Punditry feature-within-a-feature. In This is How We Do It, which I intend to be a recurring segment here, I’m just going to showcase a piece of storytelling that I think is being done exceptionally well and talk about why I think it’s so great. It is the antidote to Internet negativity. And the subject of the inaugural This is How We Do It is going to be the currently-ongoing DC Comics crossover event, Absolute Power. Fair warning, it’s not going to be possible to talk about why this is so great without spoiling some things, so this will be a spoilerful discussion. If you’re not up to date on reading this fantastic series, you may want to hold off on reading this at least until you get to issue #2 of the main title, because that’s the most recent issue as I write this.

Get ready, because this one ROCKS.

Comic crossovers are by no means a new thing, and I’ve talked before at length about them but I feel like I need to give a brief overview of what I mean here. In these “event” storylines, there is usually a main narrative that brings together the various characters of a publisher’s shared universe (in this case, DC Comics), while assorted spin-offs and special issues of the series that star the individual characters tell other angles of the story. The earliest such event I can find that followed this format is DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths from 1985-86. (It’s true that Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars came out first, guys, but there were no spin-offs of that book, which to me makes it more of an embryonic version of the crossover as it exists today.) DC has done dozens of them, as has Marvel. In fact, pretty much every publisher that has a shared universe (or even Multiverse) has dipped their toes in the format at one time or another – Image Comics, Valiant Comics, IDW, Dynamite, even Archie Comics has had crossover events. 

So what makes Absolute Power so good? In a word: construction. Some events seem to come out of nowhere and have little ongoing impact – last year’s DC summer event Knight Terrors, for instance, has made relatively few ripples after it was over. Others will sometimes take existing heroes and force them to behave wildly out of character for the purposes of the narrative (lookin’ at YOU, Marvel’s Civil War). And sometimes, they’re just so overblown and complicated that it’s impossible to keep track of what’s actually going on. Absolute Power suffers from exactly zero percent of these problems.

Mark Millar knows what he did.

A good crossover really needs to start with a good antagonist, and this story has one of the best: Amanda Waller, who has decided that superheroes are the biggest threat to the planet. Waller is an established character, best known for her role as being in charge of the various incarnations of the Suicide Squad (a group of supervillains that she forces to do jobs for the government in exchange for reduced sentences – with the caveat that if they step out of line she’ll set off an explosive device she had implanted in their NECK). Waller has always tread the line of what makes an anti-hero, usually using underhanded methods to accomplish goals that are more or less positive…ish. However, that placed her perfectly for her role of the villain in this story, being a natural extrapolation of who she has always been as a character. In fact, Waller is the BEST kind of villain – the sort that, in her own mind, is 100 percent justified in her actions. Waller COMPLETELY believes that what she’s doing is the right, moral, ethical thing to do, and that makes her both more interesting and more dangerous than any bad guy who’s just in it for the Evulz. 

What do you MEAN, she doesn’t look like a good guy?

The next thing that makes a crossover work, in my opinion, is setup. Before the original Crisis on Infinite Earths happened, there were months of stories from DC where a mysterious, shadowy figure was shown to be monitoring the heroes of Earth. (As it turned out, he wasn’t the bad guy, but you could certainly be forgiven for thinking he was.) Absolute Power has a more obvious setup, but a very effective one. Waller has taken the villains from two recent storylines – Queen Braniac from the House of Brainiac Superman story, and Failsafe, a robotic duplicate of Batman with all of his tactical genius and none of his morals and ethics. She has combined their respective tech with the work of the old Justice League villain Professor Ivo to create a set of androids who can steal superpowers, and sent them out to attack, depower, and capture both superheroes and villains alike. In the first issue of Absolute Power, dozens of heroes have their powers stolen and most of them are taken prisoner by Waller. By the time the second issue rolls around, those heroes who remain at large have begun assembling at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude to plan a counter-offensive.

Imagine how nasty a character Amanda has to be that THESE two are her MINIONS.

Another important element is that the characters be true to themselves, and here I’ve got to give it up to writer Mark Waid. Waid was a mainstay of DC Comics in the 90s and early 00s, with a legendary run on The Flash and turning out the best of DC’s Elseworlds line with Kingdom Come. After a long exile, he’s returned to DC and is crushing it with books like Batman/Superman: World’s Finest. In short, there are few people in comics who know the characters as well as Mark Waid, and he’s proving it again here. Aside from using Waller to her logical extreme, he’s showing perfectly who the various DC heroes are, such as a depowered but still dauntless Superman. When Batman and Mr. Terrific get into a squabble over who should be the leader of this little resistance group, it’s Nightwing who steps up, gives a rousing speech that would make Jean-Luc Picard stand and applaud, and takes command. The best part, though, is Batman’s reaction: watching Dick Grayson, the original Robin, take his place as the natural rallying point for a group of shattered, broken, and frightened heroes, Batman simply gives us a sly smile and says, “That’s my boy.”

For Batman, this is an almost shamefully embarrassing display of pride.

And I haven’t even talked about the artwork by Dan Mora, who is probably my favorite artist working at DC right now. It’s phenomenal, with real emotion and characterization displayed on the characters’ faces and mannerisms. A good artist can always make or break a book, and Mora – as he’s done with Waid on Batman/Superman – is doing an incredible job.

The next aspect that makes a crossover work is what happens in the spin-off books. In the original Crisis, the main story was supplemented by chapters in the various ongoing comics showing what was happening to those heroes during the Crisis itself, and that was the template for crossovers for a long time. Somewhere along the line, though, it became less likely for an individual series to be interrupted by a crossover and we’d get several – sometimes DOZENS – of spin-off one-shots and miniseries doing the job instead. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this shift in how crossovers were told corresponded with the point where the comic book WRITERS became the stars of the show, their prominence somewhat overtaking the artists. If the guy writing, for example, Uncanny X-Men at the time didn’t want his X-Men storyline interrupted because of World War Hulk, then the main title would remain unmolested and a World War Hulk: X-Men miniseries would take its place. The far extreme of this policy was what DC did last year with Knight Terrors, where EVERY ongoing DC comic was replaced for two months with a two-part miniseries showing that character’s interaction with the event, and many of them were never touched upon again.

For the most part, I’m in favor of a writer getting to tell the story the way they want, but speaking as a READER, I prefer when the crossovers touch the regular title. To me, that gives them greater weight, makes them feel more “important” than putting them into a spin-off miniseries. Absolute Power has returned to form on this. The ongoing titles are picking up the story threads started in the main series and running with them. After Nightwing gives the heroes various assignments in Absolute Power #2, we see them start to carry out their missions in the pages of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and other titles. In other books, like Green Lantern, we get side stories of some of the heroes who have been captured or are still on the run. And then there’s Green Arrow, which deals with the most shocking development of the story to date: longtime Justice League member Green Arrow has inexplicably turned tables and joined Amanda Waller, fighting his friends! Obviously, anything this incredible has to be covered in the main Absolute Power title, so what’s going on in his book right now? We see how his supporting cast – his son Connor, various former sidekicks and so on – are reacting to the fact that their patriarch seems to have broken bad. 

Crossover chapters that are actually RELEVANT? Is that ALLOWED?

There are, I should concede, two spin-off miniseries for Absolute Power, but both are a bit more justified. Absolute Power: Origins is a deep dive into Amanda Waller’s backstory, showing how she went from a grieving mother who lost family members to violence (and how many heroes have had that same motivation?) to the magnificent bastard she is today. Absolute Power: Task Force VII, on the other hand, tells stories focusing on Waller’s seven power-stealing androids and their interactions with the heroes. Neither may be absolutely NECESSARY to the story, but I feel as though they both add something that otherwise we wouldn’t have, which is what a good spin-off should do. 

The last thing that I think makes for a solid crossover is the impact of the story after it ends. I hate to keep picking on Knight Terrors, because I don’t really think it was a bad story, but the overall impact on the DC Universe since then has been negligible. The only significant thread I can think of was increasing Waller’s paranoia, but she already had that in spades and, what’s more, the Beast World event that FOLLOWED Knight Terrors did that same job, but better. Obviously, it’s impossible to tell right now just how Absolute Power will shape the DCU going forward, but there are hints in the solicitations for upcoming comics. After the series ends we’re going to be treated to a new initiative called “DC All-In,” which will start with a one-shot before branching out. This isn’t going to be a continuity reboot as DC has done in the past, but it will launch several new titles and some of the existing books will get new creative teams and new directions. The one that I’m most excited for will be the newly-announced Justice League Unlimited, done by the Absolute Power team of Waid and Mora. Although they’re playing details close to the vest until the end of Absolute Power, preliminary artwork and buzz indicate that this comic will be taking its cue from the cartoon series of the same name, in which the League expanded to include virtually every hero in the DC Universe, with different ones called up as needed. This is honestly the way I’ve thought they should have run the League for the past twenty years, since the cartoon was launched, and the fact that it’s finally happening makes me giddy. The fact that it’s Waid and Mora taking the reigns makes me ECSTATIC. 

Holy crap, guys, Santa got my letter.

So even now, only halfway through the event, I feel as though Absolute Power has all the earmarks of one of the DC Universe’s classic storylines. All the pieces are in place and the right creative team is there. I haven’t enjoyed a book of this nature this much in years, and the fact that I’m equally excited for the stuff promised to come next makes it even better. So for the next creative team – from any publisher – who’s looking to do a multi-character, multi-title crossover epic event series, I can offer no better advice than to look to Mark Waid, Dan Mora, and Absolute Power.

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. Now if only the next event series were to bring back Captain Carrot to his deserved place of prominence in the DC Universe. 

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

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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.

Goals.

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.”

Also goals.

“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 #71: Gimmie a Gimmick

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As you may have heard me mention once or twice, last weekend was the annual Nerd Bacchanalia known as Free Comic Book Day, one of my favorite days of the entire calendar year. And on this day, as they always do, my friends at BSI Comics were kind enough to allow me to set up a table and sell a few copies of my new book (which you should have ordered by now). From the vantage point of my table, I was facing a wall that displayed several back issues from those halcyon days of the 1990s, which were among the most formative years of my comic book consuming lifetime. The wall was adorned with lots of those flashy “Enhanced” covers that were so popular at the time – holofoil covers, embossed covers, chromium covers, glow-in-the-dark covers…you name a goofy gimmick, comic book publishers from the 1990s slapped it on the cover of a book. And as I spent hours there looking at those books, an odd realization slowly came over me.

I kinda miss those days.

I stared at these covers for eight hours on Saturday. It does things to a man.

It’s weird. During that time gimmick covers became a glut. They seemed to be coming at an ever-faster pace with ever-weirder gimmicks, and at the time I remember getting sick and tired of them. These days, however, they have become scarce. They’re not extinct, but you don’t see them nearly as much. Instead, modern publishers have decided to go with the business model of publishing 37 different variant covers for every issue. Some of them still slip in an enhanced cover in the mix, usually holofoil or “metallic” covers (for instance, DC recently did a run of metallic covers for various books with artwork featuring only the character’s symbol on a solid background). But they are not the exception, not the rule. 

I’m not going to try to get into a comprehensive history of the gimmick cover, but I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal experiences with them. The first cover enhancement I remember seeing was back in 1991 when DC Comics released their second Robin miniseries, Robin II: The Joker’s Wild, each issue of which had covers with holographic images. Holograms themselves weren’t anything new, of course – I even remember making them in my high school chemistry class – but this was the first time I saw one on the cover of a comic book. It was cool! It was new! It was fun! And it was – if I recall – only fifty cents more than the regular cover! SWEET!

The next time someone tells you they faked the moon landing, remind them that this was considered high tech in 1991.

Not to be outdone, the next year Marvel gave each of the four Spider-Man titles at the time a cover with a hologram to celebrate Spider-Man’s 30th anniversary. (If you, too, remember when these comics were published, don’t do the math. It’ll make you realize that Spider-Man is now in his 60s and make us all feel like that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan.) The holograms were more elaborate than DC’s, and each issue was a giant-sized extravaganza back in the days when such a thing actually meant something, so while they were more expensive than the issues of Robin, they were inarguably awesome. 

THIS technology, on the other hand, could have taken us to Mars.

Not long after that, there was another set of four Spider-Man covers with “holofoil” enhancements – the background of the artwork was metallic and shiny and you know how much we like shiny objects, so those were also a huge hit. And thus the floodgates were opened. Actual holograms became less common (as, if I remember from my chemistry class, they were more complicated to produce), but holofoil became a popular choice. Then other enhancements started to arrive. Die-cut covers, which had long been a popular choice in the paperback book market, started to show up. It made sense, too – have Wolverine’s claws slash through the cover of the comic book and you’ve got an obvious thematic connection. Similarly, embossed covers with artwork raised and stamped into the cardstock in a 3-D fashion made the transition from horror and sci-fi novels to comic books. Glow-in-the-dark, another mainstay of other marketing strategies, became used both for spooky books like DC’s The Spectre and goofy books like the Bongo Comics Simpsons spin-off Radioactive Man. 

Valiant Comics launched Bloodshot with what I believe was the first “Chromium” cover: artwork printed on a metallic backing with some sort of plastic covering. The first two books with this process had a chromium panel embedded in cardstock, then DC upped the ante with a full chromium front cover on Superman #82 (the book that concluded the Death and Return of Superman cycle). Eventually, somebody realized that it was easier to do an entire chromium cover – front and back- – instead of just parts of one, and most chromium covers after that became full wraparound covers, with art that extended from the front to the back in one large image that was no doubt easier to produce than a chromium front and a traditional back which then somehow had to be affixed.

Most people agreed that Image Comics’ “Enriched Uranium” covers went too far.

There were a couple of really weird enhancements, too. DC’s 1992 crossover event Eclipso: The Darkness Within focused on a demonic villain that possesses people infected by a magical black diamond. To kick things off, DC published a special with a cover featuring Eclipso holding up the diamond – which was an actual plastic diamond glued to the cover. Kind of cool, until the time comes to put the comic book in a bag and store it without splitting the mylar or putting divots in the back of whatever book it’s stored next to.

My personal favorite from this era, in terms of sheer weirdness, comes from Malibu Comics. Malibu was a hot publisher at the time, and their comic Protectors kicked off a new shared universe with revamps of several Golden Age characters that had fallen into the public domain. In the fifth issue of that series, the character Night Mask was killed in an effort to show early on that being a superhero would be a dangerous path and that the untrained or inexperienced would be in grave danger. Malibu chose to communicate this message with cover art that featured a bullet hole in the character’s chest that was punched through not only the cover, but the entire comic book. I’ve often wondered if this was a last minute decision, as the hole punched straight through the art on every page, in some cases even taking out a small piece of a word balloon and making you try to guess what the dialogue was supposed to be. It’s such a weird little thing, though, that even people who barely remember that the Protectors ever existed will likely remember the comic with the hole through it. (A few years later Malibu would launch their Ultraverse line, overshadowing the Protectors universe. The publisher was later purchased by Marvel, and all of their properties would fade into obscurity except for a little IP called Men in Black.)

Historians have determined that this is the point when the Comics Code just threw up their hands and surrendered.

As tends to happen, of course, good things went too far. Whereas these sort of enhanced covers started off being used for special events – first issues, anniversaries, major storylines and so forth – they quickly became overused. Instead of a holofoil cover for a 100th issue, we were getting foil covers because it was Wednesday. An issue of Fantastic Four in which the Human Torch lost control of his flame was printed with an entirely white cover, the artwork embossed into the cardstock and almost impossible to see. They’d repeat this trick with metallic Avengers covers and, of course, other publishers would soon follow suit.

With this oversaturation, fans eventually got turned off and stopped buying them, which no doubt at least partially contributed to the late 90s collapse of the comic book speculator market, and the flow of gimmicks was reduced to a trickle. Instead, as I said before, the focus for most publishers has shifted to producing variants – the same book with lots of different covers. And these have gotten ridiculous as well: while some variants have completely different artwork, others just change the color or remove the logo and trade dress or print the uncolored artwork as a “sketch” variant. For a relaunch of Justice League of America, DC put out over fifty covers with the same artwork featuring the team raising the American flag in an Iwo Jima-like pose.  For the variants, they switched out the US flag to that of each individual state and, I think, a few territories. Easiest way to sell one guy fifty copies of the same book EVER. Marvel did something similar with a series called U.S. Avengers, putting out a different cover for each state with a different Avenger, proclaiming them the official Avenger of that state. (Some of these made perfect sense: as Monica Rambeau is the only Avenger FROM Louisiana, she is the natural choice to be the Avenger OF Louisiana. But I’m still waiting for someone to tell me why She-Hulk is the official Avenger of Idaho, with an explanation other than “Well, SOMEBODY’S gotta be.”) 

And don’t even get me started on the fact that Spider-Man, the most New York hero in any multiverse, is the Avenger of New Hampshire.

Whatever the case, the result with the variant wave is the same: they’re counting on completists to buy every cover variant of the book they can get their hands on. Which I suppose helps them sell comics, but it also burns out regular readers and does absolutely NOTHING to attract a NEW readership, which is where American comics are having such a difficult time right now. I’m sure it costs less to print a traditional cover than one with a hologram on it, but I’m really not a fan of the business model that says “convince one customer to buy the same book two dozen times” instead of the business model that says “make a comic book good enough that two dozen people will want to buy it instead of one.” 

These days you still see holofoil and metallic covers, usually when a smaller publisher does a run with 75 different variants and then doubles it by making holofoil versions of each. Marvel and DC have also each done runs of lenticular covers (an image where the artwork changes if you tilt the page or look at it from a different angle) in the last decade or so. But there hasn’t been much else. When Superman married Lois Lane in 1996, there was a special edition cover embossed and designed to resemble a wedding invitation. When the Thing from the Fantastic Four finally married his longtime girlfriend Alicia Masters in 2019, we got a bunch of covers showing the couple from every conceivable angle, but not the slightest hint of foil, nothing that glowed in the dark, and certainly nothing that could be scratched and, subsequently, sniffed. 

I don’t care what anybody says, Stan Lee’s epitaph does NOT count as a cover enhancement.

I know that if the enhancements came back they would quickly become overdone all over again. I know that after three months of Green Lantern covers where one glows and the next has a lantern shape cut out and the third glows AND has a lantern shape cut out I would probably start to get irritated because they’re charging an extra buck for each cover. But they’re doing that for a lot of the variants NOW, and while I am not someone who usually buys variants, I admit that I would be more inclined to do so if there was a little bit of an enhancement to sweeten the pot. 

The hard part is not doing covers like these, it’s doing them in such a way that people don’t get sick of them. Reserve them for important occasions. First issues are acceptable. Anniversary issues are acceptable. The beginning or end of a major storyline is acceptable. 

“Wednesday” is not.

I know that my yearning for these covers is tainted by nostalgia, but that’s not always a bad thing. Nostalgia is the only reason X-Men ‘97 exists on Disney+, and people seem to be pretty darn satisfied with it. (I haven’t watched it yet, so no spoilers.) 

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just shouting into the wind and when you guys read this week’s column you’ll all think I’m crazy for feeling this way. Heck, even I think I’m a little crazy for feeling this way. All I know is this: when I go into BSI Comics to pick up some new books, I almost never want the variants…but once in a while, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on an enhancement or two. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If you go on eBay looking for some of these comics he’s talking about, don’t be fooled. The “coffee stains on page 17” variant is NOT an enhancement, no matter what the seller is telling you. 

Geek Punditry #61: Playing Favorites With Superheroes Part One

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It’s time once again for PLAYING FAVORITES! It’s that semi-regular Geek Punditry mini-column in which I throw out a topic to you, my friends in the world of social media, and ask you to suggest different categories in which I discuss what I consider to be the best of the best. This time around, the topic is superheroes. Born in the pages of American comic books, but with roots in pulp magazines, myth, and thousands of other sources, the superhero is considered to be the modern mythology, with pantheons not only in comics, but in movies, TV, video games, and pretty much every other media you can name. And I am, it cannot be understated, a fan of the superhero. So what, then, are some of my favorites?

Legacy Heroes

Sandy Brophy is going to kick things off for us by asking for my favorite legacy heroes. A “legacy” hero, for those of you who may not have been reading comic books since you were six years old, is the term used when a superhero’s name and identity is passed on from one person to another. For example, in the early days of comics, the Flash was a college student by the name of Jay Garrick. After superheroes fell out of favor and stopped being published for a while, they were resurrected in the 1950’s with the creation of a brand-new Flash, this time a police scientist named Barry Allen. Barry was the Flash for a long time before dying in Crisis on Infinite Earths (it took longer than usual, but eventually he got better), and his nephew/sidekick Wally West, aka Kid Flash, took over as the new Flash.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

This also, by the way, is my answer to Sandy’s question. The Flash is undoubtedly my favorite legacy hero in comics. By the time I started reading comics Wally was the main Flash, and even decades later he’s still the one I feel is most compelling. He was young when he became the Flash, and thanks to the magic of comic book time I eventually caught up with him at the same time he was being written by Mark Waid, who turned him into a fully fleshed-out and wonderfully realized character in his own right. He got married, had kids, and he grew and matured. He was also – as Waid said – the first sidekick to “fulfill the promise,” in other words, to take over for his mentor. He’s also still, to the best of my recollection, the ONLY one to do so on a permanent basis. It’s true that Dick Grayson (the original Robin) became Batman for a while, and Captain America’s sidekick Bucky took up the shield when Steve Rogers was temporarily dead, but both of them reverted back to their other adult IDs (Nightwing and the Winter Soldier, respectively) when the original came back. Not so Wally. Barry returned and Wally stuck around, and although there’s been a lot of timey-wimey nonsense and attempts to sort of push him to the side, he’s bounced back. Wally is, again, the primary Flash, even in a world where Jay and Barry exist, and the nominal head of the Flash family. And he’s just the best.

There are other good legacy heroes, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the Jaime Reyes version of the Blue Beetle (although my heart will always belong to Ted Kord, himself the second Blue Beetle following Dan Garrett), and there are few who will argue that Kamala Khan hasn’t done more with the Ms. Marvel title than either of her predecessors, but Wally West is the ultimate legacy hero in my book.

Superhero Logos

My buddy Owen Marshall wants to know what some of my favorite superhero LOGOS are – those titles that splash across the cover of a comic book to (hopefully) let you know what you’re about to read. I’ll talk about what I think makes a good logo in general, then get into specifics. I think a great logo is something that stands out in a way that evokes the hero in question. The Superman logo, for instance, is relatively simple – his name, slightly curved, with drop letters that give it a sense of weight, of solidity. Any time you see that logo you think that somebody could just grab it off the cover – and, in fact, there have been many covers where that very thing has happened.

You can’t beat a classic.

Spider-Man’s original logo is great for similar reasons. It’s solid, but it’s also easy to partner up with a web in the background to help get across the idea that you’re dealing with a wallcrawler. And, like Superman, it’s a short enough logo that it’s very easy to add an adjective to the title (as in the AMAZING Spider-Man, the SPECTACULAR Spider-Man), but just as easy to drop a subtitle underneath (Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows). There have been many attempts over the years to create a new Spider-Man logo, but frankly, there’s never been one I like as much as the original, and it seems it’s never anything but a matter of time before they return to it.

Yeah, that’s the stuff.

The Avengers also have a fantastic logo. They’ve had several, of course, but I’m specifically talking about the most famous version, the one that Marvel Studios used for the basis of its movie design. It’s clean and bold, and the arrow in the letter “A” gives it a sense of forward motion that sort of plants the idea that these are heroes who are about to go out and DO something.

The arrow is in case you forget and try reading it right-to-left.

Green Lantern has had a great many logos over the years, many of which actually include a lantern, but my favorite doesn’t. I like the logo that premiered in 2005 with Green Lantern: Rebirth and which remained the primary version of the logo until just a few years ago. This version has that tilt to one side and a cool roundness to it that…okay, just hear me out on this…it makes me think of classic cars from the 50s. Smooth, sleek, fast…and those are words that apply to Green Lantern, especially the Hal Jordan version. 

And it’s all spacey and stuff.

I could probably spend an entire month just going through different logos, but I’m just going to cap it off here by saying that there are hundreds of awesome logos and if you want to read more about them I highly recommend the blog of comic book letterer and designer Todd Klein, who frequently makes posts where he discusses the design and history of comic’s greatest (and worst) logos, which is like drinking mother’s milk to a nerd like me. 

Superhero TV (pre-2000)

My old friend Patrick Slagle wants to know my favorite superhero live action TV shows. Well that’s easy! There have been SO many to choose from – Stargirl was great, and I was deeply enamored of Legends of Tomorrow, and then there was–

Oh, wait.

He specified shows from BEFORE the year 2000. Well. That makes it a lot more difficult. We’ve been in a superhero renaissance in the last decade or so, guys, with such an abundance of shows that even I haven’t gotten around to watching them all yet. (Peacemaker, for example, is still warming my “to-watch” list.) But if I’m going to restrict myself to the cultural wasteland that was 1999 and earlier, I guess there’s only the obvious choice.

Project: ALF.

If I don’t do this at least once in every Playing Favorites column the Don said he was gonna break my thumbs.

The superhero shows of my formative years…let’s be honest guys, they weren’t that great. The two most fundamental ones are probably the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk and Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. And while those are both good shows, neither of them were series I would watch on repeat, the sort of thing that makes a TV series worm its way into my psyche and become a part of the vast tapestry that is your friendly neighborhood Geek Pundit. And the truth is, a lot of the other shows of that era don’t hold up. Look at the 70s Amazing Spider-Man or Shazam! shows and try to convince me that these are fundamental pieces of Americana. The Greatest American Hero is a show I know I used to watch, plus it’s got the most earwormy theme song in superhero history, but I couldn’t relate the plot of a single episode after the pilot. It got better later, with the surprisingly decent Superboy TV series (mostly after Gerard Christopher took over the role from John Newton) and the “fun but fluffy” era of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

There are some wild swings in quality happening in this picture.

If I have to pick (and I do, it’s my damn game), I guess I’m going to have to give props to the two shows that I think launched the genre on TV: George Reeves in The Adventures of Superman and the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman show from 1966. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the West/Ward era. When I hit those peak teenage years of arrogance and knowitallitude that most of us go through, I began to actively dislike that show, blaming it for people treating comic books as childish and infantile for decades after it was off the air and tarnishing the reputation of the caped crusader. Fortunately as I got older, I got over myself, thus disqualifying myself from ever running for elected office, but at the same time getting a sense of perspective. Sure, it wasn’t MY Batman, but I learned to appreciate it for what it was. I’ve softened to the show now. I even watch the reruns on MeTV Saturday nights between Svengoolie and Star Trek.

There’s no school like the old school.

George Reeves, though, I’ve always appreciated. He was the Curt Swan Superman come to life – square-jawed, barrel-chested, friend to all the innocent. But at the same time, he had a wicked sense of humor, showing clear joy whenever he got to take down a bad guy and taking a sly sort of pleasure any time he thwarted Lois Lane’s attempts to one-up him. I love the Reeves Superman and I don’t think he gets the respect he deserves. DC has launched a series of comics featuring the Christopher Reeve Superman as Superman ‘78, and that’s great. I love ‘em. But am I really the only person who would pick up a comic book called The Adventures of Superman ‘52?

Superhero Animals

I really like Marvel’s Scarlet Witch. She’s had several costumes over the years, but the best is the one George Perez whipped up for her for the Heroes Return era. It was red, naturally, which helps you identify her via color-coding, but the design also drew on the character’s Romani heritage, with a rare long skirt and robes that make you think of a fortune teller. All of that builds together and links her to her mystical roots. I’m fairly certain that if I didn’t know who the Avengers were and someone asked me which one I thought was the Scarlet Witch, I’d say, “Well, gotta be the woman in red, and not the tiger girl in the bikini.”

Jim MacQuarrie asked for my favorite Super-Animal, while Lew Beitz wants to know my favorite Super-PET. These two categories are close enough that I’ll talk about them together. They’re not EXACTLY the same, but there’s plenty of overlap. The way I look at it, we can divide super-animals into two categories: the ones that serves as an animal sidekick to the main hero, such as Krypto the Superdog, and those that are distinct heroes in their own right, like Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. The former are characters in established universes, while the latter usually exist in a Disney-esque universe where there are no humans at all, but instead races of anthropomorphic animals running the show.

As far as super-pets go, the Superman family has the deepest – and weirdest – bench to draw from. Krypto the Superdog and Beppo the Supermonkey are both animals from Krypton who made their way to Earth and gained powers like Superman and Supergirl. Supergirl also has a cat named Streaky who gains and loses his powers on a rotating basis thanks to exposure to something called X-Kryptonite (it was the 50s, it was safe to give something a name like that because there was no internet). Then there was Supergirl’s horse, Comet, who was actually a centaur from ancient Greece named Biron that was cursed and trapped in the form of a full horse. He hung around for a couple of thousand years before he met Supergirl and started to assist her on her missions, fell in love with her, and learned he could briefly become human when an actual comet passed close to Earth, allowing him to date Supergirl without telling her who he really –

Stop looking at me like that, I’m not making this up.

Superman is surprisingly indiscriminate about who he gives a cape to.

Anyway, Krypto is kind of the gold standard of super-pets, but there are a few others outside of the Super-Family worth mentioning. Wonder Woman’s kangaroo, Kanga, for instance. Ace the Bat-Hound, who Batman gives a mask to cover the bat-shaped patch of fur on his face and thus protect his secret identity. Chameleon Boy’s pet Proty who, like Chameleon Boy, is a shapeshifter, and fully sapient, and who can and did occasionally impersonate full grown adults, which makes you ask where the hell the Legion of Super-Heroes gets off treating him like a pet. And of course Damian Wayne, the current Robin, has Bat-Cow.

The only superhero who’s a source of 50 percent of the food groups.

Then there are the other types of Super-Animals: anthropomorphic heroes in their own right. Everyone who has heard me talk for five minutes will know that my favorite of these is Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Created by Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw!, this 80s phenomenon was about a group of superhero animals who got powers from meteors that fell to (their version of) Earth. After meeting a dimension-hopping Superman, they were inspired to become heroes in their own right. The art is cartoony and the premise is silly, but what I’ve always loved about Captain Carrot and company is that their stories – at least in the 80s – weren’t played like cartoons. The plots were straight out of the pages of Golden and Silver Age comics, facing giant monsters and villains with cold-rays and all kinds of classic tropes. They were funny, sure, but not at the expense of the characters, as many of the modern writers who have tried to use Captain Carrot have forgotten. When I say I want a revival of the old-school Captain Carrot, I say it unironically and with love.

By contrast, there’s perhaps the most famous super-animal of the day, thanks to his starring role in an Academy Award-winning motion picture. I refer, of course, to Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. Spider-Ham’s comic hit JUST when I stared reading comics in earnest, and I devoured it. In this hilarious take on the Spider-Man story, Peter was the pet spider of mad scientist May Porker, who accidentally irradiated herself and bit him. The spider turned into a pig while maintaining his spider-powers. When May recovered from the radiation, her memory was erased and she thought she was just a kindly old lady and Peter was her nephew.

Move over, “The Boys,” the REAL heroes are back in town.

I’m not making this up either, but I wish I could take credit for it. The early Spider-Ham comics were a lot of fun, then he disappeared for decades before experiencing a renaissance in recent years. Like Captain Carrot, his modern adventures are sillier and more “cartoony” than the earlier ones, but UNlike Captain Carrot, the cartoony interpretation fits better, and has made him a better character.

My favorite Spider-Ham story, though, is not from the comics and not from the cartoons, but from the mouth of his creator, Tom DeFalco, when I met him at a convention a few years ago. He was signing reprints of the first appearance of Spider-Ham and his other great Spider character, Spider-Girl. I bought them both and told him how much I loved Spider-Ham when I was a kid, and he told how surprised he was when Marvel Comics sent him an invitation to the premiere of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He didn’t understand why he was getting an invitation, and someone said, “It’s probably because Spider-Ham is in it.” And DeFalco, shocked, exclaimed, “SPIDER-HAM is in a MOVIE?”

Timeless. 

Favorite Superhero Costumes

My wife Erin, who always cuts the line because nobody else who submits questions has ever made lasagna for me, wants to know what my favorite superhero costumes are, both male and female. I think it was Alex Ross who said that the test of a good superhero costume is whether you could identify the character based just on the name, even if you knew nothing about them. Batman, for example. Green Lantern. Captain America. The 90s was an era where this consistently failed, especially in the X-Men comics and those later characters created by former X-artists. If you showed someone who knows nothing about comics pictures of Gambit, Cable, Maverick, Shatterstar, and Deadpool, then asked them to match the names to the pictures, any correct answers would happen purely because of the law of averages.

But anyway, when I read Ross’s definition, he also used that definition to argue that the greatest superhero costume of all time belongs to Spider-Man. It’s hard to argue with him. Nobody who saw a lineup of the Marvel Comics all-stars would have any difficulty telling that this guy is Spider-Man and not, for example, Wonder Man. And while that’s true of MOST of Spider-Man’s assorted costumes over the years, the original is still my favorite. The black costume is cool-looking, but the ol’ red-and-blues have a brighter, more optimistic tone that suits Spider-Man better. Spider-Man is a hard luck hero, to be sure, but he should never be a depressing, brooding character like Daredevil. (Are you listening, current Marvel editorial?) He’s the guy who should never give up and always finds it in himself to do the right thing, and the red and blue color scheme says that better than any of his other assorted looks. 

I don’t even blame him for admiring his own reflection.

Using the same metric, I also think the Rocketeer has a phenomenal costume. He is literally a human rocket, with a rocket pack strapped to his back and a helmet that evokes the speed and energy of the burgeoning space age. The rest of the outfit, though, with the brown bomber jacket and the jodhpur pants brings in the idea of his aviator background and grounds him in the World War II era where he belongs. 

This picture makes me want to make swooshy noises.

Honorable mention goes to the Flash, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan costume, although I have a soft spot for the one John Stewart wore in the Justice League cartoon) and Marvel’s Nova.

Erin also asked about my favorite female costumes, which I find is a little harder to do going by Alex Ross’s metric. Too many female costumes are designed more for titillation rather than actually identifying the character. And even those that DO clearly identify them often do so via a logo or symbol that marks them, such as Wonder Woman.

I think “Morgan” was the screenwriter of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

Harley Quinn is another one that is pretty obvious, at least in her original costume. The red-and-black color scheme, white makeup, and bangled headpiece brings up the notion of a Harlequin, which of course is the inspiration for the character. She’s changed her look several times over the past few years, and while some of her looks have been pretty good, none of them draw their inspiration from her roots the way her first look does. On the other hand, they’ve come up with a pretty solid justification for her changing her look – once she got over the Joker and dumped his homicidal ass, she doesn’t want to wear the costume that identifies her as his sidekick anymore.

Let’s face it, I could have posted a picture of a random duck here and you still could have pictured Harley’s get-up.

Then there’s Supergirl. She’s had a lot of costumes, the most iconic look being the basic Superman outfit, only with bare legs and a skirt. That’s not her best look, though. For me, my favorite Supergirl costume came from the 1970s, when she wore a loose blouse with a small S-shield over her heart rather than the full-size shield most superfolks wear. I love that look – it still clearly marks her as a member of the Super-family, but it’s very different from anything any of the others wear. Being loose instead of skintight like most superhero costumes, it’s got a freeing quality that speaks to a lighter version of the character in a period where she was working to get out of her more famous cousin’s shadow. It’s such a great look and I never stop wishing they would bring it back.

What can I say? She’s got the look.

That’s about it for this week, guys, but there are plenty of other questions I haven’t gotten to yet. So be sure to come by next week for Playing Favorites With Superheroes Part Two, and if you have a suggestion that I haven’t covered, go ahead and drop in in the comments. Up, up, and away!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He realizes he talks about the Superman family a lot whenever he gets on to a superhero discussion, but let’s be honest, people. It’s either gonna be this or Star Trek.

Geek Punditry #59: The Crossover Question

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

This is not a drill, people!

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

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

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

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

Childhoods were defined in these books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why do them at all?

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

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

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

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

Could this be a precursor to more?

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

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

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

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s always wanted to write the Captain Carrot/Spider-Ham crossover that America deserves. 

Geek Punditry #52: The 2023 Pundie Awards!

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In the first week of January, 2023, I was in a funk. You see, I realized that I’m happier – in general – when I’m spending time talking about those things I enjoy, an itch I used to be able to scratch through various online outlets. But the rise of Facebook had strangled the forum-based websites I used to write for, the demands of parenting had forced a retirement of my podcast, and none of the alternatives I had tried since then seemed to stick. Then, like a miracle, a voice from above spoke to me:

Hey, dumbass, you have a blog. 

So I challenged myself to spend 2023 writing a new piece once a week about something in the world of pop culture that I loved: comic books, movies, television and more. And I’m proud to say that as of this week, Geek Punditry #52, I will have successfully met that goal. And I enjoy doing it, and I have every intention of continuing it in 2024. But the question, then, was how to tie off my first year of blogging about those things I enjoy? The answer was obvious. I’d end the year by talking about my favorites from that year. So this week, my friends, get ready for the inaugural edition of the PUNDIE AWARDS!

Yeeeeeas, that’s right, the Pundie Awards, my hopefully-annual review of those things in pop culture that brought me the most joy over the past 12 months. The categories are entirely decided by what will allow me to talk about what I want to talk about. The winners are determined by a democratically-administered voting process including an electoral body consisting of myself. This ain’t fair or unbiased – this is just me talking about the things that came out in 2023 that I loved the most. 

Ready? Let’s do movies first!

Blake’s Favorite Superhero Movie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

As much as I loved Into the Spider-Verse, I couldn’t believe how much better the sequel turned out to be. An incredible team of writers, animators, and performers managed to elevate the story of Miles Morales by opening up the multiverse concept from the first film to incorporate not just a handful of Spider-people, but hundreds of them from remarkably disparate worlds. Not only that, but the different worlds often had wildly different animation styles from one another, all of which somehow managed to mesh perfectly.

None of that would have mattered, however, if the movie didn’t have a worthwhile story to go with it. Miles Morales has been somewhat lonely since his last adventure with the Spiders of other worlds, and when he encounters them again it seems as though his dreams are being answered, but the discoveries he makes in this film call into question his entire role in the Spider-Verse. There’s serious character drama mixed up with the superhero action in this movie, and it’s all as compelling as anything I saw on the screen this year. The tragedy is that the writer and actor strikes delayed production on the third film in the trilogy, Beyond the Spider-Verse, and we’re all left dangling from the film’s cliffhanger with no idea how long it’ll be before it is resolved.

Blake’s Favorite Horror Movie: No One Will Save You

I’ve gotta preface this by saying there are several horror movies that I wanted to see this year that I haven’t gotten around to yet, including Evil Dead Rise, The Boogeyman, Saw X, and several others. Out of those I have seen, however, No One Will Save You takes the top spot for the innovative way writer/director Brian Duffield told his story. The movie (a Hulu original, if you haven’t seen it) stars Kaitlyn Dever in a home invasion film where the invaders turn out to be from another world. What makes the film stand out though, is that it is told with almost no dialogue. The film relies on the visuals and the performances of the actors – Dever in particular – to tell the story, including unraveling the secret of why she is separated from the town in which she lives. The reveals in this movie are handled really well, and the ending is one of those conclusions that seriously screws with your brain. If that’s the kind of movie you’re looking for, look no further.

Blake’s Favorite Comedy: Renfield

Some may argue that this should have been included in the “horror” category, but my response to this would be that it’s honestly NOT that scary, it’s VERY funny, and these are MY awards, you jackass, and if you don’t like it, go write your own blog. 

Anyway, Renfield. Future Lex Luthor Nicholas Hoult plays the titular character, long-suffering assistant to the king of darkness, Dracula himself (played by Nicolas Cage in a performance that chews so much scenery they must have had to reinforce the walls in the set). The concept of making a comedy about Dracula’s human minion set in modern-day New Orleans is funny in and of itself, but what elevates it is the way it handles the material. The script – written by Ryan Ridley and Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman – takes the story of Dracula and Renfield and uses it as a metaphor for people trapped in an abusive relationship. Not to say that abusive relationships are funny, of course, but it’s one of those stories that uses humor to shed light on a serious situation by making it seem absurd. Looking at the dynamic between Renfield and Dracula is actually helpful in exploring how someone may need to deal with their abusers, and perhaps help the audience find their way to sympathize with victims of such a situation. 

I feel like I’m not making it clear how funny this movie is. Trust me. It’s really funny. It just has a serious point to make in-between the laughs and the vampire shenanigans. 

Blake’s Favorite Drama: The Holdovers

Paul Giamatti plays a teacher at a prestigious boys school in 1970. Stuck on the wrong side of the headmaster, Giamatti is forced to spend Christmas with a group of “holdovers” – students who, for one reason or another, are unable to return home during Christmas break. The movie turns into a pretty deep character study between three leads. Giamatti plays a bitter and heavily-disliked teacher, Dominic Sessa is one of the students that is justifiably outraged at being left behind so his mother and her new husband can take an unexpected honeymoon, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph is the school’s head cook, a grieving mother who herself is spending Christmas alone.

Each of these three, at the beginning of the film, seems to be a fairly stock character: the nasty teacher, the troubled student, the above-the-nonsense side character. But the forced proximity between the three of them slowly reveals depths to each, and by the time the movie ends we’re left feeling like we have watched three real, fully-developed people. Each of them is flawed, each of them has problems, but we understand them in a way that is undeniable and makes us love each of them just a little bit. Each of the three actors I mentioned here give a master’s performance in this movie, and it’s absolutely something worth watching.

The Most Delightful Surprise of 2023: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. 

This is the fourth attempt at a live-action Dungeons and Dragons film, and the problem with the previous three efforts is that they have all – and here I’m going to use a term from the Book of Leviticus – blown chunks. There was no real reason to expect Take Four to be any different.

And yet…damned if it wasn’t a really fun movie. Chris Pine plays the same kind of charming but slightly rough edged character he usually does, although this time it’s a new character instead of James T. Kirk or Steve Trevor, and he leads a group of ne’er-do-wells including Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, and Sophia Lillis in a quest to steal an ancient and powerful relic. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons (which I have, although it has been a very long time since I was in a campaign), the plot feels pretty standard. What makes the movie work, though, is the humor, the characters, and the way they react to the fantasy situations that surround them. Their behavior, frankly, feels very authentic to the way that people playing the game would really behave in those situations, and while the movie doesn’t really go meta in the way that description may imply, it still delivers on pretty much every level. I wouldn’t necessarily place this on any “best of 2023” lists, but in terms of expectation versus reality, there’s not a single movie this year that over-delivered more than this one. 

Let’s shift gears a bit now and talk about some of my favorite comic books of the year. I know that not everybody reading this is necessarily into comics, but y’know, maybe pay attention anyway. You might find something worth looking into. And if not, skip down to the bottom where I talk about television, by which I mean a lot of Star Trek.

Blake’s Favorite Ongoing DC Comic: Batman/Superman: World’s Finest 

Written by Mark Waid with art by Dan Mora (who I said last week is probably the best Superman artist working in comic books right now), this is the most entertaining ongoing series DC is putting out, and they’ve been on a pretty big upswing this year. Set in the early days of the characters’ friendship, this story explores not only Batman and Superman themselves, but also the characters that surround them. Over the course of this year we’ve seen Superman lose a sidekick we never knew about, a murder mystery in which the primary suspect was Bruce Wayne himself, a return to the world of Waid’s classic Kingdom Come, and a fantastically entertaining one-off story about the original Robin (Dick Grayson) going on a date with Supergirl and pretty much everything going wrong.

The book is often funny, always entertaining, and takes characters we have loved for decades and makes them fresh and fun again. And that’s just Waid’s writing. The artwork is also top-notch, with Mora handling most issues and drawing the characters in a way that feels classic and powerful. I keep harping on his Superman, but there’s a reason for that: it’s so damned good. When you see a Superman by Dan Mora, you see a guy that you would find equally believable going toe-to-toe with Darkseid and then turning around and getting a cat unstuck from a tree.

It’s already spun off another book, World’s Finest: Teen Titans, featuring the early days of Robin’s own superhero team, and also written by Waid. This is a brand that DC absolutely needs to run with, because it’s as good as it gets.

But like I said, DC has really upped their game this year, so without getting into detail, I also wanna hand out some honorable mentions. Also worth reading this year from DC are Shazam! (another Waid book), Superman, Nightwing, Green Lantern, Titans, and the recently-rebooted Wonder Woman. 

Blake’s Favorite Ongoing Marvel Comic: Fantastic Four

Admittedly, I am biased here. Everybody knows that the Thing is my favorite Marvel character and my second-favorite superhero of them all, right after Superman, so any book with him in it gets at least another two points on a scale of one to ten automatically. So with his bonus two points, Ryan North’s run on Fantastic Four gets, roughly, an eleven.

North’s run began in November of 2022, so most of his story came out in 2023. In the first few issues of the book, we see a Fantastic Four that has been run out of New York City and dispersed to the four winds (pun intended), and perhaps most horrifyingly of all, are without their children. The book launches with a mystery; we are not told immediately what happened to place them in this situation. But unlike certain other Marvel comics I could mention (I’m callin’ you out, Amazing Spider-Man) the mystery was revealed in issue FOUR, and was done in a way that was very satisfying and very in-character. Without getting into any spoilers, I want to say that the reason the FF left New York and the reason the kids are all missing makes perfect sense (unlike another certain book where the long-delayed revelation went against not only years of characterization but also just common freaking sense). At the same time, it changed the status quo in a way that is inherently temporary, but still paved the way for a year of very old-school sci-fi adventures. In other words, Ryan North found a way to take the FF back to the kind of crazy stories the book featured in the early days without getting rid of the modern trappings entirely or invalidating the feelings of the fans who enjoy those trappings. And now that we’re at a point where that storyline is being resolved, I’m really anxious and excited to see what North has planned next.

Blake’s Favorite Ongoing Image Comic: Radiant Black

This isn’t the first time this year I’ve mentioned how much I love Radiant Black, written by Kyle Higgins with art by Marcelo Costa. The title that launched Image’s “Massive-Verse” line (which also includes entertaining books such as Rogue Sun, No/One, and The Dead Lucky) is a superhero story about a young man, Nathan, who finds an alien artifact that gives him incredible power…until he’s hurt and put into a coma, with his best friend Marshall taking over. When Nathan wakes up, the two friends share the power until they’re forced to choose which of them gets to keep it. 

Aside from just being a well-written comic with great art, Higgins and Costa do really interesting and innovative things with how the story is told. In one issue, in which Radiant Black encounters a crew making a fanfilm about him, we’re given a QR code that takes us to YouTube and shows us the actual film. Issue #25 though, the issue in which Nathan and Marshall are given their choice is the one that really elevates things when the readers are instructed to vote for which of the two of them becomes the permanent Radiant Black. The BIG shock, however, came when fans walked into comic shops to pick up issue #26 only to find two different versions: one in which Nathan took over and one in which Marshall got the job. During the currently-running “Catalyst War” storyline, there are two versions of the story, and it’s NOT just a case of penciling in a different face for each version. The two of them are different people, make different choices, and have different consequences, and it’s not until the story ends that the result of the fan vote will be revealed and one of the two timelines will be declared the “real” one. 

I like good art and I love great writing, but if you REALLY want to make me go to bat for your comic book, pull some risky moves with how you tell the story and you’ll have me on your side for life. 

Blake’s Favorite Comic Book Reboot: Skybound’s Energon Universe

Robert Kirkman, mentioned back in the Renfield entry, loves to surprise his audience. He didn’t announce ahead of time that issue #193 of The Walking Dead would be the last issue of the series. He didn’t tell anyone that there would be an Atom Eve special for his Invincible cartoon until it appeared on Prime Video. And earlier this year he launched a new comic, a sci-fi space opera, called Void Rivals. Nobody was really talking about this book much until the day the first issue reached the stands and, towards the end, fans were shocked to find an appearance by the Autobot Jetfire. This is how we learned that Void Rivals was not merely a new series, but the launch for a new shared universe including Void Rivals and the two classic Hasbro properties TransFormers and G.I. Joe. 

There have been a lot of crossovers between TransFormers and G.I. Joe over the years, and the previous license holder IDW Publishing even tried to create a shared universe including those two and other Hasbro properties like M.A.S.K., ROM, and Micronauts. None of those efforts have ever really worked, though, because once these properties are already established, it’s too difficult to mesh them together. If the G.I. Joe team has already been around for 75 issues, why the hell have they never before referenced the giant robots that turn into oil tankers that have been fighting in downtown Las Vegas? You can’t explain it. What Kirkman and his team have done is the only real way to make a shared universe from these properties: tie them together from the inception. 

So Void Rivals launched this “Energon Universe,” and it’s exploring space and some of the other alien races classic to the TransFormers franchise. The line continued with a new TransFormers book by Daniel Warren Johnson, which begins the story of how the war between the Autobots and Decepticons first spills over onto Earth. This is being followed up by two miniseries written by Joshua Williamson, Duke and Cobra Commander, which show the origins of the respective hero and villain teams of the G.I. Joe corner of the universe, and link those origins to the appearance of robot aliens on planet Earth. Void Rivals is pretty good, but TransFormers has been great, and the first issue of Duke – which came out this week – really blew me away. I’m totally on board for this universe, and I’m so happy with what Kirkman has put together.

Side note: Kirkman also gets bonus points for continuing Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, the original series that was started by Marvel Comics back in the 80s and resurrected by IDW. It’s the classic G.I. Joe continuity, still in the hands of the man who basically created the incarnation of the franchise that we all grew up with, and I couldn’t be happier that it’s still out there.

Well that was a fun dip into the world of comic books. Let’s wrap up this look back at 2023 by discussing some of my favorite TV shows of the year, shall we?

Blake’s Favorite Star Trek Series: Lower Decks

I have made no secret of my love of Star Trek: Lower Decks. I wrote a whole column about it not too long ago, so I don’t want to spend a lot of space rehashing what I said then, but it would be disingenuous of me to write about my favorites of the year and NOT bring it up again. You can go back and look at that previous column if you want details, but it’s a show that is not only outrageously funny, but incredibly clever and truly loving towards the history behind the franchise. If you’re a fan of any incarnation of Trek and you haven’t been watching it, you’re making a mistake.

Blake’s Favorite Star Trek Series that isn’t Lower Decks: Picard, Season Three

With all due respect to Strange New Worlds – which had a phenomenal second season – the final season of Star Trek: Picard told a story we’ve been waiting to see for two decades now. The first two seasons of that show were no great shakes, it’s true, but the last season brought back the entire main crew from Star Trek: The Next Generation and gave them one last, grand adventure together, which they never really had. The finale of the TV show was never intended as their final story, since they were immediately rolling into production of the movies. The last movie in that franchise was not intended to be the last movie, and so it didn’t really give us closure either. But this story brought back everybody we loved and told a story that was exciting, heartfelt, and absolutely engaging from the first episode to the last. What’s more, it also laid the groundwork for a new generation of Trek, bringing in a new crew with a mixture of familiar and brand-new characters that fans warmly embraced. The executives at Paramount are absolute fools if they don’t capitalize on this and bring this crew back together again for more adventures.

Blake’s Favorite Comedy Series that isn’t Lower Decks: Abbott Elementary

Sometimes I need to remind myself that there are TV shows with live actors that aren’t set in outer space. Abbott Elementary is a wonderful way to do so – it’s a fantastically funny show that, at the same time, is really down-to-Earth and realistic in certain ways. The quick pitch behind this show is to call it “The Office, but in an elementary school.” It carries over the same sort of mockumentary style, and a lot of the characters seem to fit similar templates, such as the ridiculously inept boss (the principal, played by Ava Coleman), the hardass veteran (fantastically played by Barbara Howard) and the young, adorkable “will they/won’t they” couple (played by Tyler James Williams and show creator Quinta Brunson). 

The thing about this show is that, while it IS very funny and the characters ARE very compelling, it also works very well as a look into the working of a real elementary school. Not ALL of it, of course – it’s a comedy and like many comedies it will often sacrifice realism for the sake of a joke. But the show deals with issues that, as a teacher, I see every day: funding difficulties, student behavior issues, intrusive parents and so forth. There are a lot of movies and TV shows set in schools, but this is the first time I’ve ever watched a show about a school that actually makes me believe that someone in the writing room might actually have been a teacher at one point.

It’s a great show with no weak links, and every time I hear about it getting an award in writing, directing, acting, or anything else, I just nod and say, “Yep. Nailed it.” 

Blake’s Favorite Horror Series: Fall of the House of Usher

Writer/director Mike Flanagan has produced several films and TV shows for Netflix, and he finished up his contract this year with a miniseries kinda-sorta based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Kinda-sorta. Truth be told, when I watched Fall of the House of Usher, I described it to people as “Mike Flanagan bought all of the Edgar Allan Poe LEGO kits, threw away the instructions, and then built his own brand new thing out of all the pieces.”

This is not a criticism. The show is great.

The framing sequence features Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher, telling inspector C. Auguste Dupin (another Poe character played by Carl Lumbly) about the tragic deaths of his adult children, all of which happened in the past few weeks. What follows is a long, winding, generational tragedy, beginning in Usher’s childhood and leading up to the moments before the series actually begins. The cast is amazing, including several of Flangan’s usual troupe of actors like Carla Guigno, Henry Thomas, Kyliegh Curran, and Kate Siegel, and giving Mark Hamill perhaps the best dramatic turn of his entire career. The stories that unfold also tie into not just “Fall of the House of Usher,” but several other works of Poe as well. Episode titles, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, include “The Masque of the Red Death,” “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Raven.” 

If you go into this show expecting a faithful adaptation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you look at it as someone using Poe as inspiration to create something entirely new, it’s a fantastic, engaging, and really disturbing series that goes right up there with the best horror on TV. 

Flanagan is currently working on an adaptation of Stephen King’s epic The Dark Tower series, which previously fell flat in a movie in 2017. If there’s anyone out there who I feel has the skill and vision to make that book series – one of my favorites of all time – into a SUCCESSFUL show, it’s Mike Flanagan. 

And that’s about all, guys. Out of all the new stories I read or watched in 2023, these are the ones I enjoyed the most. This isn’t comprehensive, of course: there are hundreds of movies, TV shows, and comic books that I never got around to this year. So if one of your favorites wasn’t included in this little retrospective, just comfort yourself by saying, “Well, Blake obviously didn’t watch Oppenheimer yet, so he couldn’t include it.” Because it’s either that or I DID see it and I didn’t like it as much as you, which is especially the case if your favorite movie of the year was Flamin’ Hot. Ugh.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse back at 2023, and furthermore, I hope you’ve enjoyed spending a year with me talking about the stories and storytelling that I love. That’s what Geek Punditry has really been about since day one, a chance for me to get out there and talk about these things again. And while I may not have TMZ knocking down my door begging to do commentary for them, writing this column every week has made me feel good and I’ve enjoyed doing it. So come back on the first Friday in January, and we’ll begin Geek Punditry Year Two.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s trying to remember: in “Year Two,” is that the one where he finally tracks down the mugger who killed his parents in an alley, or is he thinking of something else? 

Geek Punditry #51: (DC Comics Presents) The Greatest Santa Claus Stories Ever Told

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Every week comic book fans go to the shop to pick up the latest exploits of their favorite heroes: Superman, the Fantastic Four, the Flash, and so forth. And this month, DC has brought back one of their top recurring characters, pairing him off with none other than the Batman in a four-issue miniseries that has proven to be the most epic tale in the battle of good versus evil since Cindy Lou Who managed to get to the Grinch. I refer, of course, to the legendary four-issue epic called Batman/Santa Claus: Silent Knight. 

“Ho ho hoooold on a second, whose comic book is this, anyway?”

Written by Jeff Parker with art by Michele Bandini and covers by Dan Mora (who – I’m throwin’ this out there – may be the best Superman artist of this generation) in this story Batman and Santa have to team up to save Christmas from the demonic Krampus. This comes as a shock to Robin, Nightwing, and the other members of the Batman family, because they always thought Bruce was making one of his rare jokes when he told them that Santa Claus was one of the many teachers he went to while in training to become the world’s greatest detective. Nope. Santa is 100 percent legit. And I love that.

When an established property does a Santa Claus story, they usually go in one of two ways: either everyone is shocked to learn that Santa Claus is real, or Santa Claus is NOT real in this dismal, crapsack universe, but people learn a lesson about the True Meaning of Christmas anyway. It’s not often that you see a story – other than those aimed directly and exclusively at children – that accepts Santa as a simple fact of existence, and the breakdown of which characters are aware of Santa and those that previously were not is really hilarious. Considering the fact that this is a superhero universe, the question of Santa’s existence seems kind of silly: your best friend can juggle mountains, you work with a guy who breathes underwater, you hang out with a Olympian Demigoddess, and your Secret Santa this year wears a magic ring he got from blue aliens. Why the hell would it be hard to believe in Santa Claus?

Back in the 80s and early 90s, DC published a series of collected editions called The Greatest Stories Ever Told, a simple best-of collection featuring some of their characters. There were, to my recollection, two Batman volumes, one for Superman, one for the Joker (this was when the 1989 Batman movie was red-hot), one for the Flash and one featuring team-up stories. Alas, they completely neglected to give a volume to the greatest hero of all: St. Nicholas himself. So in honor of Silent Night, this week I’m going to entreat DC Comics to prep his well-deserved volume for next year. And not only that, I’m going to help them out by suggesting some of DC’s best Santa Claus stories for inclusion. Almost all of these are available to read on the DC Universe Infinite app, by the way, so if you’re a subscriber, you can go over there right now and check out the saga of Santa.

We’re gonna start with Action Comics #105 from way back in 1946. In “The Man Who Hated Christmas” by Jerry Siegel and John Sikela, we meet a guy who sets out to destroy the season by assassinating Santa Claus! Fortunately for children all over the world, Superman is on the case. Like Silent Night, I love this story because there’s none of the usual prevaricating over whether or not Santa really exists. Superman hears that St. Nick is in trouble and he shoots off to save the day without hesitation, helping Santa conquer his diet (it makes sense in context) and taking over when the bad guy absconds with Santa’s reindeer. It’s a charming little story with a great cover that should be read more often.

Doing this in 2023 would immediately get you cancelled.

Superman must have forgotten this early encounter, though, because when he met Santa again in 1983’s DC Comics Presents #67, he’s shocked to discover the ol’ spirit of Christmas is real. (Save your emails – we can excuse this by saying that the Action Comics example was the Earth-2 Superman, while DCP featured the Superman of Earth-1.) In “‘Twas the Fright Before Christmas” by Len Wein and Curt Swan, a young boy named Timmy Dickens (because the 80s were big on subtlety), tries to rob a street corner Santa. Superman brings Tim to his Fortress of Solitude in the arctic to get to the bottom of things. Turns out that while sneaking an early peek at his Christmas presents, Tim was zapped by one of his toys and hypnotized to commit crimes and bring the money to Superman’s old enemy, the Toyman. When leaving the Fortress, Tim’s toy zaps Superman, causing him to crash, only to be rescued by Santa’s elves. Clark and Nick team up to take down the Toyman in a battle that I’ve always loved. I first read this story when it was reprinted in Christmas With the Superheroes #1 in 1988 (also available on the app), along with several other classic Christmas stories from DC’s history worth reading…but this was the only one that featured Santa. 

“The only characters available for a team-up this month are Santa Claus and Air Wave.”
“AGAIN?”

Mark Waid, who made the “Santa must be real” argument beautifully in an issue of Impulse (because why WOULDN’T Barry Allen’s grandson believe in a guy in a red suit fast enough to move all over the world), gave us a tale of Santa in JLA #60 (2001, with art by Cliff Rathburn and Paul Neary). This time Plastic Man is in the spotlight, spending Christmas with his sidekick Woozy Winks and Woozy’s family. Woozy’s nephew is at that skeptical “There ain’t no Santa Claus” age, so to try to restore his Christmas spirit, Plas tells him the story of how Santa Claus joined the Justice League following a battle with the demon Neron. It’s a hilarious tale, with the boy’s stubborn skepticism causing Plastic Man to constantly elevate the stakes in the story, giving Santa heat vision, armor, and other ridiculous power ups in the course of his battle. Waid being a sentimental sort, the story ends with a nice little moment of heartwarming involving some of his teammates. 

“Say it!”
“No!”
“Say Die Hard is NOT a Christmas movie!”
“This is why you’re on the naughty list!”

JSA #55 from 2003 is one of my favorite Christmas stories of all time. Written by Geoff Johns with art by Leonard Kirk, “Be Good For Goodness’ Sake” is narrated by a department store Santa Claus getting ready for Christmas Eve, planning to spend the evening entertaining the gathered kids, while at the same time waiting for a visit for some old friends – the Justice Society of America. Johns probably has a greater love and respect for the Golden Age of comics than any writer since the days of Roy Thomas, and he drew on that masterfully with this story. It was already a fun tale about heroes reconnecting with one of their own, but the reveal of just who is wearing the Santa Claus suit still warms my heart 20 years after the book was originally published. That means I’ve read this comic at least 20 times, because it’s a once-a-year read since I first discovered it. And I’ve got no plans to stop.

Not even gonna make a joke about this one. Just read the book. It’s SO good.

2009 gave us Batman: The Brave and the Bold #12. This comic, based on the animated series of the same name, teamed up Batman with Adam Strange in “The Fight Before Christmas” by Landry Q. Walker and Eric Jones. On Christmas Eve Batman is swept up by one of Adam’s Zeta-Rays to the planet Rann where he discovers that a malevolent force is sweeping through the universe, destroying planets. It’s already taken Thanagar, and Batman was rescued from Earth just moments before its own demise. But there is still a chance to save everyone thanks to some timey-wimey shenanigans that might just set things right in a Christmas miracle. Santa, admittedly, isn’t a HUGE presence in this comic, but the end gives us a shocking new twist on the old boy that I thought was clever and fun.

“Now that the Harley Quinn cartoon has made Kite-Man more interesting, you’re officially my lamest villain, Calendar Man.”

DCU Holiday Bash #2 came out in 1997, one of many Christmas anthologies DC has done over the years, featuring a variety of seasonal stories. The best, however, was a simple two-pager by Ty Templeton called “Present Tense.” On the planet Apokalips, Darkseid is alarmed to discover an incoming invader, a mysterious and absurdly powerful craft that is avoiding his defenses and on a collision course with his citadel. Like most two-page stories this one is basically an extended buildup to a simple punchline, but it’s just fantastic. And Templeton himself shared a link this week to a fanfilm by Bad Boss Studios that recreates the story in LEGO! It’s definitely worth checking out. 

You have to be REALLY aggressive to be a Doordash driver on Apokalips.

My final suggestion…actually isn’t in the DC Universe. And they no longer have the license to this franchise, so it’s not on DC Infinite. But if that Warner Bros/Paramount merger that they’re talking about winds up going through, you never know, it could come back. I’m talking about 1987 and Star Trek: The Next Generation #2. This is SUCH a bizarre comic book that I couldn’t get through this list of DC’s Santa stories without including it. “Spirit in the Sky” is written by Mike Carlin with art by Pablo Marcos, and it came out just a few months after the premiere of the TV show, which most certainly means that the comic was put into production before the creators ever got a chance to WATCH much of it…and BOY does it show. This six-issue miniseries feels consistently out of tone and character with the TV show, especially in an issue where it seems like Geordi has been killed, spurring the “emotionless” Data into a violent rage, screaming like a grieving child over the loss of his only friend. Whoo. Thank goodness when they launched the ongoing series the next year they had more of the TV show to work from.

Still better than season 4 of Discovery.

But let’s look at “Spirit in the Sky.” It’s the holiday season, and the Enterprise is hosting celebrations for the various cultures (human and otherwise) that celebrate at that time of year. As Captain Jean-Luc Picard is begrudgingly planning to make an appearance at each of the various parties, the ship encounters an alien race called the Creeg that is trailing a mysterious energy source throughout the stars. This story is truly bonkers and doesn’t feel like Star Trek at all, which may be the most Star Trek thing about it.

The prototype Cardassians were weird.

There are, of course, many other comic books featuring Santa Claus out there, and not all of them are even published by DC, but there are only three days left until Christmas, so you’ve got to pick and choose. These handsome selections should give you a solid foundation to begin your education of DC’s greatest superhero.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Dang it! He forgot all about Fables #56, where Bill Willingham answered the question as to whether Santa Claus is a Fable. Ah well, there’s always next year.

Geek Punditry #38: Whence Elseworlds?

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Multiverses are big these days. What was once a relatively niche science fiction concept has become popularized by things like the Spider-Verse movies, Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, and about seven thousand fanfics where the guy from the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon meets and beats up his counterpart from the live action movie. So it’s odd to think that one of the first fictional worlds to use the multiverse as a major concept once attempted to do away with it because it was deemed too confusing. DC Comics introduced its multiverse in 1961 with Flash #123, in which writer Gardner Fox had the Flash of that time period (Barry Allen) meet the Flash of the 1940s (Jay Garrick). The problem was it had been established earlier that, in Barry’s world, Jay Garrick was considered a fictional character that Barry had read about as a child. The fix was to declare Jay’s world an alternate universe, an “Earth-2,” even though he had been around first. Fox was even slick enough to write himself into the story, claiming that the writer “Gardner Fox” had some sort of telepathic link to the other world and didn’t realize the stories he was conjuring that he believed to be pure fiction were, in fact, reporting on actual events from Earth-2. It was a wild, crazy concept for the time, and it started an avalanche.

In the 90s, DC Comics gave us Elseworlds, a series of books set outside of the "real" DC Universe that fans quickly latched on to. This week in Geek Punditry, I take a brief look at the origins of the imprint, the history of DC'S multiverse, and explain how Elseworlds is back -- even if DC doesn't want to admit it.
“How long do you think we can keep this up?”
“Oh, I’d say at least 60 years.”

It wasn’t too long before the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, met his own Earth-2 counterpart, Alan Scott. Heroes who had been continuously published since the Golden Age and were not replaced by other characters (predominantly Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) discovered that they had almost identical doppelgangers on Earth-2, and eventually the Earth-1 Justice League of America met the Earth-2 Justice Society for an annual get-together. 

And once there are two universes. why not more? Earth-3 had villainous versions of the heroes: Superman became the evil Ultraman, Batman the crafty Owlman, Green Lantern the kinda lame and poorly-named Power Ring, and so forth. Then DC started adding worlds that included the characters they’d purchased from other defunct publishers: the heroes of Charlton Comics inhabited Earth-4, the Shazam! Family of Fawcett Comics fame was from Earth-S, and the heroes of Quality Comics were shifted off into Earth-X – a world where the Nazis won World War II! 

“Not gonna lie to you, Sam, this is kind of awkward.”

By the 80s, though, DC felt that things had gotten unwieldy, so writer Marv Wolfman gave us Crisis on Infinite Earths, their first mega-crossover event, in which all but one Earth was destroyed and the surviving heroes of many different worlds came to reside there. Both Green Lanterns and Flashes, otherworldly heroes like Plastic Man, the Blue Beetle, and Captain Marvel, and many more populated this “new” DC Universe. For the most part, I think this has worked to DC’s benefit over the years – it’s easier to build a cohesive world if all your main characters inhabit the same universe. Were it not for this, we never would have had the Blue Beetle/Booster Gold friendship, the Flash family wouldn’t have developed into the legacy it currently is, and people would have forgotten about Peacemaker long before John Cena showed up to actually make him interesting for a change. Despite that, though, I have always disagreed with the fundamental thesis that led to the writing of Crisis in the first place – that a multiverse storyline was too complicated for the casual reader. And if anything, the proliferation of multiverse stories in recent years, I think, has proven me to be correct.

What’s more, I think even many of the writers at DC Comics felt the same way, because it wasn’t too long before they started to branch out again and tell stories that didn’t fall into the canon of the one and only DC Universe. Just three years after Crisis ended, DC published Gotham By Gaslight, a one-shot story by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola, which featured a Victorian Batman doing battle with Jack the Ripper. The book was a hit, and the idea of telling stories of DC heroes in different worlds came back. Batman: Holy Terror by Alan Brennert and Norm Breyfogle, showed an alternate history in which the British Empire never fell out of favor and the colonies in North America are run by an oppressive government. In this version, Batman becomes a sort of Guy Fawkes-esque character, rebelling against British rule. This book was labeled an “Elseworlds” title, and the name became the brand under which DC stories from outside the continuity took place for the next decade and a half.

Original slogan:” Elseworlds-Because there can’t be too many different versions of Batman.”

Over the years we got some magnificent books, each casting the heroes of the DC Universe in different scenarios. In Superman: Speeding Bullets, Kal-El of Krypton crashed not in Kansas, but in Gotham City, where he was raised by Thomas and Martha Wayne. Batman: In Darkest Night showed us a world where Abin Sur crashed in Gotham City instead of Coast City (a LOT of alien spacecraft touch ground in Gotham in Elseworlds) and thus Bruce Wayne became Earth’s Green Lantern instead of Hal Jordan. Justice Riders casts the Justice League in a western yarn and The Golden Age tells a bittersweet ending to the saga of the Justice Society. Even crossovers with other companies occasionally bore the Elseworlds brand – Batman met both Marvel’s Captain America and Tarzan (published, at the time, through Dark Horse Comics) in Elseworlds stories.

Perhaps the high point of the imprint came in 1996, when Mark Waid and Alex Ross published their four-issue masterwork Kingdom Come. Set a few decades in the future, this is a DC Universe that has been disintegrating ever since Superman left humanity behind following the tragic death of his wife, Lois Lane, and the brutal murder of her killer, the Joker, before he could face justice. In his absence, the world has been overrun by a new breed of metahuman, heroes in name only, more interested in fighting each other than protecting the human race. In this story the Spectre takes a minister named Norman McCay on an Ebenezer Scrooge-type tour of this world as Superman is called back to action following a catastrophic event that pushes the entire Earth to the edge of annihilation. The story is largely a response to the sort of over-muscled, over-gunned, over-pouched heroes that were so popular in the 90s, and despite having a distinct dystopian flavor, it is ultimately one of the most beautiful and powerfully optimistic stories comics have ever produced.

You’re probably expecting some kind of joke here, but this is just straight-up one of the greatest comic book series ever made.

DC quietly pushed the Elseworlds brand aside in 2003, the argument being that it had become overused and was starting to grow stale. It’s hard to argue with that, too, especially when you start counting the number of Elseworlds that basically boiled down to “Kal-El landed somewhere other than Smallville, Kansas.” (Off the top of my head, we’ve got Superman: Red Son, Superman: The Dark Side, Superman: True Brit, JLA: The Nail, The Superman Monster, and even another Dark Horse collaboration, Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, all of which hinge on that same basic point.) As the multiverse was slowly creeping back into the “real” DC Comics, Elseworlds was placed…well…elsewhere. It came back briefly in 2010 for a three-issue Superman miniseries, Last Family of Krypton (this time little Kal-El’s parents escaped Krypton with him), and the name was used for an Arrowverse crossover event on TV, but other than that, it’s been gone for a long time.

“Okay, so you’re kind of over Batman Elseworlds. How about 37 Superman Elseworlds that all have the same starting point?”

Or has it?

DC is not using the name anymore, no, but they certainly are using the same basic concept. There are a lot of DC books being published that feature versions of the DC heroes in different worlds. Sean Phillips’s Batman: White Knight and its various sequels and spinoffs are set in a world where the Joker goes sane. Since that series premiered in 2017, it’s built a small universe of its own. There’s also the world of DCEased, a universe in which Darkseid succeeds in gaining the Anti-Life Equation, unleashing a memetic virus that transforms its victims into a sort of techno-undead creature, but don’t you dare call them zombies. Jurassic League was a miniseries that re-cast the Justice League as anthropomorphic dinosaurs, because why the hell not? Dark Knights of Steel features a medieval world where Jor-El, Lara, and Kal-El came to Earth together and live in a sort of fantasy setting surrounded by analogues of the other DC heroes and villains. And then there’s the cleverly-named DC Versus Vampires, which is about the signing of the Magna Carta.

Pictured: Pope Innocent III and King John.

Kidding. No, it’s exactly what it says on the wrapper. 

The thing about these books is that none of them are self-contained. Most Elseworlds, back in the day, ran anywhere from one to four issues, but that was typically where it ended. White Knight and DCEased both had multiple series and one-shots. Vampires and Steel each ran for 12 issues plus spin-offs. And each of these worlds has been designated a number in the new, current, DC Multiverse. They are Elseworlds in all but name – in fact, in a more literal sense than many of the older (forgotten) Elseworlds books, as they are actually other worlds in the DC Multiverse. Many of the other Elseworlds of the past have been “imported” into the new DC Multiverse as well, especially the much-loved and highly-inspirational Kingdom Come, which has crossed over and interacted with the “Main” DC Universe on many occasions, including in Waid’s current run on Batman/Superman: World’s Finest.  

Since DC has once again embraced the concept, what I (and, I suspect, many of the fans who were reading comics in the 90s) would like is for them to once again embrace the brand. Bring back Elseworlds. When these books are reprinted, give them the label. When the inevitable sequels come out, give them the label. If anything, the label will only help. While it may be clear that Jurassic League isn’t the “real” DC Universe, a casual fan picking up DC Versus Vampires might be concerned about why Hal Jordan is doing his best Dracula impression in this series but it doesn’t seem to be affecting the regular monthly Green Lantern title. Having a specific brand would alleviate that problem.

The only difference between these and an Elseworlds is the label.

And since the current philosophy at DC seems to be “every story happened SOMEWHERE in the Multiverse,” I say they should run with it. Don’t just put the Elseworlds LABEL on the book, plop a NUMBER in it as well. When they print the Dark Knights of Steel omnibus, give it an Elseworlds logo with a little mark signifying that this is Earth-118. Instead of reprinting Kingdom Come under the “mature readers” Black Label imprint (where it is woefully misplaced), give it back the Elseworlds mark and label it as Earth-22. There are two more miniseries coming out this year set on Earth-789, the world shared by the Christopher Reeve Superman and Michael Keaton Batman movies – give THOSE the Elseworlds labels too!

It exists, it has fans, and it has a clear purpose now that’s more than just a grab bag of weird. It’s true that the label was overused in the 90s, but the solution to that isn’t to never use it again, it’s just to use it sparingly. There’s no fan of the books that currently exist that would be turned off by an Elseworlds label, and there are many fans who may be more inclined to pick them up if they saw that familiar, beloved brand again. If nothing else, I think, it’s worth the try. Nothing in comics ever really dies – Superman can come back from Doomsday, Barry Allen can come back from the Speed Force…let’s let the Elseworlds brand have its time back from the dead. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Fingers crossed for the Elseworlds miniseries set on Earth-26, home of Captain Carrot. By now you should know he’s not joking.

Geek Punditry #35: Cracking Open the Mailbag

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , ,

Here at the Geek Punditry Global Media Hub and Frozen Yogurt Emporium, we do our best to keep on the cutting edge of popular culture. We check in on all the websites. We read the “Tweets” and the “X”s. We “Insta” and we “Thread.” We do not TikTok, however, because although we do have several incurable neuroses, narcissism is not one of them.

And as such, occasionally we find ourselves being asked questions by you, the faithful reader, about some of the elements of pop culture that are flickering across the internet as we speak. So this week, we’re going to crack open our bulging folder of email and address some of the questions that you’ve had for us lately.

Dear Geek Punditry,
I’ve recently subscribed to the Marvel and DC Comics apps so I can get down and read a whole bunch of comic books, and I was wondering where to start. There’s so much stuff on there and I’m not sure what I should read first.
Overwhelmed in Omaha

Overwhelmed,

You’ve certainly come to the right place. While the sheer amount of content on these two apps can be intimidating, if you figure out how to filter through it and find the things you like, the services are worthwhile. For example, if you’ve got the DC Ultra level, you can access all of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Bill Willingham’s Fables. The recently-released first issue of Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch’s Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor is there, and it is excellent. I’ve been using the app myself to catch up on those Knight Terrors miniseries that fall into books I don’t usually buy and therefore aren’t getting physically, and I’ve enjoyed several of them as well. And of course, no visit to the DC app would be complete without reading DC Challenge and Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew.

As for the Marvel app, when I first started using it my goal was to figure out what’s going on with the X-Men in the age of Krakoa. I started reading those books when Jonathan Hickman took over, then gave up because there were simply too many of them to keep up with. I saw the app as an opportunity to read the entire line all in one place without spending a fortune, and I’m happy to report that having all of the installments of the various X-Men related titles available in one place has in absolutely no way made it easier to keep up with them or, for that matter, even really understand what the hell is going on. I’d also recommend Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil, which I’ve mentioned before, Gail Simone’s Variants, and for old-school fun, check out Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham.

When the hell is THIS crossover going to happen?

Geek Punditry,

I’m a teacher, and earlier today one of my students saw the display of Superman stuff I keep in my classroom and he called it “lame.” How do I let him know that he, in fact, is the lame one, and also a stupid-head, without getting called in to the Principal’s office again?

Educational in Erie.

EE,

Ah, the “Superman is lame” argument. I’ve heard it many times. “He’s too powerful, he’s too perfect, he’s too basic.” Indeed.

First of all, I wish I could talk to the person who decided that “basic” is a pejorative. “Basic” means simple or uncomplicated, and frankly, there are a lot of days where I think it would be great if the whole damned world was more basic.

That said, the concept of Superman may be basic, but the characterization certainly is not. What you have, when you boil Superman down to his essence, is a man with the power to do virtually anything but who chooses to use that power to do good. I think people reject that concept because they can’t conceive of anybody behaving that way in real life, but that’s what makes the character so compelling to me. What kind of person, with the ability to conquer the world, would rather use it to get kittens out of trees? Of course, that’s only a small part of his job description – he also averts natural disasters, saves people from fires, thwarts supervillains, flummoxes corrupt super genius scientists/businessmen, and saves the world seven times before breakfast…and he does it because he can. Because it would be inconceivable to him to do otherwise. 

I’m not saying that there haven’t been bad Superman stories in the past (written in the past few years, beginning shortly after Action Comics #1000, theoretically speaking), but when Superman is good, there’s nothing better. Great Superman stories take this concept of an incredibly powerful alien and blend it with just a hint of the Pinocchio syndrome: he wants to be human. And like the best Pinocchios, he wants it so badly that he winds up becoming more human than anybody. Superman is a character who believes in Good – not the lowercase adjective good, but a proper noun Good that is a tangible force in the universe. He believes that most people carry it within them, and his job is to bring it out. He believes the best of everyone, he cares about everyone. In a recent story by Phillip Kennedy Johnson (Action Comics #1053) he was asked by someone why he would bother to save the life of one of his enemies. His answer was the most Superman response I’ve ever heard: if someone who has done wrong dies, they will never have an opportunity to become better.

When you don’t believe in yourself, remember that this guy would.

THIS is the Superman I love. The one who first identified himself, when asked who he was by Lois Lane, as “a friend.” The one who will never give up on people. The one whose faith in the inherent decency of humanity is both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength. If you can’t tell a great story with Superman the fault lies not with the character, but with the writer. 

Also, I like the trunks on the outside.

Hailing Frequencies Open,

In the past, you have extensively discussed your love for various iterations of Star Trek in this column. I was wondering if you would be willing to rank the various series for us, from your favorite to least favorite.

Andorian Andy

Andoriandrew,

I really hate ranking things, you know. I feel like it creates a sort of unnecessary drama, an unnatural division amongst people who, at their core, should have more in common with each other than differences. The only reason I can think of for producing a ranked list of one’s totally subjective preferences is to have something to argue about, and I don’t want to do that. I love Star Trek in all its forms, and for many different reasons.

Nearly 60 years of awesome. And also that episode of Voyager where they turned into salamanders.

The Original Series created a rich, vibrant science fiction universe that has captured the imaginations of generations, and The Animated Series began to expand upon that world, allowing writers to do wilder things that the budget of a live action TV series at the time would not have allowed. Next Generation resurrected that universe, giving us some of the greatest and most beloved characters in the entire franchise (such as Data, that other great Pinocchio of the modern day). Deep Space Nine was the first series to attempt an extended story arc, and has some of the deepest and most profound stories and character arcs in the entirety of Trek. Voyager compounded the memorable characters and took an opportunity to explore different settings. Enterprise was a step back that showed us the roots of the universe that we loved so much. The Kelvin timeline films are a fun, fresh look at something that was remarkably familiar. Lower Decks shows us that there is room for both lighthearted fare and serious science fiction in the same story. The final season of Picard is a brilliant conclusion to the stories of many of our favorite characters. Strange New Worlds recontextualizes the original series and gives new life and energy to something that we thought we knew all there was to know about. Prodigy is a series that introduces kids to the core thesis and heart that makes the Star Trek universe what it is in an exciting and engaging way. And Discovery has Tig Notaro sometimes. 

Dear Constant Reader,

You’ve spoken before about your love for the works of Stephen King. With his newest novel, Holly, hitting the stands, I was wondering if you have any thoughts or feelings about the Holly Gibney character in her previous appearances or any hopes or expectations for this new story.

Roland from 1919 19th Street, Co-Op City

R19,

I am, in fact, an avowed reader of the works of Stephen King. I’ve been a fan of his since high school and I have devoured a great many of his books. As for Holly Gibney, however, I’m afraid I actually haven’t read any of the books with her in it yet. Holly first appeared in King’s 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes, you see, and 2014 also happened to be the year I got married. That’s a busy time in a person’s life, as you may have heard, and in that time I fell a bit behind on reading pretty much anything. Then just as things were starting to settle down, my wife and I had a kid, and if the transition of getting married makes you busy, the transition of becoming a parent is like having a tornado drop into the middle of your living room and steal all your books. So the truth is, I’m way behind on reading not just Stephen King, but pretty much every other author whose work I enjoy.

The good news, as I’ve mentioned before, is that my son is a bit older now and I’m finding it a bit more possible to pick up a book and read again, so I’m slowly getting back into the game. I’ve actually made several lists of authors and series that I want to get into or back into, and I’ve been chipping away at them a little at a time. The Stephen King novels I haven’t read yet are all on those lists, and I have every intention of getting to them eventually. The funny thing is that, of all of his books that I haven’t read, only three of them were published prior to 2014…and I don’t know that I’m going to get around to Pet Sematary anytime soon. As a dad, it might just be too much for me.

Guess which one of these I’m probably going to read first.

Blake,

Is it true that you just couldn’t think of any topic to write about this week that was worth devoting an entire column to, and thus resurrected this contrived mailbag format as a way to work in a variety of different topics that wouldn’t support an extended discussion? And if so, when did it occur to you that the “mailbag,” while a classic trope, is hopelessly outdated and it would be better served to structure future such columns in the form of social media interaction?

Curious in Cambodia

Dear Curious,

Shut up, that’s why. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. What’s odd is that, although he hates ranking things, he enjoys making lists. Isn’t that bizarre?