Three Body Problem

Geek Punditry #104: The 2024 Pundy Awards

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It’s the final Friday of the year, and that means it’s time once again to sit back and talk about all of my favorite things from this year. It’s time for the 2024 Pundy Awards!

Yes, just like I did in 2023, I’m going to wrap up the second year of my little column by talking about some of my favorite pieces of pop culture to come down the pipe this year. There is no rhyme or reason to this, the categories will be decided purely based on what I feel like talking about as I write this. I’m going to tell you my favorites in movies, TV, and comics from the past twelve months, and I’m gonna tell you why I dig them and why you should check them out if you haven’t already. Also in order to avoid repeating myself, I’m going to skip over shows and comic book series that I “awarded” last year. Please be aware that I’m still a fan of Abbott Elementary, Batman/Superman: World’s Finest, Fantastic Four, Skybound’s Energon Universe, and ESPECIALLY the final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks, and they’re all worth your time.

But today, I want to talk about things I haven’t talked about before. At least…stuff that I haven’t talked about as much. Let’s get on with it!

Not the only movie this year that made me feel seen.

Blake’s Favorite Animated Movie: Inside Out 2. 

Back in June, I wrote a piece about how the shine had fallen off the once-immaculate reputation of Pixar Animation studio. After a series of duds, I wondered if the sequel to Pixar’s Inside Out was going to have what it took to bring back some of the studio’s former glory. I was so, so happy to see that it did. The first Inside Out was a great look at how the mind of a child develops and learns to process emotions, anthropomorphizing the process but doing so in a way that was both entertaining and easy to understand. Inside Out 2 continued this trend, with the character of Riley getting a bit older and the emotions she experiences becoming more complicated. Adding in the likes of Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment, and especially Anxiety into the mix has changed the game, making for a movie that perfectly encapsulates the personal journey a person goes through when they grow up. The finale of the movie was absolutely remarkable, with a scene that so perfectly demonstrates the experience of an anxiety attack that I nearly broke down in the movie theater. My son, Eddie, has since declared Inside Out 2 his favorite movie, and I’m not about to argue with him.

“Another movie about hanging around outside a convenience store, Kev?”
“Nah, this time it’s a movie theater.”

Blake’s Favorite Comedy: The 4:30 Movie.

I’ve been a fan of Kevin Smith for a very long time, and I’ve found it fascinating how his films have changed over the years. His early movies like Clerks and Mallrats were a reflection of the aimless feeling of being a young adult and trying to figure out what life is actually supposed to be. His more recent films, particularly Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III, demonstrate a growing maturity and a sense of grappling with a life that didn’t turn out to be what you expected. Although he hasn’t let go of the filthy humor and goofy characters that made his name, he’s a subtler, more sophisticated storyteller than he used to be, and I appreciate that. The 4:30 Movie doesn’t connect to his “View Askewniverse” at all, instead telling the story of a young man in the 80s trying to find the guts to make a play for the girl he’s in love with, all set around a day going to the movies. Are there dirty jokes? Absolutely. But the film is wonderfully heartfelt, and even though neither Kevin Smith nor his alter-ego Silent Bob make an appearance on screen, you can tell that this movie was intensely personal. The final scene hammers that in especially, giving you a feeling that Kevin Smith has, in a way, told his own origin story. It’s a great movie.

Tagline: “You will believe a grown man can cry.”

Blake’s Favorite Documentary: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. 

This should not be a surprise to anybody, but the documentary about the actor who brought Superman to life for my generation was incredibly moving. Everybody knows the basics of Christopher Reeve’s story – how he played Superman, how a horseback riding accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, and how he became a crusader for the disabled in the years before his untimely death. This movie delves into his history in a deeper way, told mostly through the reflections of his now-adult children, as well as further commentary and anecdotes from other family and friends. The movie bounces back and forth between his life story prior to his accident and the way his life changed afterwards. Having his children tell the story, I think, is one of the things that really helps sell the tale. The film feels so much more intimate and personal, coming from the point of view of the people who knew and loved him the best. One thing I didn’t expect, though, was the heavy focus on Reeve’s friendship with the late Robin Williams. Again, this is something fans of the actor knew about, but the way they intertwined the tragedy of Williams’s own life with that of Christopher Reeve just made it all the more powerful. Have your tissues ready when you watch this one.

Okay, if I’m gonna be honest here, Super-Man is not the only thing in this list that made me cry.

Blake’s Favorite Family TV Series: Bluey

I know, this is another one of those “no duh” moments. I have written extensively about my love for Bluey before, in particular this spring’s season finale episode, “The Sign.” But there was simply no other TV show this year that had as deep and profound an impact on me. In the final episode of this season, we saw the Heelers preparing both for a family wedding and a move to another city, two life-changing events that the titular Bluey was having a tough time dealing with. Bandit, the dad that every father on the planet is striving to become, is trying to do the best thing for his family, even as it becomes increasingly clear to the viewer that the rest of the family doesn’t actually want to leave. It’s a beautiful story and still amazingly funny, and the final song (by cast member Meg Washington) is absolutely sublime. It comes across as a meditation on being a parent and having a child, and it’s the kind of thing that absolutely overwhelms your heart if you’ve got children of your own. I couldn’t be happier with the news that the long-talked about Bluey movie has been officially announced, and I only wish we weren’t going to have to wait until 2027 for it to hit theaters. 

Remember when science fiction was SMART? It’s finally back.

Blake’s Favorite Science Fiction Series (That Isn’t Star Trek: Lower Decks): The Three-Body Problem

This Netflix series, based on the globally popular trilogy by Cixin Liu, launched this year and grabbed me immediately. Like the novel, the first season of this show focuses on several groups of people around the world trying to uncover a mystery. The show follows scientists, police, and people from other walks of life as they slowly uncover evidence of an impending alien invasion. The novels are amazing – an incredible portrait of this sort of singular event and how it would completely reshape the entire world. So far, the first season of the show is doing the same thing, but in different ways than the book. The novels, by a Chinese author, have a cast that is mostly Chinese as well, while the TV series is more international. Characters are omitted, others are combined with one another, new characters are added – the TV show uses the framework of the novel, but takes the story in different directions to reflect the difference in cast and the different cultures of the characters. As a result, while fans of the book can still enjoy it, there’s still room to be surprised. I loved the novels, and I loved the show too, but for different reasons and in different ways. That’s one of the best things you can hope for in an adaptation.

This is the best an ongoing Spider-Man comic has been in 20 years, and it’s not even close.

Blake’s Favorite Ongoing Marvel Comic (That Isn’t Fantastic Four): Ultimate Spider-Man

Last year, Marvel announced a relaunch of its once-prominent “Ultimate” brand, which reimagined the Marvel heroes as new characters in the modern day. That version of the Ultimate Universe eventually gave birth to Miles Morales, but other than him, the rest of the line has been mostly jettisoned. The only other survivor is the Maker, an evil version of the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, who has created a NEW Ultimate Universe, and it’s the flagship book of THAT line that has captured my heart this year. In the new Ultimate Universe, the Maker deliberately prevented most of the world’s superheroes from having their respective origin incidents, until their Tony Stark uncovered the truth and decided to put things right. (This is a HIGHLY condensed version of the Ultimate Invasion miniseries, by the way, which is also worth reading.) In the new Ultimate Spider-Man, we open with an adult Peter Parker who is powerless, married to Mary Jane Watson, and the father of two children when he is approached with the news that he’s supposed to be one of the world’s greatest heroes, and there’s a way to make it happen. For years, Marvel Comics has turned the mainstream Peter Parker into a punching bag, submitting him to one mindless torture and humiliation after another, to the point where stretches of his comics are unbearably depressing. Ultimate Spider-Man is the antidote to that, proving that you can tell stories about a married couple, about parents, that are entertaining and emotionally engaging without sacrificing the superheroes. This Ultimate Universe is even further removed from the main Marvel U than the original Ultimate Universe was, but this comic has been fantastic so far.

“So EVERYBODY is in the Justice League now? Ghost-Maker? Robotman? Clownhunter?”
“Okay, let’s not get carried away.”

Blake’s Favorite Ongoing DC Comic: Justice League Unlimited.

This may be a tiny bit of a cheat, as there’s only been one issue of JSU so far, but it was preceded by the excellent Absolute Power miniseries, which set the story up and was by the same magnificent writer/artist team of Mark Waid and Dan Mora, so I’m counting that towards the series. After an absence of the Justice League from the DCU for a few years, it’s time for a most triumphant return in a way that has never been done in comics before. Rather than a team of seven to ten heroes protecting the whole dang world, Waid is embracing the “Unlimited” part of the title. The Justice League – as in the classic animated series of the same name – is now a massive force, with virtually every hero on the planet Earth recruited as a member. Everyone who has ever been in the League, every Titan, everyone who wears the S-shield, Bat-symbol, or bracelets of an Amazon, is now part of the League. Waid kicks things off with a first issue showing a longtime – but fairly obscure – hero called Air Wave being taken up to the Watchtower and joining in on his first mission as a member of the Justice League. The story was great, with an engaging and entertaining point of view that is set to save Air Wave from the ranks of the D-listers, and a twist that promises great things for the series. What’s more – I’m gonna sound like a broken record here – Dan Mora is probably the best superhero artist working in American comic books right now. His characters are bold, powerful, but still wonderfully human. This book hit every box for me in the first issue and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

“What if we replace the spinach with boba?”
“No.”

Surprise of the Year: Eye Lie Popeye

It’s been a good year for reboots of old-school characters, including Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Thundercats, and the Universal Monsters. But the one that surprised me the most, in a delightful way, is Massive Publishing’s new series Eye Lie Popeye, by writer/artist Marcus Williams. When the series was announced, I didn’t think it would be my thing – a new version of Popeye is fine, but the artwork showed a distinct Manga flavor to it. I’ve got no issue with people who enjoy Manga, it’s just not usually the sort of thing I’m interested in, and I planned to pass on the series. Then came Free Comic Book Day, and they released a preview of the first issue. Guys, this is why Free Comic Book Day works, because it did exactly what it is intended to do: show me a glimpse of something that I hadn’t planned on reading, but that I found incredibly entertaining. Williams shows a deep knowledge of Popeye and his enormous cast of characters, and while the book DOES have that Manga influence, I was startled by just how well all of it managed to fit together. The style works for the characters, the storyline feels like the kind of thing that used to be done in the classic comic strips (which are quite different from the seven-minute slugfests that people who only know Popeye from his animated shorts might expect). Overall, I never would have thought it, but this was one of my favorite comic book finds of the year.

And that’s it for this year, friends – some, but not all, of my favorite movies, TV shows, and comics of 2024. Feel free to share your own favorites in the comments, and here’s to coming back here in a short 52 weeks to do it all over again!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. And yeah, he barely mentioned it, but Lower Decks was amazing. Go read it. Go read it now. 

Geek Punditry #67: What Is Literature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He doesn’t know if anyone would ever call the new trilogy version of that series, beginning with Little Stars Book One: Twinkle Twinkle, “literature,” but he DOES know it will be available in both paperback and ebook beginning on May 4, and he is CRAZY excited about it.