All of my writing in 2019

It’s the end of the year, the end of the decade, so it’s time to look back and see what I wrote in 2019, as well as what happened with my two most recent books.

Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies was translated into German (and was reviewed here). This follows it winning “Best Illustrated Book on Film” at the Frankfurter Buchmesse Film Awards, as well as its being translated into Japanese and Spanish. But whatever language you choose, Cinemaps makes a lovely gift! (Thanks to Andrew DeGraff‘s amazing art.)

My most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, also makes a lovely gift, being more timely than ever! (There’s a new Star Wars movie out, in case you’ve not heard.)

I also published a short story with Conjunctions: “Sandy Szymanski,” which is about a young woman who’s worried that she’s turning into a duck (and that nobody cares). This follows two other stories I’ve published with that magazine: “You’ll Be Sorry” and “Days of Heaven.” And I’m pleased to announce that Conjunctions just accepted another of my stories: “Thirteen Short Tales about Monsters,” which will appear in issue #74, “Grendel’s Kin” (now available for pre-order).

Beyond that, I devoted a lot of the year to working on two new books—a novel, and another critical book. More about which soon, I hope…

As for this blog: first, I added two pages to make it easier to find both my fiction and my non-fiction. (You can access these pages through the tabs at the top of the site.)

I also published a bunch of new stuff:

• “Why the Past 20 Years Have Witnessed the Triumph of Geek Culture”: When I told people I was writing a book about Star Wars and geek culture, they kept asking me “why is geek culture everywhere these days?” The book explains why, but if you want the shorter version, this post is for you.
• “The Death and Rebirth of Star Wars: Part 1 and Part 2”: Another reason why I wrote the book about Star Wars and geek culture was that I wanted to understand why the Star Wars franchise had disappeared in the mid-1980s, only to come back in the 1990s. These posts explain why that happened. (The short answer is that geeks emerged as a market.)
• “The Evolution of Wolverine, Part 1”: This is the first in a series of three posts where I document how Wolverine developed as a character. Part 2 is in the works!
• “Defining the superhero genre”: I argue that superhero stories are in fact their own genre, and explain how the genre works.
• “‘Return I will / To old Brazil’: The use of recurring space in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil”: I point out something cool about the ending of Brazil that I’d never seen anyone else point out.
• “What Was Twin Peaks? Part 1 and Part 2”: After watching the third season of Twin Peaks (which included rewatching the first two seasons), I got to thinking about how the show changed over the years. Part 3 is slowly in the works!

Beyond that, two older posts have been receiving a lot of traffic:

• “Disney should remake the Star Wars prequels. Here’s how.“ (11 Dec 2017)
• “An open letter to Cedric Phillips, Gerry Thompson, and the Pro Magic community at large” (4 Dec 2018)

If you haven’t read them yet, why not check them out? And remember, you can find all my fiction here, and all my non-fiction here.

In conclusion, I hope you had a terrific 2019. If you want to share any of your own writing or other work, please do so in the comments!

Happy Holidays, and see you in 2020!

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Why the Past 20 Years Have Witnessed the Triumph of Geek Culture

When I started writing my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, I wanted to make an argument about aesthetics. Namely, I wanted to argue that when it comes to art, geeks tend to like works of realist fantasy, which puts the lie to the widespread belief that realism and fantasy are opposites. (They’re not: realism is a mode, or way of making art, while fantasy is a genre; any genre can be done in any mode.)

As I worked on the book, however, I realized that people were just as interested, if not more interested, in the history of geek culture. Whenever I told people what I was doing, they said that they hoped the book would explain why geeky stuff is everywhere these days—why it’s taken over the culture. Why are all the movies at the Cineplex superhero movies? Why is everyone talking about Game of Thrones? Why is it now considered OK, or mostly OK, for adults to read Harry Potter novels and comic books? So I knew I needed to write about that, too.

As it turned out, this wasn’t a problem, because the two topics are intimately intertwined. Indeed, you can’t understand the history of geek culture without also grasping its aesthetics.

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The Death and Rebirth of Star Wars: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I documented how the Star Wars franchise, which burst so spectacularly onto the scene in 1977, fizzled out by the end of 1986. Before the first movie had even celebrated its tenth birthday, George Lucas had stopped making not only new Star Wars films, but Star Wars comics, cartoons, TV movies, action figures, novels, video games—you name it:

But of course the story didn’t end there. In May 1991, the franchise rumbled back to life, resuming all of those product lines, and eventually going on to release new Star Wars movies:

What’s more, all of those products have continued in some form or another until today.

What explains that four-year-long gap, when Star Wars disappeared? And why did the franchise return, and why has it stuck around since then?

In order to answer those and other related questions, I wrote my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, which I encourage you to buy and read! But if you want the short version of the story, then read on …

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The Death and Rebirth of Star Wars: Part 1

Like a lot of people my age, I just missed out on seeing the original Star Wars movies in the theater. Instead, I grew up with them on VHS. And right around when I was really getting into them, in 1986, Star Wars went away.

Which perplexed me at the time. Why did Star Wars disappear in the mid 1980s? And why did it come back, and come back differently, starting in 1991? These questions haunted me so much, I eventually wrote a book about the subject: I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture. Because it’s an interesting story, I’ll explain what happened in this series of blog posts.

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The Evolution of Wolverine, Part 1

Uncanny X-Men #141, cover (detail)

Like many, I became an avid fan of the X-Men in the late 1980s / early 1990s. I can’t remember the first issue that I read—my best friend Philip shared his copies with me on the school bus—but I remember the first one I bought: Uncanny X-Men #270, Part 1 of the “X-Tinction Agenda,” published in November 1990. Wanting more, the following month I picked up Wolverine #34, at which point I was hooked (at least for a while).

I also started purchasing back issues as best I could. But the high price of those comics prevented me from making it back past the mid-1980s. So I took for granted the way the characters were at the time that I was reading. As far as I was concerned, the Wolverine of 1990 was the same as the Wolverine of 1980, or ’75.

But one interesting aspect of serial narratives, whether they’re comic books or television series, is that they rarely start out fully formed. Rather, their concepts and characters develop over time, as the people making them figure out what does and doesn’t work. The Wolverine that I met c. 1990 was a significantly different character than the one that older readers were introduced to in 1974. And although I didn’t know it at the time, 1991 would prove another turning point in the character’s nature, as different creators brought different ideas to Wolverine, revising both his present and past.

In this series of posts, I want to delve into that history, demonstrating how the writers, artists, and editors behind the scenes created and refined Wolverine as a character over the first twenty years of his existence. Broadly speaking, there are three distinct periods:

1. 1974–1982: Wolverine comes together as a character. Initially a short-tempered man with claws, animal senses, and a tendency to fly into berserker rages, Wolverine later gets his unbreakable adamantium skeleton and his fast-healing factor, as well as his fondness for smoking and drinking, plus his catchphrase.
2. 1982–1991: Wolverine’s history as a secret agent gets fleshed out. He thinks and speaks frequently about his past, from the time he spent living in Japan, to his team-ups with fellow military officer Carol Danvers.
3. 1991-onward: In a major retcon, Wolverine is reinvented as an amnesiac, as well as a victim of the nefarious Weapon X program. In order to accommodate these new ideas, much of his past life is rewritten.

In this first post, I’ll tackle the initial period, 1974–82, showing how it took around eight years for the people behind the scenes to get the basic character down.

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Defining the superhero genre

Some people say that Superman is boring because he’s too powerful. Who could beat him in a fight? No one. He’s stronger and faster than everybody else, on top of which he can fly, see through walls, hear people whisper from halfway around the world, fire laser beams from his eyes, freeze things with his breath—plus he’s nigh indestructible, to boot. There’s practically nothing he can’t do. He can survive direct hits from nukes, and bathe in the sun without breaking a sweat. And since no one can beat him, the thinking goes, Superman, the Man of Steel, is never really in any danger, which means his stories lack peril, tension, suspense. There aren’t any stakes. There’s no thrill.

But to think about Superman this way misunderstands not only the character, but the superhero genre as a whole—what makes it unique, and what type of stories it’s best suited to tell. Worse still, this misunderstanding obscures the genre’s historical limitations, as well as how artists might transcend those limitations in the future.

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What Should Be Done with the Mutant Menace?

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on the X-Men for Seqart, entitled “What Should Be Done with the Mutant Menace?” Today I realized that I’ve never linked to those posts from this blog! So in case you haven’t seen those posts, here they are:

• Part 1: “The Lack of an Ending”
• Part 2: “The Need for Self-Control”
• Part 3: “Losing (and Regaining) Control”
• Part 4: “The Evolution of Iceman”
• Part 5: “The Special Case of Professor X”

If nothing else, check them out for the illustrations, taken from over fifty years of X-Men comics. And if you want more of my writing about the Merry Mutants, and superhero comics in general, be sure to check out my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture.

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An open letter to Cedric Phillips, Gerry Thompson, and the Pro Magic community at large

Dear Cedric Phillips and GerryT,

Having listened with great interest to the “Change Worth Fighting For” episode of the Cedric Phillips Podcast, I felt compelled to reply. On that episode, you wondered why professional Magic players have seen their fortunes decline so precipitously over the past ten years, and what they can now do to improve their situation. I believe I can help explain this reversal of fortune, and offer some relevant advice. What follows is a little on the long side, and perhaps a little depressing, but I hope you will nonetheless find it edifying. If you like, it would be my pleasure to discuss these matters further.

About me, briefly: I’ve played Magic on and off since the release of Fallen Empires, and am a regular consumer of Magic content. Among other things, I’ve watched every Pro Tour since PT Los Angeles (October 2005); I’ve watched countless LSV draft videos and Twitch streams; I’ve listened to hundreds of episodes of Limited Resources, Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast, and various other Magic podcasts; and I’ve read just about every column that Mark Rosewater has ever written. At the same time, I’m also an English Ph.D. and author whose research interests include the economics of fantasy artworks—for instance, my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, tells the story of how geek culture went from being an underground phenomenon to a mainstream demographic. Given that, I tend to view Magic from a financial perspective—by which I don’t mean living the dream of playing on the Pro Tour, or making a fortune by speculating on Magic cards, but rather trying to understand why Wizards of the Coast makes the economic decisions that it does.

I am hardly a Wizards insider. But I believe that my research into Magic’s financial history, coupled with my broader knowledge of fantasy franchises, enables me to understand why Wizards has chosen over the past decade to disinvest in its Pros, even if that decision appears baffling and counterintuitive to those players. For years now I’ve watched Pros complain about their situation, wondering why, if Magic is doing so great, then why are the Pros suffering? Shouldn’t their fortunes rise and fall with Wizards’? As you yourselves put it on your podcast, “the stars sell the cards,” by which logic if Wizards wants to succeed, then it needs to build stars. Just like how the NBA promotes LeBron James, and not simply “hoops,” Wizards should promote, say, Reid Duke, and not simply “Siege Rhino.” By that same logic, if Wizards doesn’t build stars, then it won’t sell cards, and everyone’s fortune will decline.

I sympathize with your argument. I love watching professional Magic, and once attended a Pro Tour as press just so I could blog about it. But at the same time, I think that your logic is mistaken, and I suspect that your arguments will fail to impress Wizards. Because while it appears to you that Wizards is behaving irrationally, or foolishly, the fact remains that the company long ago settled on a business plan that involves investing less in its Pro players, not more. This is because Wizards has already tried the strategy that you cite—promoting Magic by championing its Pros—only to find that it didn’t work out that all that well. Indeed, it proved nearly catastrophic. And because of that, as well as for other reasons, Wizards has spent the past ten years rebranding Magic as something other than a competitive tournament game.

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Miami Book Fair Interview

Last week, I did an interview with Florida’s Marc Bernier Show in the run-up to the Miami Book Fair, where I did a panel to promote my latest book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture. Many thanks to both the Show and the Fair, as well as to my co-panelists, authors Jonathan French (The Grey Bastards) and Mike Witwer (Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History)—I had a great time!

The interview is online; you can check it out here. I talked about how and why geeks have gone mainstream, and why the geek renaissance won’t be ending anytime soon. I also offered some thoughts on Stan Lee’s passing.

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I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: reviews, interviews, articles, and more

I wanted to collect in one place all of the secondary materials related to my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture. Below you’ll find links to the audiobook, online excerpts, interviews with me, reviews, and related articles. I’ll also update this post as new materials become available. … Enjoy!

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