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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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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I drew a picture of The Wolverine

The words above him are from some French homework, translating an interview with Foucault.

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