A Revolving Door in Heaven

By Blake Petit

When a superhero dies, nobody thinks they'll stay dead. When a superhero kills, everybody gets up in arms. When someone close to a superhero bites the bullet, no one knows what to think. A REVOLVING DOOR IN HEAVEN is a series of handy essays about the phenomenon of death (and life) in mainstream American comic books.

Blake M. Petit has been writing about comics, movies, and pop culture since 2003. The Obligatory Everything But Imaginary series draws select columns and features from the archives of CXPulp.com and presents them to you in bite-sized chunks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blake Petit
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301972166

Blake Petit

Blake M. Petit is a freelance writer, columnist, reviewer, podcaster, actor, director, teacher, and unlicensed tree surgeon from Ama, Louisiana. He is the author of the novels Other People’s Heroes and The Beginner, as well as the podcast novel A Long November. His weekly comic book column, Everything But Imaginary, has appeared Wednesdays at comiXtreme.com since 2003. In January of 2007 he joined with his longtime friend Chase Bouzigard to host the weekly 2 in 1 Showcase comic book podcast, appearing every weekend at comiXtreme. Blake is a member of the board of directors of the Thibodaux Playhouse theatre company in Thibodaux Louisiana, where his original stage play The 3-D Radio Show was produced in 2004. In a former life as a newspaper editor, his weekly Think About It column won the Louisiana Press Association Award for best column in 2001. In his free time, he teaches high school English, which at the moment pays better than the rest of his more impressive-sounding endeavors put together.

Book preview

Preface

My name is Blake M. Petit. And I am a nerd.

I don’t say this as any sort of confession. I’m not at an AA meeting, standing in front of a microphone, finally admitting to the world some deep, dark secret I’ve been trying to hide from my friends and family. Everyone who knows me knows I’m a nerd. Most of them are fine with it. And those that aren’t… well, who cares about them anyway? I’ve been outed as a nerd since I was eight years old, and I’m fine with my lifestyle choice.

I love movies. I love television. I read more books in a month than most of my high school students will read in their entire lives. But perhaps my favorite medium is the comic book. And again, I can narrow my love down even further. While I read a pretty diverse selection of titles, the bulk of my collection is from the world of the superhero.

If there’s anything I like more than reading comics, it’s talking about them. And I don’t mean the ordinary stuff either – the Who’ll win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk? stuff. (It’s an asinine question anyway – the answer is "whichever one the writer decides to win, regardless of logic or physics.) I like to pick apart the big ideas, the major themes, the recurring tropes… I like to rip stories down to their skeletons, figure out how they work, and put ‘em back together again.

In 2003, the good people at CXPulp.com (then called Comixtreme.com) gave me the opportunity to do that on a regular basis. Since then, almost every Wednesday my Everything But Imaginary column has allowed me to wax poetic on subjects as diverse as why the Jonah Hex movie failed to why I think Carl Barks is the most underappreciated creators in comic book history. I try to entertain. I try to make people laugh. But probably the most important thing for me is to get people thinking about why comics are what they are, for god or for ill.

Today I’m still at CXPulp, still turning out EBI on Wednesdays and still enjoying every minute. But I’m also trying to expand my horizons as a writer, with both fiction and nonfiction projects coming down the pipeline. That in mind, I’ve decided to start this project – a series of EBI collections, pulling together a few columns on a related theme at a price anybody can afford. If you’ve been with me for years, I hope you enjoy revisiting some of these EBIs of Wednesdays past. If you’re new to my stuff, welcome! I hope you enjoy, and I hope you check out the new commentary by myself at my buds at CX on a regular basis.

And for my first trick, we’re going to dive into something that (as