A minor quibble

There's a comic book convention going on in San Diego right now, which you might have actually heard mentioned even if you're not a giant geek like me, because it is a con that attracts (no exaggeration) 100,000 people and, because of its proximity to Los Angeles and the current trends in movies and tv toward doing more geeky genre stuff as well as out-and-out adaptation of comics properties, gets a lot of real celebrities and power players to show up. It is in fact sometimes referred to simply as Comic Con, which is kind of like referring to a meeting of the Yankees and Red Sox as The Baseball Game, because yeah sure it’s pretty much the high-point of the form but, to be fair, there are other examples out there as well.

Anyway, little news tidbits trickle outward from San Diego at a pretty steady rate but, again, a geek like me goes looking for news tidbits like that all the time so all I tend to notice is a slight uptick in frequency. But I did hear something awesome today: when Community’s first season comes out on DVD, it will include a mini-comic written (or meta-written) by the character of Troy, and starring Kickpuncher (his punches have the power … of kicks!)


Sweet. But I keep seeing references to this online in which people refer to “Troy’s creation Kickpuncher” which … gah … no!

Look, the whole point of the episode was that Troy and Abed enjoy watching crappy movies and MST3King them (obviously they don’t use that particular probably-copyrighted verb, but that’s what they’re doing) and Pierce tries to join in but he’s a Baby Boomer, not a Millennial, and he just doesn’t get MST3King and ends up overpreparing and showing up for the viewing of Kickpuncher 2 with canned material that bombs. Then in the bumper at the end Troy and Abed make a Kickpuncher fan film. Fan films are an entirely separate weird corner of the geekernet which I could probably riff on for an entire post, but the point that the bumper lovingly exploits is that they are almost always based on existing properties. Which, in the universe of Community, is what Kickpuncher is: a terrible low-budget movie series that Abed and Troy discovered, adopted with ironic love, and alternately made fun of and paid homage to. All of which is the exact opposite of Kickpuncher being Troy’s creation, as these various articles keep claiming.

Do these people even watch Community? I guess not, which makes me sad, because I want everyone to watch that show, because I want it to get good ratings and stay on the air forever. Or at least five years, so that I can see how they handle the more-or-less real-time progression of the universe’s timeline and keep the characters at Greendale for more than four years.