Bravo, Geoff Johns. Bravo. (Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1 Reviewed!)

(Note: crossposted from my Tumblr.)

I’ve blasted Geoff Johns in the past, but what can I say? He deserves nothing but the highest praise for Flashpoint and the first issue of the new Justice League comic. They’ve made me giddy for the monthlies again.

Last night wasn’t quite like the good ol’ days, when I was some 40 pounds heavier, a couple of inches shorter, eight years younger, walking to Graham Crackers Comics on Clark Street. But when the clock struck 11:50, man, I was damn ready to head out to buy some comic books. (Also, I’d had some of this, some of that — excitement was in the air!)

So I practically ran downstairs and across two streets to St. Mark’s Comics, where owner Mitch Cutler was quietly placing Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1 on the shelves.

“Are these ready to come down?” I asked.

“In 30 seconds,” he said.

It was like God damn nerd Christmas.

I daren’t ask why

But I definitely just vigorously squeezed (and was promptly moistened by) a Trader Joe’s bag filled partially with vomit, which, judging by the last time we emptied the trash heap in the living room, has been sitting in our apartment for at least two weeks, though probably more since, naturally, we place our full plastic sacks of filth on top of the paper ones, hoping, of course, that the Magical Manhattan Trash Fairies™ will take care of things from there.

There has been little, if any, progress in three years, we see, and so we must wonder if the resounding answer to The New York Times’ recent “Does College Make You Smarter?” question is, simply, “no.”

Reading 2011′s Batman

Interesting things are afoot in the realm of the Bat, dear reader.

(Side note: did you know that most of my blog’s traffic comes from Batman-related content and links from comic blogs? These things are important to me, insofar as that little counter in the right-hand column counting up to “30,000″ is important to me, like some real-world Galaga score accrued in direct proportion to my writing output — sorry, I’ve been reading this.)

Yesterday, Comic Vine posted a rather good (though purposefully incomplete, as of right now) article that aims to “break down the secrets of Grant Morrison’s Batman.” It’s a worthy read, especially if you’re interested in Morrison’s veritable Batman epic, spanning (gulp) four years now, but not the sort of fanatical interested, yet, that has you literally foaming at the words “ZUR EN ARRH.” Also, the always-worth-listening-to David Brothers wrote a nice little guide on the new Batman books for Comics Alliance that should serve well as a sort of road map for comic book readers that want to jump in but are kind of intimidated by the fact that there are 10 monthly Batman-related books right now, not counting specials and upcoming books like David Finch’s Batman: The Dark Knight ongoing.

Whew.

Anyway, I’ve had bats on the brain, and in the spirit of a now somewhat embarrassing post I made two and a half years ago (“Reading Today’s Batman“), I wanted to weigh in on some of the goings on in this massive corner of the DC Universe.

I’M STILL HERE.

But so very, very tired.

Can America Learn From Czech Muslims?

The recent hubbub about the construction of a Muslim community center near ground zero drove me to dig up a story I reported and wrote while studying in the Czech Republic last fall. Since I haven’t had much success shopping this around – a little too specific to the Czech Republic, probably – I’ve now decided to self-publish the feature here, as it seems the right time for this story. Obviously this is a personal blog, so my opinion and personal perspective are a little more available than they would be elsewhere, but hopefully that doesn’t impact how you respond to this.

Since I can say so here though, I really think opponents to the mosque in Lower Manhattan should reconsider whether the United States should be in the habit of debating core freedoms to the same extent as a much smaller nation that’s been a democracy for less time than I’ve been alive; this sort of thing is happening all over our country.

But maybe these thoughts should rest somewhere near the back of your mind as you read the story of Muneeb Hassan Alrawi’s mosque, one of only two that have been officially allowed in the Czech Republic.

——–

Czech Muslims at the Breaking Point of Past, Present, and Future
by Damon Beres

Muneeb Hassan Alrawi made a choice 25 years ago to leave his home in Iraq and lead his life as a Muslim in the Czech Republic, a nation wherein 96% of the population is ethnically Czech, and nearly 60% describe themselves as unaffiliated with any religion. At the time, there were a grand total of zero mosques nationwide for Muslims to worship in.

Over two decades later, the number has risen to two, and petitions for a third have largely fallen on deaf ears.

Is Starcraft II Good? Plus, Star Wars: Special Edition post-traumatic stress disorder

(Note: this post is sort of the second in a series that begins with this one. Read that first to get a full view of where I’m coming from with this, the most anticipated of all computer games to ever feature the heaving embodiment of tentacle rape as its primary villain.)

A friend of mine complained today that Starcraft II is Blizzard’s “first misfire.” He said it is really more like Starcraft 1.5. I agreed, somewhat — enough, at least, to bemoan the game’s $60 price tag. I mean, that is darn close to pants-and-a-half, depending on your retailer.

Still, I think a wider perspective is in order here. Starcraft II has been 12 years coming; it’s sort of the gaming equivalent of The Phantom Menace. The original altered the Korean genome such that one in three babies can Zerg rush from the womb. Basically, the thing is a big enough deal to have been a huge success, sales wise, no matter its quality, very much in the same vein as those rancid Padme flicks George Lucas secreted from the secret anus between folds of his neck beard prequels set in a galaxy far, far away.

But while we’re working with Star Wars franchise metaphors, might we consider: is Starcraft II more like the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition? That is, a significantly altered release of the first version rather than an entirely new experience?

Why yes, I think it might be.

Notes on “Starcraft II” and the Blizzard Paradigm

Yo, guys. Starcraft.

I bought it. Blizzard, creators of such minor blips as “World of Warcraft” and “Diablo II,” are juggernaut enough to have basically made their game releases a reflexive purchase for those of us keyed into this particular niche of pop culture. For me, and I suspect many others, the process was no more complicated than, “Hey, the new Starcraft came out a couple of days ago. My paycheck just came in. I can buy this online and have it directly download to my computer. I will do that.” Kotaku, Gawker Media’s gaming blog and the most significant practitioner of legitimate video game journalism on the web, just reported that Starcraft II sold over a million and a half copies in its first two days, which is an awful lot, especially considering it costs $60. Blizzard’s most recent core release in the same genre of game, “Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos,” took a month to achieve these same sales figures.

To give you a broader idea of why Blizzard is kind of a big fucking deal, the first Starcraft game (which came out over a decade ago) has sold over 11 million units worldwide. The gigantic “World of Warcraft” had over 11 million subscribers at the end of 2008; these subscribers pay a monthly fee of $14.99 (stateside; Europeans fork over €12.99, or about $17) for the privilege of playing the game. Though Blizzard releases these games slowly – excruciatingly so for some – each one enjoys a practically slavish following. Some still champion the simplicity of “Warcraft II,” over its sequel, for instance. It came out in 1995 for MS-DOS.

So, basically, this explains why I bought “Starcraft II,” because I sure don’t spend much time gaming anymore. Which raises a couple of questions, actually!

A worthy read: Tao Lin’s “Eeeee Eee Eeee”

Perhaps the finest book to ever feature so brazen a back cover description:

Confused yet intelligent animals attempt to interact with confused yet intelligent humans, resulting in the death of Elijah Wood, Salman Rushdie, and Wong Kar-Wai; the destruction of a Domino’s Pizza delivery car in Orlando; and a vegan dinner at a sushi restaurant in Manhattan attended by a dolphin, a bear, a moose, an alien, three humans, and the President of the United States of America, who lectures on the arbitrary nature of consciousness, truth, and the universe before getting drunk and playing poker.

And how!

Return of Bruce Wayne and a Comics Manifesto

DC’s “Return of Bruce Wayne” was released yesterday. It exceeded my expectations, and expectations were high.

This is a difficult comic to write about. It’s something like the beginning of a new age for Grant Morrison’s Batman epic that began nearly four entire years ago with issue #655. (His run on that title went on for nearly 30 issues, then weaved into the “Final Crisis” mini-series, then onto the now 12-issue long “Batman & Robin.”) “Return of Bruce Wayne” is also kind of a pseudo-sequel to “Final Crisis,” which means it’s sort of a prequel to every story ever written (anywhere). It’s a story that takes place back in time, beginning with prehistory, that has its most immediate repercussions at exactly this point in time (being issues #10-12 of the ongoing “Batman & Robin”). It’s, you know, involved.

Here’s the problem with “involved”: comic books don’t really have a vanguard of critics like films do. Readers may look to niche figures like Douglas Wolk for intellectual input, but for every one of said figures, there are thousands of fanboys that post online and serve as a kind of governing body, excreting loud opinions en masse and muddying the discourse. Sometimes these fanboys find professional work and have their birdbrained critiques elevated on a major platform, but that never serves to develop their writing to anything more than kneejerk yammering.

To put this in a more direct perspective, one of the first things I came upon while Googling “Return of Bruce Wayne” was this review, posted on a blog I’ve never heard of but for all intents and purposes no different than those I know and respect as legitimate, smart institutions. The problem is this: the aforementioned review was genuinely stupid, in the most literal sense of the word. And sure, there’s a conflict of interest here, you might think (I liked the comic, Jay Galette didn’t), but that difference in taste is not what bothers me: it’s the utter inability for many who write about this medium to do much beyond taking a work at face value and panning it. (Or, by that token, taking a work at face value and blindly praising it; these are equally horrible and ubiquitous phenomena.) Though most of my ilk love to do things like write thousand-word blog essays about how “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Watchmen” legitimized the comic book to the American mainstream, we seem unable to advance our own thoughts to match the work on display. It’s why comics don’t really get a prominent place in our media, why seeing a story in The New York Times about “Seven Soldiers of Victory” is so wild; even when people do want to do journalistic work about the funny pages, the right people and the right stories are hard to find. Comic book fans cherish a medium that is niche to begin with, and we further bury it with our inanity.

Blurf: a tale of a new kind of toothpaste

Full disclosure: when I moved into my room at NYU’s Alumni Hall from the Czech Republic this semester, the bathroom was already completely covered in mold. It was filthy – writhing, even. Sometimes I was convinced, lathering myself with blessed Dove, that spores were wafting into my limbic system from the caked shower curtain (and so forth). Anyway, I keep my toothbrush in one of those plastic containers meant for 12-year-old girls going to slumber parties and people who spend 20 hours of every day on a Boeing 787, because, you know, the hair grafted to the sink by bodily fluid.

Yeah, so, last night I was brushing my teeth and I kept thinking, “man, this just doesn’t feel fresh,” and I took my toothbrush out and kind of smelled it and thought, “yep, smells kind of funny.” I spat and replaced the brush in its plastic house, only to return to the bathroom a few minutes later with my girlfriend. “Tell me if this smells funny,” I said, pulling the toothbrush out again. I noticed then that there was totally some pus-colored (and textured) goop on some of the bristles and I was like oh fuck what is that? Then I jammed it under her nose and she didn’t really think it smelled funny but did agree that the, well, buttsauce was kind of weird and pretty disgusting, so I placed it back into the container, skeptically, not really thinking much else of it because I am a few different flavors of sleep-deprived.

When I woke up this morning, I noticed, after pulling my toothbrush out again, that there was even MORE foul jelly on the bristles and totally flipped. This time, with a few hours of sleep in the ol’ noggin, I decided to look inside the plastic container and noticed that each side of it was absolutely covered in this shit and promptly vommed myself (mentally, emotionally). Then I brushed my teeth with it anyway because, well, can’t go to an hour and a half of worthless “Research Methods” lecture with 6 hours’ worth of utter ass on my breath, right (the pus-mint combo was preferable according to my five seconds of cost-benefit analysis). Lesson learned, though. Totally bought a new toothbrush from Walgreens on the way to class, along with a 99 cent ruler, because for some reason we spent the entirety of this class (which my grandfather emigrated from Greece for, decades ago) measuring the length of various items on The New York Times’ front page.

AS IT HAPPENS: keeping your toothbrush in a closed container makes it breed hella bacteria, especially (I imagine) if said plastic container is resting near a toilet that sees constant use by two twenty-something college kids. (Also, my suitemate eats his fair share of instant ramen; with each flush, byproduct dust swirls up and, well.) So, I guess that goop was days and days of bacteria copulating in the soup of my post-brushing moisture? Horrible.

Still, the more you know!