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.

So after 30 seconds I snatched them down, checked out, and hightailed it back home. My girlfriend was waiting, asked to see Flashpoint, went to the last couple of pages, shot the “this is huge” face and sent me on my way.

Obviously I plopped down, tore through it, and was completely overcome with emotion.

For those not in the know, Flashpoint is DC’s summer “event” book, a five-issue miniseries that takes place in an alternate timeline that Barry Allen, The Flash, has inadvertently tumbled into. Everything’s essentially a dystopic mess in the Flashpoint universe: Wonder Woman and Aquaman are locked in a bitter war that’s left much of Europe in complete ruin, Superman’s a pallid, lanky government experiment, and a young Bruce Wayne was gunned down, leading father Thomas Wayne towards a life of emotional atrophy as a decidedly angrier Dark Knight and mother Martha a startlingly demented Joker.

There’s one bright spot, however: Barry Allen’s beloved mother, savagely murdered by the nefarious Reverse-Flash in the normal DC Universe, lives on in Flashpoint. This is the stuff of pitch-perfect cosmic soap opera, a wonderful setup for a story that, if not quite on the bleeding edge of originality, manages to establish an impressive scope with high stakes.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve becomes invested in what I suppose could be called the “literary” aspects of [even superhero] comic books, the intellectual musings that drive vital works like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics, and, more recently, Grant Morrison’s Supergods. It’s undeniably true that an appreciation for the medium and interlocking parts of the form itself makes for a more fulfilling reading experience.

Marvin Lin, author of 33 1/3′s “Kid A” book, which I happen to be reading right now, pretty succinctly explains why (in reference to music) in the “Kid Adaptation” chapter (which anticipates a more thorough, probably more illuminating passage about taste that you should check out for yourself):

“… while there’s a lot to be said about who, what, when, and where we are listening, what about for how long are we listening? And how many times? I love knowing that a puzzling album might eventually be pieced together the more I listen to it… I’m not saying all music gets better over time — a lot of music gets worse, in my opinion — but listeners who stick it out for the more challenging hiccups can reap rewards and make connections that they otherwise didn’t know were possible.” (70, 71)

Basically, this is about chewing your food before you swallow, and that goes hand-in-hand with a pointed digestion of works like the above mentioned comic theory books.

But Flashpoint reminded me that, actually, there’s quite a bit of value to be found in a more straightforward but well-crafted mythological story. The TV series Lost, for example, is all high drama but nonetheless impacted viewers (including myself) in a significant way. The movie Mulholland Drive, a favorite of mine, is a stunning labyrinthine work that’s more about the audience’s interaction with the medium itself than a comprehensible “story,” but also leaves a dramatic impression. Though critics may be more likely to intellectualize one over the other, there’s not necessarily a difference in intrinsic value.

And Flashpoint, quite simply, is so excellent an epic story that it soars above the funny pages riffraff, earning a place, to me, as “something more.” Others on the vast desolation of the Internet disagree, but hey, that’s why art consumption is a personal thing.

Part of what makes Flashpoint so excellent cements exactly why DC Comics made a right choice in “rebooting” their entire line following its conclusion. The clever conceit in Flashpoint is that it takes place completely in its own, never-before-seen universe. In the opening pages, Barry Allen falls down a flight of stairs and there he is. As he attempts to return things to normalcy following the story’s climax, he winds up in the new never-before-seen universe. By the time things are underway, the old DCU is already just a memory to the Flash, mirroring exactly the reality of DC’s editorial decision to end its long-running product line for something fresh.

The deft touch to Flashpoint‘s plot is so uncharacteristic of author Geoff Johns (who just last year was penning a frankly grotesque story of superhero space zombies disemboweling the Justice League) that I can’t help but view it as a career-changing, maturing step for him that completely validates his promotion to DC Chief Creative Officer.

And I’ll admit it: the final couple of pages, in which the Flash, here completely realized as our 21st century American Hermes, delivers a note to Bruce Wayne from his dead father misted me right up. To be fair, Flashpoint #5, in an odd bit of synchronicity, arrived five years to the day after my own father died of brain cancer, but opinion-trumpeters online have pretty uniformly praised the sequence as genuinely satisfying.

The best part, of course, is that just as Flashpoint ends in the new DC Universe, Justice League #1 picks up right away. Actually set “five years ago,” in the first bit of comic book timing that’s ever actually meant anything given the ground zero element of the proceedings, Justice League begins the origin story for our familiar-but-new heroes in grand fashion. I’ve not read much in terms of what I’d consider a valid critical response to the issue – many have complained that it’s BS that the entire Justice League roster doesn’t appear in its pages (perhaps most notably, Bleeding Cool published a review right away that’s a bizarre mix of impassioned praise and hamfisted bellyaching as only a dyed-in-the-wool comic geek stereotype could articulate) – but for my money, it’s a wonderful beginning with perfect characterization, a smattering of exciting moments, and a remarkable restraint. Yes, many of the action figures remain in the toy box for now, but I’m anxious for more.

DC Comics wants this new effort to attract more customers to monthly issues. With reports that piracy is already something of a problem (for a God damn $4 publication), I don’t know how certain the future is on the business front. I do know, however, that I’m completely sold on the relaunch’s storytelling ideals. Next Wednesday, simply put, cannot come soon enough.

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.”

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.

First, I must express unbridled, even gushing excitement at the conclusion to the first major part of Grant Morrison’s Batman tale. For those unfamiliar with his work, I’m not going to go into nitty gritty of what makes it so special as I’ve done countless times before, but you can brush up on the general points of what Morrison’s all about here, go deeper down the rabbit hole here, purchase a great documentary about him here, or take maybe the best route and read “The Invisible King” in Douglas Wolk‘s truly excellent, girlfriend-friendly book Reading Comics. If I myself had to sum up Grant Morrision quickly right now, I would probably say something about how he manages incredible artistic achievements in what has traditionally (and wrongfully) been thought of as the schlockiest of mediums, often scribing psychedelic metanarratives within the unlikely realm of superheroes. A common theme in his writing is magic (most notably “chaos magic“), and it has, since about volume 2 of The Invisibles, been specifically geared towards enabling the reader to push beyond their mental boundaries and attain a sort of higher understanding and, well, positive energy. It’s an important point because, you know, the whole comic book framing wouldn’t really work if it wasn’t geared towards making people feel good about themselves, right? Superman’s not exactly brimming with angst and all that.

(Okay, I know, I can’t help it – I love the guy.)

Anyway, what might sum up what makes Grant Morrison a little different is this half-page taken from The Return of Bruce Wayne‘s sixth and final chapter, wherein the Justice League and Bat-family are dealing with a sort of inadvertently sinister,  time traveling Batman careening out of control and distorting reality:

Taken out of context, that probably all seems like a big mess, but let’s take a closer look at one particular part:

Yes, Grant Morrison has, in a mainstream Batman story, made a teen sidekick comment on the nature of the comic book medium itself, thereby drawing attention to the fact that he is, in fact, a character in a comic book. The near disintegration of the universe that exists within the story, brought about by Batman traveling through time, is represented through the disconnection and, for lack of a better term, rapidity of the panels on the page. In other words, Red Robin is seeing exactly what the reader is seeing when he asks “Is this what time looks like?” He is commenting on how the panels are breaking apart and how they are representing movement and time in the story. Because this is indeed how things work in a comic book – look at this 3-panel excerpt from a Peanuts strip for example:

The panels, in sequence, represent time and space – Snoopy, throws the ball from its position in the first panel to where it lands in the third panel, with some amount of time in-between. (If this is the sort of thing that interests you, I recommend “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” by Scott McCloud, which deals with these ideas more eloquently and to a much greater extent than I do here.)

And really, this is sort of just a verbose way of explaining that what often makes Grant Morrison comics so cool is that they do these crazy little post-modern things that are really purposed towards exploding the reader’s brains and maybe making them think just a little more about something – which, frankly, might as well be the ultimate purpose of any sort of art, right?

Anyway, that was a little off-topic but not entirely, as we’ll see in a little bit. Return of Bruce Wayne is part of the grand finale to the last four years of Batman stories Grant Morrison’s been telling. If you were to read them in sequence, you would want these books in this order:

(if we were really going to be anal about things, it might also be important to pick up 52, and possibly go as far back as Morrison’s first two collected Batman stories from way back in the day, Arkham Asylum and Gothic, but we’re not going to. Further, completionists will note that part of Grant Morrison’s run is collected in The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul; this was a 2007 “crossover” between all of the Batman books, and it was an overall mediocre event that has little bearing on Morrison’s narrative. Also, another note: I recommend “Return of Bruce Wayne” before the final book of “Batman and Robin,” mostly because I think it makes the most sense to read it before the final issue [#16], but in actuality it probably makes the most sense to read them concurrently, which is as they were released month-to-month before they were collected. Confusing, I know!)

That’s a lot of books released in a lot of time (in fact, the final two collections – Return of Bruce Wayne and Batman and Robin Must Die! haven’t even been released yet, so you’ve got to pick up back issues for now). Morrison deliberately wrote them to have self-contained chunks of story – “Batman and Son,” for instance, has two story arcs in it (three if you include the crazy, often overlooked all-prose issue of Batman), and the book itself could be viewed as its own contained unit. And at times, though it had become apparent through the narrative and through interviews with the writer himself that each series of chapters was actually weaving together to form one major plot, it wasn’t always clear where the conclusion was: “Batman R.I.P.” was ostensibly billed as the closing part for the “Black Glove” story that ran through the first three books up there, but the villain in that story returns and works in the shadowy background of all three “Batman and Robin” books before he makes his final move – he’s also shown in “Return” to be directly related to the events of Final Crisis.

If there’s one criticism I simply cannot deny about Morrison’s Batman story, it’s that it is, perhaps because of how DC chose to release it, rather difficult to follow. I mean, even the paragraph I just wrote is pretty confusing, right? (Just follow the pictures!) The intricacies and subtleties make it difficult for anyone but the most engaged to follow it completely – the volumes pictured above aren’t even numbered, and there’s no way that anyone browsing in the book store would know to pick them up in this order. On one hand, it’s pretty cool that Morrison’s written an epic that can be broken up and enjoyed in easy-to-digest modules, but on the other hand, this stuff is all so much better in context — especially the stuff like the speculative future issue (#666, in “Batman and Son”), which would seem completely random and out of place if you weren’t looking at the big picture. So, in light of that, I want to call attention to one thing that Erik Norris, who wrote the Comic Vine article linked above, got very right in his piece:

It’s not easy trying to analyze the work of comicdom’s mad genius. Coming up with a through-line to sum up Grant Morrison’s entire run on Batman has been a difficult challenge, but after racking my brain for what seems like days, I think I’ve got it: Morrison’s work on Batman has been an exercise by the writer to create a proactive reading experience for comic fans that mirrors Bruce Wayne’s quest to fill in the puzzle pieces and give explanation to the unexplainable.

That is essentially what defines this entire, sprawling narrative: Batman is doing battle, sometimes implicitly and sometimes very obviously, with “the hole in things.” Both Darkseid (GOD OF ALL EVIL who invades and temporarily conquers Earth in Final Crisis) and Dr. Hurt (also sort of a god of all evil, as it happens, here manifested in human form) make deliberate reference to this concept throughout Morrison’s work on Batman, and it is vital. Though you could understand some of these chapters as literal “Batman versus X super villain” sorts of affairs, the fact of the matter is that, in a broad sense, this is a metaphorical story about good versus evil, yes, and it is also the ultimate – the ultimate - Batman story.

I’m not the first person to call it that, but why? Some have explained it in terms of Morrison’s “everything is continuity” approach – through various means, Batman encounters most every part of his literal history at some point in these stories. And he’s basically battling a metaphor for evil the whole time rather than just, you know, the Joker or Killer Croc. Why it really is the ultimate Batman story is maybe a little simpler, though, and it’s something that Grant Morrison actually makes pretty explicit in the very, very first issue of the whole ordeal when Bruce struggles to not get lost in his Batman persona: these 8 tomes are the story of Batman Versus Himself with the goal of realizing, conquering, and evolving beyond his fundamental being. It’s why his initial enemies in this entire run are copycat Batmen who were created by the police to take over his role in the event of catastrophe (of course they all wind up criminally insane), it’s why he must struggle with being a father to the son(s) of Batman (even “Batman and Robin,” which stars former Robin Dick Grayson, is really about the atmosphere that Bruce’s absence has created), it’s why the archvillain of the entire run is related to the Wayne family and dresses like a corrupted Batman himself, and it’s why Return of Bruce Wayne takes Bruce through a sort of metaphysical journey through space and time only to have him die and come back (FINALLY, just a couple of weeks ago) as a better version of himself, ready to start Batman: Incorporated.

Whew.

I mean, clearly you have to read this stuff yourself, but let’s get back to Red Robin talking about what time looks like for just a minute: Grant Morrison has turned Batman inside out, spilled its guts out all over the vivid pages of these comic books, and created the perfect alpha-and-omega for Batman. It makes sense that there are moments when the nature of the comic book itself are examined throughout. I read somewhere once that Batman #666, a Morrison-penned issue set in the far future of the Batman mythos, was kind of a “Rosetta Stone” for his story moving into “Batman and Robin.” I’m going to take it a bit further: Morrison’s Batman, as published in the above 8 volumes, is essentially the Rosetta Stone for Batman history, 1939-2010.

Now, with Batman: Incorporated, with the demons exorcised and the super hero evolved, we’re moving into Batman 2011.

A million comic books have been billed as a “rebirth” of whatever to move issues and sell product. For once, though, the term feels legitimate.

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.

Alrawi, head of the Islamic Foundation in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second largest city, says a new mosque is necessary. The Muslim population has swelled to around 1,000 according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” released last November, and many will drive up to 75 miles just to participate in services at the mosque in Brno, an unassuming building plopped in the middle of a glum residential lot.

But as with before, he faces opposition from Czech political parties in a situation all too familiar to Muslims in Europe, whose struggles recently reached a fever pitch in the international media when Switzerland voted to ban the building of minarets, the iconic spires that stand tall outside traditional mosques.

“We are not happy with this,” said Alrawi of opposition from political parties against the mosque. Recently, Alrawi has faced resistance from the Czech National Party and Christian Democratic Party, all because of the Islamic Foundation’s plans to build another mosque in Brno.

In a move to combat the building of the mosque, which the National Party, a far-right group, reportedly decried as a step towards “Islamization” of the Czech Republic, referring to the fear that the nation would one day become an Islamic state, a small group of protesters recently gathered outside the mosque to distribute thousands of anti-Islam leaflets to passersby.

For Alrawi, the situation smacks of what the Islamic Foundation faced years ago when they first planned the building of a mosque in Brno.

“It was a long procedure,” said Alrawi. “It took two and a half or three years to allow this small building. A petition was signed against our plans to build the mosque.”

Brno’s mosque was finally built in 1998, but it faced staunch opposition from the Christian Democratic Party. The Czech Republic’s second mosque was built in Prague under similar circumstances a year later. However, it wasn’t until five years after that, in 2004, that Islam was officially recognized by the Czech government, which entitles the religion to state funding.

It’s 2009, and once again the Christian Democrats have stepped between the Islamic Foundation and a mosque.

“The time is not ripe,” said Cyril Svoboda, the chairman of the Czech Christian Democratic Party to Ceske Noviny, a Czech news publication. Svoboda, and the Christian Democrats by extension, take issue with what they perceive as fundamental values of the Islamic faith, which include, according to Cesky Noviny, the “death penalty for unfaithful women and renegades from Islam,” and the idea that “Muslims need not obey anyone who does not preach Islam”

“The Muslim community cannot [expect] our support [for] extending its space in Brno if these things keep appearing,” said Svoboda.

The flurry of mudslinging and prejudices are hardly unheard of in the European Union; Switzerland banned minarets, France has an official moratorium on Islamic veils in public schools, and Germany birthed an anti-Islam political party in 2008 after a proposal was made for the construction of a new mosque in the city of Cologne.

But the political posturing may belie what, for Alrawi, is actually a fairly comfortable situation. After leaving Iraq to study engineering, Alrawi came to appreciate the freedom granted by the Czech Republic. Though bureaucrats balked at the prospect of visibly representing Islam on the streets of Brno and Prague, the faith was worshipped in rented hostel rooms and apartments without fear of persecution, a compromise that worked for the small population of Muslims that immigrated in large part to pursue education in subjects like medicine.

Overall, Alrawi notes, “we are very, very happy with our position in the Czech Republic, and our human rights.” Islam’s profile has been raised such that even native Czechs, that famously insular and unreligious people, are converting.

“We are not bringing Islam to the people,” said Emir Omic, an imam in Prague, “they are coming to us.”

If the natives are growing more comfortable with Islam, a notion that hits the occasional speed bump (the affixation of a butchered pig’s head to the Prague mosque earlier this year, for instance), the question remains: what makes European officials so touchy about the Islamic faith?

A large component may be the rash of terrorist action carried out by Islamic extremists throughout the first decade of the 21st century.

“The presence of 9/11 was there,” said Alrawi of the motivation behind the Christian Democratic Party’s protests against the Islamic Foundation. When attacks hit European soil, as they did in the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the London bombings of 2005, which were executed by four British Muslims, skepticism towards Islam was bolstered even further.

But Islam has been a presence in Europe for far longer than the past decade, as has anti-Muslim discrimination. The reasons for that discrimination, however, can vary from country to country.

“In the west, it’s always an issue of radical rights, but that’s not the issue [in the Czech Republic],” said Karel Muller, a professor of contemporary European culture at New York University in Prague. “It’s more identifying against ‘traditional others,’ like homosexuals and Roma, not so much immigrants, as it is in France and Germany.”

The Muslim population in countries like France in Germany is considerably more embroiled in the nation’s history, which creates a different kind of tension than there is in the Czech Republic. While Czech society is acquainted with Alrawi, an immigrant who came to study engineering and one of a thousand Muslims in the country, Germans may be more familiar with descendants of Muslim workers imported in the 1960s to do menial labor, where any individual would only constitute an infinitesimal fraction of the nationwide Muslim population, now over four million.

“In Germany, there’s second or third generations, so they face an identity crisis,” explains Muller. “They tend to identify more with regional identities. They say, ‘I’m just a Berliner.’ We don’t have this third generation who say they should be fully fledged Czechs.”

In light of that, Muller says it’s hard to predict what the future will hold for Czech Muslims.

“Czechs are very skeptical about religious affiliation,” said Muller.  “Tolerance is not a virtue. It means, ‘you don’t mind.’ It’s indifference.”

What this indifference will ultimately mean at the start of the next decade for Alrawi’s mosque and the Islamic Foundation, the pig’s head, the indignant Christian Democrats and National Party members, of course, remains to be seen.

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.

Now, Starcraft II is of course its own precious, sovereign entity. But then, so was Return of the Jedi: The Special Edition after George Lucas beefed up the performance of Sy Snootles and the Max Rebo Band at Jabba’s Palace. Because of that sequence, and because of the herd of CG banthas, and the beaked Sarlacc, and whatever, the Special Edition of Return of the Jedi is very much its own, new thing, even though it shares, with the 1983 original, the Battle of Endor, Darth Vader hurling Emperor Palpatine into a reactor core, and C-3PO making AT-AT noises in front of a baby ewok. (Side note: still very upset about the Sy Snootles sequence.)

What I’m trying to say is, after spending a good amount of time (by my standards) with Starcraft II, I don’t think anyone can really deny that its $60 cost does not buy a revolutionary new title, but rather a fresh, if a little boring, single-player campaign, a graphical update, and a genuinely very good Battle.net overhaul. Starcraft II, at the core, is still very beholden to the legacy left by Starcraft 1. On the bright side, though, this means things work out much better than they did for the Star Wars Trilogy.

My initial inclination is to think that Blizzard really couldn’t get away with shaking things up too much. Starcraft is a monolithic force that continues to be worshiped by a seriously devoted fanbase more than a decade after its release. Leaping from Warcraft II to Warcraft III really wasn’t a big deal; no one was really so devoted to Tides of Darkness or Beyond the Dark Portal, to my knowledge. When Warcraft III came out, Blizzard stayed true to the title’s genre roots, but that’s about it. Reign of Chaos was a complete upheaval of a franchise that was rendered all but completely stale by (ah, here it comes) the original Starcraft. It kicked the formula in the balls by introducing not only a diverse set of “hero” characters for the player to command in both single and multiplayer, but two new playable races (not to mention a thorough reworking of the two existing ones). In short, the gameplay was about as different from Warcraft II as it possibly could have been while still remaining familiar to those who had been fans of the series for so long.

This was good. It meant that Blizzard managed a sequel that truly advanced the series, but it also meant that Warcraft III was different enough that someone could, theoretically, want to pick up Warcraft II at a LAN every now and again. It also meant that the original Starcraft, which came out five years beforehand, could remain relevant, as Warcraft III’s smaller-scale gameplay was very much a different beast. For a time, Blizzard achieved an impressive balance with its canon. Warcraft III and Starcraft were both great, competitive, fun titles that were implicitly linked through genre much in the same way that Diablo II and World of Warcraft were.

Then comes Starcraft II. It is very, very similar in design to its predecessor. There are no new races, and really, no new significant elements to the gameplay. Sure, Blizzard added some new units and things like explodable debris on the battlefield, but the way that you play the game is largely unchanged. (Some units remain absent from multiplayer altogether, for instance.) It’s like this: Blizzard added a unit to the Protoss army called the Colossus that essentially sums up the extent of the shaking-it-uppedness to the Starcraft formula. It is really big and impressive for a ground unit (to showcase the shiny new graphics), which means that it can climb up cliffs and walls, and that anti-aircraft weaponry can target it. So, in essence, Blizzard designed two new elements (the ability for a ground unit to climb cliffs, the ability for a ground unit to be targeted by anti-aircraft weapons) so that the Colossus could function… exactly like an old-fashioned air unit.

Besides the side-step nature of the game’s new units, a lot of Starcraft’s problems are still weirdly present in Starcraft II. Your army cannot steer itself to save its life; units get caught on ledges, in foliage, behind your own buildings, which, really, is utterly unforgivable when you consider this shit was a problem in the first Starcraft and they had 12 years to fix it. There’s no way to automatically arrange your army so that, say, your medics remain behind your marines rather than in front of them, covered in acidic Zerg goo. Advanced players probably have no problem achieving the ACTIONS PER MINUTE required to simultaneously run their base and launch a successful attack that entails constant monitoring of their weaker units, but it is incredibly frustrating and dumb that Blizzard couldn’t implement some sort of formation system (or better A.I.) to streamline this stuff a bit for those of us that aren’t robots. (Side note: “actions per minute” is a very real thing. Look at a clip from the documentary The Hax Life to immediately demonstrate why this game is both an impressive and utterly depressing thing at the same time.)

These possibly sound like middling issues, but when we’re talking about the advancement of a franchise, they mean a lot. Addressing these glaringly obvious issues from the first game would probably have been enough to make Starcraft II stand out as a more clear cut success. There are new issues, of course, but they’re certainly more forgivable. On an average computer (the only sort that anyone I’ve talked to about SCII has), the game either looks awful or runs at a pace I might describe as “plodding”; on my shiny new MacBook, I’ve experienced upwards of two minutes worth of load times before missions, which just sucks. Though my video settings are such that the game looks pretty good and runs well, the first several seconds of every match are always laggy on my side, which means that my opponent has, what, 15 seconds or so to get a head start? It’s time that really does mean something in competitive play. But can I really fault Blizzard for not completely optimizing their brand new game for a MacBook? I guess not. It still runs, despite relatively frequent crashes, and I’m sure it looks sexy on a high-end machine. But, you know, I bet a lot of their business is not coming from people with high-end machines. Whatevz.

ANYWAY, I don’t think I’ve answered the question yet: is Starcraft II good? Of course it is “good.” It is not, for my money, more good than Starcraft and its expansion, Brood War, which you can get as a package for $15. Blizzard played it safe with the gameplay, probably so as to not alienate the Starcraft legions, and that’s just how it is. Starcraft II’s campaign adds a whole lot of garbage – unit upgrades! branching paths! – but is ultimately a less compelling experience (so far) than Warcraft III was. (Maybe that’s just because of the immense amount of loading I’m subjected to for the sake of hearing the cookie cutter cast explain and re-explain the slim happenings of the plot.) I mean, I’ll be honest here: I haven’t finished the game, haven’t poured in dozens of hours, but shouldn’t the start be the most compelling part? As I said in my last post, I do not have the patience for my video games to grow into a fun experience like some fucking potted plant. Pac-Man had no exposition, for Christ’s sake.

Here is why you will buy Starcraft II, though, and why it is actually worth buying if you see yourself as someone that will continue to be interested in Blizzard’s products: Battle.net. They really did a good job with that shit, and it’s pretty obvious why. Starcraft II will replace Starcraft as the new standard, just as Diablo III will replace Diablo II, and World of Warcraft will continue to fester and mutate for all time. They will all be linked, so you can track your friends’ statuses and communicate no matter what game they’re playing. There are achievements, points, and rewards that make pretty much everything in Starcraft II worth doing. Competitive multiplayer is now meticulously tracked, and because every individual’s profile is such a repository of information, Battle.net feels like a nerdy sports league, which is good. It’s actually pretty clever what Blizzard did: vastly improve the social aspect of Starcraft to ensure that everyone who has even a remote interest in multiplayer will have to buy the new titles while doing very little to impact the way the game plays.

This, combined with the facelift, would have been a wonderful value if Starcraft II cost, say, $30 or $40 instead of $60. And that seems like a silly thing to say — you wouldn’t judge the artistic achievement of a movie based on how much the theater charged you for a ticket — but there’s really no avoiding the fact that this is a lot of money for a product that, in terms of gameplay, does not really feel like a tremendous improvement on its 12-year-old predecessor. At the same time, Starcraft is one of the best games EVAR and I suppose it was a tall order to top it; at least Blizzard has essentially matched it while improving on the multiplayer infrastructure. From that standpoint, the game is good, and it is worth buying. Will its sequels, already planned and titled (“Heart of the Swarm” and “Legacy of the Void”) be worth buying since we already have all of the new Battle.net stuff, though? I sincerely doubt it unless Blizzard gets the balls to throw something daring in there (or fix the litany of rusty old problems held over from the first Starcraft; then again, doing so in the sequels but not the first Starcraft II release would be infuriating in its own way).

At the end of the day, Starcraft II is what it is: pretty much what everybody expected. Nothing more, nothing less. In a way, you have to marvel at Blizzard’s ability to literally manufacture a classic at this point, but that’s what they’ve done here.

It’s simple, really: is that worth $60 to you?

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!

The days – and nights – of my pudgy adolescence are long behind me. No more Entenmann’s donuts washed down with Full Throttle, one of those battery acid-colored energy drinks. No more 12-hour streaks spent on “Final Fantasy VII.” I work full time as a reporter now (meaning… weird hours) or have packed semesters at NYU. I have a lovely girlfriend who could not be less interested in games outside of Galaga, and I have a fairly active social life. Plus, comic books. There is very little time in my life for video games. Frankly, there isn’t a ton of interest either.

I’m definitely not at a place where I have a strong drive to invest hundreds of hours in a virtual world. I keep track of games peripherally, generally through Kotaku and the absolutely wonderful, intelligent reviews on Action Button, but actual playtime is pretty minimal. The recent “Batman: Arkham Asylum” ultimately took me about six months to complete, and some complained that it was too short. And certainly, if I was someone whose primary interest is video games, Arkham’s dozen-or-so hours worth of story would probably seem a little sparse, yes.

But I’m not that someone. That’s probably why I think “Canabalt,” a flash game that’s also available for the iPod Touch and iPhone, numbers high among some hypothetical bull shit list of the 21st century’s greatest achievements in gaming. It is simple, artistically sound, fun and fast. Maybe I don’t need my games to be artistically sound, all things considered, but I sure as hell need them to fulfill those other criteria. That’s probably why “Final Fantasy XIII” was an almost unthinkable challenge for me. Universally criticized for taking 20-30 hours to become Something That Is Fun™, FFXIII represents all that I no longer have time for. When it game out, I wanted to say, “hurgh, Final Fantasy twelve was so amazing and now they shovel us this garbage,” but frankly, there is no way I would play through FFXII now, either. In a sense, it’s kind of too bad, as I’ve long been a spirited fan of the series. I sold some old titles to get FFXIII when it came out with kind of a half-mast excitement and got so bogged down in the early stuff that I fled back to my 360 mainstays Street Fighter II HD Remix and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 — fighting games that can be picked up for a few minutes at a time. (To think I’ve played through Final Fantasy Tactics five times!)

This would all seem like some bittersweet epitaph for my youth if I wasn’t a happy, functional person now that believes games can be awesome without requiring literal days of your life. I suppose this viewpoint makes me a “casual gamer,” if that, in the eyes of the globules posting on, like, Smash Boards and IGN. Generally, casual gamers are disdained, because they drive sales up for Wii Sports Resort, which certain people creatures blame for the failure of whatever number-crunch starring a little boy with tits Atlus is publishing this year.

And that, really, is a bunch of garbage, because I still want a deep and crunchy experience with my games, I just don’t want to spend a zillion hours of my life on getting the game to become fun. I want a bloody fucking filet mignon, not some eight course slog that culminates in pheasant gizzard on greens or whatever. Christ.

I think this is what Tim Rogers wants, too, and he plays games better than you do, and is, like, a luminary or something, and more of us should value his opinion, because I probably would never have written all of this without devouring his work. (Blowjobs cease here.)

So, here’s the point. I bought “Starcraft II” because I think, based on my experience with Blizzard, which has made a few of these games that everyone buys, it can deliver a very fulfilling experience that will keep it relevant for the next 12 years. I will play it a total of two times this week, after work and when I am not with my girlfriend or at a bar, and then, maybe, a lot between August 10th and the 24th when I am visiting my family in Chicago with very little to do, provided the internet and my Grant Morrison library do not prove more interesting.

If Blizzard cannot deliver fun with these constraints, it is their fault, not mine. I guess I’ve lost $60 either way, though!

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!

“Eeeee Eee Eeee” is a winding book of alienated youth and modern despair (sometimes gleaned through moribund, talking hamsters), the sort of subject matter we don’t really need to see more of, at least not in its typical iterations. We do, I think, need to see more books that are written like this, and these books (referring… to this book) need to see a bigger audience.

Some of the reviews I’ve stumbled upon for “Eeeee Eee Eeee” have been kind of messy and nonsensical. That’s probably because this book is God damn strange (in many ways). Does saying such mark me as, uh, aggressively plebeian? There’s a sequence wherein the “main” character Andrew drives a dolphin to Target, you know. Here’s a taste:

The dolphin goes into the center of a circular clothing rack and quietly cries.

Andrew looks around.

He goes home.

The dolphin cries a while then buys a steak knife.

The dolphin goes home.

It looks in the mirror.

It puts the tip of the steak knife perpendicular to its neck and grips the handle hard.

It stares in the mirror.

It puts on a jacket, takes a plane to Hollywood, and finds Elijah Wood.

‘Come somewhere with me,’ the dolphin says.

‘Can I get a river ride?’ Elijah says.

‘Hold onto my flippers.’

Elijah climbs the dolphin’s back.

‘You are fucking stupid. Hold on when we get to the river,’ the dolphin says. ‘Not in the fucking parking lot.’

Then they go to an island cave and the dolphin clubs Elijah Wood to death. A bear enters dragging Sean Penn’s corpse, which “makes little coconut sounds against the cave floor.” When we meet the President at the book’s “climax,” he says things like “Now I’m the president. I have no human preconceptions, because I’m from a different galaxy. Listen to me, since I’m the ruler. You chose me. People need to process what I say. I’m the — I’m the fucking president,” and “how do you know if an action will increase or decrease net pain and suffering in the universe from now until the end of time? You can’t know. Impossible. You don’t know if drawing your friend a picture will or will not cause fifty thousand years of suffering to ten million organisms on Alpha Centauri one billion years from now.” His cell phone makes “coconut sounds” when it rings.

Most connections in this book are kind of like that – specific cues that discreetly recall these sort of bizarre, abstract ideas that occur elsewhere in this story about young people feeling terrible things. When you pass the novel’s 32nd page, you discover that you are now on page 153. Page 184 turns into page 65. You will read on from that point until you arrive linearly at page 153 again. And then the book continues and finishes on page 211. There are no pages 33 – 64.

I hope this is not the result of a specific printing error, because – egg on my face – I decided this dilapidated structure had LITERARY SIGNIFICANCE. It mirrors quite nicely the bored confusion and aimlessness of “Eeeee Eee Eeee”‘s cast. You don’t really understand what’s happening at first, but you roll with it because the prose is gripping, because the book doesn’t make sense in a way that doesn’t really matter, because each page is ostensibly kind of the same as most other pages. But when you are forced to revisit the pages after trudging through the bulk of “Eeeee Eee Eeee”‘s surreal mess, they’re re-contextualized and pack an emotional punch that was purposefully vacant previously. It’s really a nice little experiment that reminded me of “Mulholland Drive” in some ways. And since that’s a recent favorite movie, it stands to reason that this is bound to be a recent favorite book.

In any case, this is a short, razor sharp piece of catharsis for anyone (I imagine) that’s found themselves disaffected in the 21st century. “Eeeee Eee Eeee” is often hilarious – sort of in a grim way that you think twice about, sometimes – but ultimately poignant in satisfying can’t-put-your-finger-on-it fashion. It’s a quick read. You ought to try it.

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.

Jay Galette, in the above-linked review, says things like “nothing happens” and “apparently getting hit by the Omega Beams leaves you all types of messed up because Bruce doesn’t really say anything intelligible the entire issue, all of his words just run together,” which is going to sound like complete mumbo jumbo to many of you, but bear with me as this is important. First, the assertion that “nothing happens” is completely idiotic. It’s false. It’s hard to even address. A lot of things happen in this comic, especially in reference to “Final Crisis” and “Batman & Robin,” both comics wherein a lot of things happen. In “Return of Bruce Wayne,” these things don’t happen in a lavish setting or over a great span of time. The story is simple. But this does not mean that “nothing happens.”

And now the “omega beams.” Brace yourselves: Mr. Galette is referencing the “Omega Sanction,” which Darkseid (the lord of all darkness and a literal evil god; just look at the bastard) used on Bruce Wayne in the pages of “Final Crisis.” Grant Morrison, the writer of most everything referenced in this post, has used this device in two of his major works: first in the “Mister Miracle” story in “Seven Soldiers of Victory,” then later in Crisis. It’s been used both times as an attack from Darkseid on a hero that inflicts “the death that is life,” a metaphysical journey through time and space that basically has the hero live an infinite number of lives. In “Mister Miracle,” the titular hero escaped this effect and came back out in his normal timeline and dimension a mere number of seconds after being exposed to it. (But of course, the clever twist is that Mister Miracle had the imprint of these infinite lived lives on his soul even if basically no “real” time passed; it’s sort of this Slaughterhouse-Five notion of becoming “unstuck in time” and totally vulnerable to the power of the abstract.)

The specifics of the Omega Sanction are hazy, but they deserve to be to keep things exciting. Certain comic book readers can’t handle this. They need precise “continuity” and explanations in what they read. They spurn metaphor and subtlety. Which is certainly their prerogative, but they find themselves with a Morrison-penned work and don’t know what to do with it. So they criticize. It strikes me as unjust. This is not to say that I think that Grant Morrison (and his contemporaries) should not ever have to endure scrutiny and criticism or that all of his work is perfect. He may be my favorite writer, but I have read several cogent arguments against pretty much every one of his works. These criticisms keep me engaged. They keep me interested. They further my thought.

Which is obviously the point of criticism to begin with, and why it’s so deplorable that comic book criticism, broadly speaking, just hasn’t arrived yet.

Galette, in talking about the “omega beams,” fails to look beyond the obvious. It is true that Bruce Wayne, after emerging from the primordial Batcave, has speech bubbles that are garbled nonsense. But it’s also true that the cavemen he encounters have speech bubbles that are comprised of perfect (if base) English. Might Morrison have made this deliberate choice to play upon the expectations of the reader and communicate how alien Bruce Wayne has become as a result of the Omega Sanction? Perhaps.

It’s not even that subtle: at one point in the comic, Superman comes out of the sky (for an assuredly elaborate reason that has yet to be fully explained but will be in the upcoming “Vanishing Point” series; not important) and basically flat out says “Bruce Wayne is fucked up because of this shit and doesn’t even know who he is anymore!” Grant Morrison does that to make the comic accessible and to develop plot, but the meat and potatoes here is the writing and art working in beautiful unison to create a distinct feeling of unease that puts the reader in the title character’s shoes. In a metaphorical sense. While a reader who doesn’t want to bother even considering these things might look at a panel of Bruce splayed out in front of a massive dead prehistoric bat and think “hur, nothing is happening here,” the fact of the matter is that panel terrified me. That is some freaky, good shit! But it might require some cognition to have impact.

At the end of the day, I don’t really care how people enjoy their comics. Certainly not everyone needs to pick up a Batman comic and approach it as literature. But those that are going to write about comics should at least take them seriously. “Return of Bruce Wayne” may be difficult to write about, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

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!