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| Friday, January 14, 2005 04:12 AM |
| Three Is the Number of Your Fate |
 by Fëanor |
- I thank defective yeti for this hilarious mix-up, and you should, too.
- Two items of rueful game-related news. Last night we played Ticket to Ride (would you look at that--it has its own website!), a really neat, fun little train game that becomes surprisingly tense as it goes on. I spent the last half of the game standing up and shifting from one foot to the other, desperately praying to just get this one more route, damn it! Unfortunately, my final prayer fell on deaf ears, and I realized directly afterward that it was in vain anyway. Don't you hate it when you figure out what would have been a good winning strategy for a game only once you get to the end of the game and have already lost? This happens to me a lot. And by the time we play Ticket to Ride again, I'll probably have forgotten the strategy, and only remember it again by the end of that game. Sigh. But anyway, luckily I had expected to lose, as I have lost Ticket to Ride very badly every time I've played it, and I still managed to have plenty of fun. We actually spent most of game night just talking about various comic books and movies and issues in the news, which was just fine. Sometimes it's good to just get together with a bunch of other angry liberals and bitch about the state of affairs in the world.
Just as my winning strategy for Ticket to Ride came too late, a new game arrived at my house yesterday too late for game night. "Curses! Why couldn't you have come yesterday or this morning?" I thought. But luckily, there's a new game night pretty much every week, so no doubt we'll be able to try it soon. Anyway, the mystery game I'm talking about it is War of the Ring, and all I really know about it is that it's been number one at boardgamegeek.com for quite a while now, and it's a strategy game based on Lord of the Rings. But really that's all I had to know before deciding I would have to buy it. I don't know much more yet, either, as I only had time to peak in the box last night, but that peaking revealed the largest game board I've ever seen. It's actually two giant game boards that you have to lay side by side to create a huge, colorful, detailed map of Middle Earth. The box also contains many dice and little figures. I practically had to wipe the drool off of my chin.
- My final item this morning is a review of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again. This is a sequel to Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which impressed me quite a bit when I read it some years ago. Miller's work in general has been some of my favorite in comics--in fact, I'd put him up there with Alan Moore as one of the greatest comic writers of all time. In this latest batch of graphic novels that I've taken out of the library, I also have a collection of his Daredevil comics. And there's a book on Elektra, which I don't think is his, but which I wanted to read so I can know just how far off the source material the new movie is (yeah, I'll probably see it anyway; it has Jennifer Garner jumping around in a tight leather outfit with knives, fighting ninjas and wizards or something; how can I pass that up?).
But anyway, back to the subject--DK2. It's another really impressive book. I couldn't sleep last night, so I picked it up and started reading it, and found I couldn't stop. It's a page-turner. I thought at first maybe Miller had gotten too preachy and shrill, even more preachy and shrill than he'd been in the previous book, but then I realized that he was sort of parodying that shrill preachiness at the same time he was engaging in it. The book is a little bewildering that way, and in a lot of ways. First there's the plot; I found myself still a little fuzzy on its fine points even after I'd gotten to the end (although admittedly that may have had to do with the fact that I read it extremely fast late at night). And then there's the tone. The book swings from moments of solemn, thoughtful moralizing, to scenes of tense and brutal violence, to other scenes of clever parody and political and sociological satire, to yet other sequences of silly humor and ridiculous slapstick. Sometimes all of these different kinds of scenes and tones are even on the same page, scattered across it in various panels. There's a definite darkness around the edges of the whole thing; a deep cynicism about the world; a belief in the essential stupidity and brutality in human nature. And yet the book is also very hopeful, and even has a happy ending.
Sometimes all these contradicting tones and feelings and ideas clash a bit, and at times the story goes so far and seems so surreal that I was afraid Miller would give us one of those terrible, cop-out, it-was-all-only-a-dream endings. But I should have known he'd never do that. The book ends strong, and most of the time Miller manages to juggle all of his different tones and thematic conceits deftly. We are ultimately left with a really multi-faceted, interesting, and entertaining book.
The story is familiar if you've read Dark Knight Returns--it's also unfortunately all too familiar if you've been watching the news at all lately. The American government has been taken over by corrupt, repressive thugs bent on controlling the world. Society at large is either unaware or uncaring. In a horribly accurate and bitterly funny sequence, even when it turns out that the president is nothing but a computer generated image--a pretty, manufactured face shielding the real powers behind things--the public continues to support him.
But unlike the real world, Miller's is populated by superhuman villains and heroes--even if they are mostly old, crippled, or imprisoned. The bad guys in this case, and the real powers behind the scenes, are Lex Luthor and Brainiac. Under threat of the deaths of those he loves, Superman has been enslaved by these creatures, and they use him to do their bidding. Meanwhile, the Flash is trapped on a human-sized hamster wheel, powering cities cheaply with his incredible speed; the Green Lantern, rebuffed by the people of the world, has retreated to a distant corner of the universe; and Batman is dead.
Well, okay, obviously he isn't. Somehow the old guy is still kicking, and kicking hard. He finally gets fed up with the world the way it is and decides to hunt down, break out, and otherwise reactivate a bunch of his old superhero cronies and recruit them in a war against the criminals who run the government. To this end he has trained a cadre of Batpeople of various sorts. Robin from the previous book, who has now become Catgirl, is their commander, and Batman's second.
Miller pulls a Jaws on us and doesn't actually show us Batman until about half way through the book, at which point he appears in order to once again beat the living crap out of Superman. Let me tell you, there's nothing more satisfying to me than watching a grizzled, angry, sadistic old Batman punch the big blue boyscout until he's bloody. I think it's fair to say that Miller and I share a certain dislike of Superman. Yeah, he's a hero, and he's great and all, but he's just so pure and good and whitebread and, frankly, dumb. Batman is the twisted, dark little genius stomping arrogantly amongst giants--a mortal quite willing and ready to spit in the eyes of the Gods that surround him. Though the book is a cavalcade of old DC comics superheroes, Batman is the character at the heart of it--the general of this army, the conscience of this world.
Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle of DK2, the story seemed to take an even bigger jump than normal, and I realized that this copy of the book was missing a few pages. But the thing is so good, I'll probably just buy a copy anyway, and those pages will be mine.
In short, the book is definitely worth a read. Oh, and did I mention that the art is pretty fantastic? As far as I can tell, it's by somebody named Lynn Varley, who appears to be the same person who drew Return of the Dark Knight. The backgrounds have the same sketchy, abstract surreality, and the characters have the same chunky, exaggerated features--which are the perfect compliment to their chunky, exaggerated personalities.
So that's that. Rock on, everybody.
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