Most people have experienced text adventures (also known as interactive fiction) in some way: the phrase "you are likely to be eaten by a grue" still strikes fear into many hearts. The same way a well-written novel can conjure up detailed and engrossing pictures in the mind of a reader, so, too, can a good text adventure.

The first experiment with interactive fiction, ADVENT (or Colossal Cave Adventure), and the first commercial text adventure, Adventureland, were the model for future games of this format. Both were fantasy games with increasingly widening worlds to explore. From there, though, one company dominated the text adventure market: Infocom.

In addition to their humor, their unconventional packaging (including "feelies," odd little artifacts from the game), and their innovative interface, Infocom also developed a reputation for creating large and strange virtual worlds. They also inspired independent creators to take up the mantel of creating text-based worlds. Here are some of the most expansive and iconic of those worlds.

Zork

The first version of Zork was written in the late 70's, but since then, the world of Zork has expanded into something giant and complex. The game is divided into three parts, all set in the vast Zork universe. In part 1, throughout your quest to collect treasures and become the Dungeon Master, you explore a fiendishly complex maze, an ancient ruined temple, a portion of the "Land of the Dead," and a flood control dam, all part of a great Underground Empire.

An that's all just part 1. Parts 2 and 3 take you to more mazes, a carousel, a volcano, a museum, an immense "Land of Shadows," and more, encountering wizards, thieves, and the infamous grue. The tone of the games is lighthearted and full of jokes. The combined effect makes the Zork trilogy totally engrossing, one of the first fully immersive virtual worlds. (Play part 1 here)

Bureaucracy

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams worked closely with Infocom to create two different games. The first, and more well known, was based off of his famous Hitchhiker series, but the second was set in an entirely different, entirely scarier world.

It's called Bureaucracy, and in it, you are a confused citizen trying to file a change of address card. This simple task spirals into a complex, infuriating adventure in a fully formed world disconcertingly similar to the real one. In the world of Bureaucracy, your lunch order is lost due to a computer crash, your mail is scattered throughout the various houses you visit, you are almost eaten by a tribe of cannibals, and you eventually enlist the help of a hacker to finally get your address changed.

The thing that makes the world of Bureaucracy so engrossing is that it starts as a routine exploration of the town you find yourself in, but it quickly develops into a giant web of confusion and manipulation. It feels a little like waking up and finding yourself in a parallel world where everyday tasks take a SWAT team to accomplish.

Trinity

Trinity opens on a quiet English park about to be blasted by a nuclear explosion. Your job is to escape into a parallel universe of sorts and explore the mystery of how the bomb came to be launched at the park that day. What follows is a journey through nuclear test sites of the past and future and the surreal landscapes of another dimension, a sort of speculative history and future of the development of nuclear weapons.

Trinity is an unabashedly political game. It was released in 1986, and it's a commentary on the nuclear age. But it's also an exploration of a strange dimension with it's own rules, a blend of fiction and reality. Figuring out these rules means fully delving into Trinity's strange world.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

In a strange experiment with the virtual worlds of text adventures, A Mind Forever Voyaging presents a laboratory creating its own simulated virtual world. This research team has created a virtual city to model a new plan for economic and social development. You control an artificial intelligence named PRISM, and your job is to delve into the virtual town to observe conditions under this new plan.

The game progresses through years in the simulated city, and you observe the slow growth of dystopia. It's an unconventional entry in the text adventure canon. There are very few puzzles and the ultimate goal seems merely to observe and learn from the failures of the research team. The game essentially presents you with a declining world for you to explore and try to understand.

Curses

With the fall of Infocom in the late 80's, text adventures and interactive fiction seemed to be on the decline. But there was a minor resurgence in the format not long after. Graham Nelson's 1993 game, Curses, is considered a standout in that resurgence.

In Curses, you are a wealthy Englishman searching through the attic of your recently inherited house for a map. Of course things get complex from there, but the bulk of the richness of the environment comes from the clearly carefully conceived mansion, Meldrew Hall. In exploring the house, it seems to come alive with its own history. Curses is worth checking out for this section alone. (Play it here)

These games, among others, show the power of text to develop immersive and complex virtual worlds.

Further reading: The Cursor Is Your Friend In Scifi Text Adventure Games

The series explores the roles Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman play in the DC universe by examining what happens when they are removed. Trinity delves into unapologetically mystical territory as it posits the three heroes as representatives of essential cosmic principles that underpin the Earth (and, by extension, the entire multiverse). The concepts they represent can be articulated in a number of ways - truth/justice/the American way and day/night/earth are just two combinations suggested - but they stand for something that is fundamentally good about the world.

Their magical removal from reality at the hands of the villainous trio of Morgaine Le Fey, Despero, and Enigma (who is, well, enigmatic) radically reshapes the world into one barely held together by the older heroes Carter Hall (Hawkman), Jay Garrick (the Flash), and Alan Scott (Green Lantern), who have marshaled the world's superheroes into the Justice Society International, sworn to keeping the peace and maintaining security at any cost. It's a world where the idealism of Superman has had to give way to mere pragmatism, and one that is vulnerable to the further machinations of Morgaine Le Fey, who seeks to attain godhood and rule the world.

There's plenty more going on, only some of which can be summarized easily. Krona, the renegade Oan immortal obsessed with learning the secrets of the universe, wishes to communicate with planetary intelligences. Green Lantern John Stewart has become infected with a super-intelligent alien parasite from the antimatter universe. The Crime Syndicate enlists the begrudging aid of the Justice League to save their Earth and its oppressed citizenry. An alien convict is desperate to regain his honor after accidentally killing a civilian. A Tarot card reader discovers she is connected to the soul of the world itself, making her a prime target for the upstart trinity.

On the altered Earth, Sir Alfred Pennyworth, late of MI5, recruits five others, from thuggish gangster Richie Grayson to sensationalist TV pundit Lois Lane, who share vague memories of the lost heroes to go on a quest to another universe, where the heroes have become an actual divine trinity. Heroes like Triumph and Tomorrow Woman must face the possibility that, should the true reality be restored, they would go back to being dead, while Hawkman wonders whether there is anywhere in the entire cosmos where he is truly meant to be.

There's a ton of stuff to unpack here, as befits a story that runs well over 1000 pages, and it's all interesting material. The epic length gives creator Kurt Busiek and cowriter Fabian Nicieza the necessary space to take a tricky metaphysical concept and make it concrete, which they do with aplomb. In a sense, the threat they're dealing with - a fundamental change to the nature of reality - is very similar to that which Grant Morrison explored in Final Crisis, but they have over seven times as much time to properly unfold their narrative, which makes for far more readily comprehensible reading.

This is a story that's equal parts personal and cosmic, and hundreds of characters get their own little moments, from Ragman to Black Adam to the self-declared alien tyrant Kanjar Ro. The minor hero Gangbuster, who protects Tarot as she becomes aware of her cosmic abilities and comes to her aid time and again, provides an everyman's perspective that keeps the potentially abstract stakes relevant and relatable. It's a sign of great writing when Busiek and Nicieza handle gang warfare in inner city Los Angeles just as nimbly as they do a godlike being searching for ultimate knowledge.

Busiek also makes some great choices to fill out the supporting cast - fans of James Robinson's run on Starman (which I am, since I'm a fan of things that are awesome) will get a kick out of seeing Opal City's own Charity O'Dare, who becomes the heroes' leading mystic once Tarot is captured. Kurt Busiek is well-known as one of the half dozen or so walking comics encyclopedias that DC keeps on staff, and it shows as he crafts a story steeped in the rich history of the DCU without ever drowning in gratuitous continuity references.

What the story arguably lacks is, of all things, enough Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. This is by design, as Trinity is less interested in exploring their relationships with each other as it is pondering their mythology and considering what they really mean to the DC universe. The best way to do that is to see what happens once they're gone, but it's worth acknowledging that they don't necessarily feel like the main characters in their own story (if I had to choose one person, I'd argue this is really Hawkman's story, but that's certainly up for debate).

The story isn't quite perfect, but most of my problems are quibbles. Krona is a tricky character to write, as his unimaginable power makes it difficult to really set up a fair fight against him. The climactic showdown between Krona and the godly versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman veers a bit between an epic clash and a minor nuisance for Krona. Much like with Superboy-Prime in other recent DC stories, there were times when fighting Krona seemed to take Trinity into Prince of Space territory. (For those who don't remember that particular MST3K entry, most of the fight scenes in Prince of Space entail the title hero patiently reminding his enemies that their weapons have no effect on him.) Ultimately, it's almost impossible to deliver a completely satisfying final battle after forty-five issues of setup, but Busiek and Nicieza just about pull it off.

And then there's the art. Trinity marks Mark Bagley's debut with DC Comics, and from the first issue he feels right at home. His drawing style is crisp, clear, and a joy to look at, but more to the point he simply nails the personalities of the characters he draws. I found his interpretations of Lois Lane and Alfred Pennyworth particularly memorable, but there's really not a single character he fails to capture. The rotating backup team of Scott McDaniel, Tom Derenick, and Mike Norton offers styles that contrast well with Bagley's. The various art styles ably hit the sweet spot between being too blandly interchangeable and being too jarringly different, and Trinity is well-served by the artistic variety.

When I started getting back into comics about two years ago, it was massive, universe-spanning stories, from Crisis on Infinite Earths to 52, that really showed me the unique ability of comics to craft stories on a scale that arguably surpasses any other medium, and I found the more mythical undertones of DC made it the better-suited of the two publishers for these sorts of tales. Trinity is probably the biggest and most epic superhero story I've ever read, and it's certainly one of the best. After all the problems of Countdown and Final Crisis, Trinity shows DC can still pull off both weekly series and metaphysical epics, particularly when they're done simultaneously.

Click through to check out our interview with Kurt Busiek, who is his usual illuminating self as he delves into the behind the scenes story of this massive undertaking.

How much of the story did you have in mind when you started, and how much came into place as you went along? What were some of the biggest changes to the story from original conception to finished product?

Once we actually worked out the story, what we had was a fairly loose outline that covered the high points, and then I'd outline the first act more tightly, and we'd work from that until it was nearly done, then I'd outline the second act more tightly, we'd work from that, and then of course the third. So we had the advantage of knowing where we were going, but the freedom of having a fairly sketchy roadmap, one that could accommodate new discoveries and opportunities that came up as we went along. So I don't think there were any flat-out "major changes" from the original conception — we delivered on that original outline pretty well — but there was a lot that came up while we were under way that we were able to incorporate.

The whole Tomorrow Woman arc, for example, wasn't in the original outline, it just came up along the way, and it worked, so we went with it.

This was the third DC weekly series, following 52 and Countdown, both of which had featured fairly large writing and drawing teams. Trinity, on the other hand, had a much smaller crew, with only you and Fabian Nicieza as your cowriter on the backup stories on the writing front and pretty much only Mark Bagley and the team of Tom Derenick, Scott McDaniel, and Mike Norton handling the art. How did it prove possible to pull off a weekly series for an entire year without delays with such a relatively small creative team?

In some ways it was easier than with a larger group, I imagine — because our creative team was small and focused, it wasn't as much of a headache to juggle different visions and schedules and such. I think the 52 crew had weekly conference calls, across I don't know how many time zones between Grant and the west coast guys. Fabian and I probably talked more often, but there were only two of us. All we had to do was get on the phone, and bang, writer-team conference call. It's a lot easier. And Fabian was always ready to talk stuff over, to make suggestions, to get me past logjams.

The other half was focus — Mark, Geoff, Grant and Greg were all juggling a pretty full plate along with 52, as were the guys who wrote COUNTDOWN, but I was working on TRINITY and ASTRO CITY and a very few other things. Fabian had more to juggle, between TRINITY, a few other comics assignments and his not-inconsiderable outside-comics work, but it was still kept lean enough that he had the time to focus on TRINITY.

Same for the artists — if you look at how much other work they were doing outside TRINITY, it adds up to an impressive but manageable workload for all of them. Everyone was pretty focused. The miracle was Mark Bagley, of course. He was the only one who wasn't doing anything but TRINITY, and he had a hellacious workload — 12 pages a week — but not only is he fast, he had the other quality that kept us on track: The ability to put ass in chair for long hours and do the work. Regardless of the distractions, the whole TRINITY team focused on the work and got it done when it needed to be done. And there were plenty of distractions — from buying and moving into a new house to deaths in the family and other emergencies — but everyone had committed to this schedule, and they did the work. So credit Mike Carlin, as well, for knowing how to pick a team of guys who'd all do that without fail. And for keeping us moving, getting us answers, support, encouragement, every time we needed it and without delays. I've worked on books where I'd turn in a plot and it wouldn't get approved by the editor and sent off to the artist for two weeks or more. In Mike's case, it was rare that something came in and didn't get turned around within two _hours_. A plot comes in, it was read immediately. An outline that needed approval would get it that day, or get requests for changes. We could work steadily because there weren't delays on the DC end.

And on that score, I'll add that it was a miracle that we didn't have to tie in to the other big events of the year — so we were able to keep moving, and not have to wait to find out what was going to happen in BATMAN or JUSTICE LEAGUE or FINAL CRISIS or whatever. We kept it largely to the immediate creative team. There were two moments where Dan Didio asked us to do something differently, and neither was anything major.

But in the end it comes back to focus. Tom Derenick did more pages that year than any other year of his career, and they looked great. Scott McDaniel handled anything we asked of him, from street-level adventure to space wars to trippy cosmic encounters, and made it all stylish and attractive. Mike Norton got a lot of character-drama chapters about a dizzying array of characters, and made them all individuals. And Mark Bagley drew the entire DC Universe and a brand-new mythology on top of it. And it's not like no one ever slowed down. But no one ever gave up, no one ever said, "No, I can't do that."

Plus, we all knew that once the year was over, it was done, so while that final sprint might have been exhausting, it would end. That makes it easier to keep pushing.

One of the big themes of Trinity is that Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman fulfill special roles in the DC universe that no one else can quite fulfill. Was it somewhat strange to develop this idea at a time when two of these characters were undergoing major upheaval in their main books, with Superman leaving Earth for New Krypton and Batman apparently dying in the aftermath of R.I.P and Final Crisis?

Not really. After all, I knew — even if the readers didn't — that my story happened before all those other events. And I didn't really know what was going on with the other books — the readers saw it play out week-to-week, month-to-month, but that doesn't mean I was writing TRINITY while hearing about each new development in BATMAN RIP. I was seeing those books when they came out, and we outlined TRINITY long before they started to play out that way, so we just did our thing without the other events needing to intrude. Fabian knew a lot more about RIP, since he was writing ROBIN and other Bat-related stuff, but I felt like I was working on a big standalone novel, so I didn't have to think about the other upheavals.

Structurally, the story deals a great deal with arcane topics from tarot cards to the fundamental metaphysical structure of the universe. When dealing with such heady mystical material, how do you make these elements cohere into something relatively comprehensible and consistent? Is that even necessarily a priority? What are the challenges in taking these rather abstract concepts and grounding them as something real and immediate to the characters involved?

The one time I talked with Jack Kirby, he told me that it didn't matter how weird or cosmic or far out anything got, as long as your characters reacted to it the way real people would. Give the audience a vantage point they can comprehend, a place to stand that feels real, and they'll comprehend the bigger stuff. Ideas like the Worldsoul and the metaphysical structure of things would be arcane and dry if you just explain them in a vacuum, but if it's Tarot learning about them, or Krona trying to comprehend and failing, there's a character involved, a human emotional reaction, and that goes a long way.

For such a massive story - by my count, it runs to about 1144 pages - how do you go about settling on which supporting characters to feature? What leads you to such obscure characters as Gangbuster, Charity O'Dare, or Tomorrow Woman? Even with more major players, like Hawkman or Firestorm, how do you go about deciding they'll play supporting roles as opposed to any of the other secondary heroes in the DCU?

1155 pages, I think, with the additional pages in #1 and #52.

And the supporting characters came in for a number of reasons — usually to do the job of supporting characters, which is to support the plot and the themes. Sometimes that happens by design, sometimes it just kind of happens. To rattle through your examples — Hawkman we used because we were told that nothing was going on with him so we were free to use him, and we earmarked him to play a major role. After which, of course, plans for the HAWKMAN SPECIAL happened, and the character suddenly became off-limits, but since we were operating outside of the other events (and before the special, in any case), we didn't have to worry about that. Gangbuster was another deliberate choice — we were looking for characters to use that people hadn't seen much of recently, and Gangbuster is a character I've always liked, and who fit into Tarot's world well, so we roped him in.

Charity O'Dare we used because we were going to use Madame Xanadu, only she got her own Vertigo series and became at least temporarily off-limits, so we have her major role to Charity (and a few minor bits to Madame Zodiac). That storyline played out differently, in some ways, because Charity's a different character, but it made for some nice moments.

Tomorrow Woman was a complete fluke — we needed characters to put on a set of covers showing "replacement" icons, and I wanted to get a little weird with it. Green Arrow was kind of an obvious choice for a replacement Batman, and Black Adam fit Wonder Woman's myth-based warrior concept, and that meant we needed someone for Superman, and we didn't want the replacements to be all male (but we'd picked Black Adam in part to break up the gender pattern), so we needed someone for Superman who was female, science-fiction-y and in some way futurist. Who better to replace the Man of Tomorrow than a Tomorrow Woman? So we put her on the cover, thinking it was a nice bit, that we could use a dead character because we'd revised history and all — and then the fans went nuts. There was an outpouring of excitement even just from the cover appearing online, and we're not stupid enough not to notice — so we gave her more to do, and it just grew from there. Fairly early on, once we started using her, we proposed bringing her back at the end, restoring her to life, and got the okay, so we were off to the races.

Firestorm wasn't a character we'd planned to use as much as we did, but his role grew organically. As one of the youngest JLAers, he was a good choice to have John Stewart explain Krona to, so he started out purely as a mechanical choice — he's the one who doesn't know, so we can build an infodump around him needing to learn — but then some chemistry happens, and all of a sudden it wasn't just that he was the new guy asking the Green Lantern about GL history, he was the young black guy who didn't want to feel stupid in front of the team so he went to the older black guy to ask privately, knowing that John would understand why he didn't want to look like a dope. And from that little spark, a friendship came out on the page that we hadn't been expecting, and the Firestorm-John Stewart bond became important, so Firestorm got a bigger role to play.

That's the way it happens — some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

Beyond the Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman trinity, there are a number of other trios you developed over the course of the books. Obviously, there's the Despero/Enigma/Morgaine Le Fey trio that serves as the primary antagonists, but there's also a brief point around issue 40 where the vague trio of Lex Luthor/Joker/Cheetah, which is arguably a more natural set of antagonists for the heroes, seems to gain some significance. What was your thinking in using a more unlikely assortment of characters as the main villains, and what was the function of spotlighting the more traditional adversaries at roughly the same point in the story?

We didn't want to use Lex, the Joker and Cheetah (or Circe or Ares, the two other natural WW-archfoe choices) in part because we had this big weird plan, and it's not really a Luthor-y plans and it's not a Joker-y plan, so we needed characters who'd come together in that kind of plan. Also, we didn't want to just make the most obvious choice. And we wanted to get at some core ideas about the Trinity. Lex, the Joker and Cheetah aren't the same concepts as the Trinity, but the Dark Trinity we used — a woman of mystic power, a technological schemer and a powerful alien — fit a Trinity-pattern we could use in the story.

You could do that with Lex-as-Batman and Cheetah/Circe as Wonder Woman, but even then, the Joker doesn't step into the Superman mythic role well at all. And we see those guys all the time anyway, so let's have them play secondary roles and do something new with the main villains. That was the basic thinking.

The other big trinity appeared to be Alan Scott/Carter Hall/Jay Garrick, as they openly wonder whether they could have fulfilled the roles of the trinity, seemingly coming to the conclusion that they are lacking. How do you go about demonstrating the importance of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman without implicitly devaluing the contributions of other heroes, such as these three Golden Age crimefighers, to the DC mythos?

Keep in mind that Alan, Carter and Jay weren't simply presented as "not up to the task." They were a force in a revised history in which the very core concepts that make Superman, WW and Batman what they are had been removed, blunted, faded, all the way back through history, as seen by the fact that even the Egyptian gods in Prince Khufu's time were weakened. So it wasn't as if DC's normal Golden Age heroes aren't all that, it's that when you take away the mythic underpinnings that fuel even them, they have to soldier on in a less idealistic way, becoming more pragmatic than inspirational, becoming tougher and darker, making hard choices without the magic. So that's not a reflection on them as they were in the Golden Age, but on what they needed to be to keep the world together in a reality without that truth/justice/"American way" at the heart of it.

I think they did about as well as they could, all things considered.

It's probably a fool's errand to even ask this question, but how does Trinity fit into the larger DC continuity, if at all? In particular, The resurrection of Tomorrow Woman is probably the biggest change, although there also new characters like the Dreambound who seem to have more story worth telling. Will any of these changes carry over into other titles?

I think it's pretty easy to see where TRINITY fits into DC continuity — just look at the JLA. When we first see them in the series, Red Tornado is damaged and his brain is occupying the JLA computers. Shortly thereafter, he's been rebuilt and is back in action. So it takes place around the time that stuff was going on in the JUSTICE LEAGUE book.

As for repercussions — well, those last couple of pages will make for some very big ones, coming up. And yeah, Tomorrow Woman and the Dreambound and Xor and Tarot are out there, ready to do more stuff, have new adventures. Where and when those'll happen, I can't say for sure, but all that stuff happened, it's part of the DCU now.

Heck, I'd like to see Tatters, the Ragged Wonder, turn up in Ragman's life. And Supergirl meet Interceptor. And Tomorrow Woman figure that if she survived, maybe there's a way for her to save Triumph...

Ultimately, what are you hoping readers take away from Trinity? The obvious message seemed to be that Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have irreplaceable roles in the DC universe, but the ending of the story appeared to complicate that considerably, as the trinity acknowledged all the "normal" humans who had shaped them into who they are.

I think what we said is that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman belong at the heart of the DCU, but it's not a one-way street. They represent things that we can see resonating in the other heroes, in all of us, in the whole world. They're the face of it, the symbols of it, but it's not unique to them. They get it from their lives and experiences and the nature of the universe.

But the reader doesn't need to think about any of that; this is a big sprawling adventure thriller, not a college class. If all they take away from it is "Wow, that was fun! The Joker turned into a whole city! The anti-Deathstroke is an idealistic hero! I wanna see more Tarot, and it was cool to see that annoying frog-guy blow up!" then I'm just fine with that. Theme is great, for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight, it's not something that all readers have to care about.

The stuff happening on the surface can be the take-away just as much.

In case you haven't already, click here to read our review of the entire 52-part series as a whole.

As you might expect, the dystopias in question come from Marvel's X-Men franchise, where smiling is a sign of weakness. In addition to the collection of their WWII-era origin of Ian McKellan's favorite villain, Magneto: Testament, there are the more fictional hellscapes on offer in X-Men: Inferno (New York becomes infested with demons!) and X-Men Future History: Messiah War Sourcebook, which details the backstory of a future that makes Terminator Salvation look like the wonderful world of Oz.

Alternatively, you could just pick up the first issue of Dark Horse's Aliens relaunch, for a horrific world than requires less tolerance for superpowered soap opera, or Spider-Man: The Short Hallowe'en for a New York that is devoid of demons but written by Saturday Night Live's Bill Hader and Seth Meyers (All of today's Manhattan-based demons have been diverted to Jeff Parker and Kyle Hotz's Dark Reign: The Hood, which offers up tales of the New Avengers's newest crime boss, who just so happens to be evil-demon-powered).

If you're looking for something a little more optimistic, IDW's Star Trek Omnibus collects some of the better Trek comics from days pre-Abrams. Also, Doug (Earthworm Jim) TenNapel's Power Up tells the story of a man whose magic video game console gives him the ability to control the real world.

Old-fashioned superhero thrills, that won't make you feel bad about the future of humanity, can be found in the first collections of DC's Trinity series (Said trinity being Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, of course) and Dynamite's Death Defying 'Devil.

Meanwhile, the much-promised teens-in-tights can be found in DC's duelling teenage superhero collections, Robin The Teen Wonder - an anthology of stories about the various characters to sidekick Batman throughout the years - and Static Shock: Rebirth of The Cool, which'll remind you just how great the 1990s Static series really was.

Whether it's electric garbage-can-flying heroes or grizzled cyborg soldiers from a dying tomorrow, your local comic book store will have them all. And, if you're after something that doesn't fit into those two categories, why not check out the list of everything hitting stores this week (Psst: At least take a peek at the non-SF Bayou). But, come on. Static Shock, people.

It isn't just Serenity lunchboxes from Dark Horse Comics this week; they're also putting out a slab of goodness (in the form of Hellboy spinoff, Lobster Johnston Vol. 1: Iron Prometheus, bringing Mike Mignola's pulp crimefighter face to face with mystic Nazis on the eve of World War II.) And a slab of franchise-appeasing nostalgia (Star Wars Omnibus: Droids Volume 1, showing you yet more comedic misadventures of C3P0 and R2-D2 flying solo without parental guidance. It's just like Weird Science, trust me. Okay, maybe not).

Elsewhere in the world of four color periodicals, the fun is mostly coming from Berkeley's Image Comics: Rick Remender and Kieron Dwyer's "zombies, meet porn" comedy XXXombies gets a paperback collection, Earthworm Jim creator Doug Tennapel's new book Monster Zoo (soon to be a major motion picture!) comes out. And most importantly, the first collected volume of Proof (Imagine X-Files crossed with Hellboy, with Bigfoot replacing Mulder) hits stores as well.

Marvel Comics are, as is so often the case, chasing after the movie dollar with Hulk Vs. The Marvel Universe, a 224-page collection of Bruce Banner's mean green alter ego punching your favorite superheroes over and over. If you're looking for more than just violence, Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Origins begins, giving you a massive dose of conspiracy theory to accompany the secret origins of both Captain America and Wolverine; it's pretty, but potentially too dense for its own good. Also pretty is Astonishing X-Men Sketchbook, an art-heavy teaser to Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi's relaunch of the Joss Whedon mutant book.

DC Comics, meanwhile, are pretty much taking the week off with the exception of one book. I mean, sure, the Legion of Super-Heroes: 1050 Years In The Future is going to be an enjoyable anthology of stories from the 50 year history of the superteens from the next millennium, and Robin/Spoiler is more than just Batman's sidekick ruining the next episode of Battlestar Galactica for you (Spoiler is, in actuality, his thought-dead-but-not-really girlfriend). But still, the only DC book that counts this week is the first issue of Trinity, their new weekly book spotlighting the threesome that is Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman's unique relationship. It may not be as sexy as that sounds, but nonetheless, with Kurt Busiek and Ultimate Spider-Man's Mark Bagley at the creative wheel, it's very possibly going to be the most entertaining book to hit the stands in the next seven days.

You know the drill of this part by now: You can find the complete list of everything shipping here and find where to buy the lunchbox of your choice here. Because, seriously people. Lunchboxes.

DC started the comic convention season early with an event intended only for comic store owners this weekend. Executive Editor Dan DiDio spilled the beans on the comics that will form the backbone of DC's 2008 plans, alongside the already-announced Final Crisis.

April sees the release of something called DC Universe #0, a 24-page primer on just who's who and what's what for DC's super heroes just in case you've not been paying attention over the past few years. Written by Final Crisis' Grant Morrison and Green Lantern's Geoff Johns, the book will be priced at 50 cents to try and grab the young and stingy in time for the following month's launch of Final Crisis.

A couple of months after that, DC's worst-kept secret — their third year-long weekly mini-series, Trinity — will launch. Unlike previous weeklies 52 and Countdown to Final Crisis, this series does away with the universe-spanning casts and revolving creative teams, with each issue featuring a 12-page lead story focusing on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman by current Superman writer Kurt Busiek and former Ultimate Spider-Man artist Mark Bagley. The remaining ten pages of content will be filled by stories co-written by Busiek and Fabian Nicieza filling in backstory from the Super Friends' lead.

With both of those books marking continuity-light outreach efforts, those who read the funnybooks for long-running storylines that can't be understood by those who don't have a PhD in DCU will be happy with Rann/Thanagar: Holy War, which brings the Lady Styx plot from 52 to a head, and Reign In Hell which revives the whole "With Satan gone, who shall rule Hell?" idea, after 52 saw DC's Satan, Neron, trapped on Earth.

Whether these projects will be enough to take DC back to the top of the sales charts in a year where Marvel plan to reveal a secret alien invasion across their entire line remains to be seen, but if nothing else, it's always nice to see those little-seen characters Superman and Wonder Woman get some more publicity.

Dan DiDio, Geoff Johns on DC Universe #0 & Final Crisis' Plan [Newsarama.com]
Dan DiDio Talks Trinity [Newsarama.com]
Dan DiDio on R/T: Holy War and Reign In Hell [Newsarama.com]

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• Starcross, by Dave Lebling: This 1982 game was Infocom's first foray into science fiction, and you played the central character who was a lonely miner in space, searching for black hole. However, you end up encountering a massive alien derelict ship and to explore its depths to unravel the mystery. This was Infocom's third game (behind Zork III and Deadline) to feature "feelies," props that came in the packaging that were meant to enhance the gamplay. It included a logbook for your ship, a partial map of space, and a letter from your company which was supposed to help if you encountered alien life.
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• Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare by Michael Berlyn: This brilliant game featured the player as the "central mentality," basically a human in cryogenic freeze for 500 years, whose sleeping brain functions as the processing center for the city's support systems. However, an earthquake disrupts everything, and you have to repair the systems via six robots that serve as your sense while you're on ice before the a crew arrives to "disconnect" you. Each robot had a different ability, and most of the game was spent trying to figure out how to get them to help you. Plus, the game came with a creepy cryogenic mask cover that terrified me as a kid.
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• Planetfall by Steve Meretzky: In Planetfall the player travels the cosmos as a lowly ensign seventh class in the Stellar Patrol, scrubbing floor and performing menial tasks. However, the ship begins exploding and you flee in an escape pod, eventually landing on an alien planet whose inhabitants have vanished. As you try to figure out what happened to them, you encounter Floyd, a goofy robot who quickly becomes one of the most memorable characters in any game I've ever played, both text and with graphics. Touching and funny, this is my personal favorite.
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• The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams: This award-winning adaptation of Adams' novel takes the book to new heights as you play Arthur Dent. The plot is similar to the first novel, with the character trying to find the legendary lost planet of Magrathea, and encountering galactic hijinx along the way. This game came with a huge amount of feelies, including a microscopic space fleet, pocket fluff, and "Peril Sensitive Sunglasses" that turn black when you're in danger.
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• A Mind Forever Voyaging by Steve Meretzky: Just when you think Meretzky couldn't top himself, he does. I swear the guy probably helped shape my childhood more than most of the teachers I had in elementary school. In this game, you play an artificially intelligent computer called PRISM having just "awoken" from what you thought was a real life as a human being named Perry Sim. Turns out you were living in a simulation all that time. Your programmer sends you into several advanced simulations to check out the feasibility of The Plan for Renewed National Purpose being lobbied for by a senator. Turns out, things aren't so nice in the future if Congresses passes the thing. You visit it at 10 year intervals, and it is a commentary on the future, as well as politics. Truly epic.
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• Stationfall by Steve Meretzky: Infocom returned to the world of Planetfall in 1987 with this sequel that reunites the player (now a lowly lieutenant stuck processing paperwork) Floyd. Although not quite as charming as the original, it does have a lot of the comic and touching hallmarks of Meretzky's writing. Fans weren't too pleased with the ending of this one, however, and Meretzky said he did it because he didn't want to write another game in the series. Darn it to hell.
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• Leather Goddesses of Phobos by Steve Meretzky: This is an interactive fiction take on Barbarella, and the player can set one of three different "naughtiness" levels: tame, suggestive, or lewd. Think Leisure Suit Larry, but in space and without any graphics. Set in 1936, the player tries to stop the Leather Goddesses of Phobos from invading Earth after they abduct him. If you fail, you'll get tossed into their "pleasure dome." Why would that be considered a punishment?
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• Trinity by Brian Moriarty: Trinity is one of the most epic games ever created, and probably the best (although not most-known) that Infocom released. Set against the creation of the atomic bomb, the player finds himself in the middle of a nuclear missile attack in the United Kingdom. Through a series of adventures involving time-travel and space-folding, you have to foil several different nuclear weapons tests in order to have the military abandon the technology. Truly an incredible game with emotional moments, and well worth playing, even today.
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