Book Reviews: DC Comics’ Trinity, Volume 1

Writers: Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza

Artists: Mark Bagley, Scott McDaniel, Tom Derenick, and Mike Norton

Publisher: DC Comics

Initial Print Run: June 2008 to May 2009

The Cover to Trinity, Volume 1

Trinity was DC Comics’ weekly event follow-up to its popular series 52, though it didn’t start until a full year after 52 ended, and it followed the A-listers of the DC Universe (DCU) rather than focusing on that universe’s lesser lights.  Now I normally skip most major comic “events”, and more to the point, my interest in superhero comics tends to run inversely proportional to the number of “events” a given publisher is putting out in any given year, but the fact is that my kids like the DCU superheroes a whole lot, and that’s gotten me a lot more involved of late.  In fact, I’ve been searching for a decent superhero comics trade for my daughterEmma’s upcoming seventh birthday for more than a month now.  Seeing that Trinity stars not only Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman (listed in Emma’s personal order of precedence) but also most of the rest of the heroes in the DCU as well, I thought maybe I’d give Trinity a try and hope that Emma liked it.  That decision was made a little easier when I found the book on sale at The Strand in New York City.  When I then noticed that Kurt Busiek was Trinity’s lead writer, well, Busiek is at least an author I trust to tell a decent story without any gratuitous rape-and-murder.

The story here is way cosmic and based around a pair of simple high-concept ideas.  First is the Crisis on Infinite Earths idea that our reality is the “prime” or “keystone” reality, and that there are then an infinite number of alternate realities that exist as variations on our world, all resting on our world’s core ideals.  Second, that Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman—in their guise as multi-time saviors of the keystone reality’s primary world—are thus the collective fulcrum of our reality—and therefore all realities.  As the story progresses, the villains then seek to mystically reinforce the natural connections between the heroic “trinity” using a ritual based on the magic of the tarot, and… well, wackiness ensues.

As that description suggests, this is a pretty complex plot.  I’m not at all sure that my daughter is going to get it on her first reading.  But I liked it a lot, both because there was a lot going on and because the authors tackle the subject matter completely and unhurriedly.  In trade paperback form, this first volume is sixteen collected issues, and they read like a single complex story with a lot of important players.  Along the way, we get to see long sections with Hawkman, Nightwing, Gangbuster, and the Riddler as viewpoint characters, and that gives the story a sense of scope that, quite honestly, no other medium can achieve quite as well as the serialized comic book.  Which is to say that when I bought this book, I thought it was going to be a novel-sized story about Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman.  And it is that.  But it’s also the DC Comics equivalent of A Song of Ice and Fire or The Wheel of Time.  In the same way that those series succeed because they give the lesser characters a chance to really shine under the spotlight, this series succeeds because it includeseverybody, and it gives them all a chance to be the hero.  I loved that this book included not only Nightwing but also a talking girl gorilla and the Crime Syndicate of Amerika.  And that they all had important parts!  I don’t know how much my daughter is gonna get into the finer facets of this book and the major and minor arcane and all of that, but I know that she’s gonna love the CSA.  She’ll get such a charge out of Superwomanand Owlman that honestly, I can hardly wait.

There are four credited artists on this book, and as that might suggest, the art here is a mixed bag of styles.  Some of it is classic Big Two heroic, some of it is cartoony, some of it is jaw-droppingly detailed.  Personally, I didn’t find the mix of styles to be too intrusive.  It never took me out of the story, and in fact, most of the time I had trouble telling whose style was whose.  Scott McDaniel’s work was, to me, the most distinctive, but that’s not a complaint.  I liked his work on the Richard Dragon mini-series, and to be honest, by the time you’re ready to introduce your kids to comics, you’ll probably be ready to accept some art styles that are different from the classic lantern-jawed DC House Style anyway.  I know I am.  For my money, McDaniel’s stuff had the best energy in the book.  Beyond that, I couldn’t really tell the artists’ styles apart.

So there you have it.  Is Emma gonna like her birthday present?  I’m sure she will, at least in the short term.  The acid test will be when we see whether she sits down to read the whole story, and if she does, will she ask questions about what’s going on.  If that happens, then we’ll know she really liked it.  For me, well, one of the things I’ve always liked about the DCU is the way that it’s not just superhero storytelling, it’s science fiction superhero storytelling.  The DCU isn’t our world.  It’s the World of Tomorrow, with superheroes.  In that way, I think this book succeeds beyond its wildest expectations.  It’s Fringe with the Justice League.  It’sThe Wheel of Time with alternate realities and a tighter plotline.  Needless to say, I recommend it strongly to fans of sci fi and heroic fantasy.  If that’s you, then give this a try.