I don’t know what it’s been with me lately but reading is taking up more of my life and I’m loving this. It’s been a good while since I have finished this amount of reading material in such a short amount of time. Add to that the reality that I’m loving it and you’ll begin to see why there have been many reviews on my site lately.
The latest addition to my list of reviews is a little different from the rest. Since I’m reading the full monty in one shot, I consider this to fall into the category of novel reads. In line with my last review of Captain America, I’ve stayed in the superheroic genre of choice but with more of a connection to the source format. The others have been prose novels but this one is a graphic novel of the 2003 three-issue miniseries Trinity from DC Comics. Matt Wagner was in the driver’s seat on this from Grendel fame and he’s also the guy that does the pencils on it as well. In short, he did much of the heavy lifting on this project.
All I can say is it’s about time. Good googly moogly. I’ve been waiting to read something that I can thoroughly enjoy and though I have done this on the nonfiction side, the fiction department has been wanting the last few months. This was refreshing. It’s sad that I have to go back fifteen years in order to find something that’s good to read but the good stuff is timeless.
In this miniseries, it chronicles the three heavyweights of the DC universe and arguably of all of comicdom: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. This is the first time that all three of them are working together though it’s clear that Clark and Bruce already have a relationship. The main villain in this is Ra’s A Ghul with some back up from Bizarro and a wayward Amazonian named Artemis. Without giving too much away, Ras is out to “purify” the world and start a new civilization with a little help from his friends.
Wagner does an awesome job at capturing the essence of their relationship in one panel where the three of them are in Gotham and Batman, being his normal charming self, decides to get a little rough with a thug he’s interrogating to prove a point to newcomer Wonder Woman. He makes it worse by using Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth in the process. The outcome is comical to a degree and dead on in presenting the rawness of the core of each character. This is something that Wagner has a firm grasp over and you get the feeling that it is the how a classic, legendary relationship would begin in the early days of these three icons.
As the story progresses, we begin to see them gel as a working unit. they begin to step on each other’s toes a little less and appreciate the role that they have to play in order to stop Ras and friends. It’s one of those stories where heroes are heroes and everyone doesn’t have to be so messed up because the world is. It’s a book that you can enjoy on the basis that we want our heroes to NOT be just like us (what would be the point in calling them heroes then) and that you are rooting for them to be the icons we expect them to be. You may find yourself being transported back to a time where having the character of a hero and learning what that meant was a good thing.
About the only downside to the whole thing would be the art. It wasn’t absolutely horrible. It was tolerable. Wagner’s choice of what he puts in the panel is what stood out that made you overlook the art. The style was somehow apropos despite its shortcomings. It just fit this kind of story. It reminded me of Frank Miller’s Retu8rn of the Dark Knight to a degree, the main difference being that I could see what was being drawn in Trinity next to that chicken scratch of Miller.
On my scale of A+ to F, I give this one a solid B. This is one of those you want to go out and grab and will have you engrossed for the whole ride. Kudos to Wagner for his work on this.
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