Comic: "Trinity #1-3"
Published by: DC Comics
Written by: Kurt Busiek, Fabian Nicieza
Artist: Mark Bagley, others

Reviewer: Protoclown
Posted: 6/23/2008

Plot: New weekly DC comic that's supposed to explore the relationship between Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Review: Trinity is the new weekly DC series meant to follow up the successful 52 and the tremendous pile of stapled shit that was Countdown to Final Crisis. This series focuses on the relationship between Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and is not to be confused with the 2002 mini-series Trinity by Matt Wagner, which also focused on Supes, Bats, and Wonder Woman, but was different in that it was actually good.

Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair; after all, this series is only three weeks into its year-long story, but it appears sadly evident right off the bat that it has more in common with the crappy Countdown than the creative and interesting 52. I normally don't like to review a work until it's finished, so I can judge it in its entirity, but in this case I thought it proper to issue a fair warning.

So far what we have seen in this series is our "big three" heroes talking about some shared dream experience they had, wherein some powerful, unknown cosmic entity was obviously in distress, screaming "let me out!". Before they can really investigate this further, a generic, brutish villain named Konvikt shows up with a muppet monkey named Graak on his back, and they predictably start wreaking havoc where they touched down on Earth. They have a drawn-out brawl with the Justice League that's about as exciting as watching fish fuck, and we the reader are fully aware that these nobody villains aren't possibly going to pose the slightest threat or achieve anything of consequence.

In our backup stories by Busiek and Nicieza, we have the less-than-compelling villainous team-up of Morgaine Le Fey, Despero, and a "mysterious" guy in a green suit calling himself Enigma (who will turn out to be either the Riddler, or someone far less interesting). Enigma has a particular interest in Batman, and one half of his face is horribly scarred, covered by a metallic mask shaped vaguely like a question mark. Another Batman villain with half his face scarred. Oh, how exciting. We certainly haven't seen that before, only done in a much more interesting way. In another backup story, we see a prescient character named Tarot, who misguidedly did a reading for some drug runners who now want to force her to use her abilities to help them again. By the end of her story, the vaguest of connections to our "trinity" is hinted at, but it turns out that I don't really care, because there's nothing interesting about her character or any of these stories at all thus far.

Sometimes these weekly stories can take a little while to get up and running, but I'm playing things a bit cautious after being burned by Countdown. Dishing out $3 a week for a series amounts to over $150 by the time all's said and done, so it had damn sure better be pretty entertaining. Busiek can be a hit-or-miss writer, but I find that I enjoy his writing more often than not. I've never been much of a fan of artist Mark Bagley though, whose only real feather in his cap seems to be the speed with which he can crank out pages (perfect for a weekly series). Unfortunately, by drawing so fast, all of his characters essentially have the same face and many of his women (particularly Wonder Woman) are quite ugly.

I'll give this book a couple more issues, but if it doesn't shape up pretty quickly, I'm jumping ship before it becomes the disaster that Countdown was. I have a bad feeling that the tremendous amount of nothing that has happened in the first three issues will prove to be representative of the next thirty, as these weekly maxi-series tend to putter around wasting time with pointless filler until they get to the final stretch.

Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)