Broken Frontier

As another comic year comes to a close, the fifty-second issue of Trinity hits the stands.  The conclusion is anything but spectacular, in fact it is a bunch of talking heads.  The entire metahuman population of Earth is gathered to see Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman transform back into mortal beings and to pontificate on the importance of the Big Three.

The third of DC’s initiative to bring weekly comics to the States was the oddest attempt yet. 52 was an experiment in letting the story go where it needed and as a result it was spectacular.  Countdown was a carefully plotted mess and this book is a conundrum.  It was exhaustingly long, most of its readers exclaimed “it’s almost over” this last month as the numbers came closer to that magic 52.

The purpose of this book was fairly obvious.  It was to show the Trinity as the heart and soul of the DC Universe.  Problem is, everyone already knew this.  Sure, in the beginning, it was a solid character study, but as the back up stories became increasingly random and the main story took up various lengths during the course of the book, it became an endurance test for the reader.  Sure, there are circles that loved the book.  This reader wonders how much of that is due to loyalty to the creative team as opposed to actual enjoyment of the book.

The book could have been more enjoyable had it been a puzzle.  From week to week it was difficult to follow and in the end with this issue there is just a magic reset.  What was the point of Enigma, Tarot or Gangbuster?  In the end most of the intriguing threads just sort of fizzled away.  Sure, the evil Trinity stuff was fun, but ran its course long before the god replacement Trinity showed up and in the end when Krona was defeated in possibly the most unclear climax in comic book history... we get a long chapter with the heroes discussing alternate realities and what an inspiration the big guns are to them.

Talking heads can be done right (just check this week’s Amazing Spider-Man #595), but as the end of a really long story that failed to seem to be going anywhere long ago - it just seems so self serving.  In the end the whole project seemed like a vanity exercise.  Busiek got to write the big three without the big three (take that McDuffie) and Bagley got to draw pretty much every character in the DCU and DC got to show off their most recognizable characters (well, maybe that last one is a lie, but it was the intent, I think).

Just to make the whole thing even more oblique is the ending to Konvict’s story and the lovely reveal of the alternate hero worshiping world being Earth-1.  Someone has been playing with the dry erase board at DC editorial again, I thought New Earth and Earth-1 were the same.  Ah well, maybe next year when Morrison takes on the Multiverse, Trinity and Final Crisis will all start to make sense to us, but until then maybe we are all supposed to be collectively scratching our heads going, “yeah, but what?”

Bagley is just as mixed a bag as Busiek’s story was.  There are splash pages that are amazing, filled with a fanboy’s wildest dream of team-ups with every character impeccably rendered. Then there are panels where faces seem to morph, body designs become inconsistent, and anatomy starts to take on Liefeld level impossibilities.  Perspective can be lost and action incomprehensible.

It is in the end all a little befuddling and the mission statement takes on the feeling of one of those government studies that proves what we all thought was common sense like “scientists say that smoking is bad for you.”  Isn’t that the equivalent of a 52 issue series that reiterates that your marquee properties are special?