Trinity #17
In the lead: Morgaine Le Fey, Enigma and Despero cast the spell to retcon Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman out of existence. And Krona hatches from his cosmic egg.
In the back-up: Konvikt (remember him?) escapes from custody, and decides to head back to Thayer’s Notch to make amends for the one guy out of four he killed that wasn’t in the military. But then he just ends up sitting on the top of a mountain while a giant tidal wave overtakes him.
In the other back-up: The bad Trinity is engulfed in a golden glow. The good Trinity is trapped in total darkness. The world has been reshaped as if the Trinity never existed. And Lois Lane’s a smoker now!
My take: According to the DC Nation page at the back of the book, Trinity the series has come to the end of its first arc. According to their math, 16 1/3 issues is a third of the series. That means there’s going to be 49 issues of the series, which just seems like a weird number. Not quite 50, not a multiple of three…seems more likely that they just screwed up the math.
As a big fan of alternate universes (the Age of Apocalypse got me started on comics, and it remains one of my favorites), I’m looking forward to the World Without a Trinity arc. The WWaT is featured on the series’ covers through issue 24, but I’m not really sure they’re going to spend a whole seven issues on it. It would be kind of cool if during this period the WWaT story is the lead and the Trinity trying to escape the spell was the back-up. But I really have no clue how any of this is going to play out.
This issue really wasn’t very good though. It was nine pages of Le Fey casting her spell followed by 10 pages of Konvikt’s backstory followed by three pages of a cool teaser. Really, the spell takes up the entire lead? That’s totally unnecessary. And I don’t give a rat’s ass about Konvikt, regardless of how much time Busiek and Nicienza spend trying to make him complex or likeable. These crappy issues would probably get on my nerves a lot more if they weren’t always sandwiched in between really good issues.
Things to keep an eye on: Because the Trinity never existed, Toyman is ripping people’s limbs off, the Amazons are attacking other countries, and Lois Lane took up smoking. Let’s hope Joe Quesada doesn’t hear about that last one. And ironically, Gotham City is in the middle of an “economic boom” without Batman around.
Krona hatched. I guess that might be burying the lead a little bit, but I doubt anything significant will happen with him until the spell is reversed. And who knows how long that’s going to be?