Trinity #14
In the lead: The JLA realizes that the Trinity isn’t acting like themselves (or rather, they’re acting like each other) and decide those three need to head home and cool off while the JLA deals with Counter-Earth. Green Lantern, Firestorm, Red Tornado, Ray Palmer and the All-New Atom build a machine that will send everyone back to their normal universe, but Enigma shows up unexpectedly and activates it. Everyone gets zapped back to New Earth, but not before Despero’s thugs brand Superman with a tarot symbol.
In the back-up: The heroes fight Sun-Chained-In-Ink, who didn’t so much explode last issue as he did not explode. After a while he does explode (this time in outer space), Swashbuckler and Primat get taken into custody, and TVM gets away with Maxwell Lord’s skull.
My take: I’ve noticed that you can judge how much I’m enjoying this series by how early in the comic week this review gets posted. So obviously I wasn’t too impressed by issue #14.
Nothing really happened this issue. The JLA knows the Trinity is acting kind of funny, but readers have known that since issue #10. The satellite team built a machine to send everyone home. The non-JLAers had a boring fight with a boring character that only debuted a few weeks ago. Strangely enough, this back-up seems to be as insignificant as issue #12’s lead was, because we’re at the same point now as we were at the end of last issue: Sun-Chained-In-Ink went boom.
Two somewhat major things were buried in the meaningless story, though. Superman got branded just like Wonder Woman was way back in issue #5, leaving only Batman unmarked. And Enigma was seen for the very first time by a good guy, although none of them should have any idea who he is or that he’s related to the Trinity stuff. That’s certainly not enough to base a 12-page story on, let alone fill a 10-page back-up. (more…)