Matt Wagner wrote Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman: Trinity seven years before I started this blog, and I've finally gotten around to reading it here at the end of 2019. Lately I've been revisiting some of the DC Direct figures I've had on card in my collection, though I'd sold off many of them in the last three years to downsize my collection, among them three Trinity figures I never opened. Early in my action figure collecting, I was just buying what appealed visually to me, not necessarily related to the sheer volume of books I was consuming in attempt to get up to speed on all I'd missed in the years I wasn't reading comics. I'm unsure why I never bought the Superman from this series, other than I may have already bought enough other Superman figures from other series, or I couldn't get him at a price I found reasonable. At any rate, DC Direct was known for their creator/title inspired series, and they nailed it in 2008 with the release of the Trinity Series. Collectors often lamented the limited number of characters DC Direct offered, Bizarro and Artemis noticeably missing from this series. But if you could only choose four, they offered the four obvious characters, which looked fantastic.
I found a copy of Trinity for south of six dollars recently, and finally committed to getting it read all these years later. Not my first exposure to Matt Wagner, having read a Grendel book back in the '80s, the author's art style was instantly familiar to me- here, a quasi-Art Deco homage that brought to mind the Fleisher Superman cartoons of the 1940s. There's a great deal of Trinity I liked, while some of it falls short, such as the not-so-subtle fetishization of Wonder Woman in parts, to the murky purpose of Artemis in the book's plot. Wagner carries the entirety of Trinity on his own creative shoulders however, which is impressive from any angle, though the art lacks consistency that other artist's who employ similar simplistic styles employ more efficiently- Bruce Timm and Darwyn Cooke come to mind here. In fact, I'd recommend Cooke's Justice League: The New Frontier over Trinity if you are looking for a retro-styled DC book. That said, Trinity has a lot to offer, and I'm glad I finally read it. This is the second book I've read this year with Ra's Al Ghul, the other being the fantastic Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77. It's been fun getting back to physical comics lately, mostly DC, after reading Marvel Unlimited on my iPad the last couple years- a trend I plan to continue in 2020.
More Later- Make It FUN!
