Justice League: Trinity War by           Geoff Johns, Ray Fawkes, & Jeff Lemire.

Genre: Superhero Comics

Series: Trinity War

Publisher: DC Comics (March 18, 2014)

Author Information: Website | Twitter

Length: 320 pages

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Trinity War was another of DC’s “Big” events in The New 52 universe. Geoff Johns, Jeff Lemire, and Ray Hawkes bringing together all the clues and hints that had been incorporated into DC books for quite and while, promising to give readers lots of DCU character cameos, tons of information on shadowy people in the DC universe, and setting up the DCU for great stories going forward. So, with all this build up, it had to be great, right?

Well, there were tons of characters in this one. That lore about shadowy denizens of the New 52 DCU was definitely there. The ending left everything in a huge limbo, where you could see more stories organically growing from it. And it was all presented in stellar fashion by the art team, who rendered every DC character in beautiful detail, conveyed real emotion in the talking scenes and pulled off every pulse-pounding brawl.

Unfortunately, the artwork could not save Trinity War.

I’m not one to just say a book sucks and let it go.  Not my style.  I like to understand and explain why something didn’t work for me.  The problem here is that it boils down to the writing not being very good.  At least, in my opinion, it wasn’t.

Now, to be fair, there were moments when the story held promise.  Not every page of this was bad.  There were times I thought Trinity War had hit its stride and was going in the right direction.  But then the narrative would run off the rails again, leaving me grimacing as I tried to understand why an immortal woman trained in every form of combat ever invented had to have the help of the Justice League, or why the DC heroes actually asking the help of other heroes was a damn epiphany?  These type of head-scratching moments coupled with all the points of view and too many dead end plot lines ruined the lead up to the conclusion.

Honestly, the conclusion of Trinity War could have been great.  How the writers managed to screw it up boggles my mind, because the Pandora’s Box idea was a good one.  I mean, this creepy dude above manipulating everyone to open the damn thing and see what happens was pretty cool.  Even a casual fan like myself wanted to know what the hell was going to happen.  Instead of seeing all the Pandora’ Box foreshadowing lead to something coherent, however, it turned into yet another brawl-fest, which seems to be the ending to everyone of these big DCU events.

You know, I really wanted to like this comic collection, but it left me feeling like I’d wasted a couple hours of my time. If you try it, I really hope it suits your palate more than it did mine.

Purchase the book at Amazon.