Trinity: First Act
Trinity is a big series so I'm not going to cover it all in one post, but I'm going to divide it into three parts just like the collected editions are divided. At the same time I'm going to cover some things that happen in other parts if they are relevant for what was going in this particular part. Yes, it might get a bit confusing.
Lets start with the structure. In theory each issue is divided into two parts, one main story drawn by Bagley and a backup drawn by one of the collaborators. In practice you can't really say that one part of the book is more important than another, they are equally important and you can't ignore them like you could with "traditional" backups in other books. Bagley simply isn't a robot and couldn't draw 52 issues in a year + however long the lead-in time was.
Trinity, as the name suggests, appear a lot in the first part of this series, but you can already see that Busiek and Bagley are going to play with lots and lots of characters in this series. In one of the interviews Busiek has said that originally this series was pitched as something like "DC Universe" that would feature many different characters. Me personally, I think that this series should have been called "Bagley draws DC Universe" because he draws lots of characters and I think that this is the main selling point for this series.
So anyway, Krona is trapped in the egg, egg is going to explode and release creation energy. For one reason or another Trinity is super important and can be used in Tarot cards inspired magic spell to syphon this energy by another Trinity - Morgan Le Fey and Enigma. Yes, there are problems with third member.
The first part of this story focuses a lot on Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman being the Trinity, showing how similar or different they are, their importance to others and so on. The main problem with the idea of Trinity for me is that despite DC's, and some fans', claims WW never felt as actually being equal to Worlds' Finest. Unfortunately Busiek does not try to justify this inclusion either, we are to assume that WW is a part of Trinity and move on from there.
Most obvious problem with this is how story beats related to WW felt very "current" when this was published and now feel very outdated. WW losing powers when without armor..? Having secret identity? Working for some governmental agency..? Dating Nemesis??? Killing Maxwell Lord is still relevant to an extent, but feels like it is true only as long as Johns is involved with DC. Clay origin as well was out for few years and now it is a bit ambiguous if it is back already or still out. And sure, Batman and Superman get shakeups as well, but not to such extent, you can still recognize that it is same character. Here? Change her name and costume and you might think that this is a different character.
Another issue that plagues entire series is that I'm not sure that Busiek really had a story for 52 issues here. And to be fair, I don't think that there are many stories that warrant such length, but it is what it is. So what happens is that things sometimes move rather slowly, or they even repeat a bit in certain instances. Or something happens and you are not sure what was the point until 25 issues later that plot point is revisited.
Now, you might think that this series is pretty bad since I'm talking only about negatives, but no. I think that Bagley does great job drawing various characters and Busiek has great knowledge of DC's history and while I wouldn't say that he is best writer for any character I'd also say that he doesn't really write anyone badly either. Anyway, it is not the greatest series ever, but it is good fun and an easy read that explores various corners of DC's universe.
While re-reading this series I also read annotations done by Tom Bondurant. These annotations are not must-read like with some Moore's or Morrison's works, but they do provide additional context for many different characters used in this series and some fun speculations. Best part is that Busiek responded to some questions in comments section providing additional insight. Unfortunately Bondurant posted these annotations on multiple sites and they got revamped one or two times since then, meaning that most of the links are dead by now. Fortunately there are things like Wayback machine and I gathered archive links for the entire thing. I'm going to post relevant links for each part that I'm covering in these posts.
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