The Book of Hsssh

First act has rather good breaking point, ritual is completed and we are left to wonder what actually happened. Second act ends with us finally seeing a version of Trinity again, but it is not as clear of a cut. From what I have seen one the main criticism for this series is that it is called Trinity but Trinity is gone for the most of the second third of the series. But lets look closer at that. When you take into account that this series was initially pitched more as a DC Universe than Trinity then Trinity's absence makes sense, but well, that is not what it ended up being called. And their faces were used on the covers to sell this series. An argument could be made that the point of this act was to show what their absence means to DC Universe so in a way it is actually about them, just not directly. So, what happens after first act is that Trinity are banished from this universe and reality gets rewritten. We see DC Universe where Trinity never existed. Things are different and ...

Over the years Tomasi has used many characters and concepts created, or revamped, by Morrison so no surprise that he had a crack at Multiversity as well. And what better opportunity to do it if not when he was the main writer of Superman? For me Tomasi has something like 50/50 hit ratio when it comes to using Morisson's toys and sadly this has to be one of the biggest duds that he has written. On paper this sounds like a good story. Some villain is kidnaping and draining Supermen from various Earths. We got our main guy and Justice Incarnate (now Justice League Incarnate I guess) involved and some other characters. So how does it fail? It reads like a filler. Villain is generic and bland, we don't get much of him in general. We never really learn why or how any of this is working asides of some vague hints about coming new threats. At the end he is captured by another villain hinting at other plots that are yet to come, but never really do. And maybe it is good thing that many ...

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...

So I figured that I'd close this series of recaps once the new year starts rolling in case of something big and unexpected happening in December, spoiler alert - it didn't. For fans of not very popular characters DC doing many anthologies is both blessing and a curse. On one hand your favorite might get a short story focusing on him, on another hand anthologies are expensive and rarely you'll enjoy every story (or even majority of stories) in it. With short stories we have three that focus on Frankenstein. First one is  in Young Monsters in Love anthology, it explores Frank's feelings towards The Bride. Nothing fantastic here, it is fine, but not something that you'd buy entire anthology for so check if you find other stories interesting as well. Second one is The Doomed and the Damned where he teams up with Aquaman and I don't get Brandon Thomas' writing. I know that he has some fans (well, everyone has at least a few), but I haven't enjoyed anything he...

No, this is not going to be about that terrible mini by Wagner nor misguided and irrelevant series during Rebirth initiative. This series of posts is going to be about something way more interesting and better - Busiek's weekly Trinity series. In the first post we'll be covering some key earlier works by Busiek that led to Trinity and how it relates to Morrison's work. It all starts with wonderful JLA: Earth 2 story where Morrison and Quitely created a new version of CSA existing in anti-matter universe since at the time DC was operating under "no alternate universes" direction. And in JLA/Avengers crossover by Busiek and Perez we have Krona destroying alternative universes in Marvel and DC. So obviously since DC technically doesn't have alternate universes... anti-matter universe gets hit instead. This is important bit that is revisited later. Another important bit is that Krona is put into the egg at the end of the story. Other than that it is also a wonderf...

When Multiversity: Teen Justice book was announced some people were a bit confused why it is using Multiversity label. At that time I was more surprised that this label is being used only now, after all we had other series and story arcs that tried to deal with Morrison's Multiversity and related concepts.  We start this series of posts with Freedom Fighters by Venditti and Barrows. DC has struggled over the years to find a good place for many of their characters and it has been even bigger problem for characters that were acquired by DC from other companies. Freedom Fighters are no exception here.  They were introduced to DC by Wein in his JLA run as heroes of a world where Nazis won. Later they were moved to main Earth. Their lineup was changed many times. They went from WW2 to modern team (at some point I'll probably cover Palmiotti/Gray version in a separate post) and there were probably some other variations that I'm forgetting now. What they all had in common? None of...

When Lemire left Frankenstein's ongoing he started writing another book - Justice League Dark. And after few issues he decided (or maybe it was editors?) to add Frank to this team. That decision lead to some good and some irrelevent things. Now, lets start with the good. JLD being attached to Justice League had some staying power and had many more issues published than Agent of Shade. It also means that it got to participate in crossovers like Trinity War and Blight. It also lead to many guest appearances when one of the JLD members would have his origin story and we'd see a panel or a page showing his teammates. Or just in general when someone wanted to show that situation is important and all the superhero teams are gathering or watching some events unfolding. If Frank wasn't added to this team then it is very likely that he would have gone into obscurity after Agent of Shade ended. But being in this team lead to many, many guest appearances and, at least in theory, raise...