| Comic hardcover, 198 pages Published 2004 (contents: 2003) Borrowed from the library Read December 2014 |
Writer & Artist: Matt Wagner
Colorist: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Sean KonotColorist: Dave Stewart
Not in Continuity*
This is my third all-Matt Wagner comic in the course of this readthrough... and I want to like every one of them more than I do. Wagner's art is great, it's expressive, and he really captures the characters' personalities. I like the contrasts between Metropolis and Gotham and Paradise Island. I like how he mixes and matches villains between the three heroes here.
But his stories always seem to fail to coalesce. I think it's because they're maybe too ambitious. If this was just a superhero punch-up, it would be fine. But it wants to be something more, it wants to be first meeting between the three most important heroes of the DC universe, and it wants to say something about them as people, and about their ideals. What that statement is, however, gets lost in the muddle that is the plot, and I'm left dissastisfied, having glimpsed from a distance an excellent story that I haven't been allowed to read. This is good, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it ought to have been great.
* This readthrough of Batman stories is supposed to be of in-continuity (continuity being that of the 1985-2011 iteration of the DC universe) ones, but I didn't realize that Trinity didn't fit into continuity until I read it. There's no point in time where Superman and Batman would have met each other, but not Wonder Woman, and Batman has already been joined by Robin, as Robin's debut comes after the formation of the Justice League. I think.
Next Week: It gets a little cold outside, as Batman faces Mr. Freeze for the first time. Plus: his first attempt at a "Bat-Family" in Snow!
I get asked about this one a whole lot. But it was also published before Infinite Crisis, right? That means any proposed meeting of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman is out of continuity, because post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, pre-Infinite Crisis, Superman and Batman met in the Man of Steel miniseries, and then they both met Wonder Woman at the same time in Legends. It could only possibly be canon, maybe, after Infinite Crisis, when Wonder Woman's origins were more in flux (and she re-became a founder of the Justice League), but I've never seen an in-continuity title that refers to Trinity's events as canon.
ReplyDeleteOh, you're right! I knew this was true but forgot it. Yes, there's essentially no version of continuity where this could have happened for a number of reasons.
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