JUSTICE LEAGUE: TRINITY WAR by Geoff Johns, Jeff Lemire, Ray Fawkes, Ivan Reis, Doug Mahnke, and Mikel Janin
Collects: Justice League #22-23, Justice League of America #6-7, Justice League Dark #22-23, Constantine #5, Trinity of Sin: Pandora #1-3, Trinity of Sin: Phantom Stranger #11
NOTE: This review is based on an advance digital copy. I apologize if there is any difference in content from the final print version.
For those that haven't been keeping up with DC monthlies in the past year, allow me to take a moment to let you know what is going on here.
Trinity War was a crossover in the various Justice League books last summer and was essentially a prelude to the mini-series,
Forever Evil. It starts out with a battle between the Justice League and Justice League of Amerca and eventually sees them stand beside each other along with the Justice League Dark to uncover the mystery of Pandora's Box and find out who is behind the Secret Society of Villains.
This volume opens with The New 52 book that was made available on Free Comic Book Day back in 2012. It's a pretty nice little read that details the origins of the Trinity of Sin (Pandora, Question, and Phantom Stranger). There's a brief, yet highly entertaining, action sequence that sees Pandora retrieve her Box from ARGUS's Black Room. This is the same box she opened millenia ago that was the butterfly flapping its wings that caused the hurricane. There's just one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb that may be corrected in the final print edition: Jim Lee's foldout is included and a MALE Atom is pictured among other heroes in the midst of battle. This struck me as odd since they changed the Atom to a female less than a year later and it's that character that is prominently featured in this book.
Before we get to the meat of the story with the JL chapters, we're treated to Pandora's first solo outing in a comic book. Her origin is both tragic and compelling. We also see how she freed the Seven Deadly Sins from the Box and how these evil spirits corrupted the world. More on these entities later.
The various JL chapters are the real highlight of this book. They contain explosive action, riveting storytelling, and great dialogue. Johns, Lemire, and Fawkes make for a great yarn spinning triumverate. Various artists lent their talent to this book, but the standouts for me were Ivan Reis and Mikel Janin. These high octane chapters really reminded me of the four episode battle that closed out the Cadmus arc in the first season of
Justice League: Unlimited. It's also interesting to view Madame Xanadu's tarot cards after having read this as a collection and being six-sevenths finished with
Forever Evil. Xanadu will make you believe that cardboard can tell the future.
There's something in this collection that really struck a chord with some fans last summer: Superman kills Dr. Light. Granted it was entirely unintentional and didn't start the brushfire that
Man of Steel did. Despite the fact that the comic book plainly told you several times that Superman wasn't in control or responsible, many people didn't comprehend. This Involuntary Supermanslaughter is one of the major points of the story and I want to leave something for your reading experience. The way Superman deals with it all is quite touching.
Several non JL books are included as interludes, for better or worse.
Constantine #5 had its moments such as Constantine stealing Billy Batson's powers to become Shazam and Billy talking like an Englishman to distract a monster. (They magically swapped voices.) This chapter may be a bit off-putting for some, especially if you are unfamiliar with Constantine's supporting characters. This particular tie-in ultimately felt like a Trojan Horse to get JL fans to read
Constantine. Phantom Stranger's chapter wasn't really that great or necessary.
Although Pandora's tie-ins were by far the most engaging of the interludes and would probably make for a good standalone trade paperback, they needlessly bloated the overall story. You can probably put together from all I have said so far that the same could be said about the interludes as a whole. Once you're halfway through the JL chapters and get a cliffhanger ending, you get all these interludes and they completely ruin the pace of the book. I'm also pretty sure that I saw Shazam in a black costume in an interlude chapter before he was corrupted by Pandora's Box in a JL one. (Again, that's something that may get corrected in the print edition.) The explanation given for the Seven Deadly Sins, at least how I interpreted it, was that they were just reflections of Pandora. I'll revisit this topic momentarily.
The final chapter,
Justice League #23, is my personal favorite. It's where everything is paid off and all is revealed, including what caused Superman to kill Dr. Light, which I found to be brilliant. The battle crafted by penciler Ivan Reis is a sight to behold. It turns out Pandora's Box is, in fact, a variation of the Mother Box, is from Earth 3, and rooted in science. I understand that we spent the entire book believing it was magic, so what about the Seven Deadly Sins? Maybe this was explored in later issues of
Pandora, but you can't throw magic and spirituality at us for an entire book and then say "oopsie, it's science!" When I read this in single issue format last summer, I read only the JL books and the twist was a lot easier to swallow. Perhaps if it was plainly stated the Sins were hallucinations or entities from Earth 3, it would've fit better. Unless you haven't been on a comic book website in the last year, you know the Crime Syndicate shows up at the end to set up
Forever Evil.
If you're looking for something that collects every bit of
Trinity War, then by all means get this because that's what this is. Personally, I think it would have been a much better read if only the chapters from the three Justice League titles were included. If you want a more streamlined experience featuring the stronger points of
Trinity War to place on your shelf as a
Forever Evil prelude, you may be better off waiting until April for the release of
Justice League Vol. 4: The Grid.
Score: 7/10