Some Small Issues With Plot Progression But Still A Fantastic Chapter
This review was part of a full Trinity War review for the six chapters of the story as they were released in Justice League, Justice League of America and Justice League Dark. You can read it here.
Preface:
“Start to finish, this was one hell of a ride, and as the first mega-event in comics that I’ve been able to follow issue by issue, this definitely was something else. Geoff Johns and Jeff Lemire started off great, and they ended great, with ample support from all the artists involved like Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Mikel Janin and the others who were really on top-form here.” ~Shadowhawk, The Founding Fields
The road leading to Trinity War was laid down from the very first issues of all the titles that DC launched/relaunched with the reboot of their entire universe, dubbed New 52, in September 2011. Pandora, a mystical and mythical figure straight out of Greek legends and mythology, could be seen in subtle cameos in all the titles. I myself noted her in quite a few, although I couldn’t find her in some of them.
Regardless, Trinity War is an event that has been built up for almost two years. First it was Pandora’s special appearances. Then we started to have some backup stories in various issues of Justice League, penned by Geoff Johns, in which we saw mysterious villains carrying out schemes behind the scenes, and we even got to see more of Pandora herself as well as two other mystical and mysterious DC characters, the Phantom Stranger and the Question.
Then last year, we finally got on ongoing comic with the Phantom Stranger, which was initially penned by Dan Didio but has since fallen under the pen of J. M DeMatteis. Things came to a head earlier this year when DC launched Justice League of America, a new superhero team formed under the aegis of the United States Government as a possible opposition to the actual Justice League, should those heroes ever go off the rails.
And finally, we got a Pandora ongoing comic, penned by Ray Fawkes, and Trinity War was now on.
The idea of this event is that due to the machinations of a secretive group of villains, the Secret Society, the three Justice League teams currently in operation come to blows. There is mistrust and confusion on all sides, and this is meant to help the villains achieve their mysterious goals. With the Justice League, the Justice League of America and Justice League Dark (here on referred to as the JLA and the JLD respectively) all tied up and being manipulated without their knowledge, the stage is set, and what a fantastic and epic stage it is.
The main event begins with Justice League #22, where events are sparked off once Shazam, a new and rather inexperienced superhero, who goes into the country of Kahndaq to lay the remains of his nemesis Black Adam to rest. Unfortunately, his arrival there brings him into conflict with the national army, since the arrival of any superhero in the country breaks an international law. This necessitates the arrival of the Justice League to get Shazam out of there, no matter what. Matters are complicated further once the JLA detects the Justice League’s intervention and deploys to, essentially, arrest all the members of the Justice League for breaking the international law themselves.
Interlude: Just some brief thoughts so far. All that I expected to see out of this mega-event, I’ve been getting that and more. In all the build-up to the event, I had become increasingly excited to see how all the superheroes would fare off against each other, how they would all… reform as teams in the face of all that is being thrown at them. Nothing has disappointed me at all, I’m quite happy to say. There are so many mysteries and revelations that we’ve had throughout these three issues and each and everyone of them has added to the larger tapestry, which is no small feat given the extent of the number of characters involved here. And the story isn’t limited to these issues at all of course, as I pointed out earlier, and there are several tie-ins, most of which I’ve read too, barring Jeff Lemire’s Constantine.
Moving forward with the second month of Trinity War, I have some new expectations, mostly that we start to get resolutions to some of these mysteries, especially the larger story involving the Secret Society of Supervillains, and their so-far-unnamed leader. I want to know just what is really happening here and why Pandora’s Box is such an unknown quantity, even to the Greek Gods, being a force unto itself.
Review:
The fourth installment in Trinity War is Geoff Johns and Jeff Lemire’s Justice League of America #7. I was initially thrown off by the decision to launch this issue out of sequence, but it quickly made sense: the larger artwork by Doug Mahnke is set up that way, so going left-to-right, it stands that this issue would come out first, followed by Justice League Dark #22 and then culminating in another mega-sized Justice League #23.
The one defining thing about this issue was seeing the Martian Manhunter let loose his psychic powers. If you’ve seen Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, you’ll recall that there is a particularly powerful moment between Spock and his protege-turned-traitor Valeris towards the final third of the film, before the Enterprise arrives at Camp Khitomer to save the day. Well, the same kind of applies here, and J’onn holds nothing back. Quite surprisingly, this moment also created a subtle heart-to-heart moment between Superman and the Martian Manhunter, carrying over a theme from some of previous issue of Justice League that the latter had not really let go of his loyalties to his original friends, despite joining Amanda Waller’s JLA and knowing full well what the purpose of the new team was. Great work there by Johns and Lemire.
And this leads to the second important revelation of this series, something that we had already seen in previous issues, but that the characters themselves didn’t particularly know: that there is a double agent in one of the leagues. It is such a great emotional beat in this issue, one that matches the impact of Superman killing Doctor Light. I expected there to be some fall-out from this but unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. And one reason is that everybody is just too busy dealing with the ongoing mysteries that they don’t have the time to deal with this as well. Its not the most ideal resolution for that mystery that the writers could have gone with, but its something that I can accept all the same.
Then, we have the big, big twist in the series, the introduction of the most ruthless and cold-hearted villain in the entire DCU: Lex Luthor. I haven’t read any of the Action Comics issues for New 52 so I don’t know what happened with the character, but from everything that I’ve seen in Superman, he is currently spending time in a special prison, designed to hold him and only him. This is something that I touched on in my review of Scott Snyder’s Superman Unchained most recently. This was a really good touch, because it brought recognizable villains into the fold, as Ray Fawkes did in the tie-in issues of Pandora with Vandal Savage, amongst others. So that scratches that itch.
Also, something that is covered in the tie-in Phantom Stranger #11 is that this mystic hero and Batman, alongwith Katana and Deadman travel to the afterlife to interrogate Doctor Light’s soul and find from him what happened at the moment of his death. While that issue successfully resolve that side-jaunt, we see it reproduced here, and once again, I was hit with a gut-punch, because Phantom Stranger comes off on the wrong end of events and pay a grand sacrifice. It is a passing moment that I wish had been dealt with more, especially the consequences of it, but I’m find with it all the same.
As always, Doug Mahnke is a master of his craft here. The way he incorporates every hero into the panels and makes them all stand-out on their own speaks to his art skills, which are considerable (speaking as a layman of course) and which he has showcased again and again on this title and elsewhere. Clean, definitive pencils, with lots of expressive moments and strong moments.
One thing that stands out here is that there are so many panels in this issue. The flow is broken up here and there with a small handful of splash pages, but largely, this is an issue where the panel depth and variety is immense. This creates a very strong sense of pace for the story and reflects well on the script by Lemire and Johns. There is a bit of inconsistency in the colours, which is inevitable given the number of secondary artists on the issue, but by and large, that inconsistency isn’t prominent to leap off the page and break the flow of the story. Which is a point in the artists’ favour.
In the end, this was another great entry in the progressing narrative, but I’m getting slightly worried at this point that the larger mystery is going to remain that, a mystery. I want to know how this mysterious leader of the Secret Society is. That particular mystery has been building up for far too long, and I’m getting a bit impatient.
Rating: 9/10