Book Review Number 48: Trinity, Vol 2

(Note: Since I've been linking everything back to Amazon anyway, I figure that I might try to make a little money should anyone decide to buy it from them based on my review.  If people think this is too distracting, please let me know.)

Trinity, Vol 2 picks up where Vol 1 left off - with Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman erased from history on their earth.  Most of the people of the world - heroes included - forget that they ever existed.  It, along with the fact that the aspects the three embodied have also been weakened, makes the world a very strange one.  Only a few people remember the truth.  Firestorm was outside of time (if I'm remembering correctly) so his memories survived intact.  Tarot, being at the center of it all, also remembers some of what things need to be and quests to bring everything back to how it should be.  A lot of time is also spent on the Dark three - Morgan le Fey, Despero and Enigma (who I actually felt sorry for as I read his back story) - and what is happening with them.    

Be warned - Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman do not show up in this book.  It's much more a story of how the world changes without them in it and what needs to be done to get them back.  I've read a few reviews online that hated this fact and felt mislead because of the cover.  It doesn't bother me so much because it's the middle of the story.

And it definitely is the middle of the story.  Quite a bit has been pushed forward and there's still a lot left to go.  But that's why there's a book three.  Unlike written word series novels, there isn't a majority of a story that's been tidied up so you get a sense of some closure at the end with just enough mystery left to have you buy the next book.  Because of what graphic novels (usually) are - a compilation of the monthly comic - it is just one overarcing story and can't come in neat little packages.  Some of them can be put into those neat packages - when you have smaller storylines to deal with - but a large number of the big ones are going to be broken up like this.

One of the things that I truly loved about this particular volume was seeing the changed characters without the Big Three in their lives. Alfred, in particular, interested me.  Not having Bruce Wayne as an employer, he became an archeologist.  Yet still, he was Alfred to the core.

I would not recommend picking this one up first.  With a lot of things, I'll jump around from book to book (the Riley Jensen series, for example) and, while some bits are a little confusing, most of the time I don't mind it.  Because of the story for Trinity, I definitely suggest reading them in order.