First with 52, then Countdown, the weekly comic has become a key part of DC's periodical publishing plans. Now a new weekly series is being introduced, but it will differ quite a bit from its predecessors.
Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley’s forthcoming weekly series, Trinity, has been in the works for a long while. The first mention of it came in late 2006, as a “secret project” that was the reason Busiek was leaving Aquaman; Busiek’s original plan was to write an ongoing weekly series featuring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman that would have a seven-page installment of the main story, feature additional pages promoting what DC was publishing the next week and retail for a dollar, far less than the usual $2.99 DC cover price.
The “secret project” changed its name a few times, was delayed for a year when DC decided to make Countdown its weekly follow-up to 52 and eventually assumed its final form: another 52-issue limited series, with two chapters in each full-length, full-price issue. The 10-page backup stories will be written by Busiek with Fabian Nicieza and drawn by rotating artists, including Tom Derenick and Scott McDaniel; the 12-page lead story, written by Busiek and starring the Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman team, will be drawn by Mark Bagley, who recently completed his 110-issue run on Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man with Brian Michael Bendis.
Yes, that’s 12 pages a week drawn by one penciler. “It sounds like it’s an insane amount of work for one guy to do,” Bagley said via telephone from his Georgia home, “but I’m getting a fairly early jump on it and working at a regular pace. It’s actually not a lot more than I’ve been doing the last eight years.” And any thoughts about what he might do once it’s over? “I’m thinking about, next year, doing 12 issues of whatever I’m going to be doing, and that’s it. That’ll be like a vacation for me.”
Busiek and Bagley have collaborated before, most notably on the initial run of Marvel’s Thunderbolts a decade ago; their part of the story is being done “Marvel-style,” with the artist working from detailed plots and Busiek adding dialogue afterwards, although both of them mentioned that they’re in constant contact with each other. Busiek said that he’s thinking of the pace of Trinity as “kind of a hybrid between a traditional comic book and a classic continuity Sunday page. I can do a chapter with characters sitting around and talking for eight or nine pages, and then a cliffhanger that leads into next week, and people won’t be saying, ‘Oh, that was boring, nobody hit anybody.’ Because seven days from now, somebody’s gonna hit somebody, something’s gonna blow up, somebody’s gonna fall off a building, giant space beetles are gonna invade Duluth.... It’s got this relentless forward pace.”
Bagley’s excited about the project, too, although he noted, “It’s taking me a little while to get used to drawing the characters; I keep working the faces to death, especially Superman and Wonder Woman. But I’m really liking the scale of it—this is the first cosmic-level event I’ve worked on in a long, long time. It’s fun to do this instead of just characters swinging around New York City. Brian [Michael Bendis] worked his ass off trying to give me different things to draw, but the bottom line was that it was Spider-Man and the kinds of things that he would deal with.”
According to Busiek, the creative process on Trinity is very different from the way Countdown and 52 worked: “I think Countdown suffered early on because there were multiple different threads, but instead of having one writer oversee each thread, there was one writer per issue, and each writer was doing his piece of the story but not necessarily getting you really riveted into that particular plot line. Whatever plot line Mark Waid was writing in 52, that was his plot line, and he was going to make you care about it—he was in competition with the other three plot lines! And the result was just this explosion of cool stuff happening.
“But the main difference is that 52 had four writers; Countdown had six; we have two. And one of us has a whip. I’m plotting or co-plotting every single chapter, and everything’s being done by me or it’s being done by Fabian. If what we have is two writers, three pencilers, three inkers, two colorists, a letterer and we’re done, that gives us much, much tighter control and a much easier job of making the book consistent. And if making it consistent is easier, making it exciting is something we have more energy and attention for.”
There have actually been two earlier DC projects called Trinity—a 2003 Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman miniseries written and drawn by Matt Wagner, and a science-fiction crossover from 1993. Busiek noted that the new Trinity has connections to both, if “not really textual connections.” But his series, he said, is Trinity for a specific reason—“you couldn’t just as easily call it Trio or Troika or something—there’s a specific focus on the power of trinities and the power of this specific trinity. It’s a big, sprawling story that will take us everywhere from dealing with cosmic manifestations in Metropolis to fighting aliens in the western Massachusetts Berkshires, garden parties at Wayne Manor, Castle Branek in Eastern Europe, home of the Demon, the Earth of the Crime Syndicate, outer space, interdimensional space, a world where there are characters who exist as gods, a threat to all civilization throughout the galaxy. It’s going to be as awesome as Fabian and I can make it. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are the heart of this, but it’s the DC universe that’s the battlefield, the showpiece and the stage, and there will be a lot of territory covered.”
