The Trio - John Byrne's new title at IDW

SolitaireRose

I picked this up really wanting to like it. Byrne CAN do work I enjoy and it's been a while since he did something I liked.

This was NOT it.

The characters don't have super-hero names...OK, not clear ones. They are called One, Two and Three as well as Rock, Paper and Scissors by different groups making it very confusing to follow. We start in the middle of a fight, which is a nice way to get things off to a big start, but we don't know much about the group other than they all know each other, have known each other for a while and work as a team.

Is this a world where there are a lot of super-heroes? Only a few? Only these three? Is this a normal occurrence?

Paper/Two is injured in the fight and the team doesn't know if she is dead, so she is whisked off to a high tech headquarters, and MORE confusion ensues...is this a HQ they they own, or if they don't who has all the high tech equipment? Rock/One doesn't go the HQ and instead turns into human form, without any clothing (but has a big wad of money to pay for a cab making me wonder where he stashes the money if he can't stash clothes....) is dropped off at home and greets his family where we get a revelation as to who Rock/One is when he isn't smashing stuff.

Rock is pretty much The Thing with a different personality, Scissors may well be the goofiest looking character outside of a fanzine and Paper seems utterly worthless in a super-hero sense.

Byrne's art looked better than it has in a long time, but the character designs of both Paper and Scissor was a mess, just amateurish and I don't think anyone could make Scissors look good.

So...how did it work as a first issue?

DAMN this book needed an editor. I can understand a first issue having a "teaser" aspect to it, but this felt like an idea, not a story. There is a way to do the "you are in a new world" as a first issue that entices you. Think about the first issue of Transmetropolitan or the pilot episode of Lost and you'll see how to use this technique.

Too many things just happen without any explanation, and there is NOTHING here that interested me enough to come back to get some answers next issue.

It's a damn shame, since I am more than ready to follow a new John Byrne comic.

BlackUmbrella

Thanks for the generous warning. If there's a lesson to be learned from recent offerings by Byrne, Neil Adams and Frank Miller (and others, I'm sure), it's that the most accomplished creators can benefit greatly from a strong bridle. It's heartbreaking to see them produce horrid work.

It took decades for me to face it, but I've finally concluded that I only ever liked Byrne's art so much because of the inking of Terry Austin and Joe Rubenstein. Otherwise, it is generally unrefined and juvenile-looking. I loved his writing on FF, of course.

[Deleted User]

It is interesting that the first thing Jim Shooter did when he took over as EIC of Marvel, is he stopped the policy of writers being their own editors. With very few exceptions, every writer had his work edited by someone who could look at it objectively. Many strong series were born from that policy, in my opinion.

BlackUmbrella

Speaking of aging greats, anyone else notice that Neal Adams is starting to draw like Mort Drucker, and George Perez is starting to draw like Dave Berg? If John Byrne starts drawing like Don Martin, I think it will be an indisputable pattern.

Murray

On the other hand… I liked it quite a bit. :). I'm always a sucker for John Byrne stuff and this was pretty much what I was expecting. I'd agree that the character names and designs aren't the greatest things I've ever seen come out of Byrne, but he's certainly not afraid to change designs whenever the mood strikes him.
I didn't have the same questions or confusions that @torchsong did. I'm not concerned about why they have a headquarters or whether we'll see other heroes. Those answers will come.
Does the first issue work as a story? Maybe. I can see your concern, for sure, but it all worked for me. Does it have a distinct beginning,middle,end "done in one" feel. No, not really. But it definitely introduces the characters and sets up a threat for the next issue. For me, it worked. I wanna see the next issue and get to know these characters.
The biggest selling point was that it felt like a comic plucked right out of my heyday of reading comics. No endless run of wordless panels letting "the art tell the story". Phooey on that! There are words! Descriptive words, explanatory words, dialoguey words… the only thing missing were thought bubbles. I'd probably put this book up there with Byrne's work on Danger Unlimited. If you enjoyed that, you'd probably enjoy this.

kfreeman

I'm as big a fan of Byrne's work as it gets, and I didn't like this issue at all. It was very formulaic--it feels like Byrne has set this type of story/introduction up a dozen times previously. While I liked Cold War a lot, this one left a lot to be desired.

mdooney

I enjoyed it for it's 1980's comic vibe. I even liked the matte finish cover and the simplified interior coloring and paper.

MikeGallagher

Everyone knows I'm a huge Byrne fan. I dropped fx as it sucked so bad. This, this may rival fx. It is certainly off to a rough start.
The story was laughably bad.
Had he played up the whole rock paper scissors thing it might have been fun. But making it so serious was a mistake.

ctowner1

I'm another one of those used-to-love-Byrne-but-came-not-to's, as well. Still, hope springs eternal, so I bought this issue, too. I pretty much agree with most of the comments re plot. It struck me as a by-the-books standard superhero type story - nothing really to get me going and want to buy the next issue.

I also agree with the comments above that Byrne's art can benefit greatly with a decent inker and that it usually looks sloppy when he inks his own pencils. Here, though, I thought he did a decent job. So artwise, I thought it was ok. Not enough though to get me to issue #2.

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MikeGallagher

I liked his character designs. But I loathed that obscuring rock texture

Thor_El

I just had the opportunity to read it, since my DCBS box arrived the other day.

While I agree it's FAR from the Byrne I remember in my youth, it's still a decent book. Not anything spectacular, to be sure. However, Byrne (like many of the "Old-Timers") tends to think long-term, so I'm willing to stick around to see where this all goes. The inclusion of one of his creator owned villains from the past in issue #4 has me REALLY excited, as the potential for either a flashback or the inclusion of the corresponding hero would be fantastic.

It has also got me wondering if the inclusion of those two might be an attempt to create some kind of cohesive universe of his stuff? Excluding Next Men, might we be looking forward to seeing Danger Unlimited in these pages sometime?

It's not FF or X-Men, that's for certain, but it's Byrne doing superheroes and I really miss that.

One thing that struck me odd was the actual book itself. The cover has the same feel, material-wise, as the stuff that Ka-Blam prints. I have a couple small Transformers convention comics that feel exactly the same as this. Being from IDW, I had expected the feel of a typical comic, whereas this feels VERY self-published. I wonder if that means that Byrne is floating the ENTIRE cost of this series?