The Trio - John Byrne's new title at IDW
SolitaireRose
Posts: 1,445
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.
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.
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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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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?