Yeah, Barry then said that he had not read the book yet. He was just speculating for fun.

However, his theoretical speculations do point out that Byrne is following his own comic-book logic and not any kind of real-world physics. Which is fine.

I did read TRIO #3, and here are some


SPOILERS


SPOILERS


SPOILERS


Back in the first issue, Scissors/Ahmed answered his cell phone and said "Leslie ... sorry, Habibi ... I can't talk right now." It turns out that Leslie/Habibi is actually Ahmed's husband, Professor Galloway, an aide to the mayor, who has to leave work to run out into a disaster zone to look for Ahmed. So, points to Byrne for using gay characters in an unsensationalized way. Points off from Byrne for making them boring.

Throughout the book, Byrne sets up these tiny patterns of suspense-then-revelation, mystery-then-reveal. It's the old comic-book trope where somebody says "Ohmygod! It can't be ... you!" Or somebody says "But where could he be now?" But the trope here is drained of life, since none of the mysteries are mysterious, and none of the reveals are interesting.

Even the giant Galactus stand-in is frankly underwhelming, since all that needs to be done is have the giant Godzilla stand-in stop trashing the city and turn against the new bad guy instead. The heroes are just bystanders to the main action. This really is one of the dullest superhero comics ever.

I'm no quitter.

That's a given!

And I disagree. Say what?

As usual, I have been thinking about TRIO, a book I don't enjoy, way more than is really healthy for me.

The book is about a superhero team, but the three of them don't seem to know one another very well. They keep talking about how their powers are mysterious to one another. They apparently joined their secret group at different times (so were they called DUO or SOLO at earlier times?).

One of them is experiencing pain when he stays in rocky form for too long, and he is keeping that problem a secret from his teammates. He actually is making lame excuses in the middle of world-saving to go off and deal with his pain, and his teammates are accepting those excuses and not questioning him about it. It's almost the mirror-image opposite of the way Clark Kent runs off to save the world and his reporter colleagues accept his lame excuses.

So, why are these people working together at all? Do they have some common origin that repeated three times? Were they all recruited by their mysterious unseen boss? Does their organization have any overarching purpose, other than reacting ineffectively to super-threats? And given the current pace at which Byrne is dribbling out information, why do I expect the answers to these questions to be very slow in coming, and profoundly uninteresting once they are revealed?

Is Jaybles also banning "Dark Knight Rises," or is that okay?
If so, what is the over/under for when he "catches it on cable"?

And that's where I decided not to read any further. No, really. I did not read past that.

What I'm going to do is predict that what follows the above sentence will be filled with nothing but negativity.

Mind you, Peter, you have proven to be quite the well-spoken (for a message board poster) individual, but your true colors as a detractor manage to shine through. You haven't earned cornfield status...yet (stop with the tears!)...but keep up with the blatant nay-saying & you will have to suffer the fate of being added to the cornfield (No, really! Stop with the waterworks!).

I'll check back tomorrow. Who knows? Maybe I pegged you wrong. It can happen!

And you still expect us to believe it's not your intent to make this topic about you. Pathetic.

I don't know if "you will say negative things about a shitty comic" really counts as a prediction. At least not a very impressive one.

Fair enough, Paul. You don't have to read my complaints. Sorry if I've gotten too negative for you.

I obviously still enjoy talking about Byrne's comics. I guess what I was getting at in that first sentence, is that quite often on the internet, somebody will complain about something, and somebody else will say "if it bothers you so much, why do you spend so much time talking about it? Why don't you go pay attention to something else?" So I was responding to that unanswered question ahead of time, defensively. I guess I would have been better off just making my comments rather than getting defensive about them prematurely.