DC Entertainment’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns has made it a pretty regular thing, writing the Free Comic Book Day offering and using it as a springboard for the Next Big Storyline. In spite of being a pretty lackluster standalone issue, the Blackest Night offering a few years ago managed to really whet fans’ appetite for the already-anticipated blockbuster storyline that came next.This year, we get a look at Trinity War, an upcoming story that will pit the Justice League against the Trinity of Sin and, apparently, themselves. It is, at least in part, the payoff to not one but two long-standing DC Universe mysteries: the story of Pandora, the mysterious woman who appeared in the background of all of the #1 issues of the New 52 and the identity of the Phantom Stranger, whose origin has never been revealed since he was introduced in 1952 but who, according to this issue, appears as though he may be Judas Iscariot. What, if anything, that implication will have to do with Walt Simonson’s upcoming Batman original graphic novel, The Judas Coin, remains to be seen.If the Phantom Stranger is a member of the Trinity of Sin, he’s the one who’s most adjusted to his “sentence” as doled out by a group of mysterious godlike beings at the Rock of Eternity. The other two are Pandora herself–who is, yes, that Pandora with the box and everything–and an unnamed man who, defiant over being chastised by the gods, finds himself stripped of his identity before he can reveal it to the reader and cast down to Earth faceless as The Question. That course of events, of course, leaves open the already-puzzling question of what happened to the last known Question, Renee Montoya, in the world of the New 52 where her only appearance was as a photo on the Gotham City Police Department’s wall of honor.
Videos by ComicBook.com
