Huge multi-part special-run series make good business for four-color comics companies, I get that. The basic model is now infinitely replicated: the central spine of a six or eight-issue mini-series feeding into an extended nervous system of tie-in issues designed to part nervous fanboy completists from their apparently-inexhaustible spending money. Nowadays, the leverage placed on those completists can utterly defeat the non-completists who might otherwise buy the central mini-series: nowadays, that central series tends not even to make sense without all forty ancillary tie-ins.

DC’s big hoopla event of the summer, “Trinity War,” at least tried to keep its central story comprehensible. The six-issue mini-series created by writer Geoff Johns and artist Ivan Reis has been an almost entirely unedifying affair, mainly just issue after issue of the company’s three iterations of the Justice League (League, of America, and Dark) slugging it out and regrouping for five issues, obsessing the whole while about a maguffin in the shape of a metal skull-shaped artifact. Reis’ artwork has been superb throughout (although his habit of providing big splash panels every few pages sometimes feels oddly out of sync with the story’s dramatic beats – it’s the visual equivalent of those badly-dubbed Japanese Godzilla movies), but the ongoing frenzy of the books’ narrative has largely prevented Johns from doing much in the way of creating character or even serving up sensible dialogue (its mostly just members of the 30-something cast of characters constantly introducing themselves for the benefit of newcomers). Instead, we get five issues of build-up: what is the metal skull, and what does it do?

Since this event is supposed to be something of a knockout, Johns has deliberately hinted that the maguffin will involve that old familiar chestnut, an alternate reality – and not just any old alternate reality: the hints pointed at a glimpse of what long-time DC fans still reflexively think of as the “real” reality, the one that obtained before the company’s “New 52” revamp. The reality in which Superman wears bright colors, Wonder Woman wears bright colors, and nobody’s costumes have any pointless piping and cross-hatched seamwork.

And sure enough, after about six or seven big splash-pages, the metal skull does indeed open up a portal to another dimension, and super-beings step through. They’re not MY super-beings – considering how successful “The New 52” is, I doubt I’ll ever see that old gang again – but they’re sure as hell plot-twisters. Confusing plot-twisters, too, since they appear on the last pages of a limited mini-series; so what, then? The whole thing was a prologue only?

Fortunately, the extra frustration of watching a plot involving so many of DC’s flagship characters unravel so abruptly is confined to “Trinity War” this week – elsewhere in DC’s run this week is the newest issue of one of the company’s best titles, “Batman/Superman” (ungainly as all get-out, but in “The New 52,” the old title for such a book, “World’s Finest,” is already taken), written by Greg Pak and drawn with absolutely stunning virtuosity by Jae Lee. The first story-arc of this new title features two versions of both Superman and Batman, each plucked from different time-periods in their lives and facing the menace of Darkseid. Pak involves Wonder Woman and Lois Lane early on in his proceedings and runs his characters through some very enjoyable personality clashes (in this latest issue, Pak continues the extend these clashes back in time, here featuring the very first meeting of young-boy Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, which happens when the Wayne limousine breaks down in Smallville). But as good as his writing is, it’s blown out of the water by Lee’s revelatory artwork, which is often so stylized that you need to stop and stare at it.

This is still the “New 52” version of these iconic characters, but it’s the best version currently on the market – and it’s going to make one fine collection very shortly.