Tom King’s Trinity: Generation S is wholesome and hilarious; those who’ve been missing Peter Tomasi’s tales of the Super Sons ought surely to find something to like here. The book is also surely a testament to King’s range, the same writer who brought us Omega Men’s moral ambiguity and Mister Miracle’s darkness and the bleak climax of Batman: City of Bane also bringing us super-corgis.

Deftly, King has created a character in Lizzie “Trinity” Prince that seems poised to last. At the same time, I don’t think we can overlook that this Trinity collection of stories is itself a puzzle box, each story a little hint dropped as to the larger question of what’s going on in King’s Wonder Woman.

[Review contains spoilers]

There is an appetite out there for what I see as “cozy” superhero stories, represented in this corner of the woods by the Webtoon and DC Go! series. If I haven’t totally connected with these myself, I still recognize the zeitgeist and appreciate DC’s relatively quick swerve to give the audience what they want. And probably nowhere do we see this more clearly than in King’s Wonder Woman, which in the original publication had rending stories of Diana persecuted and discriminated against even by those she’s sworn to protect, backed up by tales of the foibles of Jon Kent and Damian Wayne trying to babysit young Lizzie Prince.

Trinity: Generation S, if I understand correctly, reprints these stories in a rough chronological order for the first time. In publication, and even in the two Trinity specials that originally brought the backups together, the stories jumped in time from Lizzie as a toddler through Lizzie as a teenager, which I’m guessing made the meta-background of these stories all the more mysterious. Yes, it’s adorable to see Damian teaching Lizzie to tie her shoes, but also as the stories flit back and forth, we also see Damian donning his own Bat-cowl (once associated with a dark future) and Lizzie graduating up the superhero ranks, not to mention the extant questions of who Lizzie is and where exactly she came from. The stories are cute, but they also clearly reflect major doings between the pages that we are not yet privy to.

On the page, however, King and mostly artist Belen Ortega have some real winners. At the point in which Damian and Jon teach young Lizzie to fly a kite by kidnapping Kite Man (returned to prominence in King’s Batman run), it’s clear King has a hold on this story both within and without. The time travel story is a feast of DC continuity sight jokes, perhaps my favorite, though Mongul as a “Canarie” (read “Swiftie”) is right up there. The 73-day space trip is a treat, too, DC not so squeamish as to prevent King from having Lizzie lecture her Superman and Batman about putting the seat down, plus the new dynamic of Lizzie and Jon pulling Office-style pranks on Damian.

I caught a line here maybe I’d missed the first time around, in one of the last stories in this book (but one that was actually published first, the short from Wonder Woman #800). Here, Lizzie teases and browbeats Jon and Damian as they join her in entering a prison against the rules, on a quest to understand her origins; Lizzie goes on at such length, almost rudely, that even the ever-patient Jon suggests she might cut it out. But she introduces herself to Wonder Woman villain the Sovereign as “leader of the Justice League,” and it occurred to me to wonder whether that’s hyperbole or whether Lizzie is the leader of this apparent future League. In the later years, she’s somewhat abrasive, and I’m curious how much of this King has planned out, whether Lizzie does lead the League, who’s a member, and how well that goes.

This is speculation, but it seemed to me DC wanted a Wonder Woman legacy character in Yara Flores, given her prominence in Future State and Infinite Frontier right after. But among drawbacks, aside from the TV show never happening, were that the Wonder Girl miniseries wasn’t very good and also that Yara very rarely interacted or had much connection with Diana herself. King here puts me in mind of John Byrne’s Wonder Woman run, where Byrne introduced Cassie Sandsmark as a member of the cast and then as Wonder Girl. Equally these stories of Damian and Jon interacting with Lizzie, helping to raise her, go a much longer way toward making Lizzie seem intrinsically part of the mythos and harder to shunt back to limbo.

I was thinking, too, how King would pull this all together. We know there’s a Trinity series (miniseries?) coming up, but these stories would suggest it be set in this uncertain future, and books set in speculative DC futures (Legion of Super-Heroes of late, Future State: Gotham) haven’t had a long shelf-life. That’s perhaps answered in two pages at the end that at first I thought was just a gag — the three Lizzies we’ve seen in this book, all together, and up to their ears in corgis. But tiptoeing around the internet a little, trying to avoid spoilers, I understand this to be at least part of the premise of the solo series, and isn’t that interesting, too — whether continuity could have its cake and eat it too if a slightly future Trinity didn’t ultimately end up living in the past.

Stories by Tom King with art by Daniel Sampere in Trinity: Generation S are just as good, though more serious. It’s all King, which is to say, it should feel all of a narrative piece, but in some respects those stories would give me pause handing the book off to someone who might appreciate the comedy; those stories to an extent break the illusion of this as “just” a cozy superhero book. Again, I’m curious where this all goes; presumably Trinity has a path in King and Sampere’s Wonder Woman, even as her solo book will be by King and Belen Ortega.

[Includes original and variant covers]