The Trillion Dollar Kid #1 // Review
The world’s first trillionaire made it into the headlines something like 4 days before The Trillion Dollar Kid made it to comic book racks. On this side of the comics rack we get a supervillain trillionaire: a racist, evil piece of white fecal matter who made decisions for the U.S. government that could literally starve thousands of people to death. In the comics, though? In the comics, we can have a better breed of trillionaire. He’s a hero brought to the page by the writing team of Geoff Johns and Peter J. Tomasi. The first issue is brought to page and panel by Stefano Simeone.
He’s Thomas Noble Townsend III. (They call him Tommy.) He’s a trillionaire thanks to money he made for his parents’ company in having invented the Ouch-Less Bandage. (On this side of the comics page, there’s a company that has trademarked the “Truly Ouchless Bandage,” which is where you might have heard the term before.) He’s a trillionaire, but he really just wants to be able to help other people. And since he’s also a genius inventor, he has the money to create...a lot of things that a 13 year-old kid would be able to invent to make a lot of people really happy. There’s something that he’s longing for, though. And he’s going to go out and look for it...
Johns and Tomasi I have set up a tremendous challenge for themselves. With income disparity being as horrifying as it's become a 21st-century, it's hard to pose anyone who is a trillionaire as a true superhero. They managed to pull it off, though. There's that dream of the extremely wealthy person who is also a genius. It's never really happened. On the side of the comics page we have a lot of tremendously, dull and stupid people who have that kind of money. (Otherwise…they wouldn't have that kind of money. It’s only the very, very stupid people who get very, very wealthy.) But it is a delicious, a little fantasy to have a kid who happens to be a genius who happens to have $1 trillion. The darkness around the edges that begins to crop up at the end of the first issue doesn't hurt either.
Simene renders a 13-year-old kid for the page who looks both cute and expressive and also sophisticated. There's a deeper emotional life before this character. And it's very visible on the page. Without that complexity entire thing could come across as a pointless update on Richie Rich. The darkness around the edges of the center of everything lens the opening issue of the series of a kind of edge that makes it appealing. There's a real horror at the heart of all of the fantasy that is only beginning to become a parent as the opening issue of the series establishes the basic premise.
Grant Morrison once said that superheroes are who we think we could all be if we got it together to stop being jerks to each other. Tommy is the trillionaire that we all wish was actually out there. If there HAVE to be people with that kind of wealth, then they should be endlessly interesting and truly interested in making other people happy. Kind of a cross between Ferris Beuller, Parker Lewis, Tony Stark and everyone who has ever had occasion to be truly nice to somebody else in the endless nightmare parade of bad comedy that we mistakenly call “the real world.”
