Tim Trench is an obscure footnote in the legacy of DC
Comics. Denny O’Neil, best known for his groundbreaking work as a writer on
GREEN LANTERN and a writer and editor on BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS,
introduced Trench in a 1968 issue of WONDER WOMAN--#179, to be exact, which
also premiered the book’s new logo.
Trench was just a shadowy figure in #179, but took a
major supporting role in #180, when the St. Louis private eye teamed up with
Wonder Woman and her elderly Chinese companion I Ching to battle the sinister
Doctor Cyber. The four-part series, which was penciled by Mike Sekowsky and
inked by Dick Giordano, ended in #182 with Cyber making a slick getaway and
Trench revealed as a traitor. He was last seen flying off in a helicopter (on
page 1!) with a booty of gems, leaving Wonder Woman and I Ching to face Cyber’s
wrath.
Undoubtedly, this was the decision of Sekowsky, who took
over WONDER WOMAN’s editing duties on #182 and installed himself as the book’s
writer too. Either he had a different concept of the storyline’s conclusion or
just hated the Trench character, but Sekowsky ditched Trench as quickly as he
could.
Leap ahead seven years to DETECTIVE COMICS #460,
cover-dated June 1976. With the main story—Batman taking on Captain Stingaree—taking
up a mere eleven (!) pages, editor Julius Schwartz turned to O’Neil for a
six-page backup. Reaching into his memory bank, O’Neil penned “The Cold-Fire
Caper!” as Tim Trench’s first solo story.
“Cold-Fire Caper” makes no mention of Trench’s betrayal
of Wonder Woman or the stolen gems, and readers could be forgiven for assuming
he was a new character. Working out of an office above a repertory theater in
St. Louis that runs old Bogart movies, Trench tumbles into a succinct mystery
involving a ruby, a femme fatale, a mobster named Lippy Louie, and a couple of
punchups and gun battles.
O’Neil brought back Trench one issue later. In DETECTIVE
COMICS #461’s “The Moneybag Caper!”, Trench found more or less the same type of
trouble, this time agreeing to bodyguard a mobster named Big Willy Cline. As
with “Cold-Fire Caper,” the art was handled by penciler Pablo Marcos and inker
Al Milgrom, neither of which turn in their best work.
Maybe Schwartz or the readers didn’t like Tim Trench,
because when DETECTIVE COMICS #462 came out, the private eye was gone, and the
Elongated Man was solving mysteries in his place (the Batman lead story was
still only eleven pages). It could also have been that DETECTIVE COMICS already
had a private detective, Jason Bard, appearing occasionally, and why did it
need another one?
And that, to date, has pretty much been it for Tim
Trench. Two six-page adventures and a four-issue (really three) supporting role
in WONDER WOMAN. He did get his own entry in WHO’S WHO: THE DEFINITIVE
DIRECTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE #24, where he was nicely drawn by Sandy Plunkett
and P. Craig Russell (of Marvel’s amazing Killraven series in AMAZING
ADVENTURES). He showed up as something of a joke in a 1996 SWAMP THING and was
killed off in Week 18’s issue of 52 in 2006.
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