If ever a comic book merited a Bold New Direction cover blurb, this is it. For in one issue we have a new base for the team…
… one member gone, another leaving, a former member rejoining…
… and demon’s daughter Raven tearing up over a satellite?
As for that zoo – why is the Justice League putting alien creatures in little cages? – a moment of empathy from Beast Boy leads to a scary encounter.
The incident annoys the Justice League Watchtower’s head of security, Renee Montoya, back in Question mode.
The over-the-top exchange means the new Titans are happy to beam back down to Blüdhaven and their latest Titans Tower, where another change to the former status quo comes.
There are no objections, although Roy is slow to acquiesce, but that’s because he’s being distracted by bad memories of his days as a drug addict, on top of concerns about mentor Green Arrow’s recent involvement with Amanda Waller. And it soon becomes apparent that he’s not the only Titan bedevilled by bad memories.
We soon see who’s behind this, and it’s a villain I don’t recall having any encounters with the Titans. Hopefully we’ll learn more next time: I’ll certainly be back to find out, as new writer John Layman and artist Pete Woods refresh a series that has, for the most part, felt pretty flat. This issue is the comics equivalent of turning the computer off and on again – things are familiar, but working a little better.
Promoting Donna to leader is a great idea – as Dick says, he has a lot on his plate, what with superheroics and social change in Blüdhaven. Donna, though, seems to have no life outside of the Titans… heck, no one except Roy, a single dad, has any apparent extracurricular interests. That’s one of the reasons writer Tom Taylor’s just-ended run didn’t hit big with me; it was all superheroing, all the time. The New Teen Titans were at their most popular when all the members were rounded characters, with lives outside of the team and their own mini-supporting casts. The new creative crew could do a lot worse than spend time building up members’ personalities outside the team environment.
I like the new Justice League Unlimited idea in terms of all heroes being on a super-Rolodex and able to use the Watchtower facilities but I don’t see why the Titans and other well-established super-teams should be subsumed. The Titans, the Doom Patrol and so on all have their own bases and reputations, why make them seem lesser? I’m glad the Titans are basically, ‘OK, cool, going home now’.
I’m sorry to see Tempest go, and off panel at that. Garth is a great character and he’s not had a decent run with the Titans since he left the original team in the early Seventies. It’s such a shame, writer-artist Phil Jimenez put a lot of work into making him a more powerful, adaptable hero and no one follows up on it.
I enjoyed Donna’s narrative voice coming in just as she’s about to be announced as new team leader, a different member giving their perspective every issue could be fun.
As for the art, it’s Pete Woods working in full colour = gorgeous. Every page is a treat for the eyes. The compositions are excellent, the figures have weight, the world seems real – Woods is a fantastic illustrator and this book is lucky to have him. The action scenes are especially good. The only thing I’d change would be Donna – she has a very well established look, but here she’s not quite herself, the eyes are a little odd at times.
But that’s just one thing, if I can live with the terribly unspooky way DC has artists draw Raven these days, I can stand a glassy-eyed Donna.
Wes Abbott, as ever, does an exemplary job with the lettering. In a nice touch he eschews word balloon borders to match Woods’ keyline-free panels, the overall impression being of softness.
The cover by Woods is a thing of loveliness – but where’s new boss Donna?
A splendid jumping-on point, I heartily recommend Titans #16.
Too Dangerous For a Girl 2 
I’m glad to hear this! I passed it up in the store, but I’m eagerly awaiting it on DCUI! As much as I like Taylor’s writing, I agree that after a promising start, his Titans never really caught fire.
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Looking forward to your view next month!
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The decision to make the Titans, Doom Patrol, JSA and seemingly every other team they could find out there be subservient to the League is bizarre. You’d never see Marvel make the X-Men, F4 or the GOTG be subservient to the Avengers.
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I hope we see some tension among the teams about this. I feel like the League sees this more as “giving every hero access to the League’s resources,” but I doubt all the heroes feel the same way.
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I’ve said this previously, but I really don’t see why the JLA get to decide they’re the preeminent team in the DCU.
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Abso-blooming-lutely. Anyway, it looks like the DC writers have a plan, let’s hope we see some fireworks.
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I never want the DCU to ape the MU but I wish DC would copy Marvel’s editorial structure. The summits for the line and those for individual groups of titles like X-Men, etc, give their line a greater cohesiveness than DC’s had for years. They also seem mostly to have editors who realize the job also includes saying no to ideas that lessen the characters and the line in general.
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I didn’t even realize it was a new creative team when I read it. I did realize Roy and Wally have horrible costumes now and that the Questionette is a bigger bitch than ever. I don’t know the intent of that sequence but what it showed is Renee is such a low powered inexperienced hero she thinks she can behave that way with the Titans. I’ll be back but who knows for how long? If it still felt like the old writer to me and continues that way, I’ll probably drop it again without deciding to, like I did last time. I’m still on disability ’til October Twenty-Seventh so I’ve been reading a lot of comics I gave up on with all my spare time like Titans that I had stopped reading.
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Is Roy’s a new costume? I can’t keep track of his looks. The Wally one is just awful, he says in his own comic it’s a tribute to Barry, but there’s no obvious link… it’s less like Barry’s than previously.
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Thanks for the review. I think I mostly agree with you but would have this to say about both Tom Taylor’s run on the title and the Titans in general. Anybody writing for the Titans in the modern era has to contend with a fundamental tension between the two primary sources of readers’ preconceptions for the team. The first is the New Teen Titans comic from the 80’s, while the Teen Titans tv show from the mid 2,000’s. Although the team has had a number of takes on them since their genesis in the mid 60’s, I think it’s fair to contend that these are by far the two most widely known and respected takes on them. The issue for any writer who wants to try to rope in readers by appealing to the Titans history is that the 80’s comic is quite different from the 2,000’s show. The comic gave a great portrayal of the members’ lives outside of their superheroic role, while the show did an excellent job of portraying the personal quirks of the team’s members along with the interpersonal dynamics that held them together as a team without giving much thought to their lives outside of being juvenile superheroes. That aside, the tone, aesthetics, and characterizations of the titans are also fairly different, and therein lies the problem
A writer who wants to try to write a modern Titans series has to contend with the fact that those two creative influences represent markedly different takes on the Titans and their history, and in turn with the subsequent fact that their respective fanbases have very different expectations for any portrayal of the Titans. People who look to the show as their guide are likely going to expect a somewhat more lighthearted take on the team that really zeroes in on the relationships they have with each other and their activities as superheroes, whereas people who look to the 80’s comic as a guide are likely going to expect more melodrama and a greater focus on the individual characters’ lives beyond their roles as superheroes along with a slightly more mature and less comedic take on the Titans themselves. Tom Taylor arguably tried to split the difference between those two takes by portraying a team that had some of the show’s comedic sensibility along with the 80’s comic’s degree of melodrama in its depiction of the team and a more mature take on the team that was in line with the 80’s comic balanced by a strict focus on the team’s superheroic lives that’s more in line with the show. Although I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that Taylor’s run featured, “all superheroing, all the time,” due to the attention he gave to the team’s relationships with each other when they weren’t on missions, you’re thus correct in noting that it featured a team who don’t seem to have much of a life beyond the team in line with their portrayal in the show.
The real takeaway from that point about Taylor’s run is it was an aspect of his attempt to meld the show’s conception of the Titans with the 80’s comic’s conception of them. By contrast, what’s potentially interesting about this run is that it seems to be leaning into the 80’s comic’s portrayal of them, or at least much further away from the show’s depiction of them. Putting Speedy on the team and removing Dick Grayson from the leadership position feels like a definite move away from the show’s depiction of the Titans. Whether that’s backed up by more of a focus on melodrama over comedy, characters’ lives beyond the team, and other narrative qualities that would move the current series closer to the 80’s comics remains to be seen, but for now it does seem that Layman isn’t trying to split the difference between those two influences the way Taylor did, which in turn implies that his run will be noticeably different in terms of tone and characterization. Whether that translates into him following the 80’s comics as a guide, anchoring his approach in other sources for the Titans, or going off in other completely novel directions remains to be seen.
Regardless of that, I agree with you that overall this was a promising new issue for this run on the title, and I look forward to more from Layman and his artistic collaborators. In particular, I would like to see the team members’ lives outside of the Titans get some extra focus. At a bare minimum, the fact that their superheroic careers are now intwined with that of the Justice League should provide some interesting fodder for interactions with other superheroic characters in the DCU, and beyond that it would definitely be nice to see them interact with the wider world around them to see what they’re like when they’re not in uniform and hanging out with each other or pounding on villains.
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Thanks for the brilliant assessment of how the comic and TV Titans are linked. You’re right about the telly influence but the show has been done for years, and I doubt trying for synergy helped comic sales. I never finished the TV series because while the comics accurate looks were brilliant, most of the characters were so angry or angsty… it was doing my head in.
Then again, there will be people offered the comics writing job who know the Titans mainly for TV depictions, and we don’t seem to have many comic editors these days who have been around for years to act as ENB or Levitz-style keepers of the characters and continuity.
Apologies, when I wrote ‘all superheroics, all the time’ I meant that we never saw them having downtime outside of the Tower, in civvies’. And maybe we did and I’ve forgotten!
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I’ve enjoyed Layman’s work in the past so I might have to pick this up (was waiting on reviews after seeing he was taking over a couple of weeks ago). It’s been a loooong time since I regularly read a Titans book. Probably the Jay Faerber series? I did get that Cavan Scott written miniseries that was clearly written to tie in with the live action TV show, but I found that a bit weak. As one of the other commenters pointed out, it’s sometimes hard to map the characters as they are now to the older versions (I really don’t know who Kori is anymore, for example, and I’ll always think she and Dick are meant to be together, and let’s not start on Raven) and as you’ve pointed out, Mart, a lot of the old allure was the soap opera elements, so maybe hiving off the characters with their own series will help with that.
I do like Pete Woods as an artist generally – I do think the issue you’ve noticed with Donna is something that does occur every so often in his art. He’s very solid with his models and sometimes they feel a bit disjointed somehow.
But anyway! As I seem to have cleared the decks quite a lot in the titles I’m following, that leaves space for a title like this, so I’ll get my hot little hands on a copy asap.
Stu
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Oh, that Jay Faerber book, was that the one with the DEO Orphans? Someone should bring them back… they could form a support group with the similarly abandoned Titans Academy kids. And was that the series with Jesse Quick sleeping with her mother’s younger boyfriend? Ah, great times…
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I’d forgotten about Jesse’s affair! Mind you, I wouldn’t say no to her taking Wally’s place on the team.
Stu
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In general, I enjoy Layman’s work, but the scripting this issue felt a little heavy handed (Dick telling Donna to take control at the start of the battle felt off… like… she doesn’t need you telling her what to do. If you’re gonna bark orders, then don’t give up the leadership of the team). Alot of the story felt like pieces were being clumsily moved into place. I’ll give it a couple of issues to work itself out and then see where we land.
It’s true that I don’t know most of these characters anymore. None of them act the way I remember them acting. And can we talk about Raven being de-aged to Beast Boy’s age? Assuming that the New Teen Titans still came together in the way they always did, it means that Wally was magically seduced by and *even younger* Raven to join the team way back when. That’s beyond creepy.
Pete Woods art felt kinda stiff to me. Weird eyeballs and expressions on the characters. I may come to appreciate it over time, if the stories are interesting. I really want to like this series, and I want to be invested in these characters. But I’m not quite there, yet.
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Hopefully that was just Dick trying to enable Donna to take the reins, but yes, he should have shut up and seen if she did, which she would have; happily, by the end of the issue no one is going to hold her back.
The TV influence on the comics is annoying, bar the occasional ‘boo-yah’. The Raven we’ve had for the last decade or whatever is unrecognisable as the heroine we had for 20 years.
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re Dick barking orders at Donna… I certainly think the intention was to show that Dick was trying to show the team that they should be looking to Donna for leadership, but it didn’t read that way. Good idea… clumsy execution.
I’m just hoping that this iteration of the team is able to showcase their personalities more. Even if it’s just giving the characters individual voices again. You could always pick up a New Teen Titans book and know who was saying which lines even without looking at the artwork. Their voices and personalities were distinct. They’ve lost that over the years. Even if she isn’t an innocent any longer, Starfire’s words should convey that she’s ruled by emotion. Donna should exemplify caring, compassion. Vic and Gar should be bantering back and forth like Johnny and Ben.
Ah well… we will see what the next couple of issues bring.
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