1 out of 5

With some usual caveats – I’m not the target audience: I’m not a seasoned Titans reader; I tend to avoid most Marvel / DC books – I do tend to believe that any single issue should / could be your first, and as I coasted for sympathetic (heh, to my views) reviews of Tate Brombal’s New Titans run, finding mostly lukewarm-to-positive stuff, I have to be more of a dick than I’d prefer and wonder: have y’all read other comics? This isn’t uncommon to when I’m doing some music reviews and have to question how much history with a genre a certain listener has, while trying to accept that – similarly – every album might be someone’s first of a certain type, and they shouldn’t have to have the full download on Where It Came From to appreciate it.

But I guess music is slightly different in that if it is, truly, your first experience with subgenre A, then that is novel; I guess if some of the comics I read are sincerely very early on in their media experiences, then I can align it with that music scenario, but often what I’m struggling with here is that the storytelling and characters just aren’t… great. And those are basic concepts that carry across movies, and TV, and comics, though then of course I need to contend with the kind of stuff that’s popular in those realms.

(Even then, I’d slightly dodge once more: are they popular because we think they’re good, or because we’re “told” they’re good, and when we know they’re not good, do we actually maybe think they are good?)

This all sets me up as some arbiter of great taste. That ain’t it, or I don’t want it to be it; it’s more that – in my narrative of this, at least – the very reason I steer away from (and have steered away from) a ton of modern books, not just at Marvel and DC, but at Boom and Image and so on, is because they tend to be written with a very, very similar voice that kind of feeds on itself: a constantly “witty” repartee that some might argue was popularized from Marvel movies and has perpetuated outward. When you combine that with uninvolving plots that aren’t visualized in a totally compelling manner, and a whole team of same-sounding characters, and, final strike, the need to “recover” your book from a recent BIG EVENT, man, it’s an uphill climb for me to enjoy these things.

When we previously left the Titans, I was giving Tate Brombal room to get his new tone setup after taking over from the previous writer, and clearing away some big ol’ EVENT crossover nonsense as well. (Okay, you’re catching me with extra extra bias here.) …But it turns out the setup wasn’t done, because there’s still event nonsense to deal with (like, I think there were two or three? The editor asterisks are out of control here), and I didn’t realize Tate was still shuffling characters around, because just when I was thinking, “wow, this new character who’s supposed to be the quirky un-human, Eve, sure acts a lot like Starfire,” Starfire conveniently announces a page later that she’s leaving. This is where longtime Titans fans will tell me it’s all in character, but every-issue-first-issue me felt like it was sudden as fuck, since she seemed in good spirits on the previous page, kinda sorta, though I’d wonder if artist Marcus To missed some nuance in the expressions, or just wasn’t a good match, as To has a kind of Titans Go! energy to it in its poppy pacing and self-aware soap opera-y expressions, but every time I thought Brombal was maybe doing some self-aware goofiness, no, it’s just comics and snippy snappy repartee.

In these two issues, there’s a longer story about the Titans settling into their new headquarters (Justice League’s old mountain) and exploring the nearby town – which may be brainwashed. This seed, of having our oddball team explore a town of smiling cuckoos, felt like a storyline that could’ve filled out a few more issues, but was maybe squished editorially, and then had to be combined with more deck-clearing nonsense as Cyborg makes the cliffhanger ending of the last arc go belly-up immediately as disappointingly without impact. Like, again, we’re just setting things up still, and every line is either a set up for a zinger, overwrought exposition to tell us who the angsty one is or the funny one or so on, a random explanatory line with an asterisk reerencing DC KO or a zinger that doesn’t land.

I’m not the audience. I’m not the audience.