2 out of 5

I’m sure this won’t be the last time I say it: team books are tough. Especially established teams – the types you find in DC and Marvel, with rosters having shuffled through generations of the cast, and histories going back decades. Even when it’s a new #1 or part of this year’s initiative (see: 2026 and “All-In” for this title), likely whatever reboot gave us that new #1 is gonna require some asterisks to tell us about the many adventures this “new” team have already had.

Stick that on top of just needing to manage screen time for everyone: doubly hard with established teams, because by now, everyone’s got their favorite, and you really need to give them all time to shine.

So the cards are stacked against Tate Brombal’s take over of New Titans, with another card because it is taking over the book; the #1s mentioned above are tough already, but now you have to establish your own voice without necessarily breaking the fanbase that’s been built… Sheesh. Yeah, it’s tough. So I’m giving some grace here, in the sense that I want to stick around to see how this turns out, as the first 3-part arc – credit for not dragging it out! – is pretty clunky.

Tate’s initial pitch is a lot of fun, though, smartly winking at the challenge above by leaning into tropes: by the end of the first issue, the Titans (or Nightwing) figure out that their existing in some kind of simulation, which has them brainwashed into acting like the most stereotypical versions of themselves, daily / nightly repeating habits that casual Titans fans will remember from different cartoon iterations, and that longtime comic book readers can smile at. It’s a good way to show best intentions: Brombal’s setting up a reason to change things, while acknowledging, politely, quirkily, what came before.

But man, the shift into what’s next is pretty clunky. The screen time bit immediately becomes a problem: Nightwing voiceovers the first issue, and then we switch POVs for the next two. This is a pretty common thing in team books, and I understand it (heck, it might even be editorially mandated), but it drives me nuts. It doesn’t let the book establish its own voice, and also ironically – since it’s intended to let personalities shine through – forces everyone to speak / patter similarly. There’s also a continual rollout of deus ex machinas that could’ve been amusing, but gets treated like an actual “plan” by the heroes when it’s just forced plotting to do a reset of the events that led us to this new story arc, i.e. lots of asterisks. And maybe there was some deadline rush here as well, as issue #35 finds artist Sami Basri, previously working solo, joined on inks with Jordi Tarragona, and whatever the work divide was, the art style becomes a lot more streamlined: square, cleanly framed panels – less dynamic than before – and a softer, somewhat simpler line.

The cliffhanger that ends this arc suggests there are more interesting things to come, but it also underlines the unfortunate inherent pointlessness of these transitional issues, where the task is just to give folks a beat to reset the board for the new writer.