Review: Teen Titans #5
This Teen Titans comic is pretty much the antithesis of everything I like in comics these days. Books like Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye and Batgirl are breaking new ground on how superhero stories can be told, with real human characters, real human drama and actual creativity in their storytelling. Batgirl, for example, embraces the modern day world of its youthful character, sending Barbara Gordon spinning into a world of Internet hookups, auto-tuned bad guys and real stakes. Ms. Marvel stars a teenager who is just as much in touch with her family as she is with superheroics, and actually has to worry about both. Hawkeye is mostly interested in the man behind the mask.
Teen Titans #5
Whereas Teen Titans is content to be just a dumb superhero comic where the characters are only really concerned about being superheroes. Not even an art change or the promise of a new character can save Teen Titans #5 from just being generally dull.
Comic Rating: 5/10 – Alright.
I said this before in my last review, but it bears repeating: what is so difficult about writing a story that’s actually about the Teen Titans themselves? The previous writer, Scott Lobdell, never managed to do it, and new writer Will Pfiefer likewise can’t seem to focus on his teen stars. It’s not like they’re a boring group! This is actually a pretty solid roster of Titans. They have the potential for some really interesting mix-ups. Beast Boy and Bunker have a neat friendship/roommate thing going. And why haven’t we heard a peep about the Red Robin/Wonder Girl romance since Pfiefer took over? Raven, meanwhile, doesn’t have any strong relationships with anyone on the team.Why not tackle some of these legitimately interesting topics?
Instead, Pfiefer introduces some of the most laziest super-villains I’ve ever read for one of the laziest superhero fights I’ve ever read. Does he not care? Does he not want Teen Titans to be a good comic? Pfiefer backs off his pet character, Manchester Black, for a little bit, but he doesn’t replace him with the Teen Titans. He replaces him with a gaggle of spoiled rich kids who take a designer drug that gives them super-powers. Is there anything more unimaginative? Then these idiots literally fall into the Titans’ laps. That’s how the heroes of this comic book get involved. The rich kids decide to fight established superheroes for no reason other than it’s a thing to do, and we have a comic.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been more disappointed in this comic. Or maybe I’m not disappointed so much as just tired. I’m tired of Teen Titans failing.
Join me after the jump for the full synopsis and more review!
We open with those spoiled rich kids smoking cigarettes on some rooftop on the Upper East Side. They’re as cliche as they come: school uniforms, three boys and a girl, token black kid, looking to get into rebellious trouble, one of them has a judge for a daddy to get them out of trouble. It’s frustratingly worthless. They’re like a very poor man’s version of the Hellfire Kids from Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men. I’m pretty sure the cliches are exactly the same. Anyway, the girl has a line to S.T.A.R. Labs and gives them all a new drug that grants people random super-powers. Does that sound exactly like Mutant Growth Hormone to everybody else? I thought so.
Then we cut to a scene of the Teen Titans hanging out in Bunker and Beast Boy’s apartment, which is apparently their entire base of operations these days. All of the Titans are in full costume, because of course they are. Red Robin is convincing the Titans how great it will be to team with S.T.A.R. Labs, an offer extended to the team by Manchester Black at the end of last issue. And just like last issue, I don’t understand why Red Robin is interested in such a partnership.
But in the world of superheroes, his costume is ‘professional’.
Why does Red Robin need a backer like S.T.A.R. Labs? Why does he need them to fix his tooth? Why does he want to use them as a base of operations? This is the guy who got the Teen Titans an entire yacht for themselves in the last volume. This is a guy who is still very close with Batman. Red Robin does not need backers. Maybe if this really was a team of misfit superheroes, they’d be excited for this. But Red Robin should have everything well in hand.
If I may step away for a moment, here is one of the major problems with Teen Titans: there’s no foundation. There’s no baseline for this team or their existence. For example, take the Justice League. They’re a team up of the world’s most powerful superheroes, based out of the Watchtower, working together to handle the threats that no one superhero can handle alone. That’s why the Justice League is together. But why are the Teen Titans together? Why are they all still hanging out with each other? Why are they hanging out in Bunker and Beast Boy’s apartment? Do the rest of them have apartments? Why are they hanging out in costume? Do they ever hang out together outside of costume? What do they expect to accomplish as a superhero team? What do they have to offer the world as a superhero team? What are they doing that no other superhero team in the world is doing?
There are no answers to these questions. They weren’t answered in the first volume, and they aren’t answered here. The Teen Titans are together simply because there is a comic called ‘Teen Titans’ and these were the characters chosen for that comic.
That’s no way to make a series.
But moving on, Red Robin proves he has a tiny bit of sense after all.
Still don’t know why you’re green
He sends Beast Boy into S.T.A.R. Labs to sneak around and find some dirt. So despite letting Manchester Black work on his damn tooth, Red Robin is still at least a little suspicious of the guy – which is played for laughs for some reason, as if Red Robin’s careful nature is comical. Beast Boy heads off to get to work, while the rest of them…continue to hang out in costume in the apartment. But let’s not pay any attention to that, because we cut to Wonder Girl and her mom.
They’re walking through the city, and Cassie’s mom is trying to understand why she’s devoting her life to being a superhero. She’s a mom, and she’s worried about her daughter. What kind of future does Cassie have? What kind of job prospects? These are actually very good questions to ask of a teenage superhero! But Cassie doesn’t have answers.
Though she does have a fan club.
Who have apparently just been following them around?
We still don’t spend much time with them, though, because we cut back to the spoiled idiots testing out their new super powers. The drugs work clean with no side effects, yet. The four of them get fire powers, electricity powers, invisibility and super monster strength, respectively, which is a pretty standard and boring gaggle of super powers. What’s the matter? Had to go with electricity powers instead of stretchy powers? And all of powers work perfectly without any problems. The teens then start bickering with each other like the idiots they are, before the girl is accidentally knocked off the roof…directly above Wonder Girl. Wonder Girl was literally in the same geographical space as the bad guys, and that’s how this issue’s fight happens.
The hero flies up to catch the falling brat, but seems kind of calm about the girl being on fire.
Don’t rush her to the hospital or anything
She smothers the fire and the rich girl gets mad at her for some reason. Maybe for putting out the fire? Is that how her powers work? I don’t know, because she calls on her friends, and they expertly fly down the side of the building and start beating up on Wonder Girl. Cassie tells her fan club to get her mom to safety while she fights the bad guys, all of whom can use their new powers with expert skill. So Cassie takes out her cell phone and calls Tim Drake for backup. (She literally has ‘Tim Drake’ in her phone with a picture of Tim out of costume. So has Pfiefer dropped that storyline where he didn’t reveal his real name to the team? And when has he ever removed his costume in this comic long enough to snap a picture on Cassie’s phone?) The phone call keeps cutting out before she can give Robin any good information, but Bunker checks Twitter and finds out about the big superhero brawl downtown. Looks like it’s time to jump into action!
Oh Red Robin, join the 21st century already!
Both sides of the fight get in their licks, with the spoiled brats still able to get in a few good hits against these skilled superheroes. During the fight, we check in with Beast Boy briefly. He sneaks into S.T.A.R. Labs and finds both Manchester Black and Josiah Powers watching the fight from some cameras somewhere. Black takes delight in pointing out the skills and abilities of the Titans. Black has already fired the guy who gave the drugs to the girl, and the cops are on their way, so he sees no fault in just watching and enjoying the fight. Beast Boy checks in with Robin, but Robin tells him to stay on his spy mission.
The Titans spot the brats popping a few more pills, cluing them in on the drug-based powers. Then Wonder Girl’s fan club randomly return and tell her to watch out for a fire attack, and Wonder Girl shouts at them for not taking care of her mother like she asked. Why didn’t they? It’s not like the girls or the mom have been major characters in this fight so far. They’ve barely been in the background. So how come they didn’t take the mom away? How come half of the dozen or so fan girls didn’t take the mom away? How does Wonder Girl know they didn’t?
Anyway, having been tipped off about Wonder Girl’s mom being nearby, the super strong bad guy grabs a garbage truck and throws it onto her mom. Fortunately, one of the fangirls shoves her to safety and gets crushed instead. But don’t worry, she’s OK!
Except for the fact that she’s going to be joining the Teen Titans…
That’s the new Power Girl. I didn’t read the comics where she debuted, but I welcome her onto the Teen Titans! This book needs some new blood – though, again, there’s not much of a team to join. What’s the point of adding a new character to an ensemble if the ensemble doesn’t really matter in the first place? What’s she going to do? What relationships is she going to complicate? What drama is she going to impact? None. Because none exists in Teen Titans. She’s only joining the Teen Titans because that was the decision made about the comic.
Teen Titans disappoints me because it could be so much more. These are interesting characters, and Pfeifer is a good writer. So why won’t he write about the Teen Titans? Why does he need to create a bunch of cliched bad guys to throw at the team in order to get a comic? Is he even trying? Why are we wasting our time on four stupid villain characters when we could be doing anything else with the Teen Titans? These characters never take off their costumes. They just amble along in the story until the next dumb bad guy shows up to fight. This comic has no soul.
Though I will say that guest artist Scott Hepburn is a very welcome addition. Hepburn has this friendly, almost cartoony style that definitely works for this series, in a way that the violently angular style of Kenneth Rocafort just doesn’t. Hepburn’s characters are vivid, brought to life with glorious color by Dan Brown. The characters pop and dance and smile. It’s a unique, playful sort of art, and I hope Hepburn sticks around for awhile. Teen Titans needs some positive mojo.
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Posted on December 18, 2014, in Comics, DC, Reviews, Robin and tagged Power Girl, Teen Titans. Bookmark the permalink. 8 Comments.
Henchman-4-Hire 
I really want to walk into DC comics and just take over Teen Titans. Nothing said, just start making it for them. Clearly someone over there doesn’t know what they are doing with this comic. It doesn’t take a lot to look online to see what people think of your comic and seeing what they want. And everyone always has the same complaint, this comic doesn’t focus on the Titans themselves. I don’t even need villains, why not have them be more like personal heroes. The Justice League can handle giant world threats and the Teen Titans can help with petty crime and helping people find lost cats. I just want to see teens hanging out with powers.
Exactly! You’ve got it right there, man! Stop throwing stupid, boring villains at the Teen Titans like it’s some kind of requirement!
Me on the other hand would call that a terrible waste of potential. Plus you already have the TTG comic, which is pretty much that.
For me the gold standard is still the Wolfaman/Perez days where you could have the ‘just hanging out’ issues along with the world-shattering stories.
Admittedly, it’s been a long time since TT has been that;
-Johns’ run was nothing but navel gazing, the team nearly only dealt with situations connected to one of them, which made it look like they lived on another world.
-Post-Johns it was a nightmare of editorial mismanagement nearly all the way up to Flashpoint.
-And Lobdell ofc tried to resurrect the 90’ties X-Men in them.
So far Will doesn’t appear to have much of an overarching story he is trying to tell (or it’s just so subtle I haven’t noticed yet), but so far I am enjoying this a lot more than I was when Lobdell was at the wheel.
I will give Pfiefer credit that he’s a better writer, overall, than Lobdell. There’s a more competent feeling to Teen Titans now. But Pfiefer doesn’t feel like he’s got anything to say with this comic. He’s got some overarching STAR Labs storyline going, but who cares about STAR Labs? Or Manchester Black? I care about the Teen Titans. Pfiefer doesn’t really seem to have any plans for them, or whatever plans he has, he shoves them deep into the background. I would kill for a good ‘just hanging out’ issue!
I’m really scratching my head trying to imagine what is the plan for this comic. Like, every month, the creative team sits around talking about the upcoming issue… and decides to stick to episodic incidents that don’t add anything? This issues have ‘filler’ written all over them.
There are nuggets of ideas there that points to actual plot arcs, but they don’t lead anywhere. It really feels like they’re going through the motions, without any real inspirations. It’s odd, especially considering they should be able to go just about anywhere with this book, since it’s basically isolated from the rest of the DCU.
Exactly! Thank you! Those are some of my major problems with this book! Pfeifer clearly has some good ideas! This Wonder Girl fan club is a neat idea, and I’d love to see him actually tackle that storyline. But for several issues now it’s just been relegated to the background. Wonder Girl barely acknowledges them!
Man, this just keeps breaking my heart. Why can’t DC handle anything that is not Batman competently?
The Titans are some of the best characters they’ve got- they’re not the mightiest heroes, but the Wolfman/Perez established that the Titans, above anything else, are family. The wonderful friendship between Gar and Vic (which is gone, Cyborg having never been part of the Titans), the rapport between Kori, Dick, Donna (and Garth being a perv). The book strayed for a while, but I’d say the team dynamic was back to that same core by the last 100 issues of its pre-Nu52 run. Heck, the way the book ended made you regret that it was ending at all, and it made you hope that the Nu 52 version of the Titans would be able to improve on that.
And it didn’t. Holy hell did it not. I picked p the Lobdell atrocity and put it back down quickly. And then Gillen and McKelvie were working on the Young Avengers and I picked up that book- and I immediately sighed, because it seemed to me that I was reading the book the Titans could have been and never were. Gillen was having -fun-, and although there was the whole Mother Parasite arc and the Billy/Teddy angst, you got a feel for their relationships, even if America’s motives wouldn’t really be known until the final two issues (man, that was one hell of an origin and motivation.) I know you never got into the book, but the feel of fun and exuberance was markedly different from anything DC was doing with their teen heroes- if you look at Ms. Marvel and Young Avengers, and compare them with Teen Titans, it’s easy to see which company *gets* teenage heroes.
And then that book ended, and I waited for the next team to take over the Titans. At first I was hopeful, but by the third issue I kept wanting to call Pfeiffer and ask him “What the hell are you doing, man? Stop trying to be Lobdell!”
Because, honestly, we don’t *know* most of these Titans. We don’t know why they hang out together, yes, but we also don’t know who most of them *are* as people. Why aren’t we seeing that being explored? Heck, in the 80s run of the Titans, it wasn’t uncommon to have an issue of ‘down time’ in between threats for characters to process and to establish relationships. Heck, Johns used that practice with the 2000 titans as well. But so far, we’ve seen nothing but a relentless wave of fights and no real downtime, no real development.
And that’s sad, because unless Pfeiffer stops phoning it in, this book’s sales will start dropping and then the Titans will be cancelled once more, and DC will blame the characters instead of the writer and the editorial decision and we won’t see them again for a while.
They really don’t have the slightest clue about what they’re doing, do they? Looking at the recent Wonder Woman debacle, you have to wonder what the hell is going on over there.
Thanks for the comment, friend! It’s always reassuring to find out I’m not alone in my dislike of Teen Titans. You nailed my #1 complaint right on the head: no character depth. There’s nothing. Even when the characters are just hanging out in their apartment chatting, they’re all still in full costume. Downtime issues are the lifeblood of any good comic. I don’t understand why DC doesn’t realize this – or at least why some writers don’t. One of the best issues of Aquaman was when he went to his 10 year high school reunion, and the event wasn’t interrupted by a super-villain. It was just Aquaman and Mera connecting with Aquaman’s old friends and classmates. The issue was brilliant. But Teen Titans gets nothing. Why aren’t any of these teens in high school? Or are they and we just don’t know it? There’s so much we don’t know about them that would make for some pretty great character-exploring issues.