In my last review of Teen Titans, I said the immortal phrase, ‘We’re through the looking glass here, people’, partly because it’s one of my favorite phrases, and partly because it’s so, so true. Teen Titans went off the rails in the last issue, with a sudden, seemingly random cutaway involving Harvest, probably my least favorite DC super-villain. Fortunately, no less than Scott Lobdell himself showed up in the comments of the last review to explain that DC higher ups wanted Superboy out of the comic, and he and Harvest were their way of doing just that. Makes sense, and I appreciated the helpful explanation. When the bosses say, ‘let’s do something else with Superboy’, you say, ‘how insane can we get in removing him?’

Teen Titans #13

Though I don’t know to what extent writer Will Pfeifer can blame editorial for the continuing insanity in Teen Titans #13.

Comic Rating: 3/10 – Bad.

I’m going to keep the phrase ‘We’re through the looking glass here, people’ in effect for this new issue, because everything is just kind of wibbly wobbly in this issue. Continuity is a little thin, characters move randomly through the issue, and once again, a big hand-waving explanation seems to come out of nowhere to reverse the entire flow of the story. But considering all the shake-ups recently, I can’t be sure if the reverse was always planned, or if Pfeifer is just scrambling to fix his story. I assume he’d planned to end things properly with Superboy and is now being forced to come up with a whole new ending to his prison story on the fly. Very weird, but that’s editorial interference for you.

Speaking of which, we’ve got three different artists this issue, and all of them are pretty bad. The art is maddeningly wild and doesn’t do the issue any favors. Nothing does this issue any favors. I can only hope that Teen Titans comes out of this mess in one piece, and maybe we’ll get some kind of renewed focus going forward. Because if nothing else, I remain eternally hopeful that things will actually get better someday.

Someday…

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