REVIEW: Titans #27 By Eric Wallace

Reviews

I’m starting on a slight rant, so forgive me. I know it’s a small detail. I know it barely even makes the rank of inconsequential. But it’s a pet peeve of mine, and as miniscule as it is, I cannot overlook it.

Writers, artists, editors, whoever the hell is in charge of putting sound effects in comics – please, use proper onomatopoeia. When Nightcrawler teleports, the word ‘teleport’ doesn’t appear out of nowhere; when Spider-Man shoots a web, you don’t see ‘shoot’ come out of his hand. I understand that there are times, like in the above example, where it might be difficult to come up with the appropriate sound. In such cases, I would suggest putting lines in the right places to indicate movement. Or, perhaps, having a character think something like ‘Caught it!’ to convey the action. If you want to be really crazy, you can even assume your readers have enough intelligence to look at a simple picture and figure out what’s happening. Don’t just make up sounds out of mundane words. It’s just sloppy.

But why complain about one minor thing – this entire comic is sloppy. That was just the straw that broke my back. Where to start?

I could harp on the story itself, or what I could piece of it. The comic opens up with Deathstroke and his new Titans recovering from a surprise attack from the Dominators. Who are the Dominators? A bunch of generic villains who I’m sure will never be seen or heard of again, and with a guy named DJ Molecule in their ranks, rightfully so. The book is pretty much just an extended fight scene, with the Titans trying to take down a facility that makes Bliss, a drug that uses little children as the main ingredient.

Actually, no, it’s not just an extended fight scene with uninteresting villains; we have whining bits with uninteresting anti-heroes interspersed within, to break the tedium. We have Roy Harper, lamenting how the old Titans never went far enough and how he’ll take pleasure in killing Deathstroke – yeah, that’ll happen. We also have Amon harping on whether it’s right or not to kill and having hallucinations about his dead sister, wondering what sacrifices it will take to bring her back. Really, it’s the same dance we’ve all had in a million comics before – should heroes kill or not? Not that the premise can’t make for a decent story, but this one doesn’t tread any new ground.

But what about the other characters? Well…what about them? Chesire’s only contribution seems to be standing around with a mean look and banging Roy at the end. Deathstroke, easily the coolest character in the bunch, only has a handful of lines and doesn’t do much besides flipping around, shooting some stuff out of his staff, and watching Chesire and Roy bang…for some reason.

Finally, there’s the art, which lands somewhere between passable and piss-poor. It’s supposed to be darker and edgier, yes, but somebody went way overboard with the shading, and it’s not helped by the overly grainy look; as if someone dumped sand all over my comic and couldn’t get it all off. Not appealing to the eye. On top of that, none of the fight scenes have good flow, not enough attention paid; you see punches being thrown and combatants moving about, but it feels more like they’re simply striking poses instead of having an epic battle. There’s no energy.

Avoid this. Whatever this comic came from, wherever it’s going, avoid it. The only real recommendation I could give is for the die-hard Titans fans, the guy who has to keep up with this tripe no matter how bad it gets, and even if that’s the case you’re probably better off just catching up through Wikipedia. I’ll admit, I wasn’t paying much attention to Titans and all the characters and storylines surrounding it until now, but you know what? Ignorance was bliss.