The Green Team: Teen Trillionaires #1
Written by Art Baltazar and Franco
Art by Ig Guara, J.P. Mayer, and Wil Quintana
The short of it:
Mohammed is making his first trip to New York on his own, and his goal is to make his father proud. His father who only views worth in terms of dollar and cents, who has told his son that unless he can increase his income then he is worth nothing, and that his cousin may become the favorite to take over the company. This trip to New York is to figure out how to become richer, how to make his father proud. He views the answer to this as Commodore and #Greenteam, and the fact that Comm keeps getting richer and richer. He hopes this is the right choice, and not a mistake that will doom him out of his own family.
POXPO 2013 is his stop, in a lowkey location in Manhattan, really, a dinky warehouse filled with all kinds of cool things, and this girl is there to welcome him and explain the whole thing. Really, she knows everything, and tells him everything, but won’t answer the question of who she is. She points out that the people who show up are either trying to sell their inventions to the super rich, or they are the super rich trying to buy cool stuff. She imagines he’s there to see Commodore, who makes one hell of an entrance with his entourage, and Mo makes a bit of an ass out of himself by seeming so starstruck. The girl, J.J., is Comm’s buddy J.P.’s little sister, and Mo introduces himself to the group…but they know who he is. His family is, after all, rich and famous. Comm thinks he’s there for his father, and finally outs him with his real name.
Prince Mohammed Qahtanii. He literally has his own country.
We get an introduction to the rest of the group, movie star Cecilia Sunbeam, J.P. Houston who might as well bleed oil, and the proper introduction to L.L….Lucia Lynn Houston. Then we get to see the point of POXPO as Comm walks about looking at the various inventions, deciding what to spend his vast fortune on. Smart phone controlled surgical lasers? A car powered by the internet? When you’ve got the money, you spend the money, and sometimes you wind up making more. He didn’t sell his company to Mohammed’s father because it’s not just about dollars and cents to him. They’re a new generation, there’s no reason to think only in terms of future earnings when you’re already richer than God.
But that’s when we get the security issues. Mo’s phone is online, GPS locator working, pictures uploading. He doesn’t understand why it’s a big deal, and the Green Team is paranoid, and when Riot shows up it’s completely validated. Comm has a super powered stalker that hates the rich. He also has the tech to try and fight him….but he has no idea what Riot is capable of. And it’s all Mo’s fault.
What I liked:
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It might seem cliche, but I like that I liked this book. I bought it on a whim, as I have no real familiarity with Baltazar and Franco, nor do I have any true affinity for the characters and concept of this book. I figured it was a first issue and I should scope it out, and I was not sorry.
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Great use of Riot, a villain I only know from one appearance in Superman as part of a group of villains I wasn’t familiar with. Wait, no, he was in an issue of my beloved Batgirl too, but the point is that he’s a pretty blank slate villain for me. So seeing him used as the voice of the 99% just makes for an interesting villain here.
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I like how the wealth is played up here. Our characters are rich, period, that’s their power, but they aren’t assholes about it. Mohammed just wants to prove his own worth, Commodore wants to make the world a better place, Cecilia is just a dumb actress, and J.P. and L.L. are just sorta there so far.
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The likable cast goes a long way here, setting it apart from its ‘sister book’ The Movement, where the book is hinging on interest in the story to keep readers coming back.
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Ig Guara does a nice job on art here, I always like teenagers who look like teenagers. It seems like such a simple thing that nobody can mess up, but there are so many artists who can’t make the difference felt!
What I didn’t like:
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You have a book about super rich teenagers and there’s no Most Excellent Superbat? Fail.
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Did they really need a character nicknamed LL? There are enough LL’s at DC.
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I don’t believe that a super rich Prince with all kinds of security would ever tweet out his actual location, even on accident. That just seems like the kind of thing his bodyguards would go over with him on day one.
- The disks give Iron Man armor with numbers…please don’t tell me they turn into Power Rangers.
Final thoughts:
Marvel is doing the super rich kids angle in Wolverine and the X-Men with the new Hellfire Club…but this is better. I don’t mind doing super rich kids, but having homicidal eight year olds was a bit much. This is much more intriguing to me, teenagers with more money than they know what to do with, acting like teenagers with more money than they know what to do with.
I wonder what country Mohammed is the Prince of.
64 trillion dollar trust funds? What did Commodore’s dad do? What do you even do with that much money?
Commodore’s disks that J.P. warned him about, one of them gives him green Iron Man armor, and he dropped more than that, so are we going to see a team of people in high tech super armor? Please give us a team of people in high tech super armor!
A phone operated surgical laser. So cool. So very freaking cool.
Using Riot as an actual villain ups the ante of this book by giving an actual physical threat, which is so much better than using something like “anonymous hacker stole my money” as a plot. Also, even if he’s a rarely used villain, I’m more partial to reinventing and working with established characters than just making new ones for the sake of making them.
This book was way more interesting than the premise of ‘super rich kids do stuff’ had led me to believe. I’m eager for the next issue.
Overall: 8/10
