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by **PDH** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 3:12 pm

I could edit it for length but I don't want to and you can't make me.

The Teen Titans - TRIGON'S BEING MEAN TO ME!!!

The Teen Titans are a gang of wrist-slitters (some of whom are closing on thirty years old) who have developed a kind of advanced suicide cult wherein they've realised that the most effective and blame-free method of ending their lives is to simply exist within the confines of the DCU. To speed this process up they live in a giant T-shaped building and wave their sweet, lolita asses around in front of people like Dr. Light until someone comes and puts them out of their misery.

What must it be like to join the Teen Titans? You know when you're a kid and your mother forces you to go the party of that little weird-smelling, dyslexic, Ralph Wiggum snot from your class who everybody hates? You go to some strange 'youth centre' you've never heard of before where a rubbish entertainer (who is a blood relative of the birthday boy like all other guests) falls asleep mid-song at the piano in a puddle of his own diarrhoea and you spend the whole time trying to remember the kid's name. That's what it must be like to join the Teen Titans. The one cool character, Ravager, was so ashamed to be near them that she physically escaped the confines of the page in order to hide in the disjointed but still superior back-up strip from former writer Sean McKeever.

Meanwhile, on the A-Side, Beast Boy or Changeling or whatever the hell he's calling himself at the moment is the new leader of the Teen Titans. This comes after one fairly important scene which takes place in a completely different book (sister title, the Titans). In that, Changeling shelved his multiple issue-spanning sulk long enough to find the Teen Titans trying to simultaneously fight a bad guy and grieve over the latest grisly death pointlessly forced on them by sadist editors. Having taken pity on them, he now hangs around with people half his age whilst they pretend it's not awkward that they are for the most part more mature than he is. Oh, and I think Raven has been raped by some kind of schizophrenic griffin or something. It's all really, really sad.

But then again, isn't that what teenagers want? Not the griffin thing but the unbelievably melodramatic angst-er-coaster of soap opera superheroics where the bad guys win more often than they do and no-one understands their pain? The teenage condition is the result of the twin discovery that your mother lied about how special you were and the horrible reality that the universe is a blank, uncaring void, physically incapable of feeling any sympathy for you and the petty string of failures you call a life. And that's where the Teen Titans come in. It's a place where your most trivial feelings are inflated to a near universal importance. Take Raven, for example. Here is a character whose thing is that if she experiences any happiness whatsoever the omni-dimensional space Satan who spawned her will enter her reality and subject its inhabitants to unremitting hellish torments, Urotsukidoji style. Isn't that the perfect teenage fantasy? It's emotional torture on an epic scale. Like Hostel for Emos.

And that's sorta what the Titans are all about. Because teenagers don't really want to kill themselves, they just want everyone else to know how much they've hurt them. If they died, they'd never be able to see that stuck up Chloe's face when she saw how much life-altering emotional damage she'd caused by daring to have larger breasts and totally exploiting it all the time. This was the case, anyway. Thirty goddamn years ago when this was still considered a fresh direction for the Teen Titans and the average comic book reader was young enough to appreciate it. At this point, the book desperately needs a new formula to run into the ground and Henderson has thus far only managed a competent if bland resuscitation of the now vegetative formula we've been stuck with for decades. It would be tempting to blame the state of the book on Dan Didio at this point, so let's do that.

Story: 5
Art: 7
Overall: 6

by **Starlord** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 5:43 pm

that was Effing brilliant!!!

by **Kerny** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 6:14 pm

PDH has been killing it with his reviews the last couple weeks

by **Punchy** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 6:16 pm

Kerny wrote:PDH has been killing it with his reviews the last couple weeks

Yeah, he kind of puts my attempts at having humour in my reviews to shame.

by **PDH** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 6:38 pm

Thanks everyone. I enjoy writing them a lot.

by **Starlord** » Sun Oct 04, 2009 10:51 pm

I want to thank everyone who reviewed this week. I know it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I really do appreciate it. :-)

I really did kind of suck, didn't it?!

by **Dragavon** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:48 am

starlord wrote::smt021

Bendis > Millar.

by **MrBlack** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:56 am

Teen Titans #75

Teen Titans was one of the first books I read when I first got into comics around the time of Infinite Crisis. I got the first three trades and loved them.

Then Superboy died and Kid Flash turned into the Flash. Suddenly, the book just stopped being as much fun. The characters all started suffering from severe depression, and the team started to go through lineup changes every two issues. Unlike most of the people here, I enjoyed Sean McKeever's issues, but felt that they were hampered by interference from editorial. McKeever finally bailed to go back to Marvel, but still manages to write the best Titans stuff on the market today, even if it is just a backup. Meanwhile, both Titans books have been going through writers as quickly as they go through team members, and have suffered for it.

As a quick aside, I actually like the current lineup of the team. I love Blue Beetle, Static, and Miss Martian, and both Bombshell and Aquagirl are interesting characters. I would prefer to see at least Superboy and Kid Flash on the team, but this is a pretty solid lineup.

We begin the issue as Raven is attacked by a...something? Platygriffin? Anyway, we then go to Titans Tower, where the team is enjoying a pizza. Cowabunga dude. Beast Boy shows up, promising to effectively replace their emotionally damaged leader...and then falls to pieces when Raven shows up unconscious on their doorstep. Oddly, Wonder Girl congratulates him on keeping his cool, which he immediately loses once more as Raven's treatment begins. Then a random cat spits up a hairball and the platygriffin is in the tower. One would think that after the whole fiasco with "Wonder Dog," the team would be a little more concerned about strange animals in their headquarters.

The plot of the issue is pretty clunky, but the character interactions seem decent enough. The writer is new to comic writing, having come from producing and writing for television (Didio doing favors for old TV contacts, perhaps?), so I'm willing to give her a bit of leeway, but this was not a good issue by any stretch. It's even worse for those who have been reading Titans (or flipping through it in their comic shop :oops:

). While Titans readers were aware of Beast Boy coming on board the team, they were also aware of his stalkerish tendencies towards Raven, which was part of the point of him leaving the Titans. After that, seeing Beast Boy rubbing Raven's hand against his face in this issue was creepy as hell.

The art was decent, but not Bennett's best by any stretch. A solid effort, but just unexciting (but I dig Beast Boy's mutton chops!).

The backup from Sean McKeever and Yildiray Cinar was the highlight of the issue, although it is unfortunate that issue #75 had to fall in the middle of the backup's story. This only reinforces why I miss McKeever on the main title, and why I wish he could have been given free reign to write the book he wanted to write.

Story: 5 (main); 8 (backup)
Art: 6 (main); 8 (backup)
Overall: 5.5 (main) + 8 (backup) = 6

by **Old Man** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 10:32 am

Dragavon wrote:Bendis > Millar.

Solid turds > diarrhea.

by ****** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 10:32 am

Dragavon wrote:Bendis > Millar.

Indie Bendis > Millar

Superhero Bendis < Millar

by **Starlord** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 3:35 pm

Old Man wrote:Solid turds > diarrhea.

by **Victorian Squid** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 6:27 pm

OK, what did you all do with the fourthman while I was gone? Huh? Someone 'fess up. I refuse to believe the absurd rumor going around that he quit his day job working for the man to follow U2 on tour, with a girl less than half his age.

by **doombug** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:28 pm

House of J wrote:OK, what did you all do with the fourthman while I was gone? Huh? Someone 'fess up. I refuse to believe the absurd rumor going around that he quit his day job working for the man to follow U2 on tour, with a girl less than half his age.

I know he was seeing Muse a couple days ago. Lucky prick.