THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Teen Titans is back, but with a twist due to the events of Forever Evil; Johnny Quick has sent the Titans through time, which means another writing shortcut for Lobdell and another month of disappointing new Teen Titans canon.
POSITIVE
We finally, FINALLY, get to see why Bart Allen, a.k.a. Kid Flash, is considered a criminal in the future. The young man apparently blew
up a spaceship containing an army that was on a warpath to his home. Unfortunately, this split-second development does little to explain how Bart was sent back in time, and it also does little to save this throwaway issue.
Angel Unzueta’s art is nice and works for the comic, but the story surrounding the art is lazy and not at all worth the $2.99 price point. Unzueta’s wonderful art is wasted.
NEGATIVE
It’s hard to tell if the story told in this issue was too ambitious or too lazy, but it definitely doesn’t work. For this issue, Lobdell has determined that Red Robin and the other Titans needed to be thrown in and out of different times—and possibly dimensions—accomplishing nothing along the way. Red Robin tries to make sense of it, explaining that each of these locations and times are “keynotes” in each Titan’s life, but that scene is immediately followed by Superboy and Wonder Girl warding off aliens invading ancient Egypt, so Red’s ideas are really just a lot more nothing. If the issue actually showed the team confronting various difficult times in each others’ lives, there could have been interesting development, but in the end, time travel was just a contrived way to get the Titans to surrender their souls to Raven. Apparently, the only way to pull themselves out of the timestream is to have Raven connect all of their souls to hers, because she was born in another dimension…Sure.
With no buildup to this plot line whatsoever, Raven tethers herself to the souls of the other Titans, the whole goal in infiltrating the team in the first place. This happens in one issue, thanks to Johnny Quick conveniently throwing the Titans into the time stream. This lazy writing is inexcusable and insulting to the reader.
I have never read an issue of Lobdell’s run on Teen Titans that I would recommend, and this issue does nothing to change that. The story Teen Titans #24 specifically, by nature of spontaneous time travel, is both nonsensical and confusing. The job of a writer in this situation is to bring meaning to the events, but the issue is so obviously contrived and exploits the readers in such a way that any attempt would be in vain.
VERDICT
(1/5)
Teen Titans fans deserve more than this. The issue is obviously filler – I doubt anyone will bother reopening it after finishing. Sure, it contains some insight into Bart’s past, but it really only touches on it rather than dedicating a real amount of page space to the situation.
