I don’t want to do this review. Seriously. I had really high hopes for this comic. And those hopes were drug out into the street and shot. This comic gets two stars . . .

You may be asking yourselves, “Shilo! Why didn’t you read all of them? Why stop three months before the end of the year?” To answer you I can only say that Teen Titans was painful. It hurt me to read. I hated it. I hated almost everything about it. I don’t have a zero-star rating so it has to at least have one. And the second star was for two characters that I liked: Bunker (Yeah, I’m biased in his favor because he’s a big flamer) and Wonder Girl (this is just because she shares the “Wonder” name and  she and Bunker have some good dialogue).

I did attempt to like the other characters, really I did! The only problem with Skitter is she doesn’t have any dialogue besides the occasional cockroach sound (Eww) and has no notable inner-dialogue. She was pulled apart from her bug-half once and all she could tell us was that without her as the host for the bug-part was that the world would be doomed. She hugged Bunker and seemed very affectionate towards him, it was too cute to hate and showed that Bunker was the most well-adjusted and caring of the Titans and that there is a human part of Skitter. So it’s only a matter of time before DC gay-bashes him to death in a story line that will unite the Titans in blah-blah-blah. Wonder Girl is wonderfully bitchy and has some pretty cool powers. The other Titans were fairly “meh”. I’ve never been able to tell any of the Flashes apart and Kid Flash (Bart Allen) is no exception. Superboy is a dick, Solstice is the weepy and creepy team member, and Red Robin (Tim Drake) is further confusing fans because in Iss #1 we see a picture of him dressed in his Robin uniform and now we’re told that he never was Robin. So DC has further confused fans with new continuity in the move that was supposed to answer all the plot holes and confusion of the old continuity. Good job, DC.

Which brings us to the plot. If you can force yourself through the comic we know that there are bad guys who want to capture teen heroes and use them to capture other young heroes and in a big plot twist it turns out they’re transported to “The Culling”, an empty space where everyone dresses like Tron, and are forced to fight each other, ala The Hunger Games. This is so that some guy called Harvest (on, clever name! Did he decide his entire identity by forcing young heroes to fight so he could use them in his army?) can take the best of the best for his Ravagers. It seriously reads like a horrible cross-universe fanfic.

OH!!! What if the Teen Titans were in the Hunger Games but the Hunger Games were in a computer?

All it’s missing is Bunker on Superboy action and we’d have it circulating Tumblr in a heartbeat. To be honest I stopped caring about the plot. The character designs for this title were only so-so. Bunker’s costume was disgusting; there is no way a boy that gay would wear something like that and think it stylish and efficient. Wonder Girl’s uniform was rather cool, it could easily be compared to Donna Troy’s of the old universe. The rest were not anything of note. The art was alright but not anything that wowed me. The look of this book is plain bland, when it’s not straight up ugly. The page set up and panel lay-out hurt my eyes. When reading comics I want the flow to be effortless, someone needs to tell the team that you can make a page look exciting without making it look cluttered.

Comics are a unique medium in that words and pictures work together and this title didn’t know that, I think. Half the time something happened a character had to scream out what was happening. This is what inner-dialogue is for. You should only resort to words when the picture can’t convey what is going on. Wonder Girl shouldn’t be screaming out, “OH NO! He used anger on my lasso against me!” while she is being smashed through a wall. No person, Wonder or otherwise, would yell that while being smashed through a wall. Superfluous dialogue and a clunky look made this comic unenjoyable for me. I was really excited for this title when I started reading it but I don’t think it lived up to its potential at all.

Let us know in the forums what you think of Teen Titans!

Tags: bunker, Kid Flash, Red Robin, Skitter, Solstice, Superboy, Teen Titans, The New 52, Wonder Girl