Drunken Comics Rage

"You want me to kick you in the shin? I mean, if you really like pain that much, I'll just kick you real hard in the shin right now, and you won't have to buy that"

DVO said that to me at the comic shop when he saw that I was actually going to buy Titans #4.

I should have taken the kick.

The train wreck that has been Titans has ended it's first story line, and I'm not sure it could have been much worse. The only upside was that there were a few ok jokes here and there, but that's it.

 If you haven't been suffering through the first few issues, I'll give you a basic recap. Trigon has been trying to kill anyone who was ever a Titan. The idea is that in a world full of super heroes, the Titans are the only ones that have ever defeated him, and he figured that he would just wipe them out and then taking over the Earth would be easy. Or something.

At the end of last issue, you find out that Trigon has three sons on Earth, and they've been doing his bidding to open a portal so Dad can come to Earth. This whole story arc seemed like it was just a rushed excuse to get the team back together. Of course with all of the backlash, I wonder if they didn't shorten the whole thing to move on to something else, but seeing how bad it was as a whole, there's just as much chance that this was the plan all along.

In this issue, the Titans meet Trigon's sons, and a fight breaks out. The fight is very much one of those where the writer thought he came up with a few clever things, and that's how the Titans sort of "win" the day. Yet most of those things are really contrived. Case in point, Flash and Donna Troy start fighting each other, because they both want the Trigon son that has lust as his power. Nightwing ends the fight by, and I'm not kidding here, putting a bag over Flash's head. He then tricks Donna Troy into picking up the Flash, and tossing him at the Trigon Son that has the power of envy. All that time, the fastest man on the planet is apparently totally unable to figure out how to take a bag off his head. 

It's things like that which made this whole story line terrible. I'll admit that fits into the story, in that Donna tosses Flash at Envy. Well when Envy touches someone, he can turn into whoever that person envies the most. In Flash's case it's Barry Allen, and Envy can't handle all that power and goes zooming off. Even if you don't want to pull out the geek card, and site that Flash could have taken the bag off his head about 10,000 times in the amount of time it took Donna to pick him up and throw him, or done any number of other things, it's still just trying to be too clever and instead becomes a "what the hell?" moment.

Yup, should have just let DVO kick me.

Rating: 1 Star

I debated giving this issue 2 Stars, on the hope that maybe they revamp everything for #5, and this series is worth a damn. I do really like the idea of putting the Titans back together, but this first story line may sink any future the title really has. I decided instead to take nostalgia out of it, and just rate this issue on it's own merit, and it soooooo gets a 1 Star. They're lucky I liked the art ok, or it might have actually gotten a big fat Zero Stars. Especially for the SUPER cheese "together forever" ending:

Ugh.

Filed under: General Comics Rage