I'll start off by saying that I loved the Wolfman and Perez New Teen Titans of the early- and mid-80s. It was the only thing that DC could come up with to combat the X-Men onslaught at that time.
Oh, how the mightly have fallen.
Some random thoughts about Titans #1:
* The art looks like something out of a third-tier Image book from the early 90s on worse paper. Ian Churchill can do good work. This, frankly, is bad. How disappointing to look under such a great cover and find something that looks like it came out of Bloodkill #4.
* The story is entitled "The Fickle Hand" part two? Not a great idea to start a new title, particularly an A-list team book, as the second part to a story. Compounding this is the fact that there's no mention anywhere of when and where part one is.
* The monsters look like they were on loan from a young adult fantasy book. Lovecraft-lite.
* Gar turns into a flying squirrel. Yawn.
* Starfire appears to be eating well.
* Trigon, too. He looks like he should be worrying more about diet and exercise than killing Titans. Living well is the best revenge, Triggy!
* DC loves killing teenagers, and not just killing them. Slaughtering them. It's a new DC tradition. Superboy Prime massacred some ex-Titans. The Flash formerly known as Impulse was beaten to death. Terra had a hole punched through her. And we won't even talk about what happened to Spoiler.
* There's no drama in killing these characters. They're nowhere in this book except at the end, and you can't make out their faces or costumes. Why should the reader care?
"You'd care if you'd been reading the Teen Titans up until now," you might say. Well, I haven't. Part of the responsibility of a number one issue is grabbing new readers. If you haven't read Titans before, this is not likely to hook you. It's too reliant on what has come before. Instead of moving in new directions it recycles too much from the past. It's a problem not just for the Titans but for Marvel and DC superhero comics in general.
But that's a discussion for another day.
Story: 2 - Average
Art: 1 - Poor
