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Titans #5 Review
by Doom, Bruce Banner and Black Goliath
More shit!
Wow, what a boring, shitty cover.
My DC reading curbed during the year long analysis of 52, in which Booster Gold went from an amusing yet also complex character to Geoff Johns' personal continuity agent. Then I gave up entirely, only reading the issues Doom sent me through e-mail. Titans #5 appeared in my inbox and I knew I could not decline or else Doom would pester for days and days until I relented or I blocked him from my e-mail and my phone. So I began researching the topic of Judd Winick's new series Titans. I found something horrifying: a pointless, nostalgia-driven series of no purpose other than to draw in positive memories which should not be associated in any way whatsoever with this ongoing series. I now realize why Doom sent me this; he wanted to punish me for writing inactivity. His punishment was very effective. I now promise to write one article per week, as long as he does not force me into reading either Judd Winick comics or Teen Titans related comics ever again.
"Date Night" originally involved a story with a cover showing Starfire and Nightwing making out in a hot tub with their costumes on, but for some reason DC thought the issue unacceptable and forced some rewriting and redrawing. Maybe it's because in Nightwing Dick already has a girlfriend and having him continue to bone Starfire would, uh, not reflect well on his character. This I agree with, if only because Winick's decision to have the two influenced into fucking in a dead woman's apartment and ignoring the continuity of Dick in a monogamous relationship was fucking idiotic. I'm glad DC values monogamy so much and would rather show Nightwing being raped than committing more infidelity. Also, forcing massive changes in the issue delayed it and therefore made fewer Winick comics come out this year, meaning less of his shit I need to read for the specious purpose of reviewing it for this website. Dan Didio, you're my hero.
He won't.
If only he pulped the issue and cancelled the entire series. The fucker. Contrary to perception of cancelling and resoliciting Titans #5, it does still address Nightwing/Starfire as well as Raven/Beast Boy, two relationships I just don't even fucking care about. Still, I must support any developments which give few pages to Red Arrow out of principle. He appears once, to make idiotic comments when Cyborg shows off his new legs. Beast Boy harasses Raven at her high school which for some reason contains a dormitory by shapeshifting into a huge polar bear whom everyone believes to be one of those ridiculously large stuffed bears boyfriends give their stupid, stupid girlfriends. They go out and Raven whines about her demon heritage and her newfound evil brothers. Then she turns evil, attacks Beast Boy and the Trigon brothers show up. As for Dick and Starfire, they kiss in the pool but do not graduate to fucking. Women take it badly when you admit you don't love them, Winick tells us. Good to know! The cliffhanger shows Raven and her brothers leaving in some portal, a la Sliders. I wonder where they went! No, I don't. I don't fucking care.
In DC Comics, evil women show more skin and pose in provocative ways. OF COURSE SHE'S EVIL, WHERE'S HER FUCKING CORSET AND CHASTITY BELT
An issue devoted to sorting out romantic relationships between the characters would be an interesting down time issue were it not part of a supervillain plot and if the character pairings said anything about anything. I cannot claim to know the ins and outs of Titans continuity, but from Internet research I know the Beast Boy and Raven pairing is a nascent development as well as profoundly troubling one. Raven was reborn as a teenager. Beast Boy is obviously old. This means if they were sexually active in their relationship Beast Boy was committing statutory rape. That both characters are utterly annoying and cliché in their dialogue adds to the shittiness. The Nightwing and Starfire relationship causes boredom in all its form and this is no exception. Winick managed to make a scene of near-nude superheroes ready to copulate in a pool boring. Perhaps there is metacommentary embedded in Nightwing and Starfire continually connecting, breaking up and reconnecting for the sake of nostalgia, but it does not outweigh the rest of the narrative. I wish DC took Titans #5's lesson to heart, however: do not reestablish a nostalgic entity just for the sake of reestablishment is not prudent. Titans' existence lends evidence to that conclusion.
I don't read a lot of Teen Titans and already I'm tired of Raven's schtick, which appears more emo than your average VampireFreaks.com user. She whines about her true nature and tells Beast Boy she wishes to kill the Titans all the time. I don't see why Beast Boy should be surprised, shocked and fearful by that confession. She's a fucking Goth girl. All of them say similar shit on their livejournals every fucking date. I know this from experience. That said, Raven does follow the patterns of behavior attributed to girls into Goth fashion and iconography (culture doesn't exist, only idiots think of Gothic culture as being real). She vacillates between moods, cries a lot, and requires constant emotional support from whoever is there to listen. In short, an utterly intolerable human being whose presence in the book gives me pause when I claim Speedy the Smackhead to be the most annoying Titan. Boring, whiny, stupid. Fuck you, Marv Wolfman, for creating a character who reminds me of the stupid, narcissistic wenches I used to date. Please, Winick, take the realistic route and have Raven slit her goddamn wrists. I'll stop making fun of you, I promise (promise not guaranteed).
If this were accurate, Beast Boy would take up a heavy drinking habit.
The one improvement in Titans #5 when compared to the previous books is the art. It actually looks decent. Not great, but decent. The characters aren't freakish cartoony caricatures which dredge up traumatic memories of Cool World and Monkeybone. Julian Lopez still has to include the idiotic designs of Raven's brothers, but the rest of the characters are rendered well (and the women actually have noticeably different faces!). I should note the original solicited artist for Titans #5 was Rodney Buchemi, with a cover by Ian Churchill (remember when he was the permanent artist for this series? That didn't last long!). Seems the pulping was for the better, as Buchemi does not compare to Lopez well. The writing overrides the art, though, as is the case in comics written by shitty hacks. No matter how good something looks, it exists within idiotic circumstances (giant green bear, shit dialogue, etc.). Maybe if you blot out all the writing Titans #5 will become tolerable. Oh, who am I kidding. It won't. Only hard liquor can erase Winick's writing from your mind, and if you have hard liquor, why the fuck would you want to read Titans #5? Here's hoping Lopez's stay in Winickland ends soon; he deserves better than being wasted on such trash.
You stupid bitch. You're an alien! You're not supposed to know this concept we humans call "love"!
So. Ain't this the shit? Titans #5 is crap and it is more pointless than living. There's no point in continuing this fucking charade anymore. I cannot, in good taste, recommend this rubbish to anyone. I don't care if you have fond memories of Titans (though you're probably fucking stupid for having them). Just don't do this. Stop buying it. Stop encouraging it. Stop promoting Judd Winick. Pretend he no longer exists. Make this trash end. I, I mean, why Judd? Why do this? I just don't see where this is going to go, or what the overall purpose is. The characters all ring false and make me want to kill them all, as opposed to support them or like them or find them interesting. I really want this to end because this is bullshit that accomplishes nothing for anyone and I would really like to kill someone named Judd Winick for his poor work in multiple creative fields. The wrong Real World: San Francisco cast member died of AIDS. ARRRGGHHHHHH!
It's easy to finish scripts in a timely manner if all the pages are blank.
DC doesn't know what to do with the Teen Titans property and it shows. This pathetic excuse for a comic book sucks and Teen Titans similarly beached itself many issues ago and several years ago. I'm by no means perturbed by this development; I don't like any of the characters or the book they inhabit. Although I question why DC would allow the property to fall in such disrepair when the Teen Titans remain one of the few franchises with a multimedia presence in the last several years which isn't Superman or Batman. You would think DC might want to give the Teen Titans the sort of attention they lavish on Green Lantern and the Justice League. Oh, who am I kidding. DC won't bother to try to make Teen Titans or Titans appealing to the assumed target audience! If they did that, they might risk alienating the 50,000 or so people reading one or both of the series! Can't have that. There you have it, my first and last championing of making entertainment for conducive for the enjoyment of children. Bookmark it. So yeah, terrible comic not fit for anyone's consumption except for DC fanboys (who as we know aren't human and as such deserve no rights nor privileges typically afforded to humans).