Entry Level: Teen Titans #23 Review

I’ve had a lot of fun at Scott Lobdell’s expense over the past couple of years, mostly due to his tendency to turn any comic book he puts his hands on into an adolescent soap opera. After all, one doesn’t turn Starfire into a takes-all-comers fuckpot with the memory and morals of a goldfish because he likes writing tales of adult sexuality. He does it because nobody reads Penthouse Forum anymore. Jesus Christ, I’m three sentences in and I’m already getting off point here.

The one title Lobdell has been working on that I still read and enjoy on a semi-regular basis is Teen Titans, and I think it’s because it’s right in Lobdell’s wheelhouse: it’s supposed to be an adolescent soap opera. There’s nothing remarkable about a bunch of good-looking teenagers trying like hell to bone each other and treating every little misstep like it’s the biggest dramatic affront in the world; that’s just high school. So Teen Titans has been a particular place where Lobdell’s weaknesses have actually been a virtue… but still, it’s not been for everybody. As a soap opera, it has a ton of characters, it has featured longer-term stories, and it has, almost more than any other New 52 title, embraced the fact that all the characters are different than they’ve ever been. So we’ve got a book with new and unfamiliar versions of old characters, with constantly-shifting and volatile relationships, and that doesn’t really equal a title that’s friendly to new readers jumping in at any random point.

Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news, at least for potential new readers, is that Teen Titans #23 is a perfect entry point for new readers, specifically and carefully introducing every character, their relationships with each other, and, as befits a long-running team book like Teen Titans, even features a fairly significant personnel change.

The bad news, at least for long-time readers, is that not a hell of a lot actually happens in this issue.

The story opens with Kid Flash being dragged through some kind of portal and screeching for help, proving that he might be many things, but Wally West isn’t one of them. One by one, the Titans come to help, with each taking the time to show their powerset and make some mention of their relationships to each other before finally dragging Kid Flash to safety. After we readers see that, whoever Kid Flash pissed off in the 30th Century enough to send a portal back for him, they’re not likely to drop tools and give up, we spend some time with the Titans talking in pairs. We learn that Superboy wants to chuck the meat to Wonder Girl, who is okay with that because hey, Superboy’s got the meat, that Red Robin sees new recruit Raven as a possible leader, Beast Boy no longer believes in much of anything, and Bunker, well, Bunker has a long, lost love who has just awakened from a coma and is asking for him, leading to his leaving the team, at least temporarily. And the timing is just terrible, because just then… actually, just then nothing. That’s pretty much it.

There’s a part of me that wants to dismiss this issue as being all soap opera and no action, because that’s what it kind of is. The only superhero action in the book is six pages of what amounts to an interspatial game of tug of war… and those six pages include one full-page splash and one double-paged spread. So this issue is damn lean on the action front, and is otherwise full of Titans pairing off to make out or to show a bunch of teenaged angst (although when it comes to Beast Boy, I’ll grant that seeing all his friends die in The Ravagers earns his bit of depression).

But it’s difficult for me to be too hard on this issue for being a teenaged soap for a couple of reasons, the first being that that’s what its supposed to be. Teen Titans under Lobdell has always been an overblown teenaged drama, and part of being a teenager is being the hero of your own romantic story (granted, once you reach your 40s, that story winds up being a farce over time, but you can’t convince any teenager of that). And frankly, it’s kinda fun to read stories like that now and again. Sure, it’s popcorn as opposed to rare steak, but sometimes you want popcorn. And if there’s one thing Lobdell’s good at, it’s love stories that stick at the adolescent, “I just wanna bone” level. That’s a curse on any book meant to depict a more adult relationship, but it’s worked in Teen Titans, and considering it is such a focus of this particular issue, it works here.

But I also won’t come down hard on this issue, because it is a true rarity in modern superhero comics: a slow-paced issue that spends nearly all its time with the characters on a simple and friendly enough level that literally anyone can pick up Teen Titans #23 and walk away from it with a decent sense of who everyone is, what their relationships are with each other, and enough of a sense of events and relationships that have led to this moment. It is a truly reader-friendly entry point to the world of Teen Titans, and while it means a slow, relatively actionless issue for regular readers, I am willing to pay that cost to call out something that is relatively rare, and yet desperately needed, in the world of superhero comics.

Robson Rocha does a good job presenting beautiful young people in good-looking poses, but what saves him here is that there really isn’t a whole lot of action. This is a good thing because I’m not completely convinced about his storytelling. Again, everyone looks good, and his fine-lined stuff gives good poses, but take a look at the first few pages: the door to Kid Flash’s bedroom moves perpendicular to the portal to parallel to it within two panels. The hole that Superboy punches in the ceiling moves to the wall within two pages. Red Robin and Raven change seats from left to right twice within four panels. And this is with a relatively quiet story without a hell of a lot of action. Sure, these aren’t terrible errors, and you can follow the story well enough, but these things matter, and there are serious storytelling flaws in this art.

Teen Titans #23 is likely to be only moderately satisfying to regular readers, particularly ones who are in it for the action and the thrills. This issue is all about the relationships, and all about reintroducing the characters, playing up the soapy elements over anything else. However, the issue plays an important role in any continuing comic title that you don’t see nearly enough: it is a perfect entry point for new readers. Lobdell clearly took the opportunity that having a single issue between his Trigon story and the upcoming Forever Evil crossover provided him to simply reintroduce everyone and give new readers a friendly place to get their feet wet. And as much as I have fun with the guy, I give him credit for giving new readers a place to jump on.

I am never going to recommend Teen Titans as the finest title for anyone. But if you have any taste for superhero soap opera, check out Teen Titans #23.