Description: Some backstory first. It's been a rough few years for the Titans franchise. From 2003 to 2007 they were on top of the world. Around the same time as the wildly popular cartoon show began, blockbuster superstar Geoff Johns had just begun his 45 issue run on Teen Titans, the most successful since the early 90's when "New Teen Titans" was consistently the best selling book at DC for years. But soon after the show was cancelled in '06, Johns left the book to focus on Green Lantern and Booster Gold. With his departure....there's really no nice way to put it, Teen Titans went to ****. It's consistently been one of the worst books at DC for the past 5 years, THE worst at its low points. IT became a revolving door of death, where the question wasn't "who will grow up to be a hero", but "who's kicking the bucket next?". The last few years have been pretty much hopeless.
Thank god for reboots.
Teen Titans is essentially starting over again, returning to the point in time where the previous volume first began. And while we may not have a DC legend at the helm, we've got...a Marvel one.
Creative Team: Scott Lobdell wrote X-Men throughout the entirety of the 90s, and somehow survived the ridiculous editorial meddling of the X-Books at the time. This included being one of the primary writers of the Age of Apocalypse event that any 90s X-Men readers will know about. More importantly for our discussion here though is the series created by Lobdell himself, Generation X. This was Marvel's mid 90's answer to New Teen Titans, a group consisting of mostly teenage superheroes almost entirely created by Lobdell himself, and directly compared to what was being released in Titans at the same time, surpassed it.
This not only proves Lobdell's ability to work on exactly this kind of book, but to do so without falling into the trappings the last 5 years of Titans. Lobdell's most famous quality is his ability to create entirely new characters rather than using existing ones, and there's going to be a lot of that in this, as there have already been 3 new Titans revealed, none with any connection to existing heroes, something not being seen anywhere else in the relaunch. And the final candle on the cake is a promise made by Lobdell himself: No recycling. All original content, no revisiting old storylines. Fresh & new are the words, and this is the man to do it.
Brett Booth is referred by many as a "90s artist" and it's kind of easy to see where they're coming from as far as design goes, but the detail and quality of the art on this book is top notch, with very strong colors and defined outlines giving the book a much more 3 dimensional look than many being put out today, even without using much in the way of perspective distortion. It's got a very dynamic feel, and you'll never see Booth repeating panels.
One of the hot topics of this series has been the drastic redesigns seen on the covers, but Lobdell and Booth have assured us that costumes will not necessarily be static in TT. We've already got the designs of future costumes sketched out.
Ease of Access: Titans has become a convoluted mess over the years, but much of that is being scrapped. Teen Titans is going to be one of the easier jumping on points. Just know it has nothing to do with the cartoon at all!
Recommendation: Absolutely. Titans fans have been DESPERATE for half a decade for a good comic, and this is like a dream come true. You would think that the talking heads that the last few writers have been giving us would mean we were just desperate for something even mediocre, but by some miracle it looks like Teen Titans is finally going to be a true top tier book again.
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~LtM