Entry tags:

blackest night

One Good Thing And One Bad Thing About Blackest Night: Titans #3
Fair warning: I was hard pressed to limit it to just ONE bad thing.



GOOD THING: The conceit that Dove radiates a pure white light that shorts out the Black Lanterns. No indication is given if this is due to Dawn Granger being so emotionally well-balanced (all of her emotions are in perfect moderation) or due to some special ability granted by the Lords of Order, who would presumably be against the Black that is raising the dead and bring about the destruction of all life. Either way, it would make sense and is quite cool.

BAD THING: Since I don't want to look lazy for saying "It Has Donna Troy in it" for two reviews straight, I choose 'Ed Benes is allowed to draw Starfire'. Granting that it's hard for most artists NOT to go all fan-service with Kory... well, just look at it.





Starfire: Proof You Can't Spell "Titans" Without T and A.


Definitely the weakest of the Blackest Night tie-ins so far.

The biggest problem is that there's no real character development and apart from the scenes with Beast Boy/Terra and Donna/her family, the story doesn't really exploit the sheer horror of being confronted with an undead version of a loved one. And even those seem a bit flat when the characters are forced to "toughen up" to fight back.





You'd expect to see a little more emotional torment in a situation like this, especially given they are fighting people who they didn't know were dead, like Tempest and the new Hawk. But you don't. Hell, Donna even goes as far as to snap the neck of the zombie Omen.

Omen, for the record, is a magic-using Teen Titan heroine who died in the same Titans/Teen Titans special in which Donna Troy died (again)... and the narrator outright said that nobody much cared about Omen dying but EVERYONE missed Donna Troy. So having Donna be the one to take her out... yeah.





This whole state of affairs is especially problematic given that this is the Teen Titans we're talking about. I've haven't particularly been a fan of this series - or any Titans series, for that matter - but I do know from conversing with fans who are that one of the biggest selling points of the series has been the relationships between the characters.

You don't see any of that here. Hell, you see the other characters acting like jerks to one-another, like when Cyborg and Starfire give Beast Boy a hard time regarding his feelings for Terra to the point of wondering out-loud why they even built a memorial statue for someone who turned traitor and nearly got them all killed.

Granting that this is a valid concern, I can't help but wonder why wasn't this brought up when they were building the statue garden in the first place? And did I mention this is happening at a ceremony to honor the dead?

And I hate to keep harping on about this... but Donna Troy needs to die and stay dead. Seriously.





No, you CAN fight like that, Donna. Unless they changed your origin story again in the past hour, last I checked you're a frelling Amazon! You can fight naked in the rain, in a muddy pit with nothing but a pointy stick for a weapon (in fact, Ed Benes probably has a sketch of that somewhere) so you can damn well fight zombies in your bed clothes.