Teen Titans #44

Genre action Author Geoff Johns Publisher Marvel Comics External Links Official Marvel Comics Website

Holy tortured Teen Titans Batman! For the sadists in the crowd just waiting to see those punk kid Titans get what for, this issue is certainly for you. For those of you who have grown to care for the team that Geoff Johns has been building up for the past 3 plus years, jeez, your favorites are in for a world of pain.

Each and every member of the team has been kidnapped or otherwise rendered immobile and are getting the bejeezus kicked out of them by the newly formed Titans East, led by regular Titan's nemesis Deathstroke. Titan's East's line-up consists of a parallel riff of Titan's, including a bizzaro Superboy named Match, a reverse kid Flash called Inertia, and the former member of the Bat-family, Batgirl. The Titan's roster, including the addition of the recently resurrected son of Deathstroke, Jericho, is faced with insurmountable odds. Each Titan is against a Titan's East member that's powers create an uneven footing for our heroes. For example, the daughters of The Joker and The Riddler take Raven captive, who are exposing her sensitive psyche to an overabundance of stimuli.

What follows is a sort of tour de force of the Titan's at their worst. It pains the reader to see former good girl Cassandra Cain fighting against Robin and the reformed daughter of Deathstroke, Ravager. While this action oriented issue certainly isn't the best Geoff Johns has to offer, it's heading into a very cool direction by tearing down the "One Year Later" roster of Titans. By issues end, it's clear that this is going to end in an epic battle between the two teams of Titan's, and sometimes that sort of raw action is just what you need to satisfy you. With Johns leaving the book in just two more issues with #46, this will certainly be a bang to go out on.

Also leaving the book on issue #46 is penciler Tony Daniel, whose style, while a little rough around the edges, perfectly suits an action book. His work on this issue definitely draws attention to itself, but not to the point of disorientation. Unlike other artists who focus on style, I'm never confused about what's happening on a particular panel, which is something that would be easy to do in a book that moves as fast as this one.

With only two more issues to go on their run, Johns and Daniel certainly have a lot of ground to cover. I certainly hope that this arc wraps up at that time, and isn't handed over to replacement Adam Beechen. Johns should certainly have the final say on a final story as heavy as this one, and it is definitely going to be a shame to see him go on a franchise that he reinvigorated. Hopefully, we will be able to see him write some of the characters he's given so much emotional weight to again in the future in some of his other books.