Teen Titans #20

Okay, we've made it past the whole, “Your Titans, Tomorrow!!” fiasco, and have the team back in the present(if the present was 12 years ago). According to the cover, this will be the Titans portion of Identity Crisis, which I may end up giving a reread for the blog to see if it held up better than these Teen Titans comics. For the Titans, Robin is the one who is most affected by Identity Crisis(and, I think is the only character from this book touched by that event), as his father is murdered by Fat, Old, Bald, Captain Boomerang, not to be mistaken by the version of that character that is none of those things. But since that mainly takes place in the Robin solo book, I literally have no idea what or how the Titans fit into this x-over... Let's rectify that now.

Teen Titans #20(March 2005):

Summary: Huh, okay, so this is actually taking place towards the very, VERY end of Identity Crisis, if not post. Okay, Robin's father has already died, but he decides to hang with the Titans as a way of trying to cope with his father being dead, you know, normality and all that jazz. Only Superboy knows, because, apparently, Superman is a giant gossip, but Tim convinces Superboy to keep the news to himself.

Fucking Superman!  "Hey Connor, guess what?  Robin's father is dead!!"

Oh yeah, and Starfire leaves to join the Outsiders, to which I say, meh. With so many powerhouses on the team as it is, her role here was super redundant. The Titans get called to Opal City to deal with some kids who stole a suit of Lex Luthor's armor. As they arrive, the discover that the Electrocutioner is also there trying to collect the suit for his mystery benefactor who is obviously Lex Luthor

Electrocutioner is such a great comic villain name...

. I'm not sure why that's supposed to be a surprise reveal or anything, but yeah, it's Lex trying to get it back. Lex's suit goes into some sort of automatic attack mode when Superboy is near, and gives the Titans a bit of trouble. However, Warp pops in and teleports away with the suit, returning it to Lex. Meanwhile, Robin ended up pairing off with the Electrocutioner, who figures Batman is Robin's father and starts to bad mouth Robin's father. Robin flips out on account of the whole, “My daddy's deaaaaaad!!!” thing, and beats the Electrocutioner unconscious. He then tells the Titans that his father was dead, which leads to them all fawning over him. From there we get two epilogues, one that tells us that, *gasp*, Lex Luthor WAS the one after the suit. The second has Dr. Light attacking Green Arrow.

Thoughts: This was a pretty good comic! Yeah, I know, I don't get to say that much with regards to this series, but hey, a spade is a spade, and this comic was solid. The artwork was really well done, and really did a great job showing Robin's various moods during this issue, with the tears at the end working perfectly to make the reader(in this case, me!) feel bad for Tim.

I don't know why this happened, but it makes me laugh every time.

The writing was a tad heavy-handed, as it seemed that Tim mentioned that his father was dead on every other page, but it all came together well and gave a nice little emotional scene at the end. Starfire leaving is a plus, because, as I said in the early part of this post, the team really didn't need her. One of my early gripes about this series was about how poorly made up the composition of the team was. There were too many powerhouses, several team leaders, etc. Starfire would definitely be better served with the Outsiders at this point anyway. Other than that, the next issue should be interesting, as we get the first post-Crisis appearance of the new and improved Dr. Light.