Teen Titans #6

I think that's El Guapo in The Flash uniform! Where's his skateboard?

Last issue, the Teen Titans were battling a bunch of drug-crazed teenagers (is that redundant? Aren't they all hopped up on Loopies and Wackbombs?) while Manchester Black and Josiah Power watched. Manchester Black and Josiah Powers are some manipulative bastards who work for STAR Labs and want to have sexual relations with young teenage heroes (possibly! I'm glad libel laws don't extend to fictional characters). Beast Boy, who somehow changed from Red to Green during the Titans' hiatus which may have been explained away somewhere somehow although I'm sure it was changed because it was just stupid that he was red and nobody liked it at all, um...I forgot what this sentence was going to be about after that adjective clause. Maybe I should just get back to the fight!

Oh yeah! Also, Power Girl showed up to try out for the team.

With Power Girl's help, the Teen Titans defeat the drug-addled teens in four pages so I guess the cliff the team was left hanging from last issue wasn't very tall. After the battle, Raven teleports the team away because the crowd starts to get stalkery and weird. I hope Raven remembered to teleport Wonder Girl's mom along with them. Being that I'm an irresponsible lout, I can't tell if leaving the unconscious super powered teenagers behind without making sure the police were there to round them up first was poor form. I mean, one of the teenagers was invisible! When the cops arrive, how are they going to know to arrest that guy? Also, how are they going to know not to run him over?!

Back at Bunker and Beast Boy's apartment, the Teen Titans sit around interviewing Power Girl while nobody mentions Wonder Girl's mom. That's weird. Are we just supposed to forget that she was in the fight scene last issue? Remember how she almost got crushed by a truck but Power Girl saved her? Now nobody gives a fuck about where she went?

Power Girl tells the rest of the Teen Titans how she got her Power Girl powers and when she gets to the part about Desaad killing her mother, nobody says, "Oh, hey! What happened to Wonder Girl's mother?" And nobody even mentions how weird it will be to have a Wonder Girl and a Power Girl on the same team. That's Legion of Super-heroes weird.

After the origin story, Power Girl tells the Teen Titans how to do their job.

Yeah! You idiots should hire Madame Xanadu to tell you who to attack before they commit any crimes! Preemptive super heroing! Don't worry if it looks like you're beating the shit out of innocent people because they haven't done anything wrong yet! You'll know you're doing the right thing! Maybe. I mean, you'll have a little bit of doubt that maybe Madame Xanadu is just getting you to beat up people she has a grievance with. But just put that out of your mind! I'm sure prophecy is a real thing!

Power Girl totally makes sense if I choose not to purposefully misunderstand her though! I mean, all the Teen Titans have been doing (mostly back in Lobdell's run) was waiting for other people to attack them while they just hung out talking about how they were going to change the world or something. They were busy coming up with names and costumes and flirting with Superboy but they weren't ever actually trying to stop super villains. They were busy visiting Dinosaur Island and going into the future and fucking each other and battling Raven's father but they never really helped the world. Which is why it's so strange that they're suddenly so popular ever since this new Teen Titans series began. How is Raven popular enough to have a band based on her? How is Wonder Girl known by enough people to have a whole gang of Faux Wonder Girls running around New York beating up muggers? Why do I even care? I should just be happy Lobdell is off the book!

Meanwhile Beast Boy continues to explore STAR Labs as a little Green Mouse. I bet he gets caught by some crazy doctor and locked in a cage and forced to run a maze for sex cheese.

Then that band that loves Raven? They managed to record her chanting a spell earlier and they're going to add it to one of their tracks. But just like that episode of Constantine where the record summons demons and opens portals to hell and forces people to remember their first broken heart so they spin around the room blubbering like nobody ever blubbered before about the human condition, the Raven's spell track disturbs the neighbors.

This is just like me when the neighbor downstairs begins playing the only bass track he seems to know on his stupid fucking bass because he's probably trying to impress another methed-out lady he picked up at the bar around the corner.

People who love music suck. Look, Never Going To Make It As A DJ: we all fucking love music. It's just that some of us don't divest ourselves of an actual personality for it. Oh, you heard a band that nobody you know knows and they're fucking terrific? Aren't you just the next fucking Mr. Lewis and Mr. Clark of the Music Frontier? Being the first person to love a band is not discovering the cure for cancer. Hell, it's not even helping a friend move! It's not even politely allowing somebody to merge on the freeway! It's next to having done absolutely nothing. Liking a band before they're liked by the masses doesn't make you a super genius. It makes you a person that has nothing to say to anybody except, "Have you heard this?" Okay, you probably know all about the bands as well to prove how much of a super fan you were before the band hits it big. So you can also bore everybody with your in-depth knowledge of the equipment the band uses and the studio they play at and the producers favorite way to fuck wanna-be songwriters. Oh, and playing your music loudly from the porch of your house as you sit amongst a pile of empty Rainier cans impresses nobody except more insubstantial people like yourself! Get off my lawn!

The Girls Wonder and Power head over to Wonder Girl's apartment where we find Wonder Girl's mom safe and sound. Whew! I was worried she'd been written out of existence! I need an older woman in this comic book so that all of my boners while reading it aren't weird and perverse and possibly illegal.

Scott Lobdell had Roy Harper say basically this same thing about Oliver Queen. That doesn't bode well for my impression of Will Pfeifer!

If you bitch about somebody always thinking they're right when they usually are right, you're an asshole. If they're usually right, they don't think they're usually right. They just usually are right. Stop believing it's some random roll of the dice that always happens to be against you and realize that maybe the other person is pretty smart and perceptive and you are an unobservant dolt! Although Tim Drake is supposed to be some kind of super genius so writers have to write lines like this so the reader can understand exactly how super geniusy he is without actually being troubled by writing scenes where he shows his super genius. Much easier to have another character state the fact for us.

Someone knocks at the door and Wonder Girl explains why it's Raven and then it isn't Raven, proving that Cassie is never right about anything ever! I think one example is enough of a sample to make that judgment, right? Science!

If I ever answered the door to find some shirtless fool draped across the doorway with his disheveled leather jacket hanging loose, I wouldn't be able to stop myself from laughing in his face. If it were a woman, I'd probably go, "Ubba ubba ubba duh duh um blork!" Hmm, so maybe this actually works if the person is of a sex you want to rub pee-pees with!

Cassie's mom, Helena, asks Manchester Black where his shirt is and I admire her lawn greatly. Old people rule! Young people go to school because nobody wants them cluttering up the malls every single day of the year.

It turns out Manchester Black is only nineteen. Because even people practically running STAR Labs have to be teenagers in a teen comic aimed at teens whose heads instantly explode if they have to read a scene with two fucking adults in one room. Even if a nineteen year old running STAR Labs really doesn't make any sense, no matter how smart or ambitious Manchester Black is. Unless he inherited the company from a parent and was allowed, for some stupid fucking reason, to run it himself. Maybe he got the job because he's sucking Josiah Power's dick? Josiah Power is an old guy, right? Please let him be an old guy! A big old lemon partyer!

Manchester Black, being the young super genius that he is, manipulates Cassie's belief in preemptive strikes to convince her to join him in battling some unknown group that's driving his surveillance people mad just from snippets of conversation they've detected. I'm sure her and Power Girl will sign on because look at his nipples!

Sex-maze time for mousey!

Some gunmen break into STAR Labs and blow a hole in its securest of secure vaults with a handheld nuclear bomb. They all survive somehow and they expect some of the STAR Labs' personnel to have survived as well because comic books. I guess calling the bomb "an experimental" fission bomb is the explanation for people being able to survive the blast? Manchester Black tells Cassie to get the team together so they can stop these terrorists from stealing all of STAR Labs most dangerous things. Why he had to come to Cassie to convince her to help him fight whatever needs fighting when the Teen Titans are just going to react (again!) to the blast on Governor's Island is beyond me. Even without Manchester Black, the Teen Titans would have gone in to secure the area after seeing a mushroom cloud out in the bay. I guess he just wanted to prance around shirtless in front of the young girls.

Teen Titans #6 Rating: No change. So far, this series feels like the Teen Titans are really doing some super heroing but are they? Once again, they're just being targeted by an enemy (in this case, Manchester Black) and manipulated into doing whatever he wants them to do. Which means, once again (again!), the only reason anything bad is happening in his comic book is because the Teen Titans exist. If they were in San Francisco, New York would be much safer because none of this would be happening. Maybe it would be. I still don't really know what Manchester Black is ultimately up to. But it seems like his plan relies on maneuvering the Teen Titans into a specific position on his chess board, so I'm going to continue to blame the Teen Titans for everything that goes wrong around them. But what else is new, right? Didn't they have this same kind of problem back in the Marv Wolfman and George Perez days? If only I could remember them!