New Titans #98

I'm hesitant to say this is the worst Titans line-up ever because it lacks Aqualad and Speedy but it's pretty terrible.

When I was in junior high, three songs would make my little love-struck heart dissolve into a weepy mess: "Against All Odds," "Total Eclipse of the Heart," and "Hello." The song titles don't actually include the punctuation but I think that's how Americans like to deal with punctuation and quotes. We're idiots. Usually I ignore the rule but sometimes I feel like toeing the line and doing the thing I'm supposed to do. I really struggled with whether or not I should leave out the totally optional (and especially useless in this case) Oxford comma. Did all of that grammar bullshit make you forget about me as a young boy weeping inconsolably due to a few pop songs that made me think about Marilyn Mendoza? Okay, good! Because that boy wasn't a soft boy at all! He was hard! HARD I TELL YOU!

Not like that, you pervo.

The Darkening continues to darken everything in its path. Luckily it's only been a short path from Councilwoman Alderman to Future Nightwing. I'm certain the person darkening everybody must be some form of Raven having gone Full Trigon. I mean, she can't really be dead, can she? Phantasm can though. Anything plot developments that help erase the memory of Danny Chase are appreciated.

Pantha gets a lot of pages at the beginning of this issue. She uses most of them to make cat jokes about herself.

His excuse is that he's not bloody?

For younger comic book readers, what Pantha is doing in this scene is thinking to herself. That's a thought bubble. It's been replaced by character narration boxes. The main difference between the two is that thought bubbles are things the character is thinking in the current scene and character narration boxes are comments from the character as if they're giving a director's commentary track on the story to the reader. They're terrible for the comic book medium. The whole point of comic books is to allow the pictures to tell a good portion of the story. But a lot of modern comic book writers seem to write scripts that give no thought to the medium. So it's tons and tons of Narration Boxes describing the action and the plot and the intent of the character. It's fucking lazy.

Not that older comic books didn't do a lot of the same thing! Non-modern writers had their share of lazy writers too! It's just they used omnipotent narrative voices in their narration boxes. Plus maybe they thought the kids reading the comic books were stupid. So they'd write a panel where the art depicts Lois driving off of a cliff and Lois thinks to herself, "Oh no! I'm driving off of a cliff!" Placed just over this scene is a narration box saying "Lois Lane drives off of a cliff!", an obviously needed redundancy for all of those daft kids.

Also note in the panel above how Red Star enjoys the home shopping network. He's no communist! He enjoys all the perks of a capitalist system, even the most terrible ones.

Orange is as orange does. Or something.

I don't get Dick's threat to Pantha about spitting out hairballs. Is he going to force her to groom herself incessantly as punishment? "You're a dirty, dirty half-woman, half-cat beast! Clean yourself good! Make sure you get your butthole. Oh yeah. Get that leg in the air! Oh. OH. OH YEAH! I'm coming all over you! Now lick that up too until you choke on a hairball, you slut." Then everybody shames Pantha for months on end because she let Dick jerk off on her.

Meanwhile Kory spends the night at a club with Jason Priestley. Unless it's meant to be the short one with the forehead. You know! The guy who played Dylan McKay! Not that I watched that show obsessively because fuck you judging my choices as a younger person! Like buying this comic book well past the hundredth issue!

Jason Priestley gets darkened as Kory flees from the club when a fan asks her to autograph her picture in a porno magazine. The picture was the one taken of Mirage shape-shifted to look like Kory. Maybe Kory shouldn't be so angry at Dick and realize that Mirage is a terrible person who has completely fucked with both of their lives. Hopefully she'll be dead soon in Team Titans #9.

Nothing much happens with the Titans. They learn Garfield tried to steal the Mento helmet and then disappeared. He's been kidnapped by the Brotherhood of Evil who have a knew member of the team: Rita Farr! Gasp! Shock! Faint!

There's something so inappropriate about this picture that I have an erection.

New Titans Rating: Two and a half stars out of five. Generally, I like when comic books slow the plot down to establish more scenes where characters simply get to interact with each other in day-to-day life. But all of those scenes in this issue just seem to be inserted to delay the reveal of Evil Raven's identity. I suppose if the dialogue were better written, I'd have really liked this issue. But Marv Wolfman tends to write scenes that are superficial and one-dimensional. Half a dozen pages of Pantha making cat jokes followed by a few more of her finding ways to call Kory a slut. There isn't any evidence of why any of these people would actually stay together to be a team. Is there a rule in the superhero community that you can't kick somebody out of a team unless you're Batman? Why do the Titans even exist if none of them can stand each other? Gar is angry that nobody has helped Cyborg. Cyborg is less animated than the microwave. Pantha hates everybody, even baby Wildebeest (who everybody is annoyed by). Dick and Kory are constantly fighting. Only Red Star seems to not have any problems with the rest of the team. But I don't care about that because he's even more boring than the microwave. I mean Cyborg!