Thursday, September 1, 2016

Titans #2


Abra Cadabra needs to come up with a new trick.

The Commentary!
Before I start reading this comic book, I should take some sea sickness medication. Will that protect me from the vertigo caused by Brett Booth's wonky panel layouts? If that does help, next I have to figure out what to take to not feel sick looking at everybody's overly long legs and massively thick thighs. Maybe cyanide?

Linda Park, Super News!, is investigating a lead and following a story! She's all hopped up on journalism and ready to Pulitzer her way into the spotlight! Sure, nobody is talking about her blog, Super News!, yet! But once she gets the scoop on the super guy that nobody knows who came from nowhere whom she can't find? Well, look out world! The story of the century!

A lightning storm has hit Keystone City which is big news because whenever that happens, people gain superspeed. So everybody runs down to the area of the storm with their golf clubs and lightning rods in the hopes that this is some of that magical lightning and not the real stuff that doesn't transform a person into anything but a corpse. When Linda gets there, she finds some costumed heroes just standing around in the middle of it. There's Robin and Wonder Girl and Aqualad and Speedy and...hey! How does she recognize Wonder Girl? Maybe she's just mistaking Donna Troy's Wonder Girl with Cassie Sandsmark's Wonder Girl. But then how does she recognize Aqualad? Speedy, I believe, does have a history with Green Arrow so I won't kvetch about that.

Linda rushes into the lightning storm to interview Kid Flash. She begins by screaming his secret identity in front of the crowd. Behind the two of them is a shop called "Pizza Fish" which I can only imagine is a Brett Booth in-joke to distract from his stupid panel layout that looks like shattering glass and his stupid bodies which look like funhouse mirrors.


Wally knew his name and could speak English just after he was born? Awesome!

Obviously these aren't the real Titans! I'm just playing along and not fooled completely! I'll never be completely fooled by anything because I never believe anything. I learned that from the Internet and from Coast to Coast AM and from everybody everywhere who are just stupid assholes. Plus, like Linda Park said, this is what these people looked like a long time ago or never ago in the case of Wonder Girl and Aqualad and Kid Flash! And since Kid Flash feels like he was just born, these must be the Abra-Kadabra puppets from the cover. It's just that they're puppets made from scratch so they get to look exactly like humans. If Abra-Kadabra had turned a human into a living puppet, they'd look like the ones on the cover. Magic is weird!

The Titans arrive just in time to battle the Teen Titans! It's so exciting! I need to learn to change the color of my font so that I can identify things I write by a color code. Blue would be sincere. Red would be sarcastic. Yellow would mean I pissed myself as I typed it. Purple would mean I'd rather be playing Call of Duty. It would be revolutionary! Also it would be a lot of work. Forget it I even mentioned it.

Oh! I have an invention that I'm just putting out there for whatever entrepreneur wants to make it happen. House slippers with a pump in the sole which sprays a fine mist around the slipper each time you step. They're for keeping cats from getting underfoot!

By the way, "It's so exciting!" would have been red.


Learn how to draw thighs, you hack! Liefeld is better at it than you are!

Shit, you know what? I apologize to Rob Liefeld for bringing him into this. He doesn't deserve to have his art mocked in a general sense when I'm mocking the specifics of Brett Booth's art. I only want to mock Liefeld's art when there's something in front of me well worth mocking. Which is, you know, most of the time I have Rob Liefeld art in front of me.

Dammit! I'm sorry, Rob! That was totally uncalled for. I'll never do it again!

There's an even worse thigh on The Flash a few pages later that makes me nauseated.


I think that's more of a crisis of identity?

Wally defeats Kid Flash by tripping him after Kid Flash does the typical challenge the other speedster to see who's faster. That's a nice moment, Dan. Too bad Brett Booth drew it.

Abra-Kadabra's main goal is to humiliate The Flash, probably just before killing him. I'd recommend just killing him but you can never get through to these super villains. Always so determined to do things their way even if their way is so cliché that it constantly brings them to failure. He learns during the battle that Linda Park is on site and that Wally loves her even though they apparently haven't met yet. Abra-Kadabra's memories are probably Swiss cheesed from all of the Watchmen interference so nothing he thinks he knows really matters. It must be really confusing for a guy from the future to find that the past isn't anything like it was supposed to be. Enh, that's probably to be expected if you're a time traveler. The history books are never that accurate.

The Teen Titans versus the Titans battle continues to rage while Tempest notices Abra-Kadabra (I guess he's just Kadabra, first name Abra) directing things from a nearby rooftop. So he faces him one-on-one while Dick yells, "No! We're a team! Going solo in a team book is always a disaster! Especially when we're on page 19 of 20! Get back!" But Tempest doesn't get back at all! Instead, he gets zapped by Kadabra's wand. Wally gets there just in time to probably save Tempest's life. But Tempest is probably so seriously hurt that he'll probably have to be sidelined for ten or twelve issues. That's really his main role in the Titans comic books!

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