Art By: Andy Smith, Keith Champagne
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: September 17, 2014
The New Kids On The Block
So if you've read Batman and Robin: Futures End, then you'll know that the Dark Knight spent the majority of that issue getting his ass handed to him by The Heretic. Now the interesting thing about that is that The Heretic is the one that killed Damian Wayne and turned out to be a deformed baby headed hulking monster clone of Damian, so with all this Robin Rises hype going around it's not out of the realm of possibility to think that this might be a future incarnation of Damian or a clone of Damian. Here's the problem. In Batman and Robin: Futures End, The Heretic was just a silent hulking beast that wanted to kill Batman. Here we'll see a very different Heretic that joins this new group of super teens that form a team to take down an asshole billionaire that does awful things to people and pretty much anything around him. We can speculate about the other Heretic just being a programmed clone, but for the Damian lovers out there I'm going with this being the "real" Damian or the "real" incarnation of a future Damian created from a clone. I'll quit it with the exposition so we can just get into this issue. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Our story begins off the coast of California where we're introduced to this story's villain, Archimedes Grant, a well to do teenager who happens to be the richest little snot in the world. So Archimedes is having a party at one of his homes that happens to be in international waters, so you know right off the bat that this is going to be one hell of a party. Archimedes is showing around his Senator friend when we see that the party's entertainment is a tank with a steroided up shark and a very Lagoon Boy looking Tempest. You might remember that Aqua Lad once went by the name Tempest, but I'm sitting here wishing he was called Lagoon Boy. It doesn't look good for our hero but another super teen comes to his aid in the form of Klarion and he abra kadabras Tempest and the shark out of there. A bit pissed off that his entertainment is gone, Archimedes wants someone to pay for this and his head of security points out Klarion as the culprit. Before he can hocus pocus his way out of there as well, he's surrounded by armed guards, but their guns mysteriously disassemble and Klarion takes the opportunity to get the hell out of there. Away from the party we see that this was a rescue mission to save Tempest and his friends Klarion and Kid Flash got the job done........ Kid Flash disassembled the guns by the way. Now for people who love to know characters, it seems that all these heroes are from Earth 2 and Kid Flash is a unidentified girl and not the Kid Flash we've gotten used to in the New 52.
The next day our trio of teens try to figure out how to get coordinated so they can take down Archimedes, because anyone that would watch a person and a shark fight to the death, has to be a no good scum bag. As they discuss their next attack, they're joined by Heretic who seems pissed off that the young heroes caused such a ruckus at the party, because he was planning on killing Archimedes himself. Eventually the trio make it a foursome as they decide to work together to get the job done.
Now we're off to New York where Archimedes Grant is continuing his festivities and it's here where we see our heroes come into their own as they coordinate their attacks and take out the security, leaving Archimedes vulnerable. Well as vulnerable as he can be, because we find out that his head of security is actually the villain of the normal Teen Titans title Algorithm, so we've got a quasi-robot on our hands. Heretic slices and dices her, but her nanotech keeps rebuilding her body until eventually Klarion turns all her pieces into butterflies. I have to remember that in the future, in case of robot attack turn it's pieces into insects...... got it.
While the new Titans are taking care of the riff raff, Archimedes is taken by a waitress to safety, but we soon find out that his waitress Alexia Santos has her own agenda tonight. It seems that Archimedes is responsible for destroying the village she came from and tonight she plans on taking her revenge. Archimedes shows that he's not completely helpless and pulls out a gun and shoots this heroine, but as she falls against a stuffed wooly mammoth (it was cloned and then killed for a trophy) we see that there's something special about this girl that calls herself Animal Girl. Now I don't know what kind of power a dead wooly mammoth could give her, but since when don't bullets that obviously go in the body kill people?
In the end Animal Girl takes out Archimedes and leaves with the new Teen Titans and while the Senator friend we saw in the beginning tries to embezzle Archimedes money, he walks into this office to see the new Teen Titans, who want to talk about his future.
That's it for this Futures End tie-in and you know what? I really enjoyed this issue. Since the relaunch of Teen Titans I've adamantly not been a fan of the series which really sucks because I love the Teen Titans. So imagine my shock when we're shown this rag tag team of young heroes and I'd rather see them than the normal Titans. Hopefully I start enjoying the regular title again so I don't constantly go back to "What if these were the Titans?" day dreams. We'll find out as we look at the next issue in October and hopefully I can get on the trolley again.
Bits and Pieces:
This has been my favorite issue of Teen Titans since the relaunch and that makes me so sad. Here we are with a bunch of new characters that have no experience really working as a team and yet they seem more cohesive than the normal Titans have felt since before it was brought back. Just a wonderful team of heroes that I'd love to see more of who were brilliantly brought to life by Andy Smith's artwork. While I'm not sure about the correlation between this Heretic and the one from Batman and Robin's Futures End, I'm just going to go out and say that this is the Heretic the fans wanted to see in that issue. A really good time and if Klarion is half as much fun in his own title that he is here, then we have a really fun book to look forward to in October. Go check it out and get to know the Titans of tomorrow.
8.7/10
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