Convergence: The Titans #1 (2015) Review

We All Have Our Reasons

Written By: Fabian Nicieza
Art By: Ron Wagner, Jose Marzan Jr., Chris Sotomayor
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: April 8, 2015

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Let's all get back to the Pre-Flashpoint Dome and see what our heroes are up to........ This time around it seems that our Titan heroes are just Donna Troy, Starfire, and Roy Harper but that's at least here....... It all goes back to where the hell is everyone else during this opening of the Dome if it's the same Pre-Flashpoint Dome that we keep dealing with this week in Convergence comics......... Okay, I guess that doesn't matter.  We're here to see some Titans and some Titans are what we see, so let's check out this issue and see how this trio of former sidekicks are dealing with life a year after the Dome.

Explain It!:

Our Titans story begins with us getting a little history about our boy: Roy Harper, from when he was Speedy, to a drug addict, a recovering drug addict, to Arsenal, to a single father, to an amputee, to a cybernetic armed man......... to finally, him losing his daughter Lian.  That's a hell of a messed up life for our former sidekick and he would have let it bring him completely down if it hadn't been for the Dome going over Gotham.  At first things got really bad but Roy tells us that once the people of the city realized that they needed each other to survive........... Gotham actually became a decent place to live.  Crime went down and Roy spends his time working with kids and displaced families thanks to a grant from the Wayne Foundation........... So really, the Dome was a good thing for Roy and a lot of other people......... hell, it was a good thing for Gotham in general.  It's just too bad that the Dome has to go down.

This issue actually makes me wonder about certain things because as most of us know, once the Dome went up, it stopped superpowers from working and here we find out that it also stopped Roy's cybernetic arm from working too.......... What I'm getting at is, it has to suck to be Cyborg in a Dome........ It's just too bad that we don't get to see that here.  So the Dome goes down and Roy calls Starfire and Donna Troy to go patrol now that they are all powered up again and he goes into one of his hubs that he's set up just in case he ever needed to keep an eye on Gotham again........... and he tells himself that he set it up to make his daughter's loss worth something.  It's really cool because throughout this issue, Roy keeps telling himself what he's done and what he's doing is for Lian, but we get the impression that he doesn't believe the lies he's telling himself.

In the end, Starfire and Donna Troy end up going up against The Extremists (not the same members in Batman and Robin) once Telos lets them know about his Battle Royal and Arsenal......... arms up and joins the fight with his friends.  This issue doesn't end like a lot of the others this week, instead of setting up a fight for the next issue, it goes one step further by having The Extremist, Dreamslayer pose a choice to Arsenal.  If Arsenal attacks his friends Donna and Kori, Dreamslayer will pluck Roy's daughter from a time before she died and reunite him with her.......... or he doesn't.......Oh Shit!  Our issue ends with Roy standing between our two heroines and his arm cannon firing to his sides...... I can't wait to see what happens next issue.

That's it for this issue of Convergence: The Titans and right now this is one of my favorite issues that Convergence has to offer this first week.  Getting inside the trauma filled head of Roy Harper and seeing how he deals with not only his past but with his current Domed life was a really excellent story and it's told with really great art and colors that left me happy the entire way through.  Definitely, one to pick up if you don't mind the high price because even though this is called "The Titans", it is strictly a Roy Harper story and I love the personal approach that the writer took to tell it.

Bits and Pieces:

I looooovvvveeee this issue.  I didn't realize until I read this how much I really missed this iteration of Roy Harper: Arsenal and Fabian Nicieza do a hell of a job in differentiating the way this story is told from what we're getting in the majority of the Convergence titles this week.  With great art and a great story, this is a Convergence title that I think everyone should read.

9/10