Titans Hunt #4 Review and *SPOILERS*

Masks On

Written By: Dan Abnett
Art By: Stephen Segovia, Art Thibert, Hi-Fi, Carlos M. Mangual
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: January 20, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

I don't know if it was just me, but the last issue of Titans Hunt really grabbed me by the boo-boo and made me realize that I should really start getting hyped for this "Titans That Never Were" story.  Jim pish poshed my excitement by saying that it was just more of the same, but the cliffhanger showing us that a shriek went out that all the Titans of old heard......... which didn't include the Dawn Granger: Dove, upped the ante for me and I can't wait to see where the rest of this story goes.  So yeah, Mister Twister is out and about and is somehow making the characters that encompassed the Titans of old remember lives that they never led, while drawing them together. Like Grayson, Donna Troy and Garth getting over their little spat and Cave Boy breaking Roy Harper out of jail........ Man, I'm excited!  Let's jump into this issue and see if the excitement holds.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our story begins in such an awesome spot from where we left off in last issue because we see our heroes joined together, but the cool part is that they are all younger and that means Dick Grayson rocking the Robin costume.  Yeah, we're seeing a lot of that lately with Batman and Robin Eternal, but I just love that costume and I just love seeing Dick........ oh yeah, it's going to be one of those reviews.  Anyway, this opener is almost like a weird kind of memory rekindled in our heroes because they hear the same scream that they heard during last issue's cliffhanger and in this flashback we find out that Mal was taken away by something and that the group has split off a bit against Robin's orders because Dove has gone off on.......... his/her own to find Mal.  I say his/her because as we saw in the previous issue, Dawn Granger didn't hear the scream and in this flashback, Hank kind of comes off like it was his brother who went after Mal........... So yeah, some weird, interesting stuff going on and I kind of love how Dan Abnett's playing the mystery angle by giving us something which we're not even sure of what it is we got.  Anyway, we see some cool team dynamics, like Roy and Donna being an item, Dick trying his damnedest to be the leader that holds this team together........ and really just a feeling of love for one another that we haven't got from a Teen Titans book in a long ass time.  

The flashback is interrupted when the team gets a second shriek that burrows through their brains and we get back to our present day and our present situations, like Dick, Donna and Garth trying to figure out what the hell all of this means and wondering who's behind it.......... and I can't say for certain if this is the case or not, but Dick seems to believe that their minds were wiped instead of this whole alternate timeline bleeding through........ but really, who would immediately think alternate timeline bleeding through?  So yeah, we've got those three, Roy and Cave Boy ducking the cops and Cave Boy coming off like he knows a lot more than everyone else about his past with these characters, but eventually we get to what happened to Mal Duncan at the end of last issue.  It seems that his composer friend believed that Mal was having a seizure and called an ambulance.  The only problem is, the ambulance never arrived at the hospital.  Mal awakes in the woods and is confronted by a ghostly Mister Twister, who eventually gets him to let out another of those shrieks and while it isn't much, this actually gives me the one thing that I desperately wanted from this series issue to issue and that's making the Herald section of these books interesting and this dark atmosphere, with the appearance of Mister Twister definitely gave me what I wanted.

In the end, we meet up with Hawk and Dove doing their hero thing and see that they're working on the Harvester case that Dick was working on in the beginning of this series and after Hawk's finished busting in heads, we see that the scream that all the Titans heard is really messing with him and he begins drawing a "T" in blood on a wall because of the thoughts the scream provokes.  As our issue closes though, we head on back to Dick, Donna and Garth and after the three have sussed out that whoever is playing off this connection that they seem to have, the person will expect them to look the way at least they think of themselves in these so called memories and Dick ends this issue with making all the Nightwing fans get wet/get hard or whatever when he remembers that he for some reason packed his Nightwing garb while he was in the Batcave and he puts that shit on to give us an excellent cliffhanger.

That's it for this issue of Titans Hunt and while I can see how some people might think that the series has become boring do to it's slow burn nature, I actually find myself more hyped about it than ever and to me it's because of this incredible slow burn, where Dan Abnett only lets a sliver of info out that keeps me hanging on each month.  It's a hell of a mystery right now and I need to get to the bottom of it.  Again, this style of storytelling isn't for everyone, but if you dig these characters and can enjoy a drawn out mystery then I think you'll be like me and will be able to get behind this very odd title.  The art, like every other issue is fantastic and originally before I wrapped my head around what kind of story this was, the art was my main draw to the book because every character looks fantastic and the colors just add so much to the eyegasm this series induces.  I don't know where we're going exactly in this series, but damn am I on board for the ride.

Bits and Pieces:

While this story moves slow and some might think that we're barely any further than where we started, this issue like last just brings the intrigue in me out in the open and I find myself glued to the page as we get little snippets of information rationed out to us a bit at a time.  Our Titans characters are just great in this series and the art that portrays them is just fantastic.  This is just a really fun story that if you have patience to see it all through, it just might be something spectacular.  

8.5/10