Titans Hunt #5 Review and *SPOILERS*

Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It

Written By: Dan Abnett

Art By: Paulo Siqueira, Geraldo Borges, Hi-Fi, Carlos M. Mangual
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: February 17, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score AT The Bottom*

Memories are funny things...... I mean we remember events, places and people, but they're not always as accurate as we assume they are......... you know, since we remember them and all that and after reading this issue, I find that memories are even funnier than I thought.  In this series we have a group of heroes, who for the most part have no idea of one another, with maybe the exception that they might have heard about one of them somewhere down the line, but no real direct connection and yet, they all have a past that none of them can recall. We've spent four issues seeing hints dropped and coincidences thrown in that give these characters a past and now that some of them have come together, it's time to find out who is pulling the strings for this forced walk down memory's forgotten lane.  Things might begin to move faster though since in the last issue, we saw that the villain behind this: Mister Twister, has captured Herald and plans on using the musically inclined hero that memory and time forgot to call the rest of the Titans together.  Let's jump into this issue and see what goes down and if more of our team come together.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins like our previous one, where we get a little look into the past and for this we see Herald being captured by Mister Twister and being threatened into climbing a spiraling staircase on a dark tower that our villain.......... I guess just created....... with his mind....... maybe.  Well, it was just created in this flashback I can tell you that, as to how it was, I have no idea.  The past and the present seem to be converging though because we jump back to our current story and Herald is in the exact same place he was without the benefit of knowing his powers or that he's gone through this before and I don't know exactly what happened in the past when he was forced to climb the stairs by Mister Twister revealing a hulking form in the shadows, who since we see in the present day is Mammoth so I'm guessing it was Mammoth in the past, but here Mal just gets the shit beat out of him as a little persuasion to get his ass to the top of that tower.  

Over in Hatton Corners, Garth, Donna and Dick are certainly turning heads as they walk through this town in their superhero get ups, hoping to find someone with some information about why they seem to have a connection to this town and we find out that the continuity of this story is all fucked up.  We find out from a police officer that the town had a scare four years ago, concerning missing children and a beast in the woods, but he acts like it was a lifetime ago and the events of what happened are almost lost to legend because he was only fifteen years old......... but it all comes off very strange because of how four years doesn't seem like shit to me when it comes to a tragedy hitting someone's hometown.  So we find out that the local kids reached out to our current heroes, who apparently were rocking the Teen Titans name four years prior and that's what started the events of our story, but we still don't know why no one remembers our heroes as this team or why they themselves don't remember either.  The only reason we know about the kids reaching out to the Titans is because Dick has a brief recollection of the events as the officer tells him what went down in the town.  What I do know is that none of this makes sense anymore because we've seen flashbacks of what went down a bit in the last issue and it's impossible for Donna Troy or Don Hall to be apart of them because of Donna just being created recently and Don dying before the Justice League ever took on Darkseid.  So while I was initially enjoying this book because we were finally getting a Titans book I felt we deserved........ now it just doesn't make any sense to me and is riddled with problems due to DC just trying to force the original Titans into the timeline without a sufficient way to explain away the problems.  At least all of this gets these three heroes to go check out the woods in town, where these disappearances took place and they come across Mammoth.

In the end, we see that Dawn Granger has taken Hank Hall to see Lilith Clay because of his freak out in the previous issue and because apparently she found out that he used to see her.......... even though she's an addiction councilor and it's here where all hell breaks loose when Roy and Gnarrk show up.  I don't know what Hank and Roy's past entails and I'm not certain that they even know, but Hank flips the hell out and starts attacking Roy and right when it's about to get interesting we leave this section with Dawn Dove-ing up and Lilith fainting.  As our issue closes we move back to Mister Twister and Herald and we see our villain force Mal to sing into what looks like Prime Evil's Bone Troller from the Filmation Ghostbusters or for those who aren't privy to that information, a bone organ and it seems to be to break through a thin spot in the Universe........ but what it's actually doing is lost to me since this story just seems to do stuff now whether it makes sense or not.

That's it for this issue of Titans Hunt and I'm very disappointed by what went down in this issue because where I thought we'd get information explaining how these characters worked together and in a time frame that made sense, instead we just get "four years" thrown at us and that's it.  I mean, I really expected a little more since we're dealing with characters who have died and ones who were just recently created........ pretty much, I'm just going with Don Hall and Donna Troy, but that's a big deal to people who have been following DC since the New 52 reboot and just throwing those characters in all willy nilly because they're cool just doesn't work for me.  Now I don't know if this continuity cock up just completely rubbed me the wrong way right off the bat, but even the pacing of the story, which I previously loved for it's slow burn nature began getting to me because we really didn't learn anything of any use in this issue and our heroes are still just wandering around remembering random things that are supposed to drive our story forward, but all they do is screw up what was established before this series started.  I hope I'm completely wrong about this and it will be properly explained in a way that makes sense, but as of right now the explanations seem lazy and made me start resenting this title for it's complete disregard for what's come before.  So yeah, we've got that going on, but we've got some good news too.  The art in this book is really enjoyable and the colors during the Mister Twister scenes really setup the mood because on top of being dark, it also adds a monstrous quality to the scenes that really make this character appear to be the evil mastermind ghost monster that he's supposed to be.  

Bits and Pieces:

Even though we finally get some answers in this issue about what our time frame looks like for our heroes and when they were supposed to be the Titans that time forgot, the explanation just seems to be thrown out there without any real thought behind it and just ends up contradicting events of The New 52 and even stories from as little as last year.  On top of that, we've got our normal slow burn storytelling that is beginning to feel tiresome due to the series almost being over, but at least the art is spot on and makes these characters look great. 

5/10