Titans #5 Review and *SPOILERS*

Playing Catch Up

Written By: Dan Abnett
Art By: Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund, Andrew Dalhouse, Carlos M. Mangual
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: November 23, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Titans has been a book that has just been pushing along without really feeling like it's doing much.  Yeah, we have Wally West in it and with his involvement in the Rebirth Special, it would make you think that this series is pretty damn important.  Sadly, these monthly issues, while enjoyable enough, just haven't lived up to the hype.......... and the hype is probably something that I created myself.  I mean, we have the fastest man alive and it feels like we're standing still here.  Hopefully that all changes though because when we last left our Titan heroes, Abra Kadabra had created a Silver Age style, heroes choice death trap, where Wally would be forced to push himself to the extremes in order to save his friends from their magical doppelgangers.  Even if Wally pushes it though, Abra made it seem like he still wouldn't be fast enough so let's jump into this issue and see if he's right.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

We start this issue off with Wally running off and hoping that he can push himself faster than he's ever run before because his friends are on opposite ends of the country and on the verge of death from Abra Kadabra's magical doppelgangers........... and really that's about it.  I'm not kidding.  The whole issue is Wally running to each location and saving his friends at the last second, while he narrates everything that we've already seen from this series.  

While this comes off a bit frustrating, I do have to say that originally it worked really well to build up a tension because Wally has six seconds to make it through seven thousand miles, but it all falls apart for me when Abra Kadabra magics his way into a sort of spectral form that can keep up with Wally so that he can continue taunting him while he runs.  The reason this feels so off is because Abra won't shut the hell up and with speech being a part of this, it takes away from the timeline that Wally has because it would take way longer than six seconds for Abra to get all his taunting out, but I guess if you had to you can go with it being somehow magically done, it just through me off is all.

In the end, Wally saves his friends and makes it to Linda before she is dumped in a fire pit, but because he pushed himself so hard, Wally finds himself being sucked back into the Speed Force and as we close this issue out........ Well, it's kind of a cool cliffhanger for visuals alone because I really don't expect Wally West to be gone from this book.

That's it for this issue of Titans and I don't know if it's because I expect a lot from this book because of the importance I put upon it, but I was really disappointed with this issue because while it looked great, the whole story was just Wally running to save his friends and making sure that everyone is caught up with what's been going on in the last four issues and the Rebirth issue.  The tension that was barely there because I never expected any of our heroes to die was completely taken away by Kadabra's mocking during Wally's run because it didn't make any sense to me, what with the time it takes to say all the things he did and even the cliffhanger feels like we're just dealing with more of the same because Wally is just thrown back into the Speed Force, where you know he's just going to come back again.  While the story was uninspiring, the art on the other hand was fantastic.  The art team of Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund and Andrew Dalhouse is one of the best that DC has and even if an issue comes off boring or slow, I can always count on it looking great and that's one solace I can take away from this issue.

Bits and Pieces:

This issue does little else than to catch new readers up on what's going on and proving that Wally is the fastest man alive......... That's about it.  The best thing about this issue is the fantastic art team that give us their all every month and make this book look great.  Besides that though, there's nothing really new here.

5.8/10