Titans #15 Review and *SPOILERS*

Picking Up The Pace

Written By: Dan Abnett

Art By: Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund, Andrew Dalhouse, Josh Reed

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: September 13, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Oh man, what are our Titans going to do now that we've seen that Dick Grayson was the one working for HIVE behind their backs?  Not only that, but will they ever find Bumblebee's memories with Nightwing working against them the whole time?  Hopefully, with Herald and Gnarrk going off on their own to hunt for the memories yields some results because it doesn't look like they're going to get much help from the rest of the team anytime soon.  Let's jump into this issue and see what goes down and if the team gets wise of Dick's betrayal.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Alright, all that hokey crap that I was throwing at the opening paragraph...... Yeah, that was bull because it seems that while Arsenal starts this issue with this bow drawn right at Nightwing for what he just overheard our former Robin saying to HIVE, it turns out that after the rest of the team is alerted that Dick has a perfectly reasonable explanation for what's been going on.  It seems that when Wally and Dick were taken captive by the Fearsome Five at Meta-Solutions that Gizmo implanted him with a nanite spyware that allowed HIVE to see everything through him, but at the end of the last issue, after Dick ran the tests to see who the traitor was, he found out that it was him and used that connection to trace it back to the source and find out where Bumblebee's memories were being held.  So yeah, Dick's not a traitor and with that, everyone's cards are out on the table.  Tempest tells everyone that he's in love with Omen, which everyone knows and then Omen tells everyone about the prophecy that Psimon told her about the end of the world coming, that she thinks she may cause.  During this time, Wally's trying to tell everyone that he plans on leaving the team after they find Bumblebee's memories, but everyone keeps interrupting him so our Titans Flash never gets a chance to tell anyone that he's two weeks from retirement........... which is never a good thing. 

So yeah, another thing that interrupts Wally is that HIVE calls Titans Tower back because apparently they need their help because they're under attack, which coincides with Herald and Gnarrk finding out where Karen's memories were being held before they were zapped away, leaving only feathers behind and Psimon too being zapped away from his cell....... again, only leaving feathers behind and when our Titans finally reach the HIVE base that reached out to them, they find out that the problem was actually Herald, Gnarrk and Psimon being mind controlled and ripping everyone apart. 

In the end, our Titans fight their mind controlled friends, but Herald gets the upper hand on Nightwing and actually impales him.  This causes Wally to use his powers more than he should (because of his new pacemaker) and when he reaches his friend, time not only stops, but starts running backwards, making it so Dick's wound never happened.  Yay!  Nightwing's alive, but it seems that the power use was a little too much for Wally's heart and we leave this issue with the possessed Herald, Gnarrk and Psimon coming after Dick, while he holds his best friend's lifeless body in his arms.

That's it for this issue of Titans and while I loved the fact that it seems like we're continuing our story from Titans Hunt, with the feathers indicating Mister Twister and the possible release of his master Antithesis, the rest of the story kind of came off flat at points because we have Lilith reiterating the prophecy, which we've seen for the last two issues now and the whole Nightwing is a traitor angle just kind of gets thrown out the window right away in this issue and that's a little disappointing for the buildup we had.  Yeah, I think that Wally West dying is a hell of a cliffhanger, but since he's kind of like the poster boy for Rebirth, it doesn't have the gravity that it should because you can't expect the character to stay dead.  As for the art.......... well, this is one of my favorite art teams at DC right now, but even with that, the panel layouts were a bit cramped in this issue, making it so that some of the action was lost, but besides for that, everything looked as good as it always does.  All in all, I love where this story is going, but aspects to this issue just didn't grab me at all....... Still excited though.

Bits and Pieces:

While there are certainly some big moments in this issue and things that allude to even bigger things to come from this series, the beginning of this issue just kind of fell flat for its reiterating of concepts we've been talking about for the past two issues and for throwing a twist that was interesting right out of the window.  Besides that though and some cramped panel layouts, the rest of this book looks like it's becoming the series that I always thought it would and I can't wait to read more.

7/10