Teen Titans Academy #9 Review

Reunited And It Feels So Good

Written By: Tim Sheridan

Art By: Mike Norton, Hi-Fi, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: December 14, 2021

Let's head on back to school to check in on the possible future of the Teen Titans with the students that we want to love, but who at this point don't really feel all that fleshed out or even used a lot. Previously, we saw the start of what led to Future State and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse when Brat-Girl and Gorilla Gregg were tampering with the H-Dial but that wasn't the most important thing to happen in the last issue, no. We saw Roy Harper return home to Titans Tower and now it's time to see how this reunion plays out. Let's jump into this issue and check it out.

In this issue of Teen Titans Academy, we have the triumphant return of Roy Harper to Titans Tower, and while I do really enjoy the interactions between our heroes... the explanations, reactions, and even the love feel like they're kind of glossed over to get to a new story about Academy members being led away to join a new kind of school. While this development is kind of cool..... even though it leads us down a fucked up alley that kind of disappointed me, this story feels like something that should have taken place after we got an actual issue of the Titans we know and love being reunited and seeing where that avenue would take them. Fuck, we even have Tempest showing up in this issue and he feels more of a joke here than anyone actually caring and that just doesn't feel like the Titans to me.

See, I'm going to complain because I'm not getting all the feels that I was hoping for from this issue but the main plot that we get at least makes things interesting and might lead to our reveal about who Red X is. It's also kind of frustrating though that everyone and their mamas seem to know who X is and there's even a development at the end of this issue that's kind of shocking but I feel if we knew more about Red X and why he is what he is that we might have gotten more out of it. The shocking nature of this ending also just leads me to be mad that we wasted a potential threat for our Titans going forward to yet again just elevate Red X above everything else without really giving much of a reason why.

All in all, the art in this issue is great and we are spending some time dealing with more characters than we usually have time for but that also leaves us not having enough time to deal with the biggest element in my mind and that's Roy Harper's reveal that he's alive to his friends. This is a huge moment that gets sidelined to make an Enchantment Under The Sea homecoming joke, where we also reveal Tempest..... who we do nothing with. This book has such a strange feeling because while interesting things are going on, this series feels like it refuses to tell an actual story for any of those elements and just wants to rely on gags to fill its pages, while the characters that you're coming to this book for are ignored or written strangely. Hopefully, the cliffhanger to this issue leads to some interesting stuff but I'm not sure if that's possible at this point because the tone of the book is so weird.

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Bits and Pieces:

While you do get our Titans reunited with Roy Harper this issue, the reunion kind of comes off a bit lackluster and is quickly overshadowed by some weird Red X stuff that ultimately feels like we're continuing to elevate the character by making others look worse. There's a lot of padding this issue that it doesn't need but more than anything this series feels like it just doesn't want to tell a story and is simply here to string us along as much as it can.

6/10