Raven #5 Review

Writer: Marv Wolfman / Artist: Diogenes Neves / DC Comics For its penultimate issue, DC’s great miniseries focused on our favorite gothic Teen Titan title Raven leaves a lot of questions still unanswered. Through the series Raven has grown a degree of closeness with her adoptive family in San Francisco, as they are truly good-hearted and caring people who took her in as one of their own, unaware of her superpowers and Teen Titan affiliation, knowing her by the name Rachel. Her newfound trust in family is an effective balance against her prior understanding of family – namely, Trigon, her father, whose evil essence is buried inside of her – and makes for a compelling inner conflict that’s the theme for this issue: does Raven have to embrace her evil in order to do good? As a mysterious orb claims the lives of 27,000 people in San Francisco and counting, Raven believes, in desperation, that the evil power within her can be enough to stop it. That, of course, would create a new problem, as her father’s essence is pure evil and would want to turn and destroy humanity itself. So what’s a girl to do?

We’re bound to find her answer in the series finale in Raven #6, but it’s surprising just how much is being saved until then – particularly the answer to what the orb is to begin with. To save the orb’s origin and Raven’s means to overcome it is to really hold your cards to the very last moment and make for a weaker issue here that definitely adds pressure to the finale to cover a lot…