Titans: Rebirth #1 Review

Writer: Dan Abnett / Artists: Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund / DC Comics The funny thing about naming your series after a race of ancient gods is that, regardless if you merely inherited the title or not, the word “Titans” is always going to make your audience anticipate something greater than humanly imaginable. So perhaps it’s not the creators’ fault if they’re at a disadvantage starting out and this comic feels a little less like witnessing the grandeur of divinity and more like, oh, I don’t know… Prometheus having his liver pecked out repeatedly by a vicious eagle.

Let’s start with the story. Having originally disappeared from post-Flashpoint reality, Wally West finds himself a ghost drifting in the present world seeking the only people whose bond is strong enough to remember him: his friends. Now, having not read Titans Hunt I know that I’m missing some key storyline but even for a first issue the narration does a lot of telling rather than showing, almost to its detriment. To me, if you’re going to describe each Titan in turn then it defeats the purpose of having flashbacks to fill in who each character is. I would have much preferred to see one solid flashback parallel with the present, so that we can see how each character’s relationships to each other has changed in addition to their relationship with Wally (after all, this isn’t Wally West: Rebirth). Getting a sense of the setting also doesn’t happen until about halfway through, and by the end of the comic I still hav…