Teen Titans hit their low
Alright, I realize this title has good points, and it has it's appeal, but honestly I'm reading too many flaws to keep me interested. Teen Titans #7 honestly loses a lot of what makes it enjoyable because of such sheer story telling problems and poor dialogue that the things that are good about it have become few and far between.
I guess a good as place as any to start with is the info dump at the beginning, which begins perhaps the most noticeable flaw of the issue: They decide to show, not tell. I'm reading through this book, and I notice that instead of showing us scenes, we have people describing to us whats going on in the typical silver age "describe everything that's happening to us as it happens" formula. In the second page, instead of seeing lasers being redirected by kid flash, we get a bland panel of it happening, and we only know kid flash did it because we're explicitly told. This is bad visual story telling, plain and simple. The biggest problem with this book, however, is the characterization. Scott Lobdell has shown this problem in Red Hood and the Outlaws, where he tends to focus on building one or two characters out of a group, which he continues to do here by only having Red Robin and Kid Flash have any real personalities, other than Wonder Girl shouting about how she has nothing to do with Wonder Woman (which she's done how many times now?).
There's just bad dialogue, but that's par for the course in this series. We're also introduced to someone named "Danny the street", but he's so vaguely defined that we only know that he can... make posters and doors appear or something. And he's a living street, but a boy in a cell? There's a difference between being ambiguous for the sake of storytelling and being insufferably vague, and they crossed it here. They even included a line about how little it makes sense, but they just wave that valid complaint off to move the story along. The villains are also forgettable, and are obviously meant to be throwaway characters, just like the guy from last issue I already forget, so the conflict is underwhelming when all we're presented with is the equivalent of canon-fodder. And finally, there's one point where Solstice gets mad at Red robin because, get this, he waited to have PROOF THAT SOMETHING WAS WRONG BEFORE ACTING. I know it's supposed to be an argument against bureaucracy and that while there waiting around trying to make a case people are dying, but he flat out says that he only had suspicions, and therefore didn't know for sure there was wrong doing. We're supposed to take this as him being cold-hearted (something he got from Batman) but it's such a lazy cliche that I just want Solstice to grow up an accept that you can't just attack someone if you don't know for sure if they did something wrong.
Art wise, I hate the bland coloring too much to really pay attention to anything else, but it doesn't seem to me to be anywhere above average. It's clearly not meant to be the focus of the series.
Really, This was just a bad issue. I have a feeling some of the things it's lacking would be made up for (or caused by) in the Super Boy tie-in issues, but even with that aside, it still feels like a lazy story, with short cuts in story-telling, characters and plot done to move it faster than it should have gone. As much as I admittedly disliked this series, there's still good found in previous installments, and I'm sure this is just a low point. But this was a bad book.
