Comics Picks of the Week 11.09.2013

DC’s Villain’s Month went ahead full-steam last week with a ton of new releases. And on the other side of things with Marvel, their X-Men: Battle of the Atom event also continued apace with the release of X-Men #5. My reading is still all primarily DC, thanks to Villain’s Month because there are just so many comics to read. I’m attempting to change things around but its going to be slow. Just a comic or two here obviously doesn’t work and I intend to grab some graphic novels at the least.

We shall see what happens when it happens.

In the meantime, here’s another edition of this new feature. Full reading list, as always, is available here and all my comics reviews are available here.

Teen Titans #23.1 by Marv Wolfman (Comics Review)

Teen Titans is a book that I’ve been struggling with ever since I picked the first issue just about a year ago. The writing hasn’t been all that great and the art has been decent but inconsistent at best. I can somewhat tolerate bad art in a comic, as long as the story makes up for it, which hasn’t been the case at all with this series. Scott Lobdell’s writing just meanders on and I really, really don’t understand why he needs to tie together all the books he’s working on. The first year of the series was all crossovers, first with Superboy and then with Ravagers, and all this meant that the writing was really fractured and the series was struggling to stand on its own. Things haven’t improved in the second year, even though the Death of the Family crossover issues were slightly better. Post that event, the writing just went downhill and I finally gave up after #19. I just called quits after that.

Then I heard about Villain’s Month and that Marv Wolfman was going to be writing the first tie-in issue, featuring Trigon, a villain who was being setup as the big bag for Lobdell’s current arc in the series. This excited me because finally someone other than Lobdell was going to be working on Teen Titans and because this gave me a chance to get back to the series. I want to like this series but Lobdell’s writing just turned me off big time. Thankfully, Wolfman was there to save the day, at least for this issue.