Titans #23 – Review

By: Eddie Berganza (writer), Scott Clark and Adrian Syaf (pencillers), Dave Beatty and Vicente Cifuentes (inkers)

What’s Good: This is the first time I’ve seen Eddie Berganza in the writer’s chair. He’s been editing Blackest Night, Cry for Justice, Wednesday Comics, and others up to now, but I think he did a fine job as a writer. I don’t know if this is a new direction for him or if he’s just pinch-hitting while they find a replacement for the excellent J.T. Krul who has taken over as writer of Green Arrow. Berganza takes us through the perspectives of three characters (Dick Grayson (now Batman), Wally West (now the third Flash) and Donna Troy) as they reminisce about their early adventures in the 1960 and how Speedy (now maimed and fighting for his life under medical care) touched their lives. Berganza has skillfully made all the narrators unreliable, because although they remember the same events, their individual regrets and bitterness tinge the narrative. It’s very hard to write a character that is fooling themselves or not seeing the big picture and Berganza did a good job. There’s a lot more bitterness and regret in the Titans’ history than I knew about. But, all this would be nothing if Berganza couldn’t tie this to the present and the struggles of now. Berganza does this by showing Dick, Wally and Donna struggling in their new roles (especially Dick) as some of the heavy-hitters in the DCU. Lastly, I really like how Berganza made Speedy/Red Arrow both a sympathetic and unsympathetic by showing his errors and his core humanity as a father, with the added tension that he still doesn’t know his daughter is dead. All in all, Berganza has shown that he is every bit the character writer that Krul is.

Clark, Syaf, Beatty and Cifuentes did some fine work too on the art chores. They separated the past from the present with the shadows and tones of the inking. The scenes set in the past had almost no inking on the characters, even in the dark, which made the scenes effectively moody and even a bit ghostly, which underscored the unreliability of some of the narrators.