Teen Titans #47 (FINAL ISSUE!): The Kids Are Alright

It sucks that this volume of Teen Titans is ending.

But I get it.

Every few years, DC gets it into their head that the Teen Titans need fresh faces, a continuation of the team’s legacy. So in come the new faces to varying degrees of love or disdain from fans; the level of backlash inevitably results in a more traditional (i.e. Wolfman/Perez era) iteration of the team being heralded as a return to greatness. Then after awhile that team fades out in favor of new faces and the cycle begins anew. This has been going on almost as long as New Teen Titans reset the bar for what the team was, and created the template for all versions of the team to follow.

So goes this latest version of the team, then. It’s truly been fun while it lasted. Originally envisioned by writer Adam Glass before passing the baton to Robbie Thompson, this version of the Titans was a product of Damian Wayne’s paranoid approach to crimefighting and their slow realization that their leader was wrong more often than not. It also brought three brand-new faces to the table: Djinn, Crush, and Roundhouse, welcome and fun additions to DC’s ever-expanding pantheon of heroes. Djinn is currently off-roster (I believe she would have returned had the title not gotten the axe); Roundhouse and Crush are still on board and have grown into their roles as heroes despite a litany of mistakes. Thompson has gone out of his way to prove that these kids aren’t just Titans in name only. They’re worthy of the mantle, especially going against Damian’s plans and standing up for what’s right. (The Damian situation is a quandary for some future comic and writer to sort out; that kid has a lot of baggage to work through.)

So despite the bitterness this title being cancels entails, it ends on a hopeful note that we haven’t seen the last of these kids, not by a long shot. Red Arrow and Kid Flash have been around for awhile now, there’s no real danger of them being forgotten. But being the new kids on the block, it’s easy to envision a situation where Djinn, Crush, and Roundhouse are written out of future Titans books and left in continuity purgatory. Hope springs eternal, though, and the final page of the issue hints that DC has some pretty big plans for the Titans post-Future State. We can only hope.

As for this issue’s plot, the defeat of Joystick and the freeing of Kid Flash and Red Arrow from his control is almost an afterthought, but it does serve to reinforce the themes surrounding these kids’ innate heroism. Artists Javi Fernandez and Marcelo Maolo (on the team since the beginning of this era despite some changes in pencillers; huge shout-out for creating artistic consistency despite that!) do a fine job, pinch-hitting for this final issue in a way that’s at once singular yet evocative of the pencillers that have come before. Fernandez does an exceptionally keen job after the action of capturing the sense of “Where do we go from here?” permeating the entire issue. He also excels at making sure we know these kids are, in fact, kids. He doesn’t draw them like little adults. And there’s a moment that’s been building for awhile between Kid Flash and Red Arrow that’s staged pretty much to perfection. Who knows if it will be reflected in future comics featuring this duo, but it’s a heckuva nice payoff nonetheless. As has been this series as a whole.