Doing The Big Hero Thing, At Last: Reviewing ‘Titans’ #15

One of their own is threatening to end the world. Time for the Titans to step up their hero game.

Everything comes to a head in Titans #15, including the “Dark-Winged Queen” story arc and this creative team’s time on the book. A long road has led to here as Tom Taylor, Lucas Meyer, Adriano Lucas, and Wes Abbott bring down the curtain.

What a long, winding, sometimes exciting, but often boring and messy road this has been.

At the end of the day, the Taylor led era of Titans has been quite a mixed bag. Billed as the Titans’ time to be the premiere heroes of the DC Universe, it’s mostly been a very insular piece that has them dealing with their own villains, issues, and mistakes more than anything else. Hell, Nightwing rising up to lead the way with his team has hit harder in just the four issues of Absolute Power than it has here.

Clearly Taylor loves these characters. Many moons ago I told a friend that had this just been billed as a regular Titans book rather than a Justice League replacement, it would have been fine. Nothing spectacular, but a very fine Titans book that gets the characters. As a big hero book, well, it was lacking. Here in the final issue, the Titans are the world savers but only because (conveniently) all other heroes are knocked out (mostly off panel). Doesn’t help that the threat the world faced is partially from their own house (with some meddling from Amanda Waller to boot).

Again, take out those other heroes and the premise and this finale is solid. Even if it took way too long to reach this point, rendering some of the resolution a bit forced. Raven coming to terms with herself is fine, as is her taking down her dad, and the Titans literally coming together to beat that aforementioned dad.

It all looks truly gorgeous and epic because Meyer just has a skill that lends itself greatly to the action, character focus, and depth that works for superhero books of certain types. We need to feel the Titans being all glamorous and powerful, which Meyer delivers. Even the story moments that I didn’t buy into as much looked stellar and carried a lot of weight on the page.

Smart panel choices that give the action even more of a tangible flowing feeling, letting the characters breathe and giving the world a sense of scale. Especially since multiple characters were literally giants in the story.

I’m hoping to see Meyer on another book sooner rather than later, because I’m in love with this art style.

As always, Lucas brings the top tier color palette stylings into play. Always managing to give every space or moment their own unique feeling, even when the colors are relatively the same throughout. His work blending more muted somewhat realistic or familiar colors with the more vibrant fantastical ones. Which gives the world even more depth than the pencils were already providing.

I actually dig how the costumes and other out there bits are just the right bit of colorful here. Nothing so vibrant it feels out of place, even though they rightfully should. Instead, they are akin to something we might see pretty regularly with their color schemes, lending to the idea that in these worlds heroes are common place.

Pairing Abbott with Taylor for multiple books keeps paying off. Taylor can be a bit verbose with the things written at times, which is neither good nor bad inherently, and Abbott finds a way to make it flow. Giving enough space for the words to be read without overwhelming and letting flashes of character and personality bleed through. Creating uniquely familiar voices that have persisted across the fifteen issues.

Next month the series is brought into the DC All-In banner as the Justice League also returns to retake their major hero crown. What that means for these characters, we have yet to see. While it was nice to, on paper, have the Titans as the premiere heroes, it would have been nice if that had actually played out across the line.

Perhaps one day, they’ll have another chance. One can hope.

Titans #15 is now available from DC Comics.