Written by Eric Wallace
Illustrated by Cliff Richards“The Methuselah Imperative” begins, continuing into the next month’s issue of TITANS! It’s all been building toward this — a giant throwdown between Deathstroke and his Titans and The Justice League! And Roy Harper must face his old teammates at last and choose his future path, with either his old friends or his new partners in crime.
I heard a lot of negative things about Eric Wallace’s Titans, but I’m always willing to give a comic a chance. After getting a bit of a synopsis of the title so far, I jumped into the Titans annual, optimistic for what it might hold. Follow the cut to see how I felt about it when I was done.
I don’t understand. Here we have a team that where every member is at the others’ throats. They’re led by the most dangerous assassin in the DC Universe, and they’ve pissed off the JLA after killing one of their members. So, to fight them off, they want to attract the attention of one of their former allies, a former god of thunder (kinda). Sounds neat, right?
Why, then, is it so boring?
Well, to put it harshly, Eric Wallace just doesn’t quite seem to get how to write comics. It sounds mean, and I guess it is, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Writing a comic is more than just taking a story and adding pictures. You need to be conscious how to set up a page, how to properly align your text with the accompanying images. This annual is filled with those kind of mistakes. In particular, Wallace has a problem that most comic writers have grown out of: including decompressed dialogue in compressed panels. We’ve all seen those panels where someone is getting punched in the face and yet manages to recite the Declaration of Independence and learned from those writers’ mistakes, but it seems Wallace hasn’t. Wallace has more than one panel where there’s far too much dialogue for what is going on at hand. It’s not that you can only have so much dialogue per panel – just ask Bendis – it’s just that the actions going on hand in each panel put a sort of cap on how much dialogue can be included before the suspension of disbelief is broken and we “realize” that we are only looking at static images. Unfortunately, Wallace passes that cap quite a few times. Of course, it’s never as bad as my previous made up example, but it seems even worse because those pages are balanced out by pages with the opposite problem, such as dividing a page into four panels of a head, some dialogue and a caption of internal narrative. It doesn’t average out, though; rather, it just results in a story that flows as slowly and unevenly as molasses.
Am I giving Wallace too much of a hard time for something that is only a fraction of what people normally consider when reading a comic? I don’t think so. Even a comic with an otherwise great story could be unreadable with poor storytelling like this, and Wallace doesn’t exactly have that. Don’t get me wrong, his story isn’t exactly awful. Hell, it could even be pretty entertaining. The series has a fun premise, and the cast of characters is intriguing. But none of the matters, really. No matter how good your tale is, if you can’t tell it well than it isn’t worth reading. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
The art, by Cliff Richards, doesn’t help the title, either. Richards isn’t bad at all – in fact, some of his pages are really neat to look at – he just isn’t an artist that you’re going to walk away going “wow, I need more of that!” about. He’s the kind of guy that I wouldn’t mind doing fills on a book I’m already picking up, or even working with a writer I love, but he isn’t enough to make me want to buy a book with a writer that I definitely am not interested in. He has the misfortune of being in a position where he is neither so bad nor so good that my untrained eye can pick out the positives and negatives of his work, and for that I apologize to him – especially since that’s a pretty negative comment as is.
Continued belowThe Titans annual isn’t spectacularly bad. Sure, it’s a very, very far place from “good,” but it’s no Batman: Orphans or Batman: Oddysey (funny that the first two to come to mind were Batman comics, but I digress). Still, though, I think that’s an even worse fate. While comics like Oddysey are losing followers simply because they’re bad, they also manage to pull in some purchasers out of the sheer buzz of “oh my god, you have to see how bad this is.” Wallace’s run on the book that DC should have canceled long ago doesn’t deserve that kind of mockery, but sadly that just means it will be quickly forgotten once the reboot comes around.
Final Total: 2.5 – Pass
By the way, Mr. Wallace, World War III has happened in the DCU. Twice, actually. While I get what you’re trying to get across with Isis’s threat, it doesn’t make much sense in context. None of my rating is dependent on that, but you know there are some continuity addicts out there who would hold it against you.
