Review: Teen Titans Vol. 2- Rogue Targets

Quick Summary

Pros: The volume starts out decently.

Cons: The story is unappealing and jumps around far too often. The characters are written poorly and are also wildly inconsistent. There are significant gaps in logic throughout the collection, making it even harder to understand. The artwork is jarring.

Overall: This is not a good book. It starts with a lackluster narrative, filled with shifting motivations and unappealing premises, and somehow manages to become even more chaotic. In this chaos, readers can find a leaps in logic, conflicting character traits, and portions of the story that simply don’t make any sense. All of this makes for a bad reading experience, especially for those who truly enjoy these characters. Overall, there is very little reason for anyone to pick up this book.

Story

After a rough opening volume, the Teen Titans series gets worse than it has ever been. Rogue Targets is a downright awful book filled with problems from both the story and the characters. Neither element is compelling, giving readers few reasons to pick up the book in the first place. Plus, the entire volume is filled with so many gaps in logic and internal inconsistencies that it is hard to read, let alone enjoy. This is simply not an entertaining collection and is likely to frustrate fans of these characters more than anything else.

(spoilers start here)

Right from the start, the story in Rogue Targets begins to show signs of trouble. It focuses on the Teen Titans personal lives and how they are adapting to fame. However, all of this is quickly dropped, along with any interesting plotlines and character development, when Superboy enters the picture. The rest of the book follows the Teen Titans through a series of misadventures that all could be solved with a simple conversation. Almost nothing about the story is actually compelling and most of it just feels like an excuse to have the heroes randomly fight one another.

However, the biggest tragedy here is how terribly the characters are portrayed. In previous Teen Titans volumes, no matter how bad the story got, readers could take solace in the fact that the characters themselves were charming and endearing. In this volume, the characters are annoying instead. Petty decisions and random mood swings dominate the personalities seen here. None of the characters are worthwhile on their own and all of them function even worse as a group.

It also doesn’t help that the characters are all written so inconsistently. For example, Wonder Girl goes from hating Kon when she thinks he might have killed people, to feeling sympathy for him when she discovers that he really did. Meanwhile, Kid Flash hates Red Robin (but is inexplicably ok with Wonder Girl) for leaving him in the future despite begging to be left there, a contradiction that is briefly touched on but never explained. These are just two of many inconsistencies that can be found throughout this work, making it even harder to appreciate these characters at all.

Along with these inconsistencies are a number of baffling gaps in logic. Some of these gaps are small and do not affect much; such as the fact that the Indigo Lantern’s powers and personality are completely different than they should be or that the Titans believe Manchester Black knows critical information about Superboy, despite never having dealt with him before. However, other gaps are larger and make the story significantly harder to read; such as why Superboy is even back in the present at all or how people knew about Despero if he was one of Dr. Psycho’s illusions the whole time. On their own, these problems would significantly hamper a collection, here they just make an already bad book even worse.

(spoilers end here)

Art

The artwork in Rogue Targets suffers from exactly the same problem as its predecessor, solid artwork in chapters drawn by Kenneth Rocafort but weirdly inconsistent artwork everywhere else. Rocafort’s chapters look great and are structured in the wonderfully creative style that makes his work so unique. However, Rocafort’s work only comprises a portion of the collection, the rest is done by a variety of different artists with a variety of significantly different styles. Watching the visuals undergo a major shift every chapter is a jarring experience, especially in a book that is already pretty chaotic. This does not do the collection any favors and ends up overshadowing any of the book’s visual positives.

Continuity

Teen Titans Vol. 2: Rogue Targets continues the story started in Teen Titans Vol. 1: Blinded by the Light (Review).

The story here continues in Teen Titans Vol. 3: The Sum of Its Parts (Review).

This volume also makes references to other comic books, detailed below:

• Elements from the Teen Titan’s team history are mentioned here.
  • Superboy fought the team back in Teen Titans Vol. 1: It’s Our Right to Fight (Review).
  • Superboy and Kid Flash stayed in the future during the events of Teen Titans Vol. 5: The Trial of Kid Flash (Review).