Titans #11 - DC Comics

TITANS No. 11, July 2024

Despite consisting of the ongoing series’ usual twenty-page long plot and featuring a rather savage battle between the comic’s titular characters and a formidably fearsome, cybernetic killing machine, some readers may well feel that this particular issue of “Titans” is a surprisingly quick read. In fact, Tom Taylor’s storytelling is arguably so engrossing that many a bibliophile will just start coming to grips with Dick Grayson matter-of-factly partitioning a part of his mind during the dead of night, before the book suddenly ends with a mortally-wounded Raven returning to Hell so as to instantaneously heal her horrific injuries.

Such an enjoyably absorbing experience is debatably down to this publication’s Australian author quite neatly breaking his tale into three separate sequences, which subsequently then roll into one another. The first of these, focusing upon poor hapless Vanessa’s desperate desire to become a super-heroine, genuinely pulls at the heartstrings, as the young woman disappointingly discovers that after successfully enduring “twisted” Doctor Morrow’s experimental post-human project, her heart simply cannot take the strain of the body’s modifications and catastrophically just stops; “Save the brain.”

This rather sympathetic character then returns, albeit in a nightmarish heavily up-gunned guise, for the comic’s pulse-pounding finale, following Nightwing’s aforementioned summons to mysteriously enter the Safe Room at Titan’s Tower and protect his thoughts from the duplicitous daughter of Trigon. Now equipped with a number of mechanically enhanced powers and vicious-looking bladed attachments, “Vanadia” attempts to eradicate her former role models in the most savage manner possible, after being reprogrammed on Amanda Waller’s instructions to believe Marv Wolfman’s co-creations are actually evil doppelgangers.

Proficiently pencilling all these sense-shattering shenanigans is Brazilian freelancer Lucas Meyer, whose best moment in this entire book arguably comes when he draws a pair of Grayson-shaped layouts which permit the inquisitive audience to quite literally peer inside the former Robin’s head and see his thoughts concerning Raven. The impressively bulked up “ultimate weapon capable of taking down all the Titans” is also reasonably well-designed, with Vanessa’s orange-skinned form appearing to contain elements taken from a number of the “teen” crime-fighters which served as her motivation to agree to Morrow’s terrifying trials at S.T.A.R. Laboratories in the first place.

The regular cover art of "TITANS" #11 by Chris Samnee & Matheus Lopes