What is Geoff Johns thinking? I don’t mean this in a “This is a travesty!” way (like I would with certain other creators who shall remain nameless). I’m genuinely curious as to what he’s got in mind with the “Titans Tomorrow” story that continued this week in Teen Titans 18.
For those of you not following the series, the current Titans get sidetracked during time travel and meet future versions of themselves who are very dark. (Even Raven added “Dark” to her name, which struck me as hilarious, because she wasn’t exactly a sunbeam before.) They kill villains and torture captives and posture.
As Batman (who was once Robin) says, “Things got so dark. The world got so dark.” (Poetry… sniff.) None of the dark Titans articulate any specific turning point where things went dark, though Batman throws in a teasing reference to “the crisis.” This could be a nod to that current mini-series where everything is revealed to be much darker than readers thought, or it could be a catch-all tease to an as-yet-unwritten dark crossover blockbuster. (Maybe things will be clarified in next issue’s conclusion.)
The implication of the arc seems to be “Dark Is Bad,” which is an odd message for a DC title at this point in time. And, since Johns has pretty much been the Identity Crisis crossover bandwagon, and since his own titles take a healthy pleasure in dark material (teens getting kneecapped, teens getting brainwashed by their creepy fathers, then mutilating themselves, women miscarrying twins, heroes staging bloody coups, heroes getting disemboweled, heroes getting parts of their faces bitten off, heroes forced to marry their “brothers”, heroes committing suicide, issue-long autopsies, coke-snorting rogues), he doesn’t have a tremendous amount of credibility as the messenger.
I’ve wondered before if Johns isn’t trying to have it both ways… riding on the nouveau-grim gravy train while saying in interviews how readers need optimistic comics like Rebirth. Now he serves up this meta-rich meditation on heroes gone dark. I should note that I’m not a big fan of “The future is horrible!” stories. Much as I liked “Days of Future Past” at the time, its influence left me with a distinct aversion to the sub-genre.
I think you lose something when you take heroic figures and make them too cognizant of a specific, crappy future that they must prevent. (It didn’t do the X-Men any favors.) It sounds gooey, but I’d rather see them act out of more open-ended, altruistic motives than in a dogged attempt to avoid a specific, sucky outcome. And that might not be the intent or consequence of “Titans Tomorrow” at all, but the possibility makes me uneasy. There’s enough grim material in the title as it is without an underlying sense of dread and futility.
I did get a good laugh out of the cover, for entirely personal reasons. Looking at Robin-Batman sitting on Batman-Batman’s headstone with “Beloved Husband” carved in it, I immediately thought, “Oh, how sweet. In the DC Universe of the future, gay marriage is legal, and Tim and Bruce made honest men out of each other.” I don’t think many people shared that reaction with me, but it made me smile. Because I’m an adolescent, when you get right down to it.