Teen Titans #33
“Who Killed Trident?”
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| Pretty cover. I love how potential reader will know immediately who Trident is. |
This is a fun example of one of my
favorite kinds of comic stories: a done-in-one issue which
takes a semi-forgotten Z-list villain and gives the poor bastard a clever twist and some spotlight.
The story is simple: Trident, a man in
a gleefully color costume who uses a giant fork to poke people, has
turned up dead in The East River and the Titans need to find the
culprit. Aside from a straight-ahead mystery though, one thing still
nags each of the Titans: that previous week several of them had fought Trident at separate times
as he committed various robberies and had come away with a completely different impression of the
man that don't match up with each other.
Raven and Wonder Girl fought a man with
a cunning intelligence while Beast Boy and Cyborg claim Trident was a
monosyllabic moron. Finally Terra and Kid Flash relate the story of a
cruel Trident, and also a man who was clearly ill, sneezing
throughout the entire battle.
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| George Perez draws destruction so prettily. |
All the while, Robin is absent from the
story tailor-made for him (Robin loves mysteries!). Citing a growing gap between him and The
Batman, Dick Grayson has become more and more distant from his
teammates, most notably his girlfriend Starfire. Robin spends the
issue with DA Adrian Chase, hunting down evidence against the mobster
who was behind the kidnappings in a previous story, “Runaways.'
With Robin away, the team bands
together to solve this mystery, and luckily for them it's pretty
easy. A Trident with three different personalities or three different
men pretending to be Trident? The Titans deduce the latter, and with one of the three men pretending to be Trident dead, easily track down the two
remaining men: ex-scientists from super-crime cabal H.I.V.E
organization that habitually plagues the Titans. Seems the men were
trying to cash in on the notoriety of the 'Trident' persona and
murdered their partner when they found he was holding out on them and
skimming from the top. Short work is made of the duo and a rainy-day
mystery is solved.
The 'Done-in-one' is the kind of
episodic storytelling that comics do really well. The main story in
this issue is, while a decent read, unimportant to the overall legacy
and story of the Teen Titans, but the sub-plots and character arcs
are carried over from previous issues and will continue to play out
in the future. Starfire blames herself for Robin's isolationist
behavior, Changeling continues to form a bond with Terra, Kid Flash
is thinking about leaving the team, and Terra feels that she doesn't
belong as a member of the team because the others don't trust her
with secret identities yet.
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| Sharks or Bears or Gorillas: Comics love 'em. Also, Terra punched Changeling; she likes him. |
These aspects give the reader a better
impression of the characters as a whole: they aren't confined to the
story being read, their lives intersect and comprise many different
stories. I'll put on my grouch-old-man hat for a second and bemoan
the trend in comics to lean towards larger 6-12 issues story arcs
that don't overlap. I think this type of story-telling is better
suited to television or film, but doesn't use the episodic nature,
nor the history of most comic-book characters to their fullest
potential.
Ok, hat off. I'm sure we'll discuss
this more the further we get into this whole Post-Crisis exercise.
Final word: good issue, great cover, and so worth a pick-up from the
fifty-cent-bin.
One shots can be a lot of fun. Especially when they're in between those 6 to 12 issue story arcs your talking about because they can give the writer a chance to explore the kind of side-story emotions that are going on or do something fun and silly. Love those House of Mystery done-in-ones :)
ReplyDeleteThe Halloween Annuals were my favorite House of Mystery stories. I'm a fan of shorter main plots and extending sub-plots through out the course of the series.
Delete". . the trend in comics to lean towards larger 6-12 issues story arcs. . "
ReplyDeleteWell said. I realize that comics are a business the same as television, but that doesn't mean that stories have to be a seasonal or year-long affair. I think that the business imposes these 6 month or 12 month campaigns way too often. Some of my favorite stories were single issue stories, but more often a 3 part arc. I read Spider-man as a kid and there were plenty of these. Some even included multiple villians, huge plots, etc.
When you try to drag stories out too long, you end up with a lot of inessential filler-time (the antithesis of Miller-time), where you have panels full of dialogue that leads nowhere in the plot development and makes the story read slower and less interesting. I bet it drives alot of people away.
Filler-time is a good way to put a lot of those longer arcs. Not a lot happens and the story drags, plus everything being 6-12 issues drains a lot of the spontaneity from comics. Stories are all shoe-horned into the same format.
Delete