DC fans the company has for some reason started this trend of turning it's characters into teenagers for a new I guess line of graphic novels. Well the latest one in that line has come a few days ago and just due to my busy schedule i've only just got around to reading it and since my review of the new Mera graphic novel went down so well I thought i'd try and review every graphic novel in this line and so here is my review of Teen Titans: Raven.
The plot of the book is Rachel Roth and her mother get into a car accident in which the mother dies and Rachel looses her memory so now armed with new friends Rachel has to deal with the darkness growing inside of her all the while working her way through high school. I'll be the first to admit that the plot to this book is basically that of a bad YA novel even down to having a bland male love interest and having him fall in love with the main girl after first setting eyes on them.
I'll admit to not really being the biggest fan of Raven it's not got anything to do with her character but it's to do with the fact that I can't find any books with her as main character or any book that she's in infact the last Raven book I read was the 2016 miniseries. That said however I still felt that how she used here felt more in line with the typical YA heroine in that she's the only one who can stop this thing from happening and she spends alot of time pining over a guy she just met.
The whole amnesia angle I did think was pretty interesting and the book does stick with this angel all the way through which I really wasn't expecting. If anything I was expecting them to drop this aspect of the story once the main love interest came into the story but no they stick with it and not only that it plays a huge part in the story which was honestly really refreshing since it would have been super easy for them just to drop it and pretend it never existed.
The writer of this book is Kami Garcia who in terms of comic books has only written this book but is perhaps most well known as the writer of the YA series of books The Caster Series which has five books in total the first of which Beautiful Creatures was also turned into a film. Yeah no wonder this whole book feels like a YA novel they had a freaking YA writer writing it that being said tho the writing isn't that bad but it's also not that good either.
To me the most real scene in this book is also the one that I feel is the best written it's the scene where Raven starts hearing students thoughts for the first time and she hears what there really thinking. To me that's a great scene because of the fact that we get to get inside the head of teenagers and get to see what there really thinking with the best example being a girl who's being bullied and just wants her bully not to turn up who hasn't thought of that when they were being bullied that's a great insight into the mind of a teenager.
The art for the book was done by Gabriel Picolo and I cannot find anything this guy has worked on according to the official DC comics website he's done work for Boom Studios and Blizzard but there's nothing saying what specifically he's worked on. His art on this book I thought was very minimalistic there's very little detail both in the backgrounds and in the character design and that was quite shocking at first but it was something that I got used to very quickly.
Just so you all know when I was saving these photos on my Laptop i've been giving them all names just so their easier to find for the above picture the file name simply read TTR (Teen Titans: Raven) Bland Love Interest. That's because we find out nothing about him we get a few lines near the end of the book but that's really it and yet somehow we're expected to buy this character as a love interest for Raven they don't even bother to give him a personality.
I was going to use two pictures to help illustrate a point here but one of them has a watermark on it so I can't really use it. This book both oddly and rather refreshingly has a lesbian couple I say it's both because it comes out of know where and plays no part in the story and so it feels like the writer forcing equality on us but on the other hand it's refreshing because it's not the sole reason why the characters used for it were created there friends with Raven and her new friend Max and they just so happen to be gay there characters first and homosexual second.
Speaking of Raven's new friends the only one we really get to know is the character of Max who Raven is staying with. I honestly like Max she's sassy and yet sensitive at the same time and I honestly feel that if DC wanted to bring the character into the main comic books she'd work really well because it's all there her character is solid as she is and so she'd only need to be written well in a few good books and she'd have a small fanbase.
I'm not going to name who the main villain of the book is but given that this book focuses on Raven you can take a pretty good guess on who it is. However I have no issue with telling you that Slade Wilson is in this book and like the lesbian couple he really adds nothing to the story he doesn't act as a red herring he just shows up every once in a while does something and then leaves and he leaves no impact what so ever.
However you could make the very real case that his impact is that someone close to Raven isn't who they say they are. I however would make the case that that's the impact of that character and not the impact that Slade himself makes. Which is both a good and bad it's good because it allows you to let those new characters grow but bad because Slade is a classic DC villain and so he should be used in a way that's more fitting.
Now since this is a superhero book that does mean I have to talk about the action that's seen in the book itself. Which very oddly enough there isn't that much action in the book itself the only real action scene comes near the end of the big where Raven and Max have to take down the big bad with help from Max's mother which I thought was super odd because this is a super hero book and so one expects there to be at least a few action scenes sprinkled throughout the book but nope we get one and that's it.
What I did find super annoying is that after the big bad has been defeated the book carries on going for quite a few more pages and i'm sat here going please just end already. I get the feeling that the writer was trying to set up the other books but couldn't fit it in anyway and so just stuck it all in at the end because the ending feels like one big set up for another book which luckily we are getting next year.
Overall while this wasn't a great book by any means it also wasn't a bad one either for everything that I liked about the book I found something that I didn't like or was just predictable and so Teen Titans: Raven gets a 5 out of 10 from me and yes the next book in this line is Teen Titans: Beast Boy it looks like there giving all of the titans there own books which honestly makes me wonder how there going to do Robin but we'll have to wait until next summer for the Beast Boy book to come out.