Review: Multiversity: Teen Justice trade paperback (DC Comics)

I enjoyed Ivan Cohen and Danny Lore’s Multiversity: Teen Justice a lot more than I thought I would. I’m an easy sell for a “Multiversity”-type series — I’ve long since been frustrated with DC teasing but not using their multiverse, and a story set in mainstream continuity but on one of DC’s alt-Earths has always seemed an interesting idea. But there’ve been a variety of short stories involving Teen Justice and its characters ahead of the miniseries collected here, some I enjoyed more than others, and I wasn’t particularly sure what I’d get within these pages.

Ultimately, to describe Multiversity: Teen Justice, the story ends up hewing pretty close to classic New Teen Titans tropes, though by way of modernity with a Super-kid on the roster, etc. And indeed though it seems Teen Justice is following a familiar Titans path, Cohen and Lore mix it with some other aspects of DC mythos to result in something that feels nicely fresh.

I would happily read more adventures of this team; in just a couple issues, Teen Justice is easily better than both the most recent Young Justice and Teen Titan Academy titles (or at least how they both petered out). It would be impressively daring if DC kept a Multiversity book in their line as their “teen team” title, interweaving the events on Earth-11 with those of Earth-1. I’m very hopeful there’s more on the way.

[Review contains spoilers]

Just my personal taste, but one of my least favorite stories from DC Pride 2021 was Lore’s Flash/Kid Quick story “Clothes Makeup Gift” — I recognize the cozy superhero-getting-ready-for-a-date story as a genre, even a popular one, but for me it felt too light.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

And to that extent, approaching Multiversity: Teen Justice, I was a bit confused as to the sequence of all of this — a Kid Quick who’s dating Aquagirl Andy Curry in DC Pride 2021, but who’s vising a Pride parade with Teen Justice (with an Aquagirl who’s not Andy Curry) in DC Pride: The New Generation. Once I understood (with help of some wiki pages — maybe comics are a bit too complicated here!) that the Kid Quick of DC Pride 2021 and Future State: Justice League is a Jess Quick from later on their own timeline than the one in DC Pride: New Generation and Multiversity: Teen Justice, that helped clear up a couple years' confusion ahead of going in to Teen Justice.

For a DC fan, it doesn’t take too long to feel like you know where Teen Justice is going, even on the gender-swapped Earth-11. The teen team battles HIVE minions on the streets of New York, trying to protect scientist Shyla Stone (mother, of course, of Vickie); the mysterious Raven warns of a dire future while the Church of Blood recruits disaffected kids. Throw in a distaff Slade Wilson and we’d be in prime Wolfman/Perez territory.

But smartly, Cohen and Lore bend it when they reveal Sister Blood to be Sinestra, a Green Lantern leading Kilowog and others; this might seem like a New Teen Titans tale, but there’s a lot more to it. That kicks things off nicely, and the book never dulls from there — a gruesome scene on Zandia, Raven separated from his soul-self, a whole alt-history of the Star Sapphires as the universe’s peacekeeping force, visions of the future, and on and on. But never do Cohen and Lore venture too far from established DC history than they remind the audience of their own fandom — a take on “You’ve got me, who’s got you,” a Lynda Carter spin, a visual call-out to Crisis on Infinite Earths, and more.

What has felled more than a few teen team books is mistaking angst for drama; there’s a Teen Titans run or two I could name where an attempt to build conflict among the characters resulted in the characters seeming juvenile and unlikable. At the other extreme was Adam Glass' Teen Titans run, which I quite liked, but which nearly took the “Teen” out of “Titans” with their vigilante choices. Cohen and Lore skew here perhaps more wholesome than I’d prefer, not in the least due to the presence of Peter Tomasi-esque “Super-Daughters” Supergirl Laurel Kent and Robin Talia Kane, but still I didn’t feel Teen Justice was too immature for my liking. Much of the interpersonal conflict particularly is between Aquagirl and Robin over who’ll lead the team (reminiscent, in one of many ways, of the Young Justice animated series) and I found that appropriately effective.

In a couple of the issue-end cliffhangers, Cohen and Lore tend to show events from one perspective, and then flash back a bit at the start of the next to show events another way. Nothing wrong with that, though I didn’t quite think events lined up every time, and certain things, like Raven losing his soul-self, I understood better from dialogue than I did from the action on the page, which isn’t ideal. A significant moment in the story is Kid Quick apparently witnessing their own future via Raven (the future that sees Kid Quick shunted to the Future State of “our” Earth), but it’s incredibly hard to parse — the vision seems to involve a mechanical Joker and something about Atlantis, not Kid Quick at all.

I gave up early on trying to find rhyme or reason in how Ivan Cohen and Danny Lore do or don’t gender-swap the Earth-11 characters — we’ve got Klarienne (bum-bum-bum) the Witch Girl and Donald Troy, through to a great “new” Lantern character at the end, but yet a male Kyle “DeWitt” Rayner and Hal “Ferris” Jordan — also, wonderfully, Hawkman and Hawkwoman, except reversed? Anyway, present as the difference is in Multiversity: Teen Justice, the extent to which it so quickly fades into the background demonstrates how rich the book is all on its own.

Marco Failla offers animated-type art throughout in the style of Tom Grummett and such. Multiversity: Teen Justice is subtitled “Will to Survive”; is it too corny for me to end hoping this series will (to) survive to see a sequel?

[Includes original and variant covers, character sketches]

Rating 2.5