Review: Titans: Beast World trade paperback (DC Comics)

Well, Titans: Beast World is a lot of fun; as event miniseries have gone so far in Dawn of DC, Knight Terrors was also good, but Beast World holds together better page-to-page from beginning to end. Writer Tom Taylor takes what could have been a very silly premise — all the DC heroes turned to animals, like JLApe writ large — and returns something convincingly at the scale of a DC “crisis” event that also earns the moniker of a “Titans story.” Taylor’s written universe-shaking stories before, but this is his first mainstream DC Universe event; I’d be happy to see DC give him another one.

[Review contains spoilers]

In the latter half of Beast World, after the heroes have taken down a rampaging Giganta-turned-kaiju grizzly bear, artist Lucas Meyer draws a splash page of wreckage — Swamp Thing and the Titans and first responders digging innocents out of the rubble. It’s a stand-in for what we’re told is happening across the planet — millions transformed to were-beasts and millions more trying to escape them. This could again get very silly (as suggested by rampaging bunny rabbit Harley Quinn), but Taylor plays it along the lines of his DCeased and etc. — a pseudo-contagion disaster movie — and that holds up even with Wolf-Batman and Fox-Nightwing.

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Indeed, without feeling like a stretch, Taylor is even able to parlay this attack of the were-beasts into cultural criticism. Against the metaphor of people turned into actual monsters, Taylor’s Doctor Hate comments on “how quickly people can dehumanize each other” and “how quickly fabricated fear of the other can turn to hatred.” When Nightwing criticizes Amanda Waller’s faux-heroism, she replies that “people … want to see punishment. They want someone to hate … and they want to be told who to blame.” It is not the first time the DC heroes have faced a populace who rejects their ideals, but the conflict Taylor raises still feels no less current.

Beast World is a fine appetizer for Dawn of DC’s culminating crossover, Absolute Power, as the book is as much about the heroes versus the beasts as it is their dealing with Waller’s machinations. Notably, Beast Boy saves the day in the first chapter, dispatching the alien Necrostar, but then the Beast World crisis is kicked off by Waller’s Doctor Hate interfering at the last minute. There’s a gripping multi-front war happening — the Titans versus Waller, Peacemaker, Hate, the transformed heroes, and a rogue Tamaranean — but at times the action gets downright political, with the heroes debating the ethics of hacking the military or the backchannel deal Nightwing makes with the president.

I’d venture Beast World proper is a little light on appearances by the greater DCU. There is the requisite crowd scene that all good DCU events need, but the action is mostly devoted to the Titans and not so much Superman (Clark Kent, at least), nor Wonder Woman, any Green Lanterns, Flash Barry Allen, or Aquaman; Batman is knocked out early on, as he was essentially in Knight Terrors. This makes for another, following also from Dark Crisis, where the Justice League is largely absent and DC’s latter generations take over. I get both that “sans League” is the theme of Dawn of DC and that the Titans' name is on the masthead, but still I was surprised who we didn’t see — and that when Nightwing says “Superman,” he’s usually referring to Jon and not Clark.

But as a Titans event, Taylor hits all the right notes. The gold standard is Devin Grayson’s JLA/Titans (sorry, Total Chaos), ending with the Titans professing their affection for one another as they await their demise in a white void. Things don’t get quite as dire here, but between the various heart-to-hearts and the final sequence in which Flash Wally West and Starfire tag-team to help Raven defeat her own darker half, the story felt convincingly Titans-esque, and clearly there’s a difference between the Titans working together and the League working together even in the League’s most familial moments.

Doctor Hate turns out to be Raven’s demon half, which is fine given the longstanding theme of the Titans battling their own worst impulses, and also foreshadowed at least in the issue of the reveal. But there’s no editor’s note here to point to when Raven first imprisoned her darker self within the gem on her forehead, and if I ever knew there was anything within the gem (if this isn’t just something Taylor made up, like Beast Boy’s ability to become multiple animals at once), I’d long since forgotten. It’s minor overall, but one of a few instances where Beast World is not totally seamless — there’s a reference to Starfire having a weakness to chromium, which seems wholly lifted from the cartoons near as I can tell; also some strangeness later on when Donna Troy is still hanging out in her super-armor long after it seems like it’s needed.

Again, overall Tom Taylor pleases with Titans: Beast World. Big stuff aside, there’s a plethora of funny and charming bits page to page — from Nightwing asking Batman to rate his injuries on a scale of “one to Bane” to a notable cameo by Nightwing’s Bridget Clancy(!), this is an altogether good one. I was even glad to see Taylor remembering Chester Runk until, well, you know, but maybe Chester’s still out there somewhere.

[Includes original and variant covers, character sketches]

Rating 3.0