There are winners and losers in the tie-in collection Titans: Beast World Tour, but above all it’s almost two-dozen stories checking in on the DC Universe’s current goings-on through a Beast World lens.
This is maybe the best way I’ve ever seen event tie-ins done — six 40-page issues, sufficient for one collection such that Beast World never seems bloated or endless, and so steeped in what’s now or what’s next that these don’t just seem an exercise in biding time. This is similar to Lazarus Planet, though the issues are smartly more centered around hero “families,” and it’s a darn sight better than Dark Nights: Death Metal’s interminable 12 tie-ins or Knight Terrors' 20 two-issue oft-disconnected miniseries. In comparison, Beast World Tour is night generous in its neat and tidiness.
Thought Beast World itself plays the “heroes turn into animals” premise fairly straight, World Tour as soon uses it for superhero action as it does outright comedy. Were it the whole of the event, that might grate, but I don’t mind when it’s just a few — and a few that are clever, too. There’s a litany of creator names I didn’t recognize, DC using this again like Lazarus Planet as a kind of “New Talent Workshop.” We’re also starting to see a few character recur across the event tie-in anthologies — what I called in my notes “crossover characters” — which is fun and that I’d be happy to see DC continue.
[Review contains spoilers]
World Tour kicks off with the “Waller Rising” issue, the only single-story issue among the World Tour tie-ins proper; still, it is in its way a good representation of what World Tour has to offer. It’s written by Chuck Brown, author of the superlative Infinite Frontier-era Black Manta miniseries, and insofar as it includes Manta, Amazonian queen Nubia, and Dr. Mist, is something of a sequel to that mini. Also here are Earth-2’s Val-Zod (picking up from his recent appearance in Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent, the continuity game being very strong), Vixen, and first Batwing David Zavimbe — all Black heroes, echoing too Brown’s Manta miniseries.
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
As such, without saying so explicitly, it is as if DC has taken a variety of characters sometimes only seen in their DC Power anthologies and brought them to the big event stage, which is wonderful. I’d as soon Val-Zod and Zavimbe appeared more regularly as a matter of course, but it would be a powerful statement if the yearly DC Power and DC Pride anthologies were tied to DC’s also-yearly big events. So there’s a lot built into this issue — Brown is also writing the character Deadeye again, whom he introduced in Lazarus Planet, and whose relation to Amanda Waller surely suggests a role in Absolute Power.1
We see a lot of this throughout World Tour. Nicole Maines and Steve Orlando are also taking Dreamer from Lazarus Planet to Absolute Power (by way of Suicide Squad: Dream Team); Red Canary and A.L. Kaplan’s Circuit Breaker are each here, both having appeared so far mainly in various anthology stories, and Brandt and Stein take on Connor Hawke again. Jarrett Williams writes his Speed Force characters at the same time they’re appearing in his miniseries, and indeed the whole of the “Central City” issue, kicked off by Flash writer Simon Spurrier, is set in Flash’s current moment. Joshua Williamson’s Green Arrow story takes place between the panels of his work on that series, and in his Lois Lane story, he nods to his upcoming Superman: House of Brainiac event, same as he did during Knight Terrors.
Among the stories that delighted me were Dan Jurgens and Anthony Marques with a Triangle Titles deep cut: Bibbo, Professor Hamilton, and the Whiz Wagon vs. Turtle Boy Jimmy Olsen — nostalgia and fun, plain and simple. Grace Ellis (Lois Lane and the Friendship Challenge) shrewdly riffs on Harvey when Harley Quinn becomes a giant bunny, and what good did we do to deserve the madness of Kelley Jones drawing Batgirl Stephanie Brown vs. a mutated (again) Killer Moth. It must surely confuse some readers that there’s two different Huntresses in this book; points to Sam Maggs for reminding us Batgirl Cassandra Cain got her getup from Huntress Helena Bertinelli, and Cassandra distracting a panther-Huntress with a laser pointer earned a grin.
No different than any other crossover, the stories often have to work between the pages of Beast World (and probably with limited information) to various degrees of success. Chuck Brown posits Doctor Hate going rogue, for which I can suspend disbelief but doesn’t quite fit in the main story; in Chip Zdarsky’s story, wolf-Batman escapes Nightwing in a nigh impossible space between panels; Sina Grace’s Aquaman story makes a lot of melodrama out of Garth being mind-controlled by Brother Eternity, particularly since Beast World resolves that swiftly. And in general I thought Meghan Fitzmartin wrote a less confident, more impetuous Aquaman Jackson Hyde than quite seemed true to character.
But none of that is wholly unexpected or egregious, and Titans: Beast World Tour manages to pack so much into such little space that it’s easy to overlook the missteps, and the book gets it right most of the time. Again, I would love to see DC go this route over something like Knight Terrors' interminable miniseries any time — what feels least like a cash grab and most like using an event to naturally check in across the DCU and show casual readers what the other titles are up to. Not to mention, as I’ve been saying lately, this underlying Amanda Waller plotline across all this disparate stories feels the most like Countdown to Infinite Crisis that DC’s achieved in a while …
[Includes original and variant covers, character designs]
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Shockingly, as it turns out, not really, though I haven’t read Absolute Power: Task Force VII yet or any of the regular series tie-ins. ↩︎
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