What DC Comics' Titans property needs are some updated origins — it’s wholly unclear right now who Donna Troy is and whether she was ever married to Terry Long, whether Starfire spent any time hanging out with the Outlaws, even, y’know, whether Tara “Terra” Markov died in “Judas Contract” or not.

Tales of the Titans, running parallel to Tom Taylor’s new Titans series and ahead of the Titans: Beast World crossover, would seem like the place to handle that. After all, of Taylor’s seven main Titans, Nightwing and Flash have their own series, Cyborg just appeared in his own Cyborg: Homecoming miniseries, and that leaves the four who each get profile issues here and who largely don’t appear outside Titans titles: Starfire, Raven, Donna Troy, and Beast Boy.

To accomplish this kind of thing, however, would require creative teams with some say in the dispensations of these characters and the knowledge of their histories to back it up, and Tales lacks on both accounts. I did enjoy some fresh takes on these characters, but at the same time it’s clear there’s a lot of exterior influence on these stories — whom the writers want these characters to be, whom the writers might know the characters as from Teen Titans Go! or the Titans TV series, what reference comics the writers read leading in to this project.

So while Tales might seem rife for the site of new Titans origins for some of its least well-known members, it’s actually the opposite. Think of this instead as more like a Titans-themed New Talent Showcase exercise, in large part “tales” of the Titans as opposed to actual stories in the actual here and now.

[Review contains spoilers]

Among these, I probably liked best Shannon and Dean Hale’s Starfire story, which starts off the book. And my enjoyment is in large part to Javier Rodriguez’s bright, sparse pencils and also Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou giving a retro flair to the lettering. I find the “which Titans stole another’s breakfast” bits too juvenile for the supposed stature of the team (even when Taylor does it), but I’ll grant that Rodriguez sells the breezy comedy, as well as the story’s alien goats and funny tentacled monster things.

In the Hales' story, Starfire’s chafes at being dismissed as too emotional and also that her role is often summed up as team “princess.” Here, Starfire is a metaphor for a valid societal complaint, though I wasn’t wholly convinced this was true to Starfire herself — Tamaraneans tend to be unabashedly emotional, and indeed Starfire is a princess — maybe? There’s reference here to Starfire’s sister Blackfire betraying her and to Starfire having set Blackfire free to do more harm, including the “fall of Tamaran.” I think some of that is accurate but also Tamaran has been destroyed at least three times and Blackfire was just on the side of angels in Justice League Odyssey, so maybe some editor’s notes might have been warranted.

That’s a difficulty encountered a few times in Tales. Tini Howard’s Raven recounts the plight of Raven’s mother Angela Roth, whom Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans readers know well as Arella, but whom this Raven doesn’t seem to know at all. (Howard also has Starfire speaking like her animated counterpart, which it’s some wonder the editors didn’t catch as being inconsistent.) Steve Orlando’s Donna Troy story has her summoning Discordia, a winged horse last seen about 10 years ago in Meredith Finch’s Wonder Woman, during the period Donna Troy was a clay figure created as a weapon to kill Diana, while his brief origin for Donna (yet another) blends aspects of other pre- and post-Crisis origins.

Notably all of these stories are 30 pages, which makes a four-issue collection a little longer than it might be normally (though neither does DC see fit to print all of the variant covers at full size). It’s obvious from any number of splash or two-panel pages that the writers don’t need all of this room, but at the same time I also saw it used well; both the Starfire and Donna Troy stories would seem to be over, but then continue on in deep epilogue conversations between Titans, of the kind 22-pages comics often can’t allow for.

Orlando’s Donna Troy story is fine; there is the obvious spending of pages on prolonged action sequences, but I like Orlando’s presentation of Donna as a photojournalist and also getting to see Orlando’s Justice Foundation again (wholly leaving aside who Strange Visitor even is anymore). Andrew Constant’s Beast Boy story is fairly boilerplate, though I was impressed with the deep dive use of DC’s werewolf Anthony Lupus.

I struggle though again to embrace the teenage iteration of Raven. That’s not in the least because Howard’s story presents her here as lacking confidence and needing advice from Starfire, when the classic Raven was always the most mature among the Titans. (And then in Constant’s story, he portrays Raven as the dutiful girlfriend sitting on the couch watching movies while Beast Boy goes out to navel-gaze.) There’s also the leaps in logic I associate with Howard’s work — Raven goes undercover in a cult but for some reason needs time “to think — to be alone,” and later chides her demon brother that he’ll “never be the hero I am” when that’s hardly the evil Trilogy’s goal.

Tales of the Titans is billed as a lead-in to Titans: Beast World, though that connection is not overt — nonexistent, even, as far as this title is concerned. My best guess is we’ll see Beast Boy try to fulfill his promise to cure Andrew Lupus and that goes terribly awry, but I’m far from certain.¹ But I don’t mind a reader needing not to come here before Beast World; these stories are not poor necessarily, but neither so expertly rendered that I’d rather see them as incidental Titans stories than a key part of the new canon.

[Includes original and variant covers, including variant thumbnails]