A brand-new never-before-seen supersuit for the DCU television character Nightwing has been unveiled ahead of the Titans season two finale, which is set to air Friday, November 29th. Beginning it’s run in October 2018, Titans loosely follows the DC Comics series Teen Titans and, although offering a grittier take than most fans of the original comics were expecting, has led to much approval and many Titans-related memes since the show’s initial release. With that costume, you’ll be all set to travel the world and recruit some international Batmen, although, of course, you won’t actually be doing that. Heroes and villains will engage in epic battles on a massive scale in a world where the line between good and evil has been blurred. Particularly, a lot of people around the world replicate the famous crime-fighting superheroes. Though I recognize its incumbent upon Abnett to create drama here, that Roy Harper and Donna Troy should be the smartest people in the room amidst the entire Justice League and the other Titans stretches believability indeed.
Donna Troy is prisoner on the Justice League Watchtower for four issues in which it never seems Wonder Woman has a plan (or Abnett has a plan for her) as to how the League will help Donna besides imprisoning her indefinitely. Outsiders: The Good Fight is a true black ops superhero drama, the likes of which only barely seen before in Joe Kelly’s excellent Justice League Elite, and I’m eager for the next volume. Outsiders: The Good Fight, the fifth volume of Judd Winick’s Outsiders series, reintroduces the team after jumping a year forward in time as part of DC Comic’s “One Year Later” event. The event focuses on Scarecrow slowly manipulating Gotham City like a puppet master. He’s earned that appellation by not only breaking the Bat but by driving him out of Gotham. While we have to wait just a bit longer to see if that pans out, we do have one new piece of good news to share regarding Knights, as thanks to a tease from Todd McFarlane on a live stream we now have our first look at the Nightwing Gotham Knights figure heading to McFarlane’s popular DC Multiverse line. Again, an Arsenal spotlight isn’t the worst thing, and it’s especially nice to see extended work by Paul Pelletier and part of an annual by Tom Grummett.
The sole focus here, benching or making ill-use of the other inaugural Rebirth Titans, seems an odd use of the last issues of this era of the book — again, so much so that it mainly reads like story to fill up the pages. The new Outsiders shrinks a sometimes large cast down to just six heroes, allowing for greater focus on the individual members. Deadpool, and tons of gaming content, including GEGG WARS, a Star Wars Table Top RPG Series featuring Prinze Jr. and the cast of Star Wars Rebels. When not working on his various projects, acting as Screen Rant’s gaming editor, or spending time with his family, Christopher J. Teuton mostly enjoys playing with dogs and climbing on trees. But Titans Vol. 4: Titans Apart reads like an expanded story from DC Universe Presents, where Harper got some time in the sun back in the day. It’s the same for these Titans, who got less than 25 issues before they broke up; after Wolfman’s Titans, and Devin Grayson’s, and Judd Winick’s, it’s hard to see the appeal of these childhood friends working together, knowing they’ll eventually split — and different from the League, buffeted by events in their own titles, that the Titans often split for angst-ridden interpersonal differences makes it doubly exhausting.
I was trying to think how we got to this Arsenal from Marv Wolfman’s earlier purple-suited government super-spy; Harper became perhaps a little less imposing when he lead the post-Zero Hour team of junior Titans, but it seems to me he became a joke all at once after Cry for Justice, not gradually, and then the wildly different New 52 version just cemented it. Abnett’s Roy Harper skews a little older than Scott Lobdell’s, which is good too, with shades of the Arsenal of old. You know good maintenance increase the service life of it. Over the course of The Good Fight, the Outsiders both overthrow a dictator and blow up a nuclear reactor, gaining the attention of both the Checkmate spy organization and Superman himself. With The Good Fight, Winick has cut a lot of dead weight from The Outsiders, and what’s left is more interesting by far. These characters are far more genuinely “outsiders” than the original team, and their quirky nature only adds to the book’s appeal. It’s a cliche to say, but the Outsiders truly are back and better than ever.