Oh boy. Before I start sounding like I didn’t enjoy Blackest Night: Titans #3, I liked it a lot — but the ending was a one-two punch of confusion. [Also: *SPOILER WARNING*]
In stark contrast to Blackest Night #4, the cover here was on the mark. I have absolutely no idea what happened with Dove’s powers at the end and why she seems to be the deus ex machina that will save everybody, but I guess I’m not supposed to. The big reveal with Donna at the end that the Black Lanterns can bite and infect a victim partially was a double whammy though. They’ve been totally gutting or otherwise killing off their victims before turning them up until this point, which was part of what set them apart from typical zombies in everything I’ve read up until now, but it seems that they may be more like zombies than they pretend to be after all. I can’t wait to see the spin-off franchise of rulebooks and manuals for Black Lantern zombie attacks that will be created in the crossover’s wake.
J.T. Krul was a solid writer for this mini page by page. I can dig the Rob Liefeld school of scripting that went on in it where you can punctuate most any line with a close-up of a ridiculous punch and make it work. And Ed Benes batted about 60% for me making those action scenes click. The dialog scenes were a bit weaker, though. I’ve seen much better Benes comics before, but he slam dunked a few of the Beast Boy moments.
Actually, the Beast Boy Stegosaurus and grizzly bear shots stole this whole comic for me. Those alone justified this miniseries.
In the end, though, I didn’t feel this as a warranted tale from beginning to end. I mentioned “Age of Apocalypse” in my last post, and one of the things I really appreciated about that Medusa head of a crossover was that even though there were three or four books coming out in a given week, each of the miniseries had a self-contained quest or dimension of the broader crossover that had its own free-standing plot. Then, in the end, each of the series complimented each other. Blackest Night: Titans — not so much. If someone were to pick up a trade of all three of these issues, I’m sure they’ll enjoy the fights, but the story doesn’t really go or finish anywhere in particular.