Titans: Beast World
As far as supervillain plans go, Brother Eternity’s is a straightforward one: Establish a religious cult on Earth to give him a power base and then leverage it to stage an expedition to the Saturn moon of Titan. Once there, speak words of power and unleash the Necrostar into the Solar System. After that: Profit. He didn’t count on the Titans being ready for him, though. Nor did he expect that one of them, Beast Boy, would have a longshot plan ready to take down this threat. What Brother Eternity really didn’t see was that Amanda Waller was able to see all this coming and find a way to turn it to her advantage and use Beast Boy’s power to turn Earth into a Beast World.
Tom Taylor has been writing comics for DC and Marvel for a while and though he’s had some success conjuring up epic level threats for each universe to face, see “DCeased,” this is the first time he’s written an event story that isn’t some kind of alternate universe tale. “Beast World” has an advantage over most in that it’s spinning directly out of the pages of his first volume of “Titans,” which introduced Brother Eternity, so anyone interested will want to read that for the backstory. As for the main event, it plays out as you’d expect it would, but it’s filled with smart writing and enough cleverness to make the whole experience an enjoyable one.
A lot of that can be seen in the first issue which spends a lot of time setting up one threat before effectively pivoting to the real one. There’s also enough done to get you invested in Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan as a character, and enough suspension of disbelief to be had in assuming that he’s going to be the sacrificial lamb for this event’s stakes. From there we get five issues, and two tie-in issues of “Titans,” featuring a lot of superheroes turning into beasts, other superheroes fighting said beasts, and those superheroes finding ways to turn the beasts back into superheroes.
That’s what I meant when I said that things play out about as you’d expect they would here. Yet the road there is never boring because the road there is littered with lots of interesting things. Batman’s final plea to Nightwing. The appearance of Detective Chimp in a series like this. Amanda Waller doing her biggest “bomb in a brain” bit (and lead henchman Peacemaker being a general dumbass). The emergence of Doctor Hate and the revelation of who they really are. There are plenty of surprises and interesting turns here to hold your interest, and anyone with a vested interest in the ongoing story of the DC Universe will appreciate seeing how this furthers Waller’s plans in a way that feels relatively organic.
I’m also a newcomer to the adventures of the “Titans,” with the previous volume being the first time that I’ve read any of their ongoing adventures. So I’m probably not in a position to say how the two-issue tie-in from that series collected here, which has a bit of a focus on Starfire’s history, squares with previous continuity. That said, I did enjoy it as these two issues deal with the threat being presented by Brother Eternity quite effectively and demonstrate the same level of cleverness seen in the main series. Because of course Nightwing would’ve learned a thing or two about planning ahead from his dad, and one Titan in particular would turn out to be a poor target for the transforming spores in this story. Travis Moore handles these issues and he does a solid job conveying the story and conveying its most important parts – like the revelation that Nightwing is a fox.
Being an event series, it’s not surprising that DC put one of its best artists on it. Ivan Reis has been doing excellent superhero work for the publisher for years now and the first two issues of the event are a great showcase for how he can deliver an epic-looking story. I say “first two issues” because Lucas Meyer does a capable job handling the next two, giving us lots of detail and capturing most (but not all) of the scale of the previous issues. Reis returns to illustrate part of the two final issues, with Meyer and Eduardo Pansica pitching in. I wish that he had been able to fully illustrate them, but that likely would’ve required DC to push these issues out once a month instead of two at a time.
I did enjoy “Beast World” and it makes a good case for following the subsequent storylines it sets up here. Waller’s ambitions are furthered in an interesting way and I’m definitely curious to see how they’ll play out in the pages of “Absolute Power.” Meanwhile, the Titans are set to face a world that has turned against them along with a new threat from within. These are things that people reading the next volume of that series will only understand if they read this one after the first proper volume of the series. That does come off as needlessly confusing, but “Beast World” is good enough that anyone who liked Taylor’s first volume, will certainly find a lot to enjoy here as well.