Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Teen Titans Academy #3 Review




Task Force Red X


Written By: Tim Sheridan
Art By: Rafa Sandoval, Jordi Tarragona, Max Raynor, Alejandro Sanchez, Alex Sinclair, Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: May 25, 2021


The Suicide Squad has come to Titans Tower to acquire the Speedster, Bolt and as we saw from the last issue of Suicide Squad, it looks like Red X is working with the team of baddies (and Superboy) to make sure they have a clear shot to get inside the Academy's walls. Let's jump into this issue and see if Amanda Waller gets her wish and gets a Speedster on the team or if the Titans of old and new and fight off this fearsome threat. Let's jump into this issue and see if this becomes the school of hard knocks. Let's check it out.


For this issue of Teen Titans Academy, we kind of forgo the cliffhanger of the last issue and spend the majority of this one in seeing the Suicide Squad enter Titans Tower and really only spend a few pages on what happened at the end of the last issue while having some criss-cross, double-agent agenda with Red X that really felt out of nowhere in this issue and didn't really do anything besides for let us know that he's not going to continue doing Suicide Squad stuff going forward, but really, that's all it felt like..... Red X just simply changed his mind and we didn't know why he was doing it to begin with so ultimately, nothing mattered.




Ultimately, the real draw of this is seeing some backstory on Alinta, aka, Bolt and how she uses her powers and where she comes from but even this aspect felt weak in that it just breezes past her losing her legs..... which seems like the most interesting part of her story. So yeah, beyond getting some background on Alinta, this is also the issue where we'll say goodbye to Crush for a bit while she goes off and does some Daddy/Daughter stuff in her own series, which like the rest of this issue, felt like it could have done with some more setup because like everything else here.... it was out of nowhere.




All in all, the art in this issue remains strong and while we have people asking about the identity of Red X, we're not thrown a bunch of Red Herring here....... we're not getting anything really beyond a feel-good moment of the new students coming together to defend their new home against the Suicide Squad, everything else just kind of felt forced and out of nowhere and every interesting thing that's briefly brought up....... is only briefly brought up when it should be the focus of the entire series.... at least in my mind, i.e. apparently Billy Batson's powers aren't working right...... I need to know more about that! This series feels like it's biting off more than it can chew with the number of characters involved because ultimately nobody feels like they're getting enough page space to feel interesting and even the older characters that we already love, feel less all around.


Bits and Pieces:


While you'll get a brief bit of backstory and some exciting student comradery, not to mention some great art, this issue feels like another miss in this series as things just seem to happen to simply happen, while motivations are just tossed aside or possibly never there to begin with and while the action was amped up a bit here, the background of wondering who Red X is keeps bogging down what should be a fun series.


6/10

2 comments:

  1. Between last issue, Suicide Squad #3 and this issue did anybody else find it confusing af the way they kept bouncing around from flashback to present? It took me a minute to figure out the order in which those scenes happened in these three issues. That wasn't just me was it?

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    1. It was not just you!!! The jumping around isn't always adding up

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