The Titans are always the bridesmaid and never the bride. The Titans were once the New Teen Titans and part of the most popular DC books of the early ’80s. However, the team never really reached the heights they could have, despite several really good series under their belt. Titans fans are a long-suffering lot, but all of that seemed ready to change after Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. That book ended with the Titans being declared as the new top team on the planet, taking the place of the Justice League. Titans was given the star treatment, with superstar creators Tom Taylor and Nicola Scott kicking off the comic, and readers were about to get the Titans-fronted event comics Titans: Beast World, a book that seemed to come and go with little fanfare from fans.
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Titans: Beast World, by Taylor, Ivan Reis, and Lucas Meyer, is a way better event book than it gets credit for. The six-issue series, and its various tie-ins, did a remarkable job of laying out an action-packed event comic that had consequences for the future of DC. Titans: Beast World isn’t some universe-shaking event, and if anything was just another chapter in the story building up to 2024’s Absolute Power, but it should be ranked among the best DC event comics ever.
Titans: Beast World Sold the Titans as the Kind of Team They’ve Always Had the Potential to Be
Titans: Beast World digs into DC lore a bit to present a great story. The book kicks off with an attack by the Necrostar, a monster from space that is related to Starro the Conqueror. The book sees the Titans take command in the battle against the monster, an exercise in futility until Beast Boy reveals that he can transform into a Starro, which is the only thing that the Necrostar is scared of. Beast Boy succeeds, but Amanda Waller, trying to turn the world against the superheroes, makes a secret attack on Starro-Beast Boy, causing him to explode into small Star Conquerors, which possess the people of the Earth, transforming them into animals. This sets up the rest of the book, which sees Nightwing leading the heroes to revert everyone back to human while also saving Beast Boy, all before Waller can kill millions of humans transformed into wild animals.
Titans: Beast World had everything it needed to be a great event. This wasn’t yet another Crisis event that vowed to change the multiverse, it was just a great superhero story that went to places that other events hadn’t before. It was the story that the Titans needed; Titans was a good book, but it often felt like every other Titans books, taking ideas and villains from New Teen Titans. Titans: Beast World showed the Titans as the leading team of the DC Universe, and it worked very well. Of course, that could be part of the problem with the story’s reception; most fans just weren’t sold on the Titans as the Justice League replacement. However, anyone who ignored the story for that reason — of because of the comic fandom’s strange disdain for Taylor — made a huge mistake.
There are some awesome ideas in this story; Beast Boy becoming a Starro the Conqueror certainly wasn’t on most people’s bingo cards, and getting to watch Nightwing lead heroes like Superman shows off just how great Nightwing is as a leader and hero. Doctor Hate, an evil version of Doctor Fate, is a great idea and adds a nice bit of mystery to the series. Seeing Amanda Waller manipulate the heroes was perfect for the role that had been built for the Wall since Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths ended. Finally, the tie-in issues, especially the Beast World Tour anthology comics, were all stellar. Seeing the different families of heroes deal with the transformed heroes and villains was spectacular, and made for some exciting stories, using Beast World to show off the various corners of the DC Universe.
Now, that’s not to say to Titans: Beast World doesn’t have its problems. The reveal of who Doctor Hate is, and her ultimate destiny in the story, is another callback to New Teen Titans that left a lot of fans cold. However, for the most part, those problems don’t outweigh the story’s strengths. Titans: Beast World had a lot riding against it, but the fact that it was able to succeed in nearly every way shows that the naysayers may have been wrong to not give the story a chance.
Titans: Beast World Broke the Crisis Formula
DC event comics are known for one thing more than anything else — multiversal shenanigans that “change everything forever”, but really just either destroy or recreate the multiverse for the umpteenth time. DC’s various Crises are amazing event books, but the fact that there have been so many of them robs them of their impact. Titans: Beast World doesn’t fit into the normal DC event formula, and that’s a very good thing. In fact, Titans: Beast World feels more like a Marvel event than a DC one.
Titans: Beast World shows off everything great about the DC superhero community while giving readers a story that took things in new directions. Superhero comics aren’t known for their novelty, so the fact that so much of Titans: Beast World revolves around not being like what came before is a much bigger deal than most people realize. Titans: Beast World isn’t a perfect story, but there are few comics that are. However, it does everything rather well, and deserves its flowers.
