The Teen Titans are an iconic team, featuring Robin, Beast Boy, Starfire, Kid Flash, Superboy, and Wonder Girl. You'll be happy to know that this team has only about half of that.
The New 52 has this problem of fixing things that aren't broken (and not fixing the broken parts). Like taking Tim Drake and no longer having him been Robin he's just straight Red Robin. The problem is that in this he mentions being Robin... what? Yes, it's totally confusing, not to mention, unnecessary.
Reading this version of Teen Titans was similar to what it would be like waking up inside the dreams in Inception. Everything seems somewhat familiar, yet it's muddled and cloudy.
The characters include the previously mentioned Red Robin, Superboy (wearing a Tron style costume and bro-tastic barcode Superman "S" tattoo), Kid Flash, and Wonder Girl. Beast Boy and Starfire have been replaced with generic and boring "heroes" whose names are not worth learning: a cloud lady and a giant spider lady that acts like the Hulk.
By far one of the worst new characters is Bunker. First off, his name makes absolutely zero sense, he doesn't turn into rock or conjured protective force fields. He can create lavender constructs such as giant fists or part of a brick wall. Secondly, his costume is just plain awful, it's maroon and purple. Lastly, DC tried to make Bunker (aka Miguel Barragan) the "Miles Morales Spider-Man" of the Titans. What I mean is they tried to cram several minority qualities into him by making him both gay and Hispanic. Now before you jump to conclusions, I am all for diversity in comics, but diversity means making people on a team diverse not shoveling ever single diverse quality into one character. I'm fine with him being both gay and Hispanic, because honestly it doesn't matter. As long as he kicks ass, I don't care.
My main problem is that DC tries to ram it down your throat by making it so obvious and not being tasteful. For instance, every other word he says is some cookie cutter Spanish word that makes Speedy Gonazles look politically correct. Also, when they travel to a different place he always has a ton of clothes with him and is constantly changing outfits. It's basically a caricature and it comes off very tasteless. Come on, DC if you're going to diversify characters, do it correctly and don't make it an over the top farce of how you think people would act.
Despite all of this the story is somewhat decent. It's the same story we've seen before, people are after a hero, the Teen Titans are protecting her, Superboy is bad, etc. But it plays out really well.
There's an awesome part where Kid Flash's costume gets destroyed so he runs and gets an old Robin costume (yeah I know) and draws a lightning bolt over the "R."
I would hope that in the future of this title we see Beast Boy and some other more familiar and useful faces. Also, I hope they have gotten the "hey we're being diverse" attitude out of the way and can really start giving meaningful and tactful story lines to Bunker and the other two characters.
Teen Titans Vol 1: It's Our Right to Fight gets a 6 out of 10 Red Robins.
RAWR(for more)
