The Stats
📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: Teen Titans: Raven
AUTHOR: Kami Garcia
ARTIST: Gabriel Picolo
@KamiGarcia @_picolo
Publisher: DC Ink @dccomics
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐
Published: July 2nd 2019
The Review
Raven is my favorite Teen Titan, hands down. She’s dark and spoopy, but with very real and relatable desires and goals. For those who don’t know her from the forty years she’s been in comics, Raven is the product of a nun and a demonic overlord. Her father, Trigon, intends to use her as a gateway into the real world, so her mother hid her away, then died, leaving her in the care of a foster mother who was in on the secret.
So, que this book, where the foster mother dies in a car wreck, and Raven gets sent to New Orleans to live with a friend of that foster mother. That friend is a voodoo priestess, so you can kinda see where she might be of help. That’s when her magical powers start kicking in: empathy and telepathy for the most part. All the while, the voice of her father keeps pounding at the back of her head.
Although this book happens before the Teen Titans: Beast Boy comic, I ended up reading it second. The order doesn’t matter a whole heck of a lot yet. Interesting things were done with color here. Most of the book is pretty monochrome. Color only starts to key in around spiritual and magical phenomena, which makes the paranormal feel more real than the normal. Interesting effect. The art by Picolo is at once teenage-sketchbook and refined, with heavy use of marker to color and emotive lineart that does a great job of informing you on what a character is thinking and what they are all about.
Sadly, though, I don’t feel like the book goes anywhere with the character that we haven’t already seen. It makes an attempt at doing a slice-of-life teen drama as her powers develop. It isn’t a horrible idea, but unless this is your first intro to the character, it falls a bit flat. I think that is because this was their first foray into the format, as Garcia made a much better showing in Beast Boy.
Summary
When a tragic accident takes the life of seventeen-year-old Raven Roth’s foster mom—and Raven’s memory—she moves to New Orleans to live with her foster mother’s family and finish her senior year of high school.
Starting over isn’t easy. Raven remembers how to solve math equations and make pasta, but she can’t remember her favorite song or who she was before the accident. When strange things start happening—things most people would consider impossible—Raven starts to think it might be better not to know who she was in her previous life.
But as she grows closer to her foster sister, Max, her new friends, and Tommy Torres, a guy who accepts her for who she is now, Raven has to decide if she’s ready to face what’s buried in the past…and the darkness building inside her.
From the #1 New York Times best-selling co-author of Beautiful Creatures Kami Garcia and artist Gabriel Picolo comes this first graphic novel in the Teen Titans series for DC Ink, Teen Titans: Raven.
I voluntarily read this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Trigon had nothing to do with it. Azerath Metrion Zinthos.