The New Teen Titans #16-22

The New Teen Titans #16-22

Originally released in 1982

Written by Marv Wolfman

Art by George Perez

This newest batch of Teen Titans issues serves an an introduction to the villain Brother Blood, elaborates further on H.I.V.E.'s goals and motives, and also gives more focus to Wally West, who up until now had been either pining over Raven or debating on whether he should be a college student or a superhero.  One issue consists of a letter to his parents, where we get more insight into how he feels about his teammates, and some insight into his conservative leanings, which are limited to being staunchly anti-Russian and his strong religious faith so far.

Love and loss drives much of these plots forward - after Robin claims not to see Starfire in a romantic light, she falls madly (and more than a little naively) in love with a man named Franklin who, unsurprisingly, has ulterior motives; he's been hired by H.I.V.E. to lure her into a trap.  Starfire remains blissfully unaware of this, even believing his claims that he plans to marry her when they've only known each other for a few weeks at most.

As the "and loss" part of the previous comment indicates, this doesn't end well; Franklin gets cold feet about betraying the Titans, and is killed as a result, with Starfire being none the wiser about how Franklin was working for the team's enemies.  Another Starfire also has issues with romance (in this case, a Russian man named Leonid Kovar) - he worked with the original Teen Titans (back when it was more of a Junior Justice League), and he comes to US because a minor employee of the USSR chose to use Leonid's fiancée (who's named Maladi) as the vector for a fatal disease out of a misplaced grudge against all Americans.  The panels of Maladi unknowingly infecting people with a touch are eerily prescient.

For a hat trick, Cyborg also suffers in a similar manner - after the parents of his first girlfriend forced her to break up with him, his ex-girlfriend joined the Church of Brother Blood.  In trying to escape from them, she's killed, causing Cyborg to lash out and swear to do the same to Brother Blood.  He doesn't get to follow through with it, as Brother Blood escapes, but I feel like this is going to have an impact on Cyborg's character going forward.  (I'm not sure if Brother Blood will be a Cyborg-specific foe or if he'll remain one for the entire team)

H.I.V.E. remains one step ahead of the team, and Brother Blood manages to manipulate them, but one villain who really gets the short end of the stick here is Doctor Light.  Despite having incredible powers and being introduced as taking on the entire Justice League, here Light is a bumbling fool who runs to the Titans for help after he accidentally summons creatures from Hindu mythology, and he has a one-sided rivalry with the Riddler where the Riddler is portrayed as the better/more effective one, and the Riddler is presumably unaware of Doctor Light's anger.

Other members of the team haven't gotten a lot to do when it comes to development (Robin and Raven have a recurring plot point where Robin tries to get Raven to open up about her emotions, Raven wants to be more open, but she can't bring herself to do that; Wonder Girl is Starfire's roommate who's concerned about her well-being after Franklin's death), though given the cliffhanger ending of issue 22, that could change.  These issues were all right, though I hope some progress is made with the H.I.V.E. plot soon - it feels like it's dragging a bit, especially when all of the members of its leadership are cloaked figures with no defining personalities or characteristics. (all we really get is that they're a group of scientists who lost battles to various superheroes, which means that they could be anyone from Lex Luthor to the Bug-Eyed Bandit, or even characters who were just background henchmen working in a lab or characters who hadn't appeared before and were beaten up by heroes off-screen)