Teen Titans 3

 
Teen Titans 3

The Sum of its Parts
DC Comics

2016

 

 

After finishing the third post-New 52 Teen Titans collection, I'm convinced that this would work better if it was episodic instead of serialized. The attempts to tell a truly ongoing story mostly seem to have resulted in a lot of foreshadowing that turns into dropped plot threads and storylines that make no sense.

 
So this time around, we start out with the Titans under arrest by someone named Alpha Centaurian. They inevitably escape, Kid Flash decides to go have his own adventures, and Chimera goes back to her home planet. Also Power Girl can turn giant now for some reason. Manchester Black and Superboy are entirely absent. I still don't really understand who was supposedly responsible for the various double-crosses at the end of the last volume.

 
Anyway, Superboy being framed for a massacre and the Teen Titans breaking into a supervillain prison have turned the public against them and against teenage vigilantes in general. This spells trouble for ... no, not the Wonder Girl gang we met before ... but instead 'the Robins' a different vigilante fan club that has never previously been mentioned. Red Robin runs off to help the Robins escape from the police and go into hiding at a posh boarding school, where apparently either all of them are students or else no one will mind a dozen strange boys showing up to live in the dorms suddenly.

 
While Red Robin is busy with that, the others get bored, and Raven receives some kind of psychic distress signal. They find Professor Pyg turning a bunch of people into zombie slaves. The zombies beat up the Titans and Professor Pyg steals several bags of blood from each of the Teens. Then they escape, but can't free the zombies, and also Professor Pyg escapes and gives the blood to Brother Blood who has plans for it. So like, was his brilliant plan to steal the Teen Titans' blood to commit a crime in an isolated lair without leaving any external clues and just wait for them to show up ???

 
Finally, in the most sensible story so far, Wonder Girl gets curious about her unknown father and is maybe receiving some kind of psychic or magical messages either from him or about him. She finds his severed, turned-to-stone head, gets ambushed by hyena men, and meets her Aunt Cassandra, who used to have the ability to command people with her voice, until Wonder Girl's dad wrecked her throat and she killed him.
 

Auntie claims to regret her actions and says she wants to find the Staff of Hermes to resurrect dad. Wonder Woman shows up and uses her Lasso of Truth and seemingly discovers that the aunt is telling the truth. Of course she is not, and there's some very ridiculous explanation for how she could lie despite Wonder Woman's magic. She uses the Staff to restore her magic voice that lets her command people, but then Wonder Girl wrecks her throat again, just like her dad did before.