Teen Titans 4
When Titans Fall
2017
When Titans Fall is the final post-New 52 / pre-Rebirth Teen Titans collection. This one continues to flirt with some ideas about contemporary digital celebrity and social media, but still doesn't seem to have much to say about them.
Red Robin is worried about the Titans' reputation and public image, and then discovers they're being mocked on a website that posts memes making fun of super-villains. He hacks the site, finds the owner, and goes to confront him. What he's hoping for is unclear, but possibly just to get the Titans content migrated to a site that makes fun of super heroes.
When they get to the site owners' apartment, they discover he's being held hostage by The Brain and Monsieur Mallah, who are mad that the villain site posted a meme about them too. The evil brain-in-a-jar and super-intelligent French gorilla escape to a nearby zoo, the Titans chase them, and Brain uses tiny robots that stick to people's skulls to mind-control all the zoo-goers and animals. Raven makes the robots fall off, and the Titans get good press by putting the escaped animals back in their cages.
During the zoo fight, Red Robin is kidnapped by Amanda Waller's security team. She wants to recruit him and/or the Titans into her Suicide Squad. The other Titans break into Waller's secret prison and rescue Red Robin.
Afterward, the psychic Hive Queen uses mind control to take over everyone in whatever city the Titans are in at the time. Red Robin's strategy and Raven's own psychic powers defeat her.
To relax afterward, the team goes to a nightclub, but the party drugs at this club cause people to turn into green animals. Uh oh! This is the work of Sister Blood, whose hideout is in the basement. She made the drugs using Beast Boy's blood that Professor Pyg sold to her. It turns out the animals turn back into people if you punch them enough, so the team does that, and also beats up Sister Blood.
Then Red Robin dies in between issues, which might be shown in a different comic, but wasn't included in this collection. In the final issue, the other Titans attend his wake, trade Red Robin stories, and decide to break up the team. It's implied that Damien Wayne Robin will try re-forming the Teen Titans in the future.
A pretty anti-climactic and out of nowhere ending. In this run, the Teen Titans started out popular, got more so, then became notorious, and now maybe went back to being beloved. A lot of ideas were introduced and then dropped unresolved. I would not point to this as a particularly successful run of Teen Titans stories.
In this volume specifically, Red Robin worried that the team couldn't function without him, saw that it could, thought about leaving the team to let them continue without him, then died off-camera, and the team immediately dissolved, showing that his emotional journey on that topic was just wishful thinking. Cool.
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