Written By: Ivan Cohen
Art By: Marcelo Dichiara and Franco Riesco
Published By: DC
Don’t let the cover fool you, nothing interesting happens in this issue. Not to jump the gun or anything, but I’ve always been mildly frustrated with comic book covers that are downright misleading.
In issue #24 of Teen Titans Go!, the team discovers that Beast Boy has been collecting everyone’s mail in a mail room but neglecting to tell anyone that there is a mail room. While everyone goes through the piles of old letters that need sorting, the team discovers that they’re overdue for renewal of their super team registration form, which legitimizes them as super heroes in a legal sense. The book continues on with a typo of the team’s name bringing their very group into question, but overall nothing entertaining comes out of these events.
The strength of the Teen Titans Go! animated series on Cartoon Network comes partially from these overly-mundane activities like filing paperwork or sorting the mail and turning them into funny situations because we’re looking at super heroes doing it. There’s typically some levity and hyperbolic emotion that comes with something like accidentally registering the team as the “Ten Titans”, but in this comic we don’t get any of that. Raven uses magic to hold up some letters in one panel and Beast Boy turns into an octopus to hold up letters in one panel, but that’s the full extent of super powers at play in this book. They could have easily rewritten this issue with a lot more zany mail sorting and I would have given it a 7/10 on that basis alone.
Mail sorting can be hilarious because it’s so painfully boring. In fact, maybe the Titan’s greatest foe in a book like this should be monotony, but the issue really presents no conflict or progress. There’s no life lesson to be learned and no challenge to overcome; they just organize their mail and then resubmit a form to try again. The only thing I cared about in the entire book was their local mailman Ray, because I have a great deal of respect for postal workers and the hard work they put into keeping our bureaucratic world functioning on a daily basis.
While I can’t give Teen Titans Go! a high score, I do want to offer a salute to our boys in light blue.
