Teen Titans #26

You Can't Go Home Again

Written by Scott Lobdell
Breakdowns: Scott McDaniel
Pencils: Tyler Kirkham
Inks: Art Thibert and Dan Green
Letters: Travis Lanham
Color: Arif Prianto and Stellar Labs
Cover: Booth, Rapmund and Dalhouse
Assistant Editor: Anthony Marques
Editor: Mike Cotton
Group Editor: Eddie Berganza
Superboy created by Jerry Siegel
By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family

Our cover shows a flashback of Bar Torr dressed in the black-and-blue suit we saw in some of the previous flashbacks, but not all. He's surrounded by rubble and chaos, holding an injured 30-year-old woman. (She's throwing me off because she looks exactly like Brett Booth's Iris West, but he drew this cover before he took over The Flash. I guess he can only draw so many female body types.) In an odd, but slightly interesting effect, transparent images of Kid Flash and the Teen Titans are seen in the background. I guess that's to represent them reliving this memory, even though in the story they're literally just watching a TV screen.

Our story begins with Bar Torr finally remembering everything about himself. He was the son of two missionaries on Altros Prime who incurred the wrath of the Functionary. They sent a goon squad called the Purifiers to brutally murder Bar's parents, while the 8-year-old boy hid in a crawl space with his baby sister, Shira (who, by the way, was the fattest, ugliest baby you've ever seen). As the Purifiers torched Bar's apartment, he leapt out the window with Shira in his arms. It was a long fall, but Bar miraculously landed unharmed in a pile of mud.

Little Bar and the improbably fat Shira spent the next few years living on the street, starving, stealing and doing what they had to survive. One time, Bar broke into a man's store, and when the man threatened Shira, Bar killed the man with a large shard of glass. Bar realized it was too difficult to protect his sister, so he left her at a convent called the Sisterhood of the Word.

With his newfound freedom, Bar decided to enlist with the Purifiers, realizing he was too young to kill them. The Purifiers immediately put him to work as one of their delivery boys. Orphans were expendable and children were small and light, allowing them to put more contraband into the tiny ships that rocketed across the galaxy on three-day voyages. Bar made about two dozen of these trips until one day he crashed on a planet. Somehow, someway, this crash gave him super speed. He doesn't know if it was the radiation in his ship or if the near-death experience merely activated a latent metagene.

For some reason, it took a whole month for the Purifiers to come looking for their cargo. Empowered with super speed, Bar began striking back against the Purifiers and Functionary. He got himself a black-and-blue outfit, recruited an army and stole some ships which he decorated with the Flash logo. They went from planet to planet, liberating the people from the Functionary. But one day, Bar' sister was wounded during an attack led by Bar, and he mournfully cradled her body like on the cover. It's unclear whether she was an innocent bystander or a soldier fighting against Bar's forces. And strangely, she looks about 10 years older than him, even though she's supposed to be seven years younger.

Bar couldn't live with himself after nearly killing his sister, so he surrendered to the Functionary and told them everything about his rebellion. In exchange for his information, Bar was placed in witness protection, which involved sending him back to the 20th century under the name Bart Allen (for whatever insane reason). It's unclear whether Bar's memory loss was the result of the time traveling or a deliberate action of the Functionary.

Anyway, after Bar's story concludes, he tells his friends that he's changed since then and they know what's in his heart now after all their adventures together. But none of them, not even Solstice, can look Kid Flash in the eye.




Argh! So many inconsistencies! That's what happens when you have a writer slowly leak out tiny bits of a story over a two-year period, when he hasn't even written the story yet! But let's set everything aside and look at just this issue. Bar's actions were completely justified. The Functionary and Purifiers were abhorrent, evil entities that brutally murdered kind people just trying to practice their religion. If Bar didn't slice that man's throat with the glass, his sister would have been raped. And his rebellion was an act of heroism. Who cares how many people he killed? They're at war! Soldiers know what they're signing up for!

The only potentially creepy aspect of Bar's backstory was last issue's scene of him surrounded by blood and skulls in his green-and-yellow uniform. But that was never explained. This issue only portrayed him as a heroic, courageous young man, who grew up in a tough world of conflict, and did what he had to survive, while helping as many people as possible. So why are the Teen Titans so uncomfortable around Bar? And just as a reminder, the current roster of the Teen Titans features an evil impersonator disguised as Superboy and Raven, who is still secretly working for Trigon. How many double agents can one team handle?

Oh, and can we talk about Lobdell's super lame explanation for Bar's powers? The Flash made a point of emphasizing that Kid Flash isn't connected to the Speed Force. So where DID his powers come from? Just luck? And why did the Functionary in its infinite wisdom give Bar Torr the name Bart Allen? This is impressively lazy writing. You have to look hard to find another comic created with as little thought as this one.

Channel 52 talks about Justice League 3000, a series that takes place in a future that is completely different from the future the Teen Titans are currently visiting. Because, you know, it'd be too much to ask these creators to talk to each other.

Next time, we'll take a very quick look at the short-lived Green Team series.