Year in Review: 2015

I spent most of 2015 in Boise, Idaho, before moving back down to Utah at the end of the year to start my current job at the Deseret News. And one of the most exciting moments for me was going to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens with my brothers. Most of the rest of the world saw it, too, as it earned a staggering $2 billion. Four other films also crossed the billion-dollar mark, including Avengers: Age of Ultron. Marvel also produced the surprising Ant-Man and the disastrous Fantastic Four. For the second straight year, DC was absent from the big screen. And the Academy Award for Best Picture went to Spotlight.

Bart Allen was almost nowhere to be found in 2015. We saw the Injustice version of him make an unspoken cameo before being killed unceremoniously in an atomic explosion. We also saw a teensy tiny cameo of Impulse at the end of the incomprehensible Convergence story. And then Bar Torr of the old New 52 randomly reappeared for no apparent reason. Nobody knows why. Nobody knows how. And apart from one out-of-character rant directed at Red Robin, everybody just acted as though Bar had been there all along. In fact, everybody consistently called him Bart. It was a complete and utter mess. Every issue of Teen Titans we reviewed had a different art team. And Scott Lobdell came back halfway through just to tear down everything Will Pfeifer was clumsily trying to build. It truly was miserable.

Best Story: DC Sneak Peek: Teen Titans

Every issue we reviewed this year was pitiful. The conclusion of the company-wide event Convergence was incredibly disappointing. The Injustice issue was bleak and brief. And each Teen Titans issue was worse than the previous one. So this award goes to a comic that wasn't even really a comic. And it wasn't that good, but it was the best we had. If you could look past the rather weak attempts of an intellectual discussion, this Sneak Peek did present a fairly interesting concept of a war between the top teen heroes of the time. I wanted to see what Kid Flash and Wonder Girl were going to do alongside Klarion and these others. I was hoping to have been thrust into a grand mystery with Manchester Black and potential mind control. None of those things panned out, though. But that fleeting feeling of optimism was nice.

Best Writer: Will Pfeifer

Last year's winner, Scott Lobdell, was once again eligible, but all he seemed to do was make things worse. Pfeifer was building up to a big fight between the Elite and Teen Titans, set against a supermax prison breakout. Sounds great, right? But then Lobdell hijacked that story to shove in a stupid, confusing Harvest cameo. Plus, Lobdell gets dinged for his failure on Convergence and completely forgetting that he set up Kid Flash and Power Girl for his Doomed crossover. So Pfeifer wins. Not for merit, but by default.

Best Artist: Kenneth Rocafort

Ethan Van Sciver, who won this award in 2000, was once again eligible for his near-microscopic inclusion of Impulse at the end of Convergence. But that combined with his thoroughly unpleasant covers of Teen Titans wasn't near enough to win. Granted, Rocafort didn't do much more, either, but he was the most competent artist we encountered this year. Yeah, he did draw Bar Torr as if he were Wally West. And I guess he deserves credit for changing Kid Flash's eyes from red to white (be that better or worse). But at the end of the day, all the other competition in this category was pretty awful.

Best Supporting Character: Red Robin

The original Tim Drake previously won this award in 2007, back when Bart Allen was the Flash. This Red Robin is the New 52 Tim Drake — a similar, but more annoying character. And he's actually kind of a surprising win this year, thanks entirely to the disjointed writing of Pfeifer and Lobdell. When Bar first came back, he sided with Wonder Girl and confusingly blamed Red Robin for sentencing him to life in prison. But as soon as Lobdell came back, he made Kid Flash completely and utterly devoted to Red Robin, acting as his personal body guard and checking in with him on every step of the fight. And, he made Bar's favorite memory the time he stole Tim's shirt, as opposed to any memory with Solstice. So Red Robin edges out Wonder Girl in this most confusingly written story arc.

Best Villain: Harvest

Regrettably, Harvest wins this award for the second time. He's just an improbably invincible villain, who can and will randomly pluck our characters away from whatever they're doing just to torment them. Usually, that torment involves head games and revisionist history. But also, he wins this award for being the true source of conflict in this stupid story. It's a bit convoluted, but hear me out. The only reason the Elite was against the Teen Titans was because Superboy had killed a bunch of aliens. And Superboy only killed them because Harvest had programmed him to do it. Manchester Black had no plan at all. He gathered the heroes, secretly gave Power Girl a new power, then idiotically ran straight to who he thought was Despero to beg for his help. Harvest's plan didn't make any sense, but at least he had one.

Next time, we'll begin 2016 by finally sending off Bar Torr once and for all.