Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The Peace Corps. The toughest job the Teen Titans will ever love. Teen Titans #1


Okay, this was a weird issue, with a LOT of loose ends. First of all, the Titans are asked to join the Peace Corps, which their adult counterparts are THRILLED with. Now I'm all about superheroes standing for good citizenship, but this is the most heavy-handed piece of DC propaganda since "Superman's mission for President Kennedy". Also, I'm not sure the Peace Corps took non-U.S. citizens, so how did Wonder Girl and Aqualad join up?

The Teen Titans are sent to a town called Xochatan, "high in the Andes mountains of South America" to build a dam. They've been sent there because the dam-building project keeps being sabotaged by an evil spirit named "El Conquistadore" who takes the form aof a 50-foot-tall conquistador. El Conquistadore seems to be trying to stop the dam because if the river is dammed up, it will flood the valley, submerging an ancient temple.

You would think that someone, anyone, would say "hey, that's an important piece of local history and it could be of great cultural and scientific benefit and MAYBE we should build our dam FURTHER UPSTREAM!!" But no. The Teen Titans whale the tar out of El Conquistadore and the shape-changing Beast-God of Xochatan and get the dam built on schedule.

Also amusing: one of the principal characters names is Juan Valdez, like the guy in the old Columbian coffee ads.

2 comments:

  1. Flooding of ancient ruins as a result of building dams, unfortunately, is not that uncommon. (e.g. Glen Canyon Dam in the U.S. or Aswan in Egypt)

    Of course, there were no ancient spirits sabotaging those projects ...

    Or were there?

    7

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