Alright, so I’m a glutton for punishment. Had I any sense, I wouldn’t be going anywhere near Titans with a ten-foot barge pole ever again, after its craptacular introductory issue last month. But on the other hand… well, where’s the fun in that? Besides, we’ve had quite a good week so far with excellent issues of Batman and Captain Britain and MI:13, so it’s about time something got a good kicking. And Titans is certainly worthy of that honour. Somehow, this second issue manages to be even worse than the first, and consequently turns the series into a bona fide, Ultimates 3-esque car crash of a comic – and like all the best car crashes, it’s one from which you simply can’t wrench your bleeding eyes.

It’s hard to know where to start with this, really, but we may as well look at it sequentially, since some of the most painful-to-read moments come in the first few pages. An opening full-page splash of Argent, tied down, writhing and sweating, is hardly an auspicious beginning, and does little to suggest that the change in artist (Joe Benitez filling in for the injured Ian Churchill) will do anything to decrease the amount of pandering wank fodder. Turn the page, meanwhile, and we’re immediately given the first example of the absolutely painful dialogue that Winick litters throughout the book. And I’m not kidding, there – some of this dialogue actually gives you a headache. Check out this gem, spoken on page two by the mystery (and soon-to-be-eaten) villain : “We will manage a whole hell of a lot more if you don’t tell us right now who you’re working with?”

Just chew that over for a moment. Takes a couple of goes to actually get through, doesn’t it? And even if you can get round the awful syntax, does anyone know what that question mark is doing there? And isn’t this exactly the sort of thing that editors get paid to spot (particularly as this issue has not only an editor, but an assistant editor credited)? But amazingly, the writing actually gets worse, even if the sentence construction is never quite that bad again. Take the first appearance of the Titans, which sees Nightwing declaring “Yes. ‘Way’” after bursting in and stopping the demon shark thing that had eaten said villain (I say that that’s what happened, but I’m working by assumption here – because the storytelling is so unclear that it’s certainly not communicated on the page.) I genuinely had to check if I wasn’t missing a page – because that “Yes way” is in response to nothing. Nobody said “No way”. Nobody said anything, in fact. So again, I have to ask – what was it doing there?

Those are just a couple of specific examples, but they serve to illustrate how amateurish the writing throughout the book is. Winick is a professional writer with many years’ experience in the industry – so I simply don’t understand why he’s suddenly writing like a 14-year-old. He has absolutely no grasp of characterisation, instead trading in broad tropes – Nightwing is the stern one who says nothing unless it’s relevant to the plot, Beast Boy is the “funny one”, and so is constantly spouting lengthy dialogue that has the shape and form of jokes and wisecracks without ever actually being them (imagine someone with no sense of humour trying to “do” Joss Whedon, and you’re pretty much there), and Starfire never uses contractions in her speech, presumably because she’s an alien. I’m guessing she upped and decided to do this recently, as it’s never been a characteristic of her dialogue before now. But then again, Winick has Beast Boy turn into some kind of weird anthropomorphic cape-wearing goat thing at one point, so let’s not act like he’s ever actually read a Titans book before taking on this one.

What really renders this issue worse than the first and pushes Titans into full-on disaster territory, though, is Benitez’s art, which manages the unfathomable achievement of making me yearn for Ian Churchill. It’s a quite frankly startling mashup of the current favoured DC style (you know, those scratchy Jim Lee-esque pencils traded in by the likes of Michael Turner, Ed Benes and Churchill) and Humberto Ramos’ elongated, manga-ish cartoonery. And it looks utterly rank. There’s next to no facial consistency in his characters, the storytelling is desperately unclear at times, and he still manages to have every female character burst forth from the page like a lingerie model. The absolute nadir of this is a sequence in which Raven visits her father in Hell – and, for some god unknown reason, is wearing nothing more than what appear to be strips of duct tape across her body. I’m not sure if her personification in Hell is supposed to be the same body that she inhabits on earth or not – the huge tits would suggest otherwise – but even if she’s not supposed to be a high-school-aged girl, the fact that Benitez has clearly drawn her naked and then hastily added the “costume” lines (at times they don’t even fit the contours of her body) is no more forgivable. As I’ve said before, I’m no prude, and I have no objection to sexuality in comics if it’s done in any kind of mature fashion – but this adolescent crap just irritates the hell out of me.

Ally the dreadful artwork, vapid dialogue and piss-poor storytelling to a plot that holds just no interest whatsoever (the “revelation” at the end of this issue is that Trigon has another offspring besides Raven. Wooo. Wonder if they’ll be good or evil?) and which has largely been told by the characters rather than actually happening on the page, and you’ve got all the ingredients for an absolute catastrophe of a book. And it’s not even bad in an entertaining way, not really. It’s just depressing. It probably needs a couple more issues of this before it can be spoken of in the same breath as Ultimates 3 and All-Star Batman, but you have to hand it to Winick – he’s having a hell of a crack at getting there.