I must admit that it’s been over a decade since I’ve followed the inter-title continuity of western comic books. I couldn’t tell you which titles were involved in the Marvel Civil War, or give you a cogent description of what DC’s Countdown was about. So I don’t really know who Terra is. Or was. Apparently she had something to do with the Teen Titans. I inferred this while reading the four-shot series Terra.
Terra follows a young newcomer to the superhero scene of the DC continuity. She has been very busy recently, popping up from the Earth to save the day from all manner of subterrannean threats, saving coal miners, staunching rogue lava flows, et cetera. It’s all very heroic, and the behavior of the new heroine is markedly naive.
This series does something that I had grown alien back in the late 1980’s and 90’s when I was regularly following the convoluted plot conceits of superhumans-in-tights: it doesn’t really explain things. I don’t know who the first or second Terra were. I don’t know what their powers were, who they associated themselves with, what perils the faced, overcame, or were defeated by. I have no idea how powerful they were on a scale of The Question to Superman. Terra doesn’t bother telling me. It’s important that there were two previous metahumans named Terra that had similar powers to this title’s protagonist. That’s all I needed to know, and the writers were kind enough to leave it at that. If I hadn’t known who Hawkman or Geoforce were, it wouldn’t have mattered and they didn’t tell me. Thank you, Gray and Palmiotti, for keeping the continuity in your pants.
The art, by Amanda Connor, is interesting. Stylized with a fair amount of detail but leavin enough room for the colorist to get some detail in, she does a great job conveying motion, keeping it easy to follow from frame to frame in a way that many artists often fail to. The faces, however, showed some inconsistency that was a little disappointing. All four covers were great, but Connor falls into the trap of defining a character by a few overt features (costume, hair color & style), and lets things blur from there. In some scenes featuring Power Girl, I was certain that a change in coloring work would have rendered the two superheronies indistinguishable.
Overall, I found Terra to be a refreshing glimpse into the DC Universe. It didn’t smack me about the face and neck with seventy years of back-story. It told a story from beginning to end, showed character growth (terribly rare in superhero comics), and ended appropriately. The artwork was solid if not perfect, and is certainly worth picking up either individually or as its inevitable TPB.
