It's not a secret by now that the Titans titles at DC Comics are in desperate need of a revamp. Unfortunately, someone higher-up seemed to decide that "Blackest Night" would be the perfect chance for a "Blackest Night: Titans" mini-series. I can't decide which was a worse idea, pushing this out into its own mini-series (instead of running it in the pages of "Titans"), or thinking that this sounded like a fun comic to read.

"Blackest Night: Titans" is less a continuous narrative and more of a series of scenes containing gratuitous violence. I know that zombies are big these days, but "The Walking Dead" or "Left 4 Dead," it's not. Instead we get charming scenes like Donna Troy getting bitten by the rotting corpse of her dead son (who seems to have also regressed to a baby), or a former Titan getting her heart ripped out of her chest. This isn't fun, it's not even entertaining. It's just a gross-out comic, where each scene tries to be more disturbing than the one before.

Of course, it's not helping matters that Ed Benes is drawing the book. Benes' art is infused with T&A, from ass shots of Dove, to Donna Troy running around in her underwear that seems to hike up more and more as the book progresses. And I know that while there's some lone fan out there that has been hoping to see a zombie Terra's inner thighs, I will also make a guess that there was no one else at all who would be pleased at that visual. I will give Benes credit that up until now I don't ever recall him drawing male T&A, so at least it's not entirely one-sided for a change.

All in all, though, this comic is cringe-inducing levels of bad. Characters in comics are often walking exposition factories, but J.T. Krul's script goes even further here. I can't imagine someone, upon being in a tower that's shaking apart, to stop and calmly say, "The last thing we needed was an earthquake right now." (Of course, when you consider that they also were just fighting Terra, it's also a slightly naïve comment.) It's sad, because I'm enjoying "Blackest Night," as well as the tie-in issues in "Green Lantern" and "Green Lantern Corps." This comic, though, is tarnishing the crossover by association. Hopefully no one will assume the main story is this bad.