Perhaps unfairly, I grant, Tom Taylor’s Dawn of DC Titans feels like a failed experiment to me. Despite success with Titans: Beast World, a really good event comic, a lot of Taylor’s Titans felt like just bucking up his Nightwing run. To wit, the Titans were just there in Bludhaven one day, with no story points as to what lives they were leaving to rejoin the group; I defy the reader to tell me much about Donna Troy or Starfire based on this series alone.

That culminates in Titans Vol. 2: The Dark-Winged Queen, which does find its way to some good heart in the end, but is also a Raven/Trigon tale. That is, for what’s only Taylor’s second main Titans storyline and what turns out to be his final one before he unceremoniously departs, Taylor writes the story that in broad strokes is the same story just about every other Titans writer has done.

It’s enjoyable — in Taylor’s way, the characters are reasonable and act essentially exactly how you’d hope — but it doesn’t do much to establish an aesthetic for the Titans going forward, any different than most people’s baseline Titans recollection. And indeed, what little I’ve seen so far of John Layman’s Titans to follow has the group bickering like children again; that’s not on Taylor alone, but the lack of a strong first year for Titans, at least insofar as focused on the team itself and not serving the greater needs of the DCU, can’t have helped.

[Review contains spoilers]

Let me make clear, there’s pages upon pages of good stuff in Dark-Winged Queen. If Raven and her corruption by Trigon is old hat, then I did at least like Trigon involved in a few more machinations than simply being a rampaging giant. Taylor wrangles the various children of Trigon that others have invented over the years, with Trigon variably pitting them against Raven and each other. Also, while Amanda Waller making deals with Trigon puts her more in the villain category than I think is quite in character, Trigon among the boardrooms is a sight to behold.

Taylor’s Nightwing is unmatched, of course, and we have everything from Dick Grayson getting LED alerts on his escrima sticks to the fact that Dick also has a backup personality in case of mind control, called Circ-En-Arrh (took me a minute), only his lacks the nasty world domination tendencies of Batman’s (artist Lucas Meyer particularly shines in that sequence, too). I was pleased to see Apex Ava again, Taylor’s Beast Boy-centric villain and one of the few new characters introduced around this series; even as Vanadia, Taylor’s Titans-Amazo, comes and goes very fast, I thought Taylor did well making her an empathetic character in a relatively small space.

Something we already knew, but Taylor is funny; there’s some lofty speak about how Olympian messenger Hermes, bringing warning to Donna, is moving too fast for mortals to see, and then Flash is like, “Hey, it’s Hermes.” Apex Ava threatens, grotesquely, to wear Beast Boy’s skin on her face, and a worked-up Beast Boy shouts back, “Not if I wear your face first!,” bringing the scene to a hilarious standstill. And though I think this is used too often to bad effect, having Raven, imbued with all the Titans' powers, saying “Booyah” as she fires Cyborg’s arm cannon seems about the right time to use that.

I’ll give it to Taylor, too, for making the (almost) end suitably Titans-esque. It’s a great moment when Raven trades her crown made of demons for one made of her friends, a kind of Mighty Morphin Power Titans, a twist that was surprising but seems obvious in retrospect. But here again, that Taylor’s story works is both a blessing and a curse. The story comes down to accepting one’s feelings and Raven and Beast Boy both understanding they have the capacity for good and evil within themselves, which feels genuinely like a Titans story — though only because it’s already been done so many times.

“Dark Raven” can’t destroy the Titans because she secretly feels for them; Donna Troy is nearly killed by a rogue robot; Raven stabs Trigon through the heart in a splash reminiscent of Deathstroke and Jericho in “Titans Hunt” — it might be fine for Taylor to play the Titans greatest hits had we more pages, but not when the book screeches to a jolting halt in the final issue. For a moment Raven even returns to her white-suited form, but that’s reversed as of the final page, another callback that ultimately doesn’t signal anything.

“Dark-Winged Queen” takes up eight issues, so it’s not exactly fair to say Taylor rushes. But after Raven's healed, there’s just two pages of epilogue, and those involve the Titans breaking in to Waller’s office — set up, essentially, for Absolute Power. Layman’s issues will deal with the Titans being demoted from League status, but here again, it all feels rather unceremonious; the Titans themselves haven’t been the focus either on the way in nor on the way out, and it adds up to a Titans story that didn’t really do all that much with the Titans.

In between battles with demons, Tom Taylor’s Titans Vol. 2: The Dark-Winged Queen sees the Titans cleaning up after a hurricane and also protecting the democratically elected president of a foreign country. It’s an example of heroes for justice, not pounding supervillains, that we’ve also seen in Taylor’s Superman: Son of Kal-El and Nightwing, and which is refreshing, though at times Taylor doesn’t treat the idea as significant as it is. Maybe if some of that could have been espoused more — if Titans had a raison d’etre at all — that might have shored it up for what’s to come. If we lose this title in a year or so, when Taylor clearly had the basis to make it work, well, more’s the pity.

[Includes original and variant covers]