I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: May 20, 2023] Teen Titans: Beast Boy

Kami Garcia has written (and Gabriel Picolo has illustrated) a trilogy of books about Raven and Beast Boy from the Teen Titans.

I only know about Teen Titans from teen Titans Go! which I think is hilarious and (which I realized years after watching it) has nothing really at all to do with the actual Teen Titans who are serious (and kind of dull in a DC comics way).

But these stories are interesting and seem to be breaking out of the darkness that DC is under with these lighter (but not nearly as light as Teen Titans Go!) origin stories.

As with all comic book characters, origin stories are canon.  Until they need to be modified for the new series. I don’t know what the actual origin stories of either of these characters are, but I enjoyed these quite a bit.

This story begins in Georgia where teenaged Garfield Logan (Beast Boy) has a bucket list that mostly includes gaining weight and muscle.  As he leaves the house, his parents ask him if he has taken his Aminotrianidol, to which he says yes, just like every day.  This is a supplement that they say he absolutely must take every day.

Garfield and his friend Stella drive to the county fair to watch their friend Daniel ‘The Tank” Tanaka win a hot dog eating contest.  Stella is an online gamer with thousands of followers.  Garfield is bummed because he doesn’t have a thing that he’s good at.

Garfield fears that the supplements he takes are impacting his growth, so he abruptly stops taking them.  He also agrees to a daring stunt–eating a super duper hot pepper in front of the school tough guys.  He eats it and something happens in his brain that seems to mess with his DNA.  It also means the pepper doesn’t burn him.  But when the coolest guy in school tries to prove the pepper is not so hot he burns his mouth just by touching it.

Overnight Gar grows several inches and the kids in school start calling him Beast Boy.  And he finds out that his pepper stunt has made him internet famous.

And soon he starts doing more things to flood the internet. Like stealing a school’s mascot (and also releasing all of the animal test patients–which they swore  they didn’t have– from their captivity).  The mascot is a giant snake who seems to like him.  He also winds up with a monkey in his backpack.

Suddenly Gar is very popular and he also notices some other changes–like his ability to transform into other animals as needed.

His parents are concerned for his sudden growth spurt and they wonder why Slade Wilson (who we saw in the Raven book) is in town.  Turns out Slade is there to capture Gar for study.  So his parents tell him the truth.  While they were working for H.I.V.E., they were studying vaccine research.   Young Gar contracted da deadly disease called sakutia.  They injected him with antibodies from a money–a monkey that was immune to the disease.

When something impressive happens to Gar, he decides once and for all to get to the bottom of things and meet Slade.  Just like Raven planned to do at the end of book one.