Review: The Mighty Titan #1

By Reboot 

Back in August of last year, The Mighty Titan became a successfully funded Kickstarter project.  Created and written by Joe Martino with art by Luca Cicchitti, this is a deeply personal story from Martino using a superhero tale as a backdrop.  This is a review of issue #1 of 5.

Right off the bat, this is a story with a great deal of sincerity.  Not only sincerity in the sense that this is a story of personal struggle, but in the fact that Joe Martino is clearly a fan of silver age comics.  The references to Captain Marvel, the dialogue, and having a bank heist scene are all a testament to that.  I find that, for me at least, this is not entirely a positive.  The dialogue feels forced and at times is a chore to get through.  The clichés are all things that have been done more times than I could even attempt to address.  There was also a successful mini-series in Millar World, Superior, that has many similar themes to this story as well.

Moving away from the story itself, the art is actually quite good for this kind of project.  The work is tight and consistent.  It doesn't get too creative or experimental, but considering the silver age feel they seem to have been going for the artist was doing everything right to capture that.  I could see this kind of art in a BOOM! Studios book or something comparable.

Overall, I would say that The Mighty Titan is a great endeavour and I applaud Martino for having a successful Kickstarter to fund this mini-series.  Launching a successful Kickstarter campaign is not easy.  There are a great deal of comic book projects on there and they all don't make it.  While I do think it's fantastic, and I do think it's important that Martino told the story his way, I feel that doing this as a superhero story takes away from the overall impact of it.  The comic book medium is more than superheroes and the big two have an untouchable monopoly on that genre.  Nearly every smaller company has been moving away from trying to tell those stories to instead focus on other genres. Autobiographical comics like Howard Cruise's Stuck Rubber Baby and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home tackle personal struggles in a raw, stripped down narrative and have both received critical praise and solid sales.  I want to see more people push this medium I love further and I look forward to Joe Martino and Luca Ciccitti's contributions to it in the future.

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