Review of Teen Titans: Beast Boy

11/23/2024

OTHER REVIEWS IN THIS SERIES: Raven | Beast Boy | Beast Boy Loves Raven | Robin | Starfire

Beast Boy is the second installment in Kami Garcia's interlocking origin stories of the Teen Titans. If you're not a Titans aficionado, Beast Boy (a.k.a. Garfield "Gar" Logan) is one of the original Titan members. Gar contracted a rare illness called Sakutia as a child. His scientist parents cured him using an experimental serum extracted from a rare green monkey. The serum both saved Gar's life and gave him the ability to change into any animal form and create strong psychic bonds with animals of all kinds.

As the book opens, these facts are unknown to Gar. All he knows, as a semi-insecure teenage boy, is that his parents are making him take an amino acid supplement every day which he's convinced has kept him from growing taller or bulking up. (In reality, the supplement is suppressing his superpowers.) Despite a ravenous appetite and lots of working out, poor Gar can't put on any weight and his small size makes him feel unseen among his peers and invisible to the popular girl he adores.

In desperation, Gar decides to stop taking the supplement... and weird things begin to happen. Not only does he begin growing physically, but his confidence and impulsiveness balloon out of proportion. When he rashly decides to accept a local restaurant's challenge to eat a Carolina Reaper chili pepper, the pepper strangely has no serious effect on him — similar to a tree shew who can eat the peppers freely. Later, he shows almost catlike reflexes during dodgeball. Finally, he decides to pull an Instagram stunt by breaking into a laboratory and photographing himself with a local sport team's mascot — a massive ball python. In the process, the snake seems to form an attachment to Gar who feels compelled to free it and the laboratory's other captive animals.

With a little experimentation, Gar discovers that not only can he communicate with animals as he did with the python and the other lab animals — he can transform into them. His parents have hidden this from him all his life, but now that the, uh, cat's out of the bag, Gar wants answers.

Yet the answers (or the promise of them) don't come from Gar's parents, but rather a mysterious stranger called Slade Wilson. (Wilson was also a player in Raven and his true purpose remains unknown but seems nefarious.)

As with Raven, author Kami Garcia and illustrator Gabriel Piccolo do an amazing job of capturing teenage angst — even when it arises from the discovery of superpowers. Gar is a delightful underdog (no pun intended), whose false bravado turns out not to be so false after all. By the end of the book, Gar departs his home to meet Slade Wilson in Nashville... and something tells me Raven will be nearby.

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