I liked issues 23 to 25 because it featured the Kingdom Come Teen Titans and actually gave them more dialog and personality then they had in the actual story, and the main villain was Dark Angel who is my all time favorite Titans villain and a sorely underused character.
Those three issues are the only ones of this run that I've read to date, and then mainly because Donna's my girl. I enjoyed them despite their flaws (I recall reading in the Wikipedia entry for Hypertime that Faerber's original plans for the story got watered down.) I might get the previous 21 issues, I'm not very familiar with Devin's other work, but I do love me some decent Titans stories.
So, I've managed over the past twenty months to add bargain-priced copies of most of the first 22 Titans issues.
I'll start with what I liked -- I absolutely *loved* Jay Faerber's opening 2-part arc (Titans #21-22), with the Titans initially protecting but ultimately fighting Cheshire, and Deathstroke crashing the party. Now THAT'S the way to do a Titans comic right!! And reading it also gave me a new perspective on the next arc, with Donna and the Kingdom Come Titans versus Dark Angel -- I enjoyed it for the first few reads, but compared to Faerber's awesome opening arc, it does pale quite a bit. I also found out in the interim (thank you, Glen Cadigan, for Titans Companion 2, which my favorite auntie gave me as a belated birthday present) that Faerber himself was not very happy with the end results.
As for the Grayson and Grayson/Faerber issues, and it pains me to report that if Gail Simone wasn't so full of herself, I'd probably say that Devin Grayson is an even more overrated writer than her.
Bucky's art was nice, but ultimately there's only so much a good artist can do with such listless, clumsy scripts. Dear Ladies & Lords, after reading Grayson's snail-paced, badly structured, and just plain dull Titans stories, I'm almost afraid to check out *any* of her Bat-Franchise work, even the early stuff that got such rave reviews.
I might get to her better Bat-works eventually, but I still need to put more distance between myself and those Titans issues. Gah.
Finally, I still haven't read any issues after 25, because I am aware that there was a change in editors. For all that can be said against Eddie Berganza, I feel he did do a bang-up job editing Peter David's entire run on Young Justice, and who knows what else he and Faerber could have done together on Titans in the long run? Andy Helfer, OTOH, never edited any DC book that I can honestly say I like. Staton/Englehart GLC? Sorry, no. JLI? Not my thing. And so on. I think firing Helfer was one of the few wise moves made by the post-Kahn DC executive board, and that it had been long overdue.
I also give Faerber a lot of credit for pulling his punches when talking about Helfer in Titans Companion 2. I hate it when editors are so effin' heavy-handed in the way they end up dictating the entire direction of the book to the actual writer!! And, really, what's Helfer actually written himself that was any good? The only reason I've kept my issues of his Deadman mini-series is because Garcia-Lopez drew it -- TBH, I can't recall for sure if I ever even got all the way through all four issues. So, well done, Jay, very classy. (Shameless plug: I think Faerber's relatively brief run on Generation X, with Terry & Rachel Dodson on art, was wonderful, even though it took a few reads to grow on me, and that his original series Dynamo 5 is also very underrated.)
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