Pet Sounds

Tiny Titans #14

It’s time for another meeting of the Tiny Titans Pet Club. Today, the meeting is being held at Paradise Island, where all the boys have to stand on tables so they don’t touch the ground. We get to meet Cassie’s pets, Matilda the Minotaur (who looks an awful lot like Elsie the Borden Cow), Yooni the Unicorn (who really is quite cute), and Cecelia the Cyclops (whose mother wants to eat everyone). We also get the enduring question of what the heck kind of critter Lagoon Boy is, as well as an episode with Cyborg’s new out-of-control vacuum cleaner. And we close things out with a shapechanging contest between Beast Boy and Miss Martian.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Just ridiculously cute. Yeah, it’s probably designed for the younger side of the All-Ages set, but I still think it’s good fun for grownups, too.

Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #34

It’s a time travel adventure, as Spider-Man, Hulk, Tigra, and Ant-Man get caught up in a rogue time vortex, along with Sgt. Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos. They play with some dinosaurs in the year 230,000,000 B.C., they eat pancakes with Abraham Lincoln, Tigra gets painted by Toulouse-Lautrec (“Hulk likes tiny man’s hat.”), and they head back to ancient Egypt, where they tangle with some Egyptians inexpertly wielding modern weapons. All that, plus Tigra gets mistaken for Bast, the Egyptian goddess of cats.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’ve been a bit burned out on time travel stories lately, thanks to the unending confusion in the “Booster Gold” series, but this one was pretty good. Excellent comedy, with some excellent blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em cameos, and some wildly goofball time travel fun. I wish they’d had something more for the Howling Commandos to do, though, as they mostly tended to stay in the background and react to stuff the Avengers were doing.