Tiny Titans: Welcome to the Treehouse

Those of you who know me in RL have heard my superhero rant before--big industry (I'm talking about you, Hollywood!) promotes its superhero summer blockbusters to young children (buy the happy meal toy! the lunch box! the coloring book! the pajamas!) when the material really isn't age-appropriate. I find myself regularly explaining to parents of preschoolers that no, there really isn't anything about Batman on our shelves that's likely to appeal to their 3-year old in terms of content, illustrations, or length of text, no matter whether or not the child has already seen the movie. Ditto for the 6, 7 & 8-year olds. (Yeah, there's another rant in there about taking them to the movie in the first place, but I'll spare you that for the moment.) While there've been a few beginning reader series over the years that have helped fill the kid-friendly superhero void a bit, they go out of print, and when they go, they go fast. Thankfully, we're seeing some new offerings these days. The Big Two (DC and Marvel) have recently been publishing more kid-friendly superhero comics and even (gasp!) chapter-books. And I'm here today to tell you about my new favorite from DC:


Collecting issues #1-8 of Tiny Titans, TINY TITANS: WELCOME TO THE TREEHOUSE (ISBN 9781401220785) is a must-have superhero title for young children. Written by Art Baltazar & Franco (Patrick the Wolf Boy!) with art by Baltazar, it's an exceedingly cute and funny look at the teen titans as young children. They've got the powers, costumes, and personalities their later teen and adult selves would evidence but all of the emo, the angst, and the age-inappropriate baggage has been removed. This is a truly kid-friendly, all-ages title that shows the young sidekicks/super-hero wannabes attending elementary school (their teachers are all super-villains, though the most villainous thing they do is assign homework), exploring the Batcave (watch out for the penguins!), reveling in their first crush, making new friends, finding the perfect pet, and doing "battle" with their future nemeses on the playground. The humor here (horrible knock-knocks and all) is sure to appeal to anyone 4th grade on down but there are also some serious issues being addressed. Raven, Rose, and Robin all struggle to find their own identities and disassociate themselves with their sometimes embarrassing parental figures (Trigun, The Terminator, and Batman, respectively.) Cassie learns the hard way to be true to her self and to not let her peers dictate her sense of fashion. And Starfire gets a close-up look at what it means to be a two-faced friend.

Things, meanwhile, that made me howl with utter glee:

*Alfred putting the intrepid explorers, penguins and all, into the time-out corner.

*"Tiny Titans versus the Fearsome Five : The Winners Get to Use the Swings!"

*Aqua Lad's pet fish, Fluffy.

*The "How many Beast Boy Alpacas Can You Count? (Hint: They're the Green Ones)" activity page.

*Cyborg as Easy-Bake Oven

There's a lot here to appeal to adult fans of the Titans and a number of in-jokes that may go over the heads of anyone unfamiliar with the older-audience fare, Principal "They call him The Terminator" Slade, for example. As such, Tiny Titans is good clean fun for the whole family. Go check it out now!