Kami Garcia has mostly written for adults before, which is why it’s surprising just how easily she slips into the YA format. Neither of them are really the characters we know yet-but that’s part of the appeal.

Beast Boy, meanwhile, joined the story as a vegetarian teen with an odd medical condition and very secretive parents. We first met Raven as a troubled teen who recently lost her mother and gained a new foster sister, as well as some creepy powers and a tagalong demon. Ray: The first long-form narrative to come out of the DC young-adult graphic novel line concludes this week, with crime writer Kami Garcia and fanartist-turned-pro Gabriel Picolo uniting one more time to finally team up their two heroes. Teen Titans: Beast Boy Loves Raven – Kami Garcia, Writer Gabriel Picolo/Rob Haynes, Artist David Calderon, Colorist Ray – 8/10 Ages 13–up.Beast Boy Loves Raven cover via DC Comics.

Readers without prior knowledge of the character may be confused by the jumpy plot and vaguely developed characters, but Garcia’s exploration of the connection between memory and identity offers a promising entrée to the Teen Titans series. Picolo’s spare, effective use of color and slightly edgy art helps situate the story in a supernaturally tinged world of high-school drama.

Garcia (the Beautiful Creatures series) reframes Teen Titans comics character Raven as a young adult discovering her powers, focusing more on issues of identity and navigating teen social spaces than on superheroic battles (though this reboot has some of that, too).

Recovering her memories might explain these strange phenomena, but Raven isn’t sure she wants to be the person she was before. She also starts to have nightmares, hears the thoughts of people around her, and can seemingly cause bad things to happen just by thinking about them. There, she quickly bonds with her new foster sister and finds school friends while finishing her senior year. After an accident kills her foster mother and leaves Raven with amnesia, she is sent to New Orleans to live with her foster mother’s sister.

Raven titans book