Teen Titans fans tend to love Marv Wolfman and George Pérez like Republican candidates love Ronald Reagan. It was therefore surprising, and a bit refreshing, to learn that new Titans writer Sean McKeever’s first point of reference with the group was not the classic Marv & George issues, but the “Titans Hunt” era of the early ‘90s.
That was not the best time to be reading New Titans (the “Teen” was dropped in 1989). Pérez had left the book for the second time about a year before, and “Titans Hunt” was a special 10th-anniversary storyline wherein every member of the team except Nightwing had gone missing. Thus, the roster was completely up for grabs and Nothing Would Ever Be The Same Again. As serialized entertainment for longtime fans, “Titans Hunt” was decent, but I can’t imagine how a newcomer would react. Oddly enough, though, “Titans Hunt” did shake up the status quo, and nothing ever was the same again, in part because the book went downhill pretty quickly not long after it concluded.
But I digress. Marv and George had built their collective reputation long before, on four extremely memorable years’ worth of soapy superheroics. Those fifty-odd issues are remembered both for their epic arcs, each of which explored new areas of the DC universe, and for their dramatic character moments. Wolfman wrote the main Titans book for fifteen years, with Pérez as his collaborator for five. Every book since has looked to their work in some way. When the Dan-Jurgens-guided Teen Titans followed the original book, Pérez finished Jurgens’ pencils and provided additional creative input. When the original Titans reunited in JLA/Titans, in preparation for their adjectiveless reunion title, the story was told by unabashed Wolfman/Pérez fans Devin Grayson and Phil Jiminez. When Cartoon Network finally animated the Titans, they used a healthy dose of Wolfman/Pérez characters and stories. Finally, when Geoff Johns kicked off the current Teen Titans title, he did it with an updated version of Marv and George’s initial lineup.
Again, I’m not disagreeing with the large footprints Wolfman and Pérez left on the group, nor am I suggesting that fans’ and pros’ sentiments about Marv and George are just perfunctory. However, I do think it’s important to point out that fidelity to the team’s past was not a terribly high priority for Marv, George, or their editor Len Wein when they launched the book’s second revival in 1980. The title had been cancelled twice already, in 1973 and 1977, and the ‘70s revival ran for only ten issues.
As we all know, the New Teen Titans showed the youngest (at the time) generation of DC characters maturing past the point of being sidekicks. Each of them was college-age (except for Gar Logan, who had tutors), so NTT was free to ignore the standard set of high-school issues and treat its characters as young adults. They were teens only chronologically. Wolfman and Pérez also had a lot of leeway with their characters. Because Gar “Don’t Call Me ‘Beast Boy’” Logan was relatively obscure, they could give him a new, smart-aleck personality, basically the Johnny Storm to Cyborg’s Ben Grimm. Wonder Girl and Kid Flash, barely used in their mentors’ books, were similarly ready to be molded. Although Robin presented the biggest hassle, we know how that turned out.
The watershed issue #39, in which both Kid Flash and Robin retired, represented the apex of Wolfman and Pérez’s efforts to remake the team. Ironically, though, by the time “The Judas Contract” concluded a few months later, the book had become a victim of its own success. Pérez was busy pencilling its direct-market-only successor, and would soon become real busy pencilling Crisis On Infinite Earths. The bulk of Wolfman and Pérez’s work now seems most concerned with laying the foundation for a “dream team” they barely got to enjoy.
Wolfman did his best for a while, though. After Pérez left, Wolfman spun a nineteen-issue yarn about how Starfire’s arranged marriage contributed to the Titans’ breakup and eventual reunion. It probably hasn’t aged well, but in 1986-87 it kept me coming back. Wolfman tried something similar in 1990 with “Titans Hunt,” which lasted 14 issues and left the team with fewer positive moments. After that, the book succumbed to a lot of typical early ‘90s stunts before being cancelled for good. Wolfman hung in until the end, eventually writing about 200 issues. I had stopped reading the book about three years before the axe fell, but morbid curiosity and cheap back issues filled me in later.
It takes a lot to get me off of a Titans book. I bought all of the Dan Jurgens series, and all of the no-adjective The Titans, despite their shortcomings. Nevertheless, I stayed with Teen Titans 3.0 only through #23′s dogpile on Doctor Light. Although I appreciated Johns’ attempts to rehabilitate Raven and Jericho, the book just wasn’t doing anything for me. Jim Roeg and I have fairly similar tastes, so I felt better about my decision after learning he’s just decided to cancel his subscription. Jim describes Johns’ work as “frantic referencing of the past coupled with an equally hyperactive generation of endless new ‘Titans’ and team line-ups in the present, as if he were presiding over a giant game board.” He also calls the “Titans East” arc “a kind of HeroClix Titans battle utterly devoid of characterization, narrative logic, or even basic suspense.”
Personally, I liked the Wolfman/Pérez approach which had the team being a product of the characters, as opposed to the characters being plugged into the team. (Even with the tweaks and membership changes, the same core of characters remained.) Raven originally brought the members together out of necessity, both a) to fight her demonic, despotic father, and b) because the Justice League thought she was irredeemably evil. Her case was not helped by the revelation that she put an empathic whammy on Kid Flash, making him love her so he’d sign up. The drama didn’t end there, of course — many of those early issues featured one or more members wondering melodramatically about a breakup.
These are standard soap-opera tropes, to be sure, but they mirrored Marv and George’s development of the characters into a more cohesive ensemble, independent of their Justice League mentors. Their Titans were together out of friendship and mutual needs, not because the world needed another super-team. Indeed, attempts to give the Titans a purpose have often felt forced to me, whether it was the post-Zero Hour reinvention as a government-sponsored group or the Jurgens characters’ common origin. Even Johns’ afterschool-hangout idea seemed to impose too much structure, sponsored as it was by the adults.
In other words, to me the later attempts to revitalize the Titans have all tried hard to recreate the same spirit as the classic Wolfman/Pérez stories, without considering what made that run so memorable. Wolfman and Pérez were just using “the Teen Titans” as a framework to show a group of young characters emerging from their teens. After Raven brought them together, their stations in life drove the stories more than a need to have a Titans group did. I think Young Justice – which was never an “official” Titans title, despite its setup — worked well because it took a similar approach. Although The Titans’ heart was in the right place, I think it ended up showing that these characters didn’t need each other as much as they once did.
By contrast, Johns seemed torn between wanting to revitalize the Wolfman/Pérez characters and wanting to go back to the original teen-sidekick dynamic. Johns’ sidekick characters were also more involved in the larger DC Universe, with Robin having his own title and the others appearing regularly in their mentors’ books. Accordingly, Johns didn’t have the same amount of freedom to grow and develop his roster that Wolfman and Pérez did. Sure, Superboy was killed and Kid Flash was promoted, but those events were influenced by factors outside the title.
Again, while Wolfman and Pérez are rightly considered the gold standard, just using the same characters, or those characters’ successors, is not the best substitute. Marv and George spent a couple of years together figuring out how they could make their team run most smoothly, and navigated the choppy waters of both DC history and DC editorial politics to get it done. They weren’t working off a recipe, or trying to recapture whatever magic a previous Titans group might have had.
I’m eager to see how Sean McKeever handles the Teen Titans. It sounds like his experience with the Wolfman years is very different from those of us who grew up with Wolfman/Pérez, so that’s a good thing. Marv and George tried to do something radically different with a franchise that had grown stale, and I hope McKeever brings that same spirit to his work. Although he doesn’t seem beholden to his memories of their work, that to me gives him a better perspective on revitalizing it. Having Wolfman and Pérez in the same issue will make the comparison that much easier.
[A big tip of the Grumpy Old hat to TitansTower.com for its invaluable reference library.]
May 17th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
“Titans Hunt” was actually my introduction to the Titans, with the first issue, #71. I’ve been a Titans and Nightwing fan ever since, so it worked pretty well in this newcomer’s case.
I’m intrigued to see McKeever’s take on the team. I’ve heard nothing but good things about his writing.
May 17th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Wolfman has gone out of his way many a time to suggest that people following his run on Titans try to do their own thing instead of just aping what he and Perez did.
Granted, I think Jurgens did that more than anyone (though The Titans run was its own animal too) and that run (like the Grayson/Faerber/Peyer one) wasn’t received very well.
Personally, I think that Johns did a fairly good job in changing the identity of the Titans and creating a coherent team, at least through the first year or two of the book. The first few issues, especially, were very well done.
The idea that the Titans is a support group of sorts for young superpowered individuals, somewhere that they can go on the weekend so that they don’t necessarily grow up to be well.. Batman, is a good one, save for the fact that it forces the plot-based stories to come to them, as opposed to vice versa.
It was also one of the few books to use the OYL Concept well, filling it with lots of little hints over what happened during the year (most of the other DC titles seemed to set up a new status quo days before the OYL title started).
But yes, it has lost the tight, streamline focus it started with.
Despite that, I think the new cast is very strong. Miss Martian is the most endearing character DC has created in years. Kid Devil is one fo the most likable, and Ravager’s become one of the more sympathetic.
I think if anything, the big problem OYL has been too much movement and not enough slow issues. Johns immediately after setting up the status quo (and Wendy and Marvin), had the Titans go around the world, tossed in one very well used issue with Kid Devil, and then had them assaulted in an almost all-action story. After this we’re getting the Amazons Attack Crossovers.
I think really, if the book had a few more slow issues OYL where there wasn’t a bad guy and it was just the characters interacting and living their lives, it’d have done better. But it was too much, too soon.
Let’s see how McKeever deals with the hand he’s been played.
May 17th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
The most recent issues were unnecessarily long and drawn-out, with little-to-no plot development. Also, pretty much every single artist and letterer who has been on Teen Titans since (I think pre-)Infinite Crisis has been downright lousy.