I have this theory — maybe you’ve heard it — that DC Comics is slowly, steadily, perhaps unconsciously working towards a Platonic ideal of its entire superhero line, in hopes that a certain combination of creative personnel and/or character interactions will allow it to produce accessible, reliably marketable comics, week in and week out. It’s a variation on the perpetual-motion machine, and therefore it’ll never happen, but it’s fun to see how close DC can get.
This week confirmed a couple of ostensible developments toward that ideal: Jim Shooter returning to Legion of Super-Heroes, and an Old New Teen Titans title featuring the six constant members of the Wolfman/Perez era.* It’s a peculiar juxtaposition of comebacks: the writer who made his mark as a teenager, and a set of onetime teens now challenged by adult uncertainties.
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You’d think I’d have more of a reaction to the Shooter/Legion news, considering that the end of Shooter’s second writing stint came in the bucolic mid-1970s of my DC-loving childhood. For whatever reasons, though, I wouldn’t read the book regularly until (gasp!) the Giffen/Bierbaums’ “Five Years Later” relaunch in 1989.
Still, I think I know how those Shooter-Legion fans feel. My favorite reunions include Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers/Terry Austin bringing back Silver St. Cloud in Batman: Dark Detective, George Perez coming back to New Titans for “Who Is Wonder Girl?” and “A Lonely Place Of Dying,” and the two Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis/Kevin Maguire “Super Buddies” miniseries.
Shooter also joins Mark Waid (Flash), John Ostrander (Suicide Squad), and Chuck Dixon (Robin) in returning to characters with whom he’s closely associated. Additionally, Dan Jurgens (Booster Gold), Sergio Aragones (Bat Lash), and Marv Wolfman (Vigilante) are working again on characters they (co-)created.
These reunions are nothing new, of course. George Perez returned to the Titans twice, if you count inking Jurgens’ series. Carmine Infantino returned to The Flash. Paul Levitz wrote a JSA arc during Infinite Crisis. Joe Staton returned to Green Lantern after Dave Gibbons succeeded him; and Gibbons, in turn, came back after 20 years as writer (and sometimes artist) of Green Lantern Corps. Curt Swan left the Superman books once the Byrne revamp started, but later became a regular guest artist and drew Action Comics Weekly’s two-page Superman strip.
While it can comfort fans of the title, though, a returning creative type is no predictor of quality. The return may even be a disadvantage, because it must live up to the expectations the original work garnered. I liked Dark Detective and “Who Is Wonder Girl?” well enough, but they didn’t overshadow the originals by any means. (The second act in my mind that really sticks out as an improvement is Perez’s work on Avengers Vol. 3, and that’s probably more of a third act….)
The question then becomes whether in fact Shooter remains a good fit for the Legion. I can’t really speak to that. However, clearly it’s not “his” Legion anymore, nor is it the maturing Legion of the mid-‘70s. Today’s book is built in no small part on Shooter’s successes, so what more can he bring to it?
That’s the classic conundrum of a one-time innovator growing up to find his innovations commonplace. George Lucas put Star Wars together without all the tools he wanted, but when he finally got those tools they went to his head. Gene Roddenberry’s shot at doing Star Trek without network interference ended up producing the uneven early seasons of The Next Generation.
Not to say that success spoiled either entirely. Revenge of the Sith seemed to satisfy a lot of fans turned off by the other prequels, and Roddenberry was at least around when TNG hit its stride.
Actually, the more I think about it, Shooter/Legion 2K7 reminds me of the special-guest-judge week on “American Idol.” Shooter’s obviously in the Rod Stewart/Barry Manilow role, and the Legionnaires are the fresh-faced kids** gathered around the piano. Sometimes the kids click with the oldsters, sometimes they don’t.
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I’ve talked about the Old New Teen Titans previously, so I’ll try to be brief now. Not that the two fandoms necessarily intersect, but a week in which the 25-year-old Britney Spears looks ready for retirement can’t help the cause of an upcoming comic about former teen stars. The book does definitely need a couple of things: a name distinct from “Teen Titans,” and a reason for existing. The former sounds like it could well be “Titans East.” I guess that would be OK.
The latter probably has something to do with the cast of the Titans East Special likely being (ahem) rendered unable to serve by its particular villain. Considering that Cyborg is the putative Titans-East leader, that’s kind of ironic. The last Old New Teen Titans series started with him as the antagonist, seeking out all the former Titans.
(It might be more appropriate for the reuniting Titans to collaborate initially on the members’ solo projects: helping Starfire’s space mission with Adam Strange and Animal Man, hopping through the Multiverse with Donna, heading off Ra’s al Ghul’s resurrection, etc. However, I imagine those stories will have ended by the time Titans East begins in earnest.)
I suppose one of the main reasons the Old Teen Titans persist is that they are the signature team for DC’s third generation. The original Infinity, Inc., would have been another third-generation team, but many of its members graduated to the (various) Justice League(s) and the Justice Society. The original Speedy and Kid Flash are Leaguers now as well. Titans East‘s two ex-sidekicks have both taken over for their mentors temporarily, but they’ll never replace Batman or Wonder Woman permanently. The others have apparently hit a similar glass ceiling. Indeed, they all may have nowhere else to go.
Looking at it that way, then, the Old New Teen Titans could do worse than to re-establish themselves as DC’s answer to the Defenders, an ad hoc non-team composed of old friends who just like working together. It could even be a twenty/thirtysomething version of the “adventurer’s club” I thought would be good for the Justice Society. George Perez once described the Titans as “sitting around a table waiting for a safe to fall on them,” but as long as the Titans’ Tower utilities are paid and someone sweeps the place out every couple of weeks, who needs a purpose? None of these characters particularly needs a day job: Nightwing, Troia, and Beast Boy are independently wealthy, Starfire can go back to modeling, Cyborg can work at STAR Labs, and Raven’s still in school. If the new setup allows more old Titans like Lilith (she won’t stay dead for long) and Tempest (nee Aqualad) to stop by, so much the better.
But, you know, that’s what I’d like. There’s probably a much better way to demonstrate that this new book isn’t completely superfluous in DC’s grand scheme of things. Maybe Shooter-Legion Redux and the new Old New Teen Titans will even come that much closer to their titles’ Platonic ideals.
More to the point, they’re both part of a familiar just-like-before-but-better strategy. To be more prosaic, both are (at least superficially) concerned with recapturing that peculiar spark of youth that makes growing pains so attractive to adults. I’m eager to see whether either strategy pans out.
* Nightwing, Troia, Cyborg, Starfire, Beast Boy, and Raven.
** Which Legionnaire would Taylor be? I’m inclined to say the thousand-year-old Mon-El, but he looks more like Lightning Lord….
September 13th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I rarely read the Blog@ features on Newsarama, but this column is always thoughtful. I usually agree with it, but even when I don’t, it’s a pleasure to read because it’s obvious that you understand not only the kind of ideals that comics are meant to speak to (which many comics columnists are hung up on), but also the realities of the marketplace and industry politics. This story is a great example.
I would say it’s worth mentioning (and I know this isn’t the only one missed, but it’s a biggie given context) that Waid & Garney’s return to Captain America after “Heroes Return” was not nearly as well-received as their first run on the book, and that Waid had really floundered toward the end of his run. While nobody was happier than me to see this once-great creative team replace Liefeld, nobody was happier, either, to see Jurgens step in and save the mess that the title had become (talking dinosaurs? Seriously). Probably doesn’t bode all that well for The Flash.
September 13th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Aw shucks, Russell! Thanks for the kind words.
My list of returning creators was focused more on people who’d been away for a significant period and who (probably) weren’t expected to return. Also, since this is a DC-centric column, I don’t get into a lot of Marvel examples.
I can’t remember the ins and outs of that Waid/Garney run, although I read it (and the Sentinel Of Liberty spinoff too). I thought Waid left the book after an editor rewrote the first part of his Red Skull story. The rest of the run hasn’t stayed with me as much as the first pre-Onslaught story, “Man Without A Country,” so yeah, it may not be as good.
Another example upon which I didn’t elaborate, and which is even more appropriate given the context, would be Keith Giffen on the “5 Years Later” reboot. That certainly hasn’t been received as well as Giffen’s original Legion work!
September 13th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
What endlessly fascinates (and frustrates) me about DC is its constant waffling back and forth between wanting to reach a new audience and catering to its older, more reliable audience.
The Legion of Superheroes title is a perfect case study of that schizophrenic approach. When the title lauched a number of years back, the big pitch coming from writer Mark Waid was that the title would be some sort of Youth Power/Grown-Ups Are Bad pseudo-political call-to-activism thing (dontcha love it when middle aged guys try to be all cool and stuff?)…in an obvious attempt to reach a teen/twenty-something market that allegedly shares what Waid perceived to be the prevailing zeitgeist. Obviously, the need to bring (then-hot selling) Supergirl in to headline the title shows you how successful that strategy was.
Flash forward as the axis shifts, and DC reverts to its “fan service” mode by bringing long-lost Jim Shooter in from wherever he’s been the past decade or so, appealing to perhaps the oldest demographic still buying comic books on a weekly basis (who conceivably could have bought Shooter’s Legion comics on the newstand).
How DC can logically think that a Jim Shooter who’s four decades older than the one who wrote the 1960′s Legion stories (for an utterly different comic book audience and marketplace) is going to know how to recapture interest in the Legion shows me just how desperate things are getting in the Didio Cubhouse.
Jim Shooter, God bless ‘im, has done some great things over his career, and (in my opinion) ticked off all the right preening peacocks during his Marvel years, and the first few years of Valiant Comics was amazing….but come on. Considering how savagely Legion fans turn on new writers, and how little the younger fans know about Shooter (if anything), it’s not going to go anywhere.
While I wouldn’t put the hiring of Shooter on the same insanely wrongheaded level as when he hired two former writers of the early 90′s Flash TV show (!) to write “The Flash” (the tipping point in my opinion of Didio), it’s close to it. Once again, the Old Boys network and blurry sentimentalism gets in the way of sound creative and marketing decisions.
September 13th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
I’ve been reading comics for a little over 10 years, so all the earlier runs that you mentioned are things I’ve either read in trades or not read at all.
But I think some of the problems you mentioned with the Titans do affect the creators as well. Just like Nightwing will never become Batman, it is very hard for a creator to top a well-liked run on a series.
Change seems to always be hated (especially online) while we have rosy-colored memories of the past. And then when the savior returns to the character that he or she created/perfected, the stories are compared to the past, rightfully or wrongfully, without really giving the new tales a fresh-eyed response. I just fear that a taste of nostalgia gets the best of fans and the companies alike.
But a return to the past seems to be DC’s current direction, so it makes sense that they want to “rejuvenate” their books with old blood. I also am interested in how it will turn out, but I fear the worst. I just hope to be able to read a book without having to read fifty-two others to make sense of the story.
September 13th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
The Legion of Superheroes title is a perfect case study of that schizophrenic approach. When the title lauched a number of years back, the big pitch coming from writer Mark Waid was that the title would be some sort of Youth Power/Grown-Ups Are Bad pseudo-political call-to-activism thing (dontcha love it when middle aged guys try to be all cool and stuff?)…in an obvious attempt to reach a teen/twenty-something market that allegedly shares what Waid perceived to be the prevailing zeitgeist.
I don’t think that’s what happened, though. I think Waid was using that idea to try to provide a reasonable premise for why the 31st century has a big team of teenage superheroes doing so much important work. Then, once the team was established, the young-vs-old aspect could be shuffled offstage (which is in fact what happened). As for appealing to young readers… the Legionnaires early on in Waid’s run gave off a kind of ’60s vibe, and it’s unlikely anybody would think that that would be a big draw for today’s teenagers.
As for Shooter, I guess we’ll see. I can see a lot of reasons why it might not work, but I don’t see any reasons why it can’t work.
September 13th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Back in 1975, I was one of those people buying Shooter’s last run off the newsstand–Superboy and the LSH #209 was my first. I was three years old. (Okay, so it was my parents buying it.) It was fun back then, albeit written for 12-year-olds.
Now that the core Legion audience (the exact same folks, basically) is in its 30s-40s if not older, I’m not sure how Shooter’s return can work. While I’ll entertain the possibility that Shooter is talented enough to pull it off, I’m mostly expecting it to read like the recent Levitz issues of JSA. Like Shooter, Levitz was once very good at writing a certain style of comics that just doesn’t play anymore. Watching Levitz try to emulate modern pacing was nearly as painful as Herb Trimpe’s attempt at an Image style. The only thing worse would have been Levitz writing JSA like it was still 1977. Based on Shooter’s curmudgeonly comments, it sounds like that might be what we’re in for: over-explanatory captions, thought balloons, characters always announcing each other by their full names and relationships. In short, all of the contrivances that support Shooter’s old maxim, “every issue is somebody’s first”.
Frankly, this hire reads to me like an admission of defeat on DC’s part, acknowledgment after at least 2.5 reboots that the Legion concept cannot be sold to new audiences, so fuck it. Give ‘em the old guy.
September 13th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
If these work, I hope DC will give Tony Isabella another shot at Black Lightning.
September 16th, 2007 at 4:27 am
While we’re wishing – how about Beau Smith on Guy Gardner? He wrote THE definitive Guy Gardener.