This summer, we will see Geoff Johns & Mike McKone’s new take on one of DC’s most successful franchises from the past: Teen Titans. From New Teen Titans (later simply New Titans), Cyborg, Starfire, Changeling & Raven (though not necessarily the same Raven we’ve known in the past…long story) of the 80s powerhouse team will be making their return. Noticably absent from the new book are mainstays of the original team, Nightwing (formerly Robin), Troia (formerly Wonder Girl) & The Flash (formerly Kid Flash), most recently of just-cancelled series Titans (Nightwing, in addition to his own ongoing solo title, will join fellow ex-Titan, Arsenal, in another new series with an old name, The Outsiders, while The Flash remains the star of his own series as well as a prominent member of The JLA; Troia’s future is up in the air at this point). In their place, a new Robin, a new Wonder Girl, and a new Kid Flash (formerly Impulse) as well as Superboy, all of another just-cancelled series: Young Justice.
The Teen Titans. Titans. Young Justice. Not to mention Geoff Johns, Mike McKone, Nightwing, The Flash…all titles, creators, and characters close to my heart. But let’s focus for now on the thing we know for sure won’t be around come summer: Titans & Young Justice; both have already seen their last issues come and go this past month.
If you read Titans #50 and then go and read Young Justice #55 (the respective final issues of each series), you will see the biggest difference between the two series about “kids†not quite old or experienced enough to be JLA material (well, except for Nightwing…and Jesse Quick for a bit…and The Flash, of course…but I digress): namely that the cancellation of Titans is mercy killing while the cancellation of Young Justice is a true shame.
Don’t get me wrong; the Marv Wolfman/George Perez New Teen Titans, the major influence for the new series, was my favorite comic run of all time, and Geoff Johns & Mike McKone are two of my favorite creators in the business. I am excited for the new Teen Titans. However, the question: did both Titans and Young Justice need to die in order to create Teen Titans? The answer: absolutely not.
It’s necessary to examine both series to understand why this is the case.
Ironically enough, I read the current incarnation of the Titans before I bought a single issue of Wolfman & Perez’s classic run. I was in my comic shop one day, looking for something new to try out, and the beautiful Phil Jimenez (a long time favorite from his Guy Gardner: Warrior days) artwork on a comic called JLA/Titans: The Technis Imperative stood out to me. I was getting into the Morrison run on JLA at the time and decided to pick up the three issue limited series.
Technis Imperative, written by Devin Grayson, is a wonderful adventure story fueled by nostalgia. The JLA are featured, but the once and future Titans are the stars; the original five (Nightwing, The Flash, Troia, Arsenal & Tempest), joined by Changeling, Raven & Starfire, the second generation, and their quest to save the lone remaining core Titan, Cyborg, even after he has become a threat to Earth (I won’t go into too much detail…you should buy the trade paperback yourself, good deal…the writing is good, but the ultra-detailed Jimenez artwork alone is worth the price of the book) struck a chord with me.
“The Titans aren’t a team, they’re a family.†This is the point that Grayson seeks to hammer home in Technis Imperative and what you will hear in any interview with any Titans creator or in any soliloquiy given in an anniversary issue of a Titans series by Nightwing, Troia, Starfire, or whomever.
When you become a Titans fan, it’s like joining that family. I made what I believe was a good decision after Technis Imperative; rather than find out what happened, next, I decided to look into what came before, and snatched up a mess of issues of the old New Teen Titans series. If you’ve never read New Teen Titans, you’re missing out on a joy. Unlike the JLA or the Avengers or even the X-Men, the Titans of old were not any sort of professional team that heroes aspired to join; they were a group of friends, bordering on family, and when a new member joined the team, it was because they needed a family themselves. You examine the first five years of New Teen Titans, the definitive Wolfman/Perez run, and only two new members joined the team: Terra & Jericho. Jericho joined because he was more or less an orphan…as far as Terra goes…read the series (some things you just don’t spoil).
New Teen Titans dealt with everything from sex to drugs to running away, but never lost its fun super-heroic roots. Robin became Nightwing, Kid Flash left and became The Flash, people died, people fell in love, old friends came and went, but in the end, it was always the story of Dick, Wally, Donna, Kory, Vic, Gar, Raven & Joey and why they needed one another that made the book a hit and led to me becoming forever a fan of anything Wolfman or Perez touched, even Marv’s really bad stuff (and his really bad stuff is pretty bad).
With a base like this to build off of, how could Titans fail? Well, first of all, it was about the seven or eight heroes that made NTT a hit in the 80’s, it was about the original five Titans, a group that had popularity among the nostalgia crowd, but had never really sustained a series. Second, the creative teams never really stuck. Grayson seemed to lose her motivation quickly and was tossing out uninspired stories and doing major damage to the characters of Cyborg & Starfire by the time she exited in the book’s second year. Jay Faerber, the writer who followed, tanked big time, introducing the most hated concept in years in the DEOrphans (a group of five clichéd super-powered runaways who all but relegated the Titans to the role of metahuman babysitters instead of cutting edge stars) and screwing up Jesse Quick, perhaps for good (in fairness to Faerber, it has been suggested that editor Andy Helfer, since fired, was screwing with his ideas big-time). Artists Mark Buckingham and Paul Pelletier crumbled under the shadow of Perez and Jimenez. Co-plotters Tom Peyer (writer of Hourman) and Barry Kitson (penciller of JLA: Year One and Empire) were to be the saviors of the title, but failed to create anything significant and relevant with cancellation hanging heavy over their heads.
Great characters, great creators (if nobody else, Peyer & Kitson are certainly no slouches); why did everything Titans touch turn to crap? Maybe it’s simply that lightning can’t be captured in a bottle twice (Teen Titans will prove or disprove this theory). Maybe it’s because the atmosphere of the comics world has changed. But my take is simply that the whole thing was too forced. Trying to re-create New Teen Titans is a tall order; everybody from Devin Grayson on had tremendous pressure on them. The best thing for the creators of Titans to have done would have been to have gone back, read the old stories, and then write something completely new and their own, just basking in the goodness of the past work. With both Grayson & Faerber it seemed as if they were trying to buck the pressure from past Titans fans by taking the series as far away from its roots as possible, which blew up in their face. With Peyer, it seems like either he felt so much pressure that he chose not to rock the boat with anything remotely controversial…or more likely that he knew about the cancellation before he could even get out of the gate.
The bottom line is that the character in NTT were ones you could relate to, whether you were young or old, because they were so diverse and so real (the anti-Ultimates if you will…sorry, cheap shot). Dick was the guy you wanted to be, Wally was the everyman, Gar was the brat, and Vic was the brooding tough guy. Kory was the bombshell, Raven was the shut-in, and Donna was the sweetheart. There was something for everybody. The characters in Titans just never seemed cool. At no point during the series did I want to be Arsenal, Tempest or even Nightwing; they were constantly screwing up and acting like morons, then just moving on and doing it again. In NTT, the characters screwed up all the time (Gar alone messed up his entire life every three issues or so), but they grew as characters and learned. That’s what made them so cool.
If anybody has a chance at resurrecting this franchise, it’s Geoff Johns. He has a respect for the characters, but he’s at a stage in his career where there is no pressure on him to prove himself. I think he can take the old material and create stuff that’s loyal to it, but new. We’ll see.
There is no other writer in the comic book industry like Peter David and there has never been and might never be again another book like Young Justice. There is nothing on the market that entertains the way YJ did. There are other books that are funny (David’s other “baby,†Captain Marvel comes to mind), but none have the element of pure cover-to-cover fun of Young Justice.
The series began as a book about the off-kilter team-ups of Superboy, Robin & Impulse. The book never took itself seriously from the start and that was what made it special. Oh yeah, there were serious stories, and sometimes you could literally feel the emotion coming off the page, but there was always an underriding sense of the reader being in on the joke that made the book something special.
Admittedly, as a DC fanboy, I may have enjoyed YJ more than the average fan. There are so many easter eggs and references to DC in-jokes that you could fill two 80 page Giants with just those. Nothing was safe from a Peter David joke. The fourth wall didn’t prevent a hilarious conversation between Superboy, Impulse & The Ray about their favorite comic books being cancelled only to be halted for them to glare at Robin who can merely exclaim “What did I do now?â€
And characters long thought dull by the comic book world at large were revitalized with an enthusiasm perhaps rivaled only by Johns over on JSA. YJ’s reinvention of the one-note Vision clone Red Tornado as a family man with a dry (almost British) sense of humor (who flew around with “Impulse Rules†spray-painted on him for, like, two issues) and Lobo’s re-imagining as a reckless youth predated the resurrections of Green Arrow & Hawkman. PAD took the brilliant new take on Snapper Carr that Tom Peyer created in Hourman and took it a step further. The Hal Jordan version of The Spectre may have received better writing in one issue of Young Justice (#42, if you were wondering) than he did in his entire series. Doiby Dickles, aged sidekick to the Golden Age Green Lantern (now Sentinel), became the most lovable grandfather in the DCU during a three-part story involving YJ trying to save a planet by winning a baseball game. And probably towering above them all, Wonder Girl, from John Byrne’s reviled run on Wonder Woman, went from nerdy also-ran to one of the most appealing and emotionally powerful female characters in all of DC.
And the new characters were nothing to sneeze at either. Secret was one of the most delightfully complex characters in years. The “cute but really deadly†routine has been done before, but the crucial point about Secret was that she truly didn’t know what she was herself; she was so adorably naïve and at the same time the power level and unawareness her teammates were afraid of seemed a very real thing to the readers as well; Secret ended up owning the final few issues, and for good reason. When I first collected back issues and read up on Empress, she seemed nothing special, but after seeing how she was inducted into the team, and reading her origin, she became another favorite. And I’ve never thought a female character kicked as much ass as Arrowette; and the fact that she continued to do so for almost three years as a “civilian†member of the supporting cast is the really impressive thing. And the supporting cast…Traya, Cissie’s Mom, Fite & Maad…man, I just love this book.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the killer artwork of Todd Nauck. Most of those easter eggs I referred to came from him. There is no character he did not draw and make look good. And the level of detail he put in, considering how few issues he missed (he was the book’s regular penciller it’s entire 55 issue run with only a couple fill-ins): phenomenal. His cover homages were sidesplitting and inspired and the number of posters I could request from his splash pages goes into triple digits.
I could keep trying to describe why YJ was such an amazing books, but I’m sure I wouldn’t do it justice (bad pun); it was just that kind of book. The important thing: when you read YJ, you’re really getting the full bang for your buck (or $2.25 or whatever). I can plow through an issue of Avengers in five minutes, but the attention to detail in the art and writing, the amount of dialogue (and none of it filler, like in X-Treme X-Men, all of it gold), and the breaks needed for fits of laughter bump YJ up to ten-fifteen minutes on a bad issue.
But when you break it down, Young Justice was great for the same reason New Teen Titans was great: the characters were cool and they were a family. Robin puts it best in YJ #55 (I don’t have it front of me so I’m paraphrasing…I hope I at least come close): “Everybody always asks ‘why Young Justice?’ It’s simple, because we’re so damn glad we found each other and we cling to one another like the final lifejacket on a ship going down. We don’t get more complicated than that because we don’t need toâ€. And that is what it came down to. Young Justice was a book about a group of kids who just hung out and were fun to read about. Simple. And it was good. Read two back issues and tell me one other book on the market that is anything like Young Justice (and some of you may personally not like it, but find me something else you dislike in the same way; that’s the challenge).
Young Justice does not need to die in order for Titans to live on as Teen Titans.
For one thing, YJ was selling more than a book that is cancelled is supposed to. It was still making DC money. There was a devoted fanbase, two devoted creators, and a lot of story-telling room left that didn’t need to get the shaft.
But more importantly, DC and Geoff Johns do not need the kids from YJ as part of the equation to make a new Teen Titans successful. The concept of “super-powered kids†is not really one that needs revamping; DC has a book about that age group in Young Justice and it’s selling fine. It’s the Titans franchise that needed work. New Teen Titans was a serious book about young adults growing up. Young Justice is a light-hearted book about kids being kids. One does not need to lead into the other until it is ready.
Technis Imperative proved that there is still a spark between that old Titans team that can be built on. Devin Grayson fumbled the ball by cutting out Gar & Raven and ultimately Kory & Vic. The ball was never picked up. Geoff Johns is the man to pick up that ball and run with it.
But Teen Titans, as solicited, is not the successor to the NTT throne. It’s a book with characters that already have a home and some characters that needed to be brought back; they need none of column A and more of column B.
If DC wants to revive the Titans, they gotta go all the way; sorry Mr. Winick, but you don’t get Nightwing, Titans does; sorry Powers That Be, Donna is sticking with Titans; hey Joe Kelly, do you really need Wally that much? These are the things that needed to be said. Geoff Johns writing the classic seven characters associated with New Teen Titans and seeing how far they’ve come twenty years later would have been a creative success. Teen Titans may or may not be a success, but it killed a great book in Young Justice regardless.
It didn’t need to be that way.
I will read and most likely enjoy Teen Titans, but I will never ever forget or stop missing Young Justice.
