Month: February 2011

The Curious Case of Donna Troy (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Eight)

The “origins” issue of New Teen Titans (baxter series), #47.

Open New Titans #85 to the letters page and tucked among the correspondence and editorial comments is a letter from two kids from Sayville, NY.  The contents of the letter are more or less forgettable–the two guys talk about how awesome they think the Teen Titans are, they ask why issue #80 had no letter column, and then make a prediction about the Vigilante coming back–but they sign off with something that seemed to get the editors’ attention:  PLEASE KILL DONNA TROY.  To drive home the point, they referred to themselves as the “PEOPLE FOR THE DEATH OF DONNA TROY.”

Yeah, I was a 14-year-old with a hit list.

I don’t honestly remember which one of us came up with the idea that Harris and I should write in clamoring for the death of Donna Troy, but I do know that we really didn’t want her dead and the true reason was that we thought that in order to have a letter published, we should come up with a gimmick.  Donna Troy became the target because she was going to be the focus of the next big storyline, and we figured that they’d already screwed with every other member of the Titans, so why not her?

I think that’s what the powers that be on the Titans were thinking at the time as well, because if you look at every issue since New Titans #71, Donna wasn’t really affected because for the most part she was shuttled off to an adventure with Wonder Woman and then War of the Gods before being around at at full strength to take on Jericho and the Wildebeests.  But, is the fact that she really didn’t have much to do during the Titans Hunt enough to warrant focusing an entire three-book crossover on her?

(more…)

Terminators, Terrible Toddlers, and Terra (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Seven)

The last page of New Titans #79, which introduced the new, time-tossed Teen Titans

“Dagon.  Chatter at Ground one.”

“Already misting, Jon-boy.”

“Hi, any luck?”

“Uh-uh.  Pulled a huss.”

“What if we don’t find her?”

“We will.  And we’ll kill her.”

‘Time’s on our side.  We can’t fail.”

“So why did you call us here, Jon?”

“We don’t need to talk.  We need to find Troy.”

“Terra says she found something.”

“And I have.  Troia’s ours for the killing.”

The era of the Titans that I am focusing on is generally, at least from what I understand, controversial.  I don’t think it’s very well-liked because characters that people loved were killed off or injured beyond repair or because what the stories began in New Titans #71 eventually morphed into.  But I defy anyone who wants to piss all over this run of stories to tell me that they didn’t read the last page of New Titans #79 and get completely psyched.  I was, and I was completely incapacitated.

Summers, in the past, were never good for any of my collecting habits.  When I had first started collecting comics with G.I. Joe and The Transformers back in 1987-1988, I didn’t get past issue 67 of G.I. Joe and issue 34 of Transformers because I went away for part of July, came back, and spent so much time playing sports with friends that comics and the toys they more or less advertised took a back seat to baseball and football and then the onset of puberty.  However, between the eighth and ninth grades, I spent half of the summer recuperating from laser surgery on the scar that’s on my upper lip, which meant that I had a bandage wrapped around my face for a few weeks and really couldn’t go outside.  I’d also gone to Florida in July to visit my friend Chris and he’d not only hooked me up with a bunch of X-Men and Spawn stuff but I’d also raided his local comic store’s stash of New Teen Titans comics, getting most of the original Wolfman/Perez run pretty cheap (again, this was the 1990s when books like this were very cheap in back issue bins, mainly because they didn’t have an “X” or “Bat” in the title).

The cover of New Titans #79, a "sickbed" book for me that kept me hooked through the summer of 1991.

So I had nothing better to do with my time except read comics and watch TV and I was able to get my sister to go to the comic store and pick up my reserved books a few times.  She came home one Wednesday with New Titans #79 and soon I’d get New Titans Annual #7, which came out more or less a couple of weeks later and thankfully that annual would explain who the people in that above exchange were, or else I would have been completely lost.  I twas also the best way for the book to get involved with the annual crossover that DC had been running at the time, which was Armageddon 2001.

For a better look at Armageddon 2001, I suggest going over to one of my favorite podcasts, “From Crisis to Crisis: A Superman Podcast” and listening to their two-parter about Armageddon 2001 from November 2010 (you can look at part 1 here and part 2 here).  But in brief, it’s the story of a hero named Waverider who travels back in time to kill one of our current superheroes because that particular hero will kill all the others and become a tyrant named Monarch.  When New Titans Annual #7 hit the shelves, we were smack in the middle of the “Who is Monarch?” mystery (the answer, btw, is one of the biggest disappointments in comics), but also smack in the middle of the Titans Hunt.  Now, the way the crossovers worked, Waverider would touch a book’s main character and then we’d all see his future, and what could happen to turn them into Monarch.  So the crosover would not interrupt the book’s current story and the writers wouldn’t have to worry too much.  However, the Titans annual took it one step further and became the only annual to have serious repercussions in its book.

(more…)

The tale of a continuing voyage on the sea of no cares

Love stories are hard to tell.

Oh sure, I can point to an endless number of works of literature, film, and song that suggest otherwise, but for the most part they’re either complete garbage or don’t tell the whole story.  Or perhaps they attempt to tell the whole story but they’re just way too broad, so they skip over a lot of the details.

Then again, isn’t pre-packaged love with a nice soundtrack what we have all been conditioned to look for, anyway?  It’s certainly less complicated than being in a relationship or being married, and our modern world certainly allows ourselves to encapsulate first glance to last kiss in a narrative.  I certainly am guilty of polluting my girlfriends’ lives with mix tapes that were sometimes so awful that I am shocked that I wasn’t broken up with after the first listen.  But for as much as my musical taste has been questionable throughout my life, I know that at least a few time I found a gem among what Sir Paul once called “silly love songs.”  In fact, it’s happened several times, including when I first heard Great Big Sea perform “Sea of No Cares.”

Great Big Sea is a band I stumbled upon in the summer of 1999 when Amanda and I were house-sitting for a friend.   While we spent a good amount of time exploring the greater Arlington/Alexandria area and seeing every movie that was in theaters at the time, I spent much of my days hanging out while she went to the internship she’d started after graduation.  Most of that time, I was working on a novel and the various 1980s mixes in my car were wearing thin, so I went diving into her friend’s CD collection and found Rant and Roar.  I’d heard of the band because I’d seen a video or two on MuchMusic, but wasn’t that familiar with them.

They didn’t need to do much to make me a fan, to be honest.  The band was from Newfoundland, which is where my grandmother hailed from, and they had a boisterous sound that was what I was looking for after spending most of the last four years trapped in my roommates’ Grateful Dead/Phish/Jimmy Buffett death spiral.  A year or so later, they played the Birchmere is Alexandria to support Turn.  It was a great gig and I knew I wanted to see them again, so when my sister heard that they were playing the Maritime Festival in West Sayville on July 13, 2001, I was on the phone the minute tickets went on sale.  I mean, when you come from a town that’s as obscure as mine, you definitely jump at the chance to see one of your favorite bands play there.

So we went, and in the hot July afternoon right next to the Great South Bay, the band started with “Donkey Riding,” which had become somewhat of a staple as far as opening numbers were concerned.  The next couple of songs were from a few albums back and then, the band decided to play “Sea of No Cares,” which was going to be the title track to the new album.  Amanda was standing next to me and humored me by letting me hold her even though by that point we were both sweaty and gross, and Alan Doyle began: “When you’re in love, there’s no time and no space/There’s a permanent smile on your face/Your friends all complain that you’re goin’ insane/But the truth is they’re just afraid/Hey, hey, hey somewhere/You threw your fear in the sea of no cares …”

Almost immediately, I found myself struck by the lyrics, as if they were some sort of revelation.  Or, at least, I flashed back to an earlier point in our relationship where those first few lyrics rang true.

(more…)

The Yearbook Myth

One commercial that stuck with me from the time I first saw it as a kid until I became a teenager was an ad for McDonald’s entitled “Great Year!”  It features the antics of Central Junior High School’s yearbook staff as they attempt to cover all of the great and crazy things that happened during the course of the school year and then meet at McDonald’s to celebrate their success.

Watch the minute-long ad and you’ll see a portrait of a junior high school that in 1983 or whenever it was originally shot had to be the coolest place on Earth.  Everyone gets along, someone walks through the hallway dressed as a strawberry, and even the high pressure moments are filled with a goofiness that only comes when you are selling hamburgers.  I don’t have to do much to convince anyone that my junior high experience was not really like this.  Had “Great Year!” been a real reflection of what I remember, there would have been footage of a gym teacher cutting gum out of someone’s hair, two guys blowing snot rockets all over the school store while the people who worked there gagged and yelled at them to stop, and one kid looking scared out of his mind while another threatened to beat the ever-loving snot out of him if he did even the slightest thing wrong.  Or maybe that’s just my take.

(more…)

Scared Straighter

The shouts echo through the near-empty room, and while the volume of voice and harshness of his tone would make any normal person wince, the boy he is screaming at doesn’t budge.  In fact, he seems to be staring past the raving man and putting his best defiant face forward.  He might seem like he isn’t listening to the man talk about how he got to prison and what all of his experiences in prison have done to him as a person, but someone thinks he is.   More than likely this person is his teacher or a mentor or the head of some program that’s meant to take kids off the streets and make them realize that if they continue their behavior, they will have a very hard life.

The inspiration for such an experience is Scared Straight!, a 1978 documentary that showed a group of juvenile delinquents spending three hours with a group of convicts. Most of the delinquents had been in and out of trouble with the law and the idea was to have them face reality and change their lives.  For the most part–although there definitely are critics of the program who say it wasn’t–the teenagers were “scared straight” and the documentary inspired several other television specials, including follow-up shows, and local scared straight programs that were conducted through sheriff’s departments and public schools.

I wasn’t the the type of student to ever wind up in a scared straight program.  I was an honors student and my life was very straight and narrow; I hadn’t stolen so much as a pack of gum in my lifetime and never even had an overdue library book.  However, in the spring of my junior year of high school, I found myself standing in the middle of a prison cafeteria watching my friend get reamed by a guy named Tracy and his fellow inmate, Cedric. Of course, we weren’t tough-as-nails juvenile delinquents and I think that the two of us would have both urinated all over ourselves if we went on the trip not knowing that we were going to get yelled at by felons because we were not in the scared straight program but part of an 11th grade social studies elective called You and the Law.

(more…)