Month: November 2011

Angst, Abuse, and Rock n’ Roll: A Team Titans After-School Special (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty)

With about a year on Team Titans under his belt, Marv Wolfman left the title he started with Total Chaos to spend his energy on the goings-on in New Titans and Deathstroke: The Terminator.  In interviews about this particular era, he’s said that he really doesn’t even remember writing this book for an entire year and doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the characters; obviously, Woflman doesn’t think that his year with the Teamers was his best work.  It’s kind of a shame, too, because the main Titans title was suffering a little bit at this point and while Deathstroke’s “World Tour” storyline was about to get going, those were books on my pull list that I read after everything else, especially considering both Knightfall and Reign of the Supermen were going on, and Team Titans was the one book in that family that I was attached to.

Looking at the last three parts of Wolfman’s run (two of which were merely plotted by Wolfman and scripted by Tom Peyer), I can see where his heart wasn’t in it and how a new creative team might be able to do a little more with the characters because some of the story elements seem a little forced.  Take, for instance, the two-parter in Team Titans #11 and 12, which came out around June 1993 and heavily featured Metallik, the Voltron-esque Titans team that we’d been introduced to in the immediate post-Total Chaos issues.  The premise of the two-parter was that a robot was sent back in time to eliminate the Team Titans, and immediately goes after a lone Teamer named Sunburst before Metallik gets in on the action and eventually our main team of Titans joins in the fight.

It’s kind of a throwaway story, to be honest.  The robot comes in all Terminator-style, winds up killing Sunburst (which pisses off the girls of Metallik because they think he’s cute) and eventually meets his end when Kole shows up again and augments Kilowatt’s power in order to destroy it.  There’s also some subplots that are continued, one being an attempt to give Batallion depth as he tracked down and pretty much stalked the woman who was his wife in the alternate reality from whence he came.  He scares the crap out of her (well, who wouldn’t be scared if they were being constantly followed by some guy with a huge mane who is armed to the teeth?) and then realizes that he can’t be with her and is going to be alone in this world. I think I’ve said before that I was never a big fan of Batallion because it was obvious that someone at DC wanted the Team Titans to have a “badass” character that could compete with Cable.

But Team Titans was never X-Force and was never going to be X-Force because even though Wolfman didn’t particularly like writing the book, he did his best to have the team in a realistic world, whereas X-Force always seemed to take place at scientific facility X or desert location Y.  The subplots that would continue past Wolfman’s tenure showed that.  Mirage dealing with the aftermath of Deathwing’s trying to kill her after he slept with her; the team’s overstaying their welcome at the Troy/Long farm; and the mystery of how many Titans teams survived the trip back from the alternate 2001 and how they fared were moved along here and would be be fleshed out more over the course of the next six months.  I especially liked, and still like the idea that not all of the teams did as well as the team we’re following.  Sunburst, when we’re introduced to him in issue #11, is the only one who survived the trip back (and wound up going back three years early) and was essentially homeless and waiting for the end.  Most time-travel stories with superheroes don’t have them get so banged up.

Wolfman ended his run with the first Team Titans annual, part of the much-reviled Bloodlines crossover, where aliens were feeding on people and turning some of them into superheroes.  In New Titans Annual #9, we discovered Anima in a rather forgettable story (though she did get her own title after that); in Team Titans Annual #1, we get Chimera in one of the better Bloodlines annuals, which was written by Woflman and features art by Art Nichols.   The team encounters the alien early with one of the few times that Dagon being a vampire that can transform into a man-bat really does look cool.  They take on the alien without Redwing, who is attending a high school dance as part of another attempt to fit in.  She feels like a freak and her one friend, Sanjeet, isn’t there to encourage her, so she flies off and is about to help the rest of the Teamers when she sees Sanjeet get into an argument with her father and take off in his car.

Carrie chases after Sanjeet and they run into another alien, who attacks her friend and puts her into a coma, during which it’s revealed that Sanjeet now has the power to make dreams become real and … well, deadly.  Part of this has to do with the attack and her powers, but it’s revealed that part of it has to do with the fact that Sanjeet was doing drugs in order to cope with her father’s abuse.  So what you get here is very much a psychological drama as it is a superhero story, but with the psychological part literally coming to life.  When it appears that Sanjeet and the Team Titans are adversaries, she forces them to face some of their greatest nightmares (Mirage, for instance, is forced to relive time as a whore for Lord Chaos and his troops).  Eventually, they talk her down and Sanjeet faces off against her father, who is eventually arrested.

Now, it’s a bit like one of those “very special” episodes where there’s an issue and we all learn a lesson after our heroes solve their problems, but Wolfman made the Chimera character one that is more personal than some of the very forced heroes we were getting out of the “new blood” that DC was trying to position as the next big thing (read: they really needed to compete with Marvel and Image), and to be honest, even though Anima did get her own series, the only character worth anything to come out of this particular crossover was Hitman.  And if this hadn’t been part of a crossover, it could have worked on its own because Sanjeet’s powers trapping her in her own world and manifesting her torment were very similar to what Wolfman and Perez had done in “The Possession of Frances Kane” back in the early 1980s.  Plus, the team may have been heroes by at least giving them a shot at a true teenage problem was worth it.

Next Up: Deathstroke goes on a World Tour.

Get Out the Map

What is American is one of those things that is so hard to determine that at this point, it’s almost like a philosophical dilemma rather than a physical entity.  Many have tried to define or capture it; in fact, it seems that the right wing has sought to trademark it for the last couple of decades.  But pinning the answer to that question to one definition is never successful, and it seems that the journey to find that answer is just as if not more important.  Such is the case with Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn’s Anthem: An American Road Story.

In the summer of 1995, the two women, fed up with their jobs, decided to interview as many people as they possibly could under the auspices of looking for the definition of our country, of American heroes, and of the American Dream.  The result was a chronicle of that trip told through both a book and a film.

I am not sure if either the film or book were very popular upon their release, as I came in after the fact, getting the book as swag in the summer of 1998 when I interned for its publisher, Avon Books.  I was quite possibly the worst intern in the history of publishing because aside from free books and the ability to fix a five-way copier jam in under a minute, I took nothing away from my experience except for the desire to not work in publishing and to not spend my life commuting into Manhattan via the Long Island Rail Road.

But my ultimately unrewarding experience aside (which, by the way, is compounded by the fact that I turned down an interview for an unpaid internship with a major comics publisher because this internship was paid and I didn’t want my parents to be upset that I was working for no money), I got some very good reads out of it and Anthem was one of them.  During my time in editorial, the book’s editor, Jennifer Hershey, had a large poster of the cover to the paperback edition (Gabel and Hahn standing in a road holding their recording equipment) on the wall of her office and a huge stack of the hardcover edition by her door.  I either asked for a copy or swiped one (probably the former) because the concept of two people taking a road trip to interview people intrigued me, as it was a huge risk for someone to take with her life and I was one of the most risk-averse people in the world (still am to an extent).

I read Anthem on the train, taking it in kind of passively.  I don’t think that’s the type of reaction that the authors were looking for from a reader, but it’s not their fault; at that time I had the perspective of an overprivileged white college student who really knew nothing about the world beyond beers on Saturday.  Oh sure, I had service learning in classes that had me volunteering in sketchy areas of Baltimore and there was a professor or two that required a subscription to The New York Times, but the atmosphere at Loyola was very insulating; I went to college for four years and really didn’t take the time to look very much beyond myself or my own shit.  So really, it’s not their fault. (more…)

Mets Madness

When I sat down to write about the afterglow of the 1986 World Series, I started to consider what it was like to be a fan of a championship-winning team and how that carried over into the 1987 season when I was sure that the Mets would “do it again” as the promos kept saying. But the 1987 Mets were a bit of a letdown (Thanks a LOT, Terry FUCKING Pendelton!) and the afterglow of the 1986 World Series is something that I don’t remember as well as my repeated viewings of 1986 Mets: A Year to Remember had made it seem.

Then, I began to sift through the massive amount of 1986 Mets crap that I own or have owned at one point during the past 25 years, and thought I would simply “catalogue” it.  Partially because I’m lazy and don’t feel like writing anything with an actual point, and partially because even I am amazed at how much stuff there is.

1986 Mets: A Year to Remember.  This is the official team highlight video, which my friends and I rented repeatedly from Video Empire, so much so that it was impossible for anyone to find it because one of us always seemed to have it out.  I do happen to have my own copy because sometime in the late 1990s I rented it one more time and hooked two VCRs together in order to dub the video.

The video itself starts with a highlight of Game Six and then goes month to month through the regular season, with a few montages thrown in, the most famous of which definitely has to be the Len Dykstra and Wally Backman “Wild Boys” video set to the Duran Duran song of the same name, as well as a great clip of Howard Johnson and Roger McDowell telling the audience how to pull the “hot foot” prank on a player.   The playoffs and series are covered as well, with most of the play calling coming from Bob Murphy, the radio voice of the Mets, which I have to say is awesome because as much as I like hearing Vin Scully, Bob Murphy’s voice calling the Mets is one of the best things you’ll ever hear. (more…)