Author: Tom Panarese

Night Moves (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Thirty)

If the New Titans was, after issue #100, anywhere near the quality that Marv Wolfman, Tom Grummett, and Al Vey had been delivering when I started picking up the title with issue #71, I probably would have been felt that New Titans #113 was a monumental comic book. But Bill Jaaska was still on the artwork and the series had been limping along for the better part of a year, so I probably skimmed through the issue upon buying it and then set it aside so that I could dive into the latest chapter of KnightsEnd, Mark Waid’s run on Flash, or anything that was going to clue me into what Zero Hour was going to be about (especially since my beloved Team Titans were apparently agents of Monarch). As a result, it never registered with me that New Titans
#113 and #114 was the last time for a long time where Marv Wolfman would write Dick Grayson (he’d return to the character for guest spots on various Titans-related titles and have a run on Nightwing after Infinite Crisis, but after these two issues, Master Grayson was put in the capable hands of Chuck Dixon).

When you consider that Dick Grayson and Tim Drake were basically the reason that I started collecting comics for real in 1990, that’s actually kind of sad.

I bought comics for about a year–most of 1987, in fact–and since most of those comics were toy-based (G.I. Joe/Transformers), the wane in my reading and collecting coincided with the wane in my interest in toys. By the fall of 1987, my interests turned to more hardcore action/sci-fi movies like Aliens and Predator and my friends and I were tuning into the WWF twice a week when we weren’t playing Nintendo or playing baseball. With the exception of a random trip or two to the comic store, I didn’t really pick anything up until the summer of 1990 when friends of mine had started reading Batman comics on the regular. So after thumbing through a few issues, I picked up Detective Comics #617, the “middle chapter” of a three-part “Return of the Joker” story (that is a surreal story that isn’t vital to the other parts, which were in Batman #450 and #451 and is more or less a side dish).

But what made me stay was the next issue, Detective Comics #618. In that issue, Tim Drake’s parents are kidnapped and he starts what would be the penultimate story arc toward his finally putting on a new Robin costume in Batman #457. Concurrently, in New Titans #71, the Titans are kidnapped and Dick Grayson is among those looking for him and … well, if you’ve read the past 29 blog posts in this series, you know what I mean.

It took about four years (almost to the month–the Titans Hunt started the same month Batman #456 was published) for the team to finally be completely dismantled and the one character who was instrumental in getting and keeping the team together through his leadership to finally walk away for good. Now, if I’m being completely accurate here, Nightwing hadn’t really been leadning the team since issue #100 because of what had happened at his “wedding” to Kory. But during the year’s worth of Titans issues (and a few issues of Flash and some Bat-related books as well), there was always the underlying sense that when this was all over and Kory was saved and Raven was defeated, then Nightwing would return to leading the classic Titans lineup. Yes, they would have changed slightly–Cyborg’s new body and Donna Troy’s job as a Darkstar being great examples of this–but the classic New Teen Titans would be back.

This was not to be. New Titans #113 happens more or less simultaneously with the previous couple of issues, but instead of the satellite where the Titans are kissing Kory back to “normal,” Dick is in the jungles of South America on some sort of voyage of self-discovery where he canoes down rivers and hangs out with native tribes that have the kind of half-nude women you’d see in old issues of National Geographic. It’s the kind of plot device that has you sort of shaking your head and going “really, Marv?” but also makes total sense. After all, Dick is the “son” of a very wealthy person and needs to do something to cast that aside instead of trying to prove that he is/isn’t/is better than/is over his relationship with his “father,” which is what he’s been doing since he put on the Nightwing costume … at least in the post-Crisis.

And I guess we should talk about that, right?

The storyline that is arguably the most famous in New Teen Titans history is 1984’s “The Judas Contract.” It’s a four-part story that is the culmination of not one but two years’ worth of comics that began with the introduction of the character Terra in New Teen Titans #26. Actually, let me walk that back slightly–it’s technically the culmination of something that had been going on since the end of New Teen Titans #2 in 1980. In that issue, Grant Wilson gets superhuman abilities from the H.I.V.E., who stole them from Deathstroke, and then takes on the name of The Ravager and a mission to kill the Teen Titans. However, his powers overload his physiology and he winds up dying, leaving Deathstroke to take on that contract.

Slade Wilson appears one more time after that, in issue #10, where he tries to nuke the Titans and kills Changeling (who is brought back to life on Paradise Island in the following issues) and more or less lays low until issue #34, where Terra, having become a newly inducted member of the team, is key to his defeat. We then learn that said defeat was a setup to get the Titans to trust her some more–after all, she’s working with Deathstroke to uncover their secrets. The result is “The Judas Contract,” where Deathstroke and Terra play their endgame, capturing all of the Titans and giving them to the H.I.V.E.

Dick Grayson makes his official debut as Nightwing in Tales of the Teen Titans #44.

“The Judas Contract” is amazing for its being a four-part finale where the payoff for years of buildup was satisfying (although full disclosure–I didn’t read these issues as they come out, so I’m only speaking from my experience of doing several read-throughs) but also because it was a game-changer for DC. In Tales of the Teen Titans #44 (the title switched names in order to make way for the direct market-only “Baxter series” that would hit the shelves about a month after “The Judas Contract” finished), Dick Grayson puts on a new costume and says, “Are you people ready? Say hello to NIGHTWING!” At the same time, over in Batman, a kid named Jason Todd was putting on the Robin costume for the first time.

When you think about it, this was huge. Dick Grayson had been Robin since his debut in Detective Comics #38 in 1940 and up until the late 1960s, he had been Batman’s trusty sidekick, a “Boy Wonder” in every sense of the word. When the Dark Knight was reinvented for the Silver and Bronze Ages, Mr. Grayson was aged and sent off to college–no longer a boy, he was the teen wonder and would be so through much of the 1970s.

When DC Comics Presents #26 and The New Teen Titans #1 rolled around in 1980, not only was Dick Grayson a teen wonder, he was showing signs of having outgrown his pixie boots and short pants. He dropped out of college and had moved back into Wayne Manor and that had begun to cause tension between him and Batman. This tension grew throughout the New Teen Titans series, especially in late 1983 when Jason Todd was introduced to the Batman titles and was being groomed to be the second Robin. When the Titans teamed up with Batman and the Outsiders in New Teen Titans #37 and Batman and the Outsiders #5, the tension was so high that the Dynamic Duo openly argued with one another. Two issues later, Dick announced that he was giving up being Robin and after a two-part Brother Blood story and Deathstroke failing to capture him in part two of “The Judas Contract,” Dick became Nightwing and teamed up with Slade’s other son, Joseph, aka Jericho, to stop Deathstroke, Terra, and The H.I.V.E.

The poster version of the covers to The New Teen Titans #37 and Batman and the Outsiders #5, which was done by George Perez and Jim Aparo, two of the all-time DC greats.

Which they do. Jericho jumps into Deathstroke’s body and frees the Titans from whatever the H.I.V.E. was holding them in (it’s one of those Rube Goldberg devices that drains powers and kills heroes that villains were into back in the Bronze Age) and a huge melee breaks out between the Titans, the H.I.V.E., Deathstroke, and Terra, with Terra finally snapping and trying to kill everyone but doing herself in. It’s a tragic ending and a pyhrric victory that only gets more painful in Tales of the Teen Titans #55 when Changeling drags Slade Wilson out of court to get him into a confrontation so he can murder him but then has a cup of coffee and a nice long talk. No, that’s really what happens and it’s actually a well-scripted issue because it gives those two characters depth in a way that few writers ever could (on a side note, Peter David will outdo Wolfman in the early 1990s with X-Factor #87, a stand-alone “therapy” issue that is still one of the all-time greats).

From here, Nighwing goes on to lead the Titans and while his relationship with Kory has some bumps, he gets closure with Batman and really is his own man. Until the Crisis and then Max Alan Collins come along.

If there’s one Titan whose entire story was monumentally screwed up by the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, it’s Donna Troy. Second to her is Dick Grayson. If you look at any of the other founding members of the team–Raven, Starfire, Cyborg, Kid Flash, Changeling–the Crisis comes and goes and they’re more or less fine. However, Donna’s history gets messy as a result (and I covered that in past entries in this series) and so does Dick’s because of the way the Batman books changed Jason Todd.

The pre-Crisis Jason Todd was more or less a Dick Grayson clone. Yes, there were differences is his story and Dick’s, but the kid was a circus kid whose parents were killed and who eventually became Robin. It fit what DC was going for at the time, which was to get the image of a classic Dynamic Duo back into the forefront. After the Crisis, Max Alan Collins took over the writing on Batman while Mike W. Barr did a woefully underrated run on Detective Comics (a run that–and I realize it’s sacreligious to say this–feels more Batman than Frank Miller’s Batman). While Jason appeared alongside Bruce in ‘Tec, Collins spent a few issues reinventing and retconning the character, which also completely redid the relationship between Bruce and Dick. Batman #408 is titled, “Did Robin Die Tonight?” and in that story, Dick (as Robin in his only post-Crisis Robin appearance at this point) is shot by The Joker. Batman, saying that Dick made a stupid mistake and let himself get shot, fires his partner. An issue later, he catches Jason Todd trying to steal the tires off of the Batmobile. Missing his partner and thinking that this kid has serious spunk, Batman takes him under his wing as a new Robin.

This version of Jason Todd was met with derision from a number of fans, especially after Batman #423, when he kinda sorta kills a drug dealer by not helping him when he falls off an apartment balcony. This Jason was a smart ass, a punk, and not the type of kid you thought deserved to be Robin, no matter how much Batman thought he needed saving one way or the other. So the fans voted to kill him in the infamous “A Death in the Family” storyline, something that would reverberate and have consequences all the way up until and through the day I picked up that copy of Detective Comics #618.

Which is to say, it was all prologue, and all things I hunted down either in trade or in back issues so that I could read what I felt was the “full story of Nightwing.” And if you want, you can create your own “Marv Wolfman’s Nightwing” (with some other writers thrown in at times) by reading the following books (and a quick note here–I limited this to stuff published between 1940 and 1994-95, so some storylines that came later, such as Chuck Dixon’s Robin Year One, Batgirl Year One, and Nightwing Year One are not here, although they do add some great stuff to the Nightwing mythos) …

Detective Comics #38: Not 100% necessary because in the post-Crisis DCU, Wolfman will tell this story in Batman: Year 3, but this is the introduction and origin of Robin and even if you’re reading the character in a modern context, I think it’s important to go back and look at where he started. Furthermore, I think it’s important to see how dark his origin was–the death of his parents and subsequent tracking down of his parents’ killers are gritty and real to the point where they hold up better than any other version of this that I’ve seen.

The Brave and the Bold #54, Teen Titans (1964 series) #14, Batman #312, Teen Titans (1964 series) #53: While I’m sure there are other essential stories from the original “Teen Titans” run as well as Robin stuff in the Silver and Bronze Ages, these four comics are a quick look at the evolution of Dick Grayson from “Boy” to “Teen Wonder.” B&TB #54 is the very first Teen Titans adventure (although it happens sans Wonder Girl) and if you can pick out any crucial Teen Titans issue regarding Robin, it’s issue #14 with its famous Nick Cardy “Quit, Robin, Quit!” cover. Self-doubt would become a running theme for Dick and we even see some of it in Batman #312, where he leaves Wayne Manor for Hudson University (and Bruce subsequently moves out of the Manor and into the Wayne Foundation building, which is where he would be for much of the 1970s). Teen Titans #53 is the last issue of that series and serves as a retcon of the original meeting of the team as well as a reference point for where Wolfman will pick things up a few months later. If you want to dive deeper into this, I’d also recommend picking up the Steve Engelhart-written/Marshall Rogers-pencilled issues of Detective Comics that were collected into the “Strange Apparitions” trade paperback a number of years ago.

DC Comics Presents #26, New Teen Titans (1980 series) #1, 2, 10: While #10 has little to do with the Batman and Robin angst going on, it helps to read it so that you can see a solid Deathstroke appearance before you get into the meat of the goings on with “The Judas Contract” and you can understand why there’s such animosity between Slade and Gar Logan. The DCCP issue is the first appearance of this new team and issues #1 and 2 do show some of the tension that’s been building up between Bruce and Dick–when Dick heads out to meet Donna at the beginning of issue #1, he thinks about how Bruce has been upset with him as of late because he dropped out of college. Issue #2, which is Deathstroke’s first appearance, plants the seeds for what we’ll see later.

New Teen Titans (1980 series) #26-27; Justice League Quarterly #17; New Teen Titans (1980 series) #28-34, Annual 2; : The Titans return home from an epic adventure on Tamaran, Dick and Kory begin their relationship, and we are introduced to Terra. The last few issues of this run reveal that Terra has been working with Deathstroke and also introduce Adrian Chase as The Vigilante. It’s this case that has Robin begin to seriously rethink his role as Batman’s partner, and while he does not go down the route of killing perps like The Vigilante does, he sees that perhaps he needs to be more hard-edged. Terra, it should be noted, does not immediately go on the attack. It will take another year for her and Deathstroke to make their move. The Justice League Quarterly issue is not vital–it just happens to have a follow-up to the “Runaways” storyline from #26-27 that I have always absolutely loved.

New Teen Titans (1980 series) #37; Batman and the Outsiders #5; New Teen Titans (1980 series) 38; Batman #408; New Teen Titans (1980 series) #39; Batman #409, 410, 411; Tales of the Teen Titans #40-44, Annual 3, 53-55; Annual 3: “The Judas Contract” and its aftermath, with the origin of the post-Crisis Jason Todd weaved in. It’s not the smoothest thing, but if you read the Titans-Outsiders team-up followed by “Who is Donna Troy?” and then “Did Robin Die Tonight?” you can head into the “Robin Quits” issue of New Teen Titans (with the iconic “Dick and Wally Walk Away” cover) before reading the introduction of the new Jason as going on parallel to the events of the Brother Blood storyline and “The Judas Contract.” Again, the three issues of Tales of the Teen Titans that come out after the annual are not Nightwing stories but they give Changeling and Deathstroke closure (to the point where with the exception of a cameo or two, Slade doesn’t appear in a Titans book until 1988/1989).

BatmanNightwing

New Teen Titans (1984 series) #19, 20, 21; Teen Titans Spotlight #14; Batman #416: The three issues of the baxter series are more vital to the long-running Tamaran and Brother Blood storylines (and I mean loooooong ruuuunnnning) than anything, but there’s more of Wolfman giving Dick serious doubts. Teen Titans Spotlight #14 is a great Batman/Nightwing team-up and goes well with the first post-Crisis meeting between Dick and Jason in Batman #416, which is still one of my favorite Jim Starlin Batman issues.

Batman #426-429; New Titans #52, 55: The Batman issues are “A Death in the Family,” where The Joker kills Jason Todd. The Titans issues are part of the “Who is Wonder Girl?” storyline and you need to read just a few panels of #52 (Danny Chase searches for Jason Todd on the CBI databases and can’t find him, leading him to think he’s dead) and a few pages of #55 (Danny smart-mouths his reaction to Jason’s death, Dick goes off on him and then heads to the Batcave to confront Bruce. After Bruce decks him, Dick realizes that Danny is a pain in the … I mean, too young for this … and fires him from the Titans).

Secret Origins Annual #3; Batman #436-439; New Titans #57-59: The Secret Origins annual tells the history of the Teen Titans all the way up until this point through the perspective of Dick Grayson being haunted in his nightmares by an old enemy. The main thing to read here is Batman: Year 3, which is in those four Batman issues. Marv Wolfman and Pat Broderick deliver a post-Crisis version of Dick Grayson’s origin as well as have him work out some of his present-day issues with Bruce. It’s actually unique to the “Year” storylines as it doesn’t happen entirely in flashback the way Year One and Year Two do. The Titans issues are a side dish–a few pages in each update us on the team’s concern for their leader as well as help set up the next storyline.

A DC house ad for “A Lonely Place of Dying.” Art by Jim Aparo.

Batman #440-442, New Titans #60, 61, 65: “A Lonely Place of Dying.” Batman is starting to run amok. Two-Face has grand plans. And Tim Drake tracks down Dick Grayson, revealing that he knows who he is and he knows that Batman not only needs help, he needs Robin. It is a sequel to “A Death in the Family” that has Tim putting on the Robin costume for the first time, at least momentarily, and starts him on his road to being the next Boy Wonder, which wouldn’t officially happen for another 15 issues. The story in New Titans #65 is one where Tim visits Dick in New York and learns some things about what it means to be Batman’s partner as well as a detective. It serves as an outstanding epilogue to “A Lonely Place of Dying” and makes me appreciate the time that Wolfman, Alan Grant, and Denny O’Neil would put into developing Tim Drake’s character before he actually became Robin.

A couple of notes here: “Year 3” was wiped out of continuity post-Zero Hour when Robin’s origin was retold in Robin Annual #4 and then later on in Robin: Year One. However, “A Lonely Place of Dying” stayed in continuity for years afterward, even being packaged in a new “A Death in the Family” trade. It’s also at this point where you can follow Tim Drake’s road to becoming Robin in Detective Comics #618-621, Batman #455-457, and the first three Robin miniseries before he gets his own book. Nightwing’s story continues in New Titans #71, which was the first post in this blog series. After reaching New Titans #113, you would read #114 and then head to Robin #0 followed by the “Prodigal” storyline, which is about Dick temporarily serving as Batman. At the end of that story, he heads off into his own miniseries and eventually into the Chuck Dixon-penned title of the late 1990s.

But I won’t be going too far into those. Instead, I’ll be sticking with the Titans themselves and talking about their disillusion and reformation.

Next Up: The Titans fall apart while Zero Hour rages on.

The taste that’s gonna move you!

I’ve never been a regular gum chewer. Oh sure, I have a pack of peppermint gum sitting next to me while I’m typing this but that’s because I had serious onion breath the other day and went out and bought said pack so I could talk to people in a professional capacity without killing them. But really, I’m not a regular gum chewer. It might have something to do with the fact that from the third grade on and off until my sophomore year of high school, I had braces; however, I like to think that it’s because I am ultimately disappointed that I never had the experiences that gum companies promised me in the 1980s.

Commercials for gum these days seem to hype the product’s taste, making it seem that chewing a piece of 5 gum will make your entire body shake from its awesomeness. In the 1980s, however, gum commercials seemed less focused on how great everything taste and more focused on the amount of sex you could possibly have as a result of chewing said gum. Extra promised that things would last an extra long time, you could get a “little lift” from Wrigley’s spearmint gum, Big Red allowed you to get a little closer and kiss a little longer, and Doublemint … well, they had twins. But no gum was so focused on getting you some than Juicy Fruit, which had the taste that was going to move you …

Bottom half of this illustration: my “crew” in high school.

It really is the ultimate gum commercial and uses sex for its sales pitch so much that it’s practically a beer commercial. You have a group of un-loving teens who are going water skiing on a lake somewhere. And they’re not just any group of teens, but they are the type of group that I’m sure my father would have referred to as a “crew.” For instance, “Yeah, that’s Jake Ryan. He hangs around with Andrew Clark, Brad Hamilton–you know, that whole crew.”

I was never part of a crew. You have to be popular to be part of a crew, and I wasn’t popular. I did have friends, but the closest we ever got to being a “crew” was emulating the Car of Idiots from that Far Side cartoon. We certainly never went water-skiing; I don’t think we ever event went to the beach. I know that I was certainly embarrassed to take my shirt off in public when I was a teenager (although there wasn’t anything wrong with me, aside from my being skinny), and if you ever did catch me at a lake or at a beach, you’d probably find me with my face buried in a Star Trek or Star Wars EU novel. Yeah, not exactly the type of person who belongs in a “crew.”

Funny thing, I kind of always wanted to be in a crew and I think it’s commercials like this that helped feed this desire. That and it seemed like everybody water-skiied in the 1980s. I remember being dragged to what seemed like an endless stream of barbecues, clambakes, and family parties (okay, it was probably two) where someone had a boat and a pair of water-skis and the entertainment for the evening was seeing how long various partygoers could stay on the skis before they completely wiped out. Here, everyone seems to be an expert skiier and while some of them do wipe out on occasion, it seems that they all know how to perform the type of stunts that you’d only see at Sea World. (more…)

White Water Summer

So a couple of weeks ago I noticed that White Water Summer was going to be on one of the random movie channels on the higher end of my digital cable menu (Encore? Flix? FX Movies? Movierama? Video Empire?), I thought, “Yes! I am SO watching this and blogging about it!” Then I couldn’t help but laugh when I set up the recording because the of the description that Comcast provided: “Kevin Bacon plays a sadist in charge of adolescents on a camping trip.”

If you take that description at face value along with the title, it sounds like a horror movie, as if Bacon plays the serial killer in some bad Friday The 13th ripoff (which, considering White Water Summer‘s 1987 release date isn’t entirely unrealistic); however, the film is actually a coming-of-age tale that involves Kevin Bacon in one of his douchiest roles, as an outward bound-type counselor named Vic who takes a very reluctant, scared kid named Alan (played by Sean Astin) and several others on a trip into the wilderness.

It’s not a movie that a lot of people have seen–it never made it past its original limited release and I’m sure it wasn’t flying off video store shelves–and it wasn’t well-received, getting a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But I have to say that the reason I wanted to blog about this movie isn’t because it is a great piece to play in a game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (if anyone actually plays that game anymore), but because this was one of those movies that I rented over and over as a kid and with which I have always felt this oddly deep connection.

As I mentioned, Kevin Bacon’s Vic is an expedition leader who is clearly a full-fledged “nature boy” because when we see him for the very first time, he is walking down the streets of New York City wearing the same fully loaded backpack that you’d wear when hiking through the rough terrain of the Rocky Mountains. He is there to visit Alan, who is basically Sean Astin in his Goonies phase, as opposed to another, older Alan who narrates the movie, which is Astin in his “Kirk Cameron’s wise-assed sidekick” phase. This, by the way, was because most of the movie was filmed in 1985 but shelved, then there were Ferris Bueller/Zack Morris-type interstitials where an older Alan would talk to the camera to offer commentary about what was going on that were shot two years later right before the film was released.

Anyway, Alan winds up being convinced (he’s kind of forced) to go on the trip and heads off with three other guys: Mitch (Jonathan Ward, who played middle child Doug Pembroke on the first season of Charles in Charge), George (K.C. Martel, who played Mike Seaver’s friend Eddie on Growing Pains), and Chris (Matt Adler, who starred in the 1987 surfing flick, North Shore). George and Chris are the older guys who tend to look down on Mitch and Alan and even give Alan the nickname “Dickface.” They head off to the woods and almost immediately, Alan proves to be the “problem” on the trip–he carves his name in a tree, he doesn’t want to catch a fish with his bare hands, he freaks out when crossing a rope bridge, and is literally left hanging when he’s too scared to rappel across a huge rock formation named Devil’s Tooth.

That’s a huge simplification of most of the movie, but most of what happens is basically tension between the very reluctant and often scared Alan and the “Oh come on, you guys are going to be great at this and if you aren’t, I’m going to push you until you DO WHAT I TELL YOU!!!” Vic. The other guys do get into it with Vic here and there, especially the night he leaves them all alone in a thunderstorm and they freak the hell out (George, especially, who hams it up rather dramatically). But for the most part, Alan is “dickface” the entire time and Vic’s their brave leader and a really cool guy. Until that moment I mentioned in Devil’s Tooth, which is when they all turn on Vic by walking away from him to go back to the ranger station, then when he tracks them down (and is slightly unhinged), beat the crap out of him and break his leg. So it becomes up to Alan to take a wounded Vic down a raging river to get help (hence, the white water in the summer).

As far as coming-of-age stories go, it is a bit tepid, especially by today’s standards. There’s no sex, there’s no horror, there aren’t any real quotable linesand one of the few things that you can really laud it for is that it’s shot beautifully. But I rented this movie at least four or five times between the time I first saw it in 1987 and the time I started junior high school in 1989, which is odd for a kid who was subsiding on a steady diet of Schwarzenegger, Seagal, and Van Damme. Sean Astin finally getting up the courage to make his way across a dangerous rope bridge and being left to figure out how to rappel over a ravine isn’t exactly Arnold camouflaging himself with mud and setting all sorts of woodland traps for the alien in Predator; and while Kevin Bacon’s Vic is a total jackass, I wouldn’t say that he’s that Bolo Yeung in Bloodsport. Still, I loved it and still love it because when I was 10 years old, I identified with Alan. (more…)

16 Days of Glory

As of my writing this, we’re about knee-deep in the 2012 London Summer Olympics. In fact, as I glance over to my television, the NBC Sports Network is showing a U.S.-North Korea women’s soccer match (it was either that or tennis). I’ve always been a huge fan of the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, especially at how it has me watching and enjoying sports I would never watch otherwise (I went to lunch with some work friends the other day and we watched a water polo match that was on at the restaurant).

This love of the Olympics has its roots in my love of sports, of course, because if I didn’t like sports I wouldn’t care about the Olympics; however, I feel like sometimes I am the only guy who watches the games for the sheer pageantry of it all. Which is why, by the way, I kept tweeting out snarky bon mots throughout last Friday night’s Opening Ceremonies, pissing and moaning about how badly NBC was mangling their tape-delayed coverage. In fact, NBC’s fail on this part has been so epic this year it’s like a running joke among tweeters and bloggers, especially those who look forward to the games every four years.

But I’m not going to spend this entry complaining about NBC (that’s what Twitter is for). No, I thought it might be cool to sit down for a few moments and think about why I am so enthralled by the Olympic Games and why I will spend so much time watching them, even staying up until ungodly hours to watch women’s gymnastics prelims in the summer or a curling match in the winter. And thankfully it’s not a hard thing to figure out because the very first games I watched were I think the games that people my age think of the most when they think “Olympics.”

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be speaking for my entire generation but I think that the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics really did come to define “Olympics” for quite a number of Children of the 1980s.

I turned seven in 1984, which meant that this was the first Olympic Games that I actually remember. I’m sure that people who are even slightly older than me will tell me they have memories of the 1980 Winter Olympics, especially the “Miracle on Ice,” and to that I say that they’re seriously lucky. Being born in June 1977, I was all of 2-1/2 years old when the underdog U.S. hockey team beat the U.S.S.R. and then Finland to win the gold medal, so if I saw the game against the Russians (which I highly doubt), I don’t remember it at all. Had there not been a boycott of the Moscow games that same year, I may have seen the 1980 Summer Games, but that wasn’t to be.

The 1984 Summer Olympics soundtrack cassette. This is not available on CD or digitally, so I kind of regret not getting it back in the 1980s when I really wanted it.

So, the summer when I was seven years old and was allowed to stay up slightly later than usual, I saw some of the competition, but most importantly I caught quite a bit of the opening ceremonies. I don’t know if it was because my parents thought it was important for me to see it or if ABC aired it live instead of on tape delay (which may have been the case — a 3-hour time difference meant it might have aired live; then again, ABC tape delayed the U.S.-Soviet hockey game in 1980 so I wouldn’t put it past them), but I saw quite a bit, including parts of the Parade of Nations (or as my wife put it, “The Model U.N.”).

In my mind, I thought it was the most epic thing I had ever seen (which is saying a lot because I had been watching Star Wars every morning for the past two years). The audience all had cards on their seats and after a guy came flying in on a jet pack–yes, a JET PACK, which is awesome on so many levels–the PA announcer told them to hold up the cards and the entire stadium was then decorated in the flags of the participating countries. Plus, you had a theme composed by John Williams that to this day stands as one of my top five John Williams pieces (and next to his NBC News theme, one of his most underrated). In fact, I loved it so much that when I saw a copy of the soundtrack on cassette at TSS a few years later, I wanted it. In fact, I coveted that soundtrack so much that I actually took it out of the place where it had been placed and put it behind another cassette on another shelf where nobody but me would find it, not realizing that I probably wouldn’t ever get the money to buy it or that I didn’t have to hide it because it was 1988 and nobody but me was coveting the soundtrack (for the record, I never did get the tape).

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Kynasf’rr and … The Teraizer? Seriously?! (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty-Nine)

Liz Alderman in full-on Renfield mode, pregnant with her master’s demon seed. New Titans #108.

A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing eBay for things Titans-related and among the auctions was a group of four or five comics that were being offered at a starting price of $5.00 (with some sort of astronomical shipping attached). I almost laughed out loud because the comics in question were New Titans #108-112 and in all honesty, those are barely worth their cover price anymore.

Okay, maybe that is a little harsh, but those books are smack in the middle of what was, at the time, the nadir of the New Titans. In fact, a couple of the issues in this pile still make my all-time, dumpster-behind-a-Sizzler, bottom five Titans stories of all-time. Yet unlike some of the other stories I would put on this list, these do have at least one or two redeeming values.

I’ll start, I guess, with what has been happening since it’s been a couple of months since i sat down and looked at the main Titans book (which is kind of how things went for me back in 1994 anyway–I was so into Team Titans and the lead-up to Zero Hour and so turned off by what I was seeing in New Titans that I’m sure I was reading these out of obligation). Anyway, the Titans are now being led by Arsenal and have returned from the whole Cyborg/Technis storyline a team member down and without any real support. Meanwhile, Nightwing, their former leader, is focused on taking care of Starfire because she’s still suffering from whatever Raven did to her in issue #100 (oh yes, Dark Raven is still out there … and they won’t truly get rid of her until issue #130, which is the last issue of the series). Basically, this is the focus of the book all the way to Zero Hour‘s aftermath, and the quality of the two plot lines differ incredibly.

I’ll start with Dick and Kory; specifically, Kory, who is the focus of the first two issues and quite frankly who Marv Wolfman seemed to want to write about. This was around the time when the “Knights” sagas (-fall, -quest, -end) were finally wrapping up in the Batman books and as a result, Dick Grayson was going to be brought back into that particular “family”.” Wolfman would be losing a character he had been writing for a decade and a half, and since Nightwing’s solo adventures would (at first) have little to no connection to anything Titans, Dick and Kory had to break up. So, in issues 108 and 109, Starfire undergoes Kynasf’rr (pronounced “k-eye-nass-ferr?” I have no idea. I mean, you pronounce “Koriand’r” “coriander,” which … spicy … but … yeah …), which is a Tamaranean maturity ritual that I can best describe as kind of like Pon farr, the Vulcan mating ritual. As a result, Kory goes from being a blubbering mess to a fierce, almost emotionless “Shaman of Tamaran.”

Where this starts is in an insane asylum. Kory once again visits Liz Alderman, who now looks like a crazy old woman who is … pregnant? Huh? Well, she tells Kory exactly what is gestating inside of her and our hero as well: a demon seed, the dead children of Trigon. Nightwing steps in to protect Kory and as he does, an image appears to her and she flies off to the Southern Hemisphere, burying herself deep in the Andes to begin Kynasf’rr. (more…)

Cuckoo for CoCo Wheats

I’ve always been attracted to random stuff at stores. When I was a kid, for instance, I liked to walk down the “aisle of forgotten toys” at Toys R Us. In fact, I even had a few of the random-assed action figures found in that aisle or at places like Odd Lot. The obscurity of those things was kind of alluring – they were products that weren’t as cool or popular as the G.I. Joe figures that were selling out in droves, so they were more or less buried in the store (which, in a way, probably explains why I created this blog). As I got older, I saw the same thing with books, albums, and movies, which led to some purchases that were pretty awesome and others that wound up explaining why said item had been left for retail dead.

I never thought the same could be said for food, however. Food, in general, has an expiration date, so I would be less likely to find a three-year-old jar of peanut butter on a store shelf (although I am sure they probably have some at South of the Border) than, say, leftover Spider-Man 3 toys. Still, there are always some foods in a supermarket that never seem to exist anywhere else, as if they were brought here through an interdimensional portal or something.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with cereal. Stroll down your average cereal aisle and you’ll see a variety of products you never knew existed–bagged cereals, oddly named generic cereals, laxative cereals, King Vitaman–and while most of them won’t even garner a second glance, there is sure to be one that jumps out at you.

For my wife and I, this was the case with CoCo Wheats. A chocolate-flavored farina cereal, we first encountered it at a Kroger in Charlottesville back in 2004 or 2005. I can’t remember if we bought a box the first time we saw them or if our first time came later, but somewhere along the line in our search for a breakfast food that wasn’t the same boring box of Cheerios, we decidd that we had to have them. Thankfully, we were not disappointed upon trying them for the first time; in fact, they’ve been a welcome addition to our breakfast table ever since.

Okay, I read that last sentence and realize it sounds like every crappy commercial ever. Sorry.

Anyway, two things that I found particular about CoCo Wheats were that for a cereal that kind of seems obscure, it has a pretty rich history; and the actual process of cooking CoCo Wheats is nothing short of a chemistry experiment. (more…)

Elseworlds (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Twenty-Eight)

As I’ve said before, when you’re trying to cover a series, annuals can be problematic. They don’t often fit into the continuity, or you find yourself struggling to fit them in, and even when they do they’re often not that good. During the sixteen years that Marv Wolfman wrote the New Teen Titans and New Titans series, there were fourteen annuals, and when I think of it there were three that were good and three that were worth reading. The three that were great were the exceptions to the rule–three annuals that wrapped up major storylines (the original Tamaran storyline, the origin of the Vigilante, and The Judas Contract in the 1980 series’ three annuals). The three that were worth reading either wrapped up long-standing questions (New Titans Annual #6, where the team returns to Tamaran and Karras dies), introduced new characters (New Titans Annual #7, which introduced the Team Titans), or carried the story along (1995’s New Titans Annual #11). But for the most part, the annuals from the New Teen Titans/ New Titans “baxter” series badly introduced new heroes or villians or spent time trying to reconcile post-Crisis continuity issues.

For what it’s worth, during the 1990s, DC did try to make their annuals relevant and for a couple of years it seemed to work. I don’t have the exact sales figures or anything in front of me, but I found both Armageddon 2001 and Eclipso: The Darkness Within fun, and Bloodlines … well, I read Bloodlines, does that count?

Okay, pithy comments aside, I’m sure that lack of quality and/or interest in Bloodlines proved a little problematic because when 1994 rolled around and it was time for annuals, DC decided that it wasn’t going to force its readers to buy every single annual out there to get a full-on storyline, but still wanted to tie together all of its annuals in some way and went for a thematic tie-in with Elseworlds.

Elseworlds was a concept that up until this point had mainly been applied to prestige format one-shots that mostly featured Batman or Superman, beginning with the excellent Gotham By Gaslight, which placed Batman in 19th Century Gotham City trying to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper (it didn’t have the “Elseworlds” emblem on it, but is considered one of the very first).

The concept, as described by DC, is, “In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places–some that have existed and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist.”

The Elseworlds specials seemed to be pretty successful each time and fans seemed to love the idea so much that the 1994 annuals were all “Elseworlds” stories starring the characters from those individual comics. This made it easy for continuity geeks like me to figure out where the annuals go, even if some of the annuals were pretty good and others seemed to come from the hackneyed “Die Hard on a ______” type of storytelling model.

The Titansverse had three annuals going for it, as Deathstroke: The Terminator Annual #3, New Titans Annual #10, and Team Titans Annual #2 were Elseworlds tales, and apparently I found these so significant that I didn’t realize that I didn’t even known the Deathstroke annual until a couple of years ago when I was sorting my collection into fresh long boxes and I noticed it wasn’t there. My local comics shop had it for a whopping $2.00, so it’s not like it was a crisis.

That Deathstroke annual, which was written by Marv Wolfman with art by Ed Benes (yes, that Ed Benes, and it’s extremely early Benes, so there’s no butts in anyone’s face), is the story of how Deathstroke fights in a future gone made against a race called The Genetix. Since he has been made immortal because of all of the experiments conducted on him, he seems to be the only man who can take down The Genetix, especially after learning their secret. Reading the story made me wonder if Wolfman had been watching Mad Max movies or reading old issues of Hex, because the post-apocalyptic world is right out of the 1980s. But to his credit, he chooses not to rework an origin story (which is what so many of the Batman Elseworlds tended to do) and that makes it the strongest of the three and a decent stand-alone story.

New Titans Annual #10, on the other hand, which was scripted by Louise Simonson from a plot by Wolfman, tries a little too hard. The creative team tries to place the Titans in a sword-and-sorcery epic and relies on a plot by Raven to bring back Trigon so he can take over the world, which is what had already been going on in the regular title (and what, quite frankly, fans were a little tired of) and quite frankly it feels like … well “It’s Die Hard but with magic!” and is rather forgettable.

Team Titans Annual #2, on the other hand, is not too bad. This came out a week before Team Titans #20, so Monarch hadn’t been revealed as the Team Titans’ leader and we weren’t aware of how he had this master plan that involved the upcoming Zero Hour crossover, but it wound up revealing one of the plot points for the last issues of the series. The adventure takes place in outer space with Lord Chaos essentially using Earth as some sort of Warworld and the Teamers being a band of rebels committed to destroying his tyranny. Most of the characters stay who they are, except for Redwing, who is able to transform into a beast called “Warhawk.” The difference between this and her transformation during Team Titans #20-24 was that in the annual she changes back to her more humanoid form and in the series the change is permanent, but I do remember seeing the regular issues and thinking it was pretty cool that I was able to see that Carrie would become “warhawk” in the regular comic.

Otherwise, the comic feels like a rehash of the Team Titans’ origin but a good enough rehash to stand on its own as a halfway decent story. Jeff Jensen and Phil Jiminez wrote a story that seemed to be a throwback to Marvel’s Star Wars series from the late 1970s and early 1980s, with its rebels and swashbuckling sort of space adventure and much like the series they were writing, they did their best to show that they were having some sort of fun. Had there not been three art teams, it may have been a little more solid, but reading “The Titans do Star Wars” is worth tracking it down.

So I’m sorry if this seems a little rushed, but that’s annuals for ya — something you’ve got to read because you’re reading everything, but nothing that you really remember when you’re done and file it away among the regular story.

Next Up: Raven haunts Starfire as New Titans heads toward a huge change.

Self-Righteous

The watershed moments in your life rarely come with a script. Oh sure, you have your major milestones and accomplishments but the moments of true epiphany are the most random, often happening when you least expect it. One such moment in my life came before a club meeting during my senior year of high school. I was helping pass out agendas and had left my backpack on my seat. A friend of mine, Jim, was a fellow officer in the club happened to see my Walkman and out of curiosity, pulled it out of my bag and gave it a listen. I returned to the table in time to see a look of complete confusion make its way across his face.

“Give me that,” I said, snatching the Walkman out of his hand. Jim didn’t respond, and I put my headphones on to hear what had prompted such a strange look. Playing near full blast was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Luckily, the meeting soon began and Jim didn’t care enough to mention it again or to anyone else, and needless to say that had me relieved because while I brushed the incident off, I felt the same sort of weird guilt you’d feel as if you’d been caught masturbating. This was music I had been listening to when nobody was around, an act of musical self-pleasure that I kept hidden from the guys I talked heavy metal with at the lunch table where for all they knew, I was genuinely impressed that Jeff tracked down a Megadeth bootleg or that Brian finally acquired the studio version of “Breadfan” when he bought the Japanese import single for “One.” Had he mentioned it to the group of people we hung out with, I would have been mercilessly ridiculed, like the time they found my copy of Born in the U.S.A. and wrote “Nice ass!” on the cover.

I probably shouldn’t have cared, to be honest. What’s wrong with having your own tastes? Who cares what other people think, right? But I was an individual with serious self-esteem problems and a need for approval that meant not only did I really want to seem like I was cool, but I was quite possibly the easiest target for ridicule. I will spare you the vulgar nicknames, the perfume sprayings, and other jokes in my honor and say that though Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield’s glory years were a good thirty years behind them at that point, my listening to the Righteous Brothers tape I’d borrowed from my mother, especially “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” had a perfectly reasonable explanation: Top Gun. (more…)

Fuzzy memories of summer camp

On Monday, my son started summer camp. Beng that he is a four-year-old rising kindergartener, this was a pretty big deal because it is his first “summer break” after a year of school (whereas up until last August he was simply in daycare). The camp is run out of his school, so there really is no difference in our morning and afternoon routines of dropping him off or picking him up, even though he is going to spend most of his days going to the pool or making crafts or playing games as opposed to sitting in class and learning letters and numbers.

Apparently, camp around here is kind of a big thing, to the point where every spring, there is not only a huge advertising supplement in the local newspapers about the various summer camp programs offered throughout the greater Charlottesville area, but there is a “summer camp expo” held at a local hotel where parents can stop by, pick up literature, sign up for camps, and meet local newscasters (I don’t know what the appeal is in meeting local newscasters, but there you go). Where I grew up on Long Island, I don’t remember the ramp-up to summer break being a huge rush to get kids “signed up for something,” because quite a number of my summers were spent sitting around and doing very little. I know that I sound like an old fart when I say that I was a kid in the days when kids could be left home alone and there was no danger in that, but it is actually true. Most of the friends I had in later elementary school were kids whose parents weren’t always home and as long as I could ride my bike to their houses and as long as I was home before dinner time and wasn’t committing any criminal acts (and seriously, I grew up in freaking Sayville … the most “illegal” thing I ever did was cut through an abandoned lot and buy smoke bombs from the ice cream man), everything was fine. Granted, there were days where my friend Tom and I spent time jumping out of trees and body slamming his little brother and I’m amazed that nobody got seriously injured, but we wound up fine.

But for those kids whose parents: a) were sick of their children doing nothing except watch TV all day; b) didn’t want their children unsupervised; or c) had the money, there was “camp.” I didn’t know many kids who went to a “sleepaway” camp like the type portrayed in Meatballs or Wet Hot American Summer, probably because by the time I was old enough to do a sleepaway camp, those places had become synonymous with machete-wielding, hockey-mask-wearing killers.

Okay, that probably wasn’t the reason–it was probably more like sleepaway camp was a pain in the ass and parents preferred something more local, of which there were plenty of opportunities, some of which were almost like a sleepaway camp but were called “day camps.” Every spring during my childhood, when I would be home in the afternoon watching G.I. Joe or He-Man and the Masters and the Universe, the local syndicated stations (like WPIX and WNEW/WNYW) would air a commercial for Young People’s Day Camp:

Now I am sure that this commercial ran well into the late 1980s and maybe even the early 1990s because I remember seeing it for years and I am sure that most of the kids in the commercial were in college by the time I was watching it. I’d say that Young People’s Day Camp is the Mount Airy Lodge of children’s camps–the type of place that if you visited it now, it would be mired in bankruptcy and one skinned knee from being shut down by either the board of health or child protective services–but they are still up and running throughout the New York and New Jersey area, even if they’re not airing the same commercials. (more…)

On Earth, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

“The Book of Alien,” published in 1979, had me scared out of my mind when I was a kid.

I think of all the movies I’m looking forward to this summer, Prometheus is at the top of the list. I know that being a huge comic book reader I would probably be more excited about The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises, but when I heard that Ridley Scott was making a movie that had ties somehow to Alien, something in my nerd past reawakened and I remembered (suddenly? I mean it’s not like I ever really forgot) that when I was about 11 years old, the world he created in Alien was the center of my universe.

Okay, to be fair, the reason for that was more due to James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, because up until the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I had only ever seen anything to do with Alien in the movie book–The Book of Alien–that someone on my bus had been passing around when I was in the second grade. Furthermore, what I had seen was a picture of the movie’s infamous “chestburster scene” (although at the time we called it “when that thing came out of the guy’s stomach”) and it scared the crap out of me.

I refused to watch Alien until I finally sat down and watched it during the summer before sixth grade–this was either the day before or the day of the incident where my father, who was wallpapering the living room–stepped on a razor blade and wound up with a few stitches in his foot. I don’t think I thought very much of the movie when I first saw it because it wasn’t as cool as Aliens, which I had already been watching on constant replay for the better part of a year.

Can you really blame me, after all? I was eleven or twelve and it was the middle of the “action Eighties” where I was into any movie that had large guns that shot lots of people, it quickly became my favorite movie. My friends and I would “play” Aliens (I was often Hudson to my friend Tom’s Hicks, although I think one time I actually played Ripley which I’m sure that some psychologist would have jumped on … but I have a feeling I just wanted to be one of the leads) when we wanted something slightly different than the “army” games we were used to playing after being kicked out of the house for watching Aliens way too many times.

But with anything from my childhood, my interest faded after a little while and I paid less attention to Ripley, Hicks, Hudson, Newt, and the other characters and more attention to things like baseball and the WWF. I would gravitate back toward Alien when I was in junior high after watching the original theatrical trailer while waiting on line to ride The Great Movie Ride at what was then called Disney’s MGM Studios in Disney World. I knew I had seen the movie before, but trailers were hard to come by in 1990–you either had to have it as part of a commercial break on something you taped off of television or on another video tape that came out at that time, and considering that Alien was released in 1979 and then released on VHS for the first time by CBS FOX video in the early 1980s, that wasn’t likely to happen in my house. The trailer blew me away and left so much of an impression that I remember trying to duplicate it as part of a computer animation project in my advanced computer graphics class in the ninth grade (I think it was a bunch of stills with quick cuts that wound up with no sound and a title in a really bad font … then again, it was 1991).