The last page of New Titans #130, which has a cameo by Nightwing.

I stopped reading Titans in 2011.  DC announced the New 52 and the new series looked so horrible (as did Red Hood and the Outlaws) that I finally declared that I’d had enough.  My life as a Teen Titan, however, really does end with New Titans #130.

I mentioned in the last entry that I saw the Previews solicit for the comic during parents weekend of my freshman year of college and was surprised that the series was coming to an end.  I wasn’t upset, though, because comics at the time were taking a back seat to everything else–movies, music, girls, beer–and while I still collected and read them, they became something to read on breaks and during the summer when I was on my own and wasn’t sifting through assigned reading.  The Titans during that time took an even further back seat, as I became more interested in other books as well as big events like Kingdom Come.

The Titans themselves would, of course, go on.  Arsenal had a special shortly following the end of the title, an international espionage story that did wrap up one loose end from the series–we find out that the Titans had disbanded at some point following the events of “Meltdown”–and even got a lettercolumn about New Titans #130.  About a year later, Dan Jurgens would write and pencil Teen Titans, a series that is a bit of an oddity but that I enjoyed and find to be underrated.  Then again, I haven’t read it in at least 10-15 years, so I’ll have to see if my opinion changes when I get around to it.  The Devin Grayson/Jay Faeber Titans series deserves much of the criticism it gets, and I have mixed feelings about the series that started in 2003, especially Geoff Johns’s run.  I intend to reread all of those comics all the way through, although I won’t be writing about them because they all feel like they are part of different times in my fandom and comic collecting life.

I started reading New Titans when I was thirteen and the final issue came out when I was eighteen.  By then, the comic store was no longer around the block and I was no longer a lonely, worried junior high school student.  Moreover, I had moved beyond the point where I was reading about the Titans because I was looking for characters with whom I could identify.  The 1980s books had been like watching a John Hughes movie or hanging out with my older cousins–these were people I might wind up being–and the 1990s comics had characters I wanted to get to know.  By the time that title left the world behind, I had stopped needing to have a personal investment in the people I was reading about.

And really, the timing of the end of the series was perfect because the subsequent relaunches did feel like going back to my old town or old high school and seeing that things weren’t ever going to be the same:  the Dan Jurgens title was the new class you didn’t know very well, The Titans was Wooderson period, and the 2003 Teen Titans was almost like coming back to teach (your dreams were your ticket out).

Closing out what wound up being an enormous blogging endeavour isn’t easy to do.  After all, this spawned a podcast that is still going and some of the posts I wrote have gotten quite a number of hits these last few years.  But I found a source of inspiration in the last pages of that very last issue.   Though he hasn’t been in the book since issue #0 (and even that was a cameo), “Where Nightmares End” concludes with the person with whom it started–Dick Grayson.  Standing on a rooftop, he thinks:

There have been so many moments to think about.  Moments good and bad.  Moments I’d love to live all over again … and others I’d pay anything to forget.  But I don’t think if I could I’d change any of them.  I move on, but I don’t leave my childhood behind as if it’s gone.  It can never be gone … while it’s so alive inside me.

The future’s always uncertain, but that’s okay.  If I’d know what was ahead of me all those years ago, I might have avoided all the bumps … but I’d also have missed all those laughs.

He then says,

Take care, guys.  You’re the best!

Marv Wolfman then gives a farewell to the audience and thanks everyone he’s worked with in the fifteen or sixteen years he’s been on the title and I’m glad that on some level, that he ended the series on his terms.  I’m also glad that even though it took a while, I had a chance to look back on comics that have been so important to my life as a comic collector.

For all of my devotion to The New Titans, it’s ironic that I almost missed the ending.  Okay, I wouldn’t have actually missed it because I had the book on my pull list, but the final issue came out during my freshman year of college, a time when I was incredibly disengaged as a comics fan.  In fact, I remember the day I discovered that the book had been canceled:  it was parents weekend and I was flipping through Previews while waiting for my mom and dad to show up.  The solicit for The New Titans #130 read FINAL ISSUE and featured a cover by George Perez that showed the current version of the team in the same exact pose as the original team did in the very first issue of The New Teen Titans back in 1980.  After sixteen years, Marv Wolfman’s nearly uninterrupted run on the title was about to come to a close.

The story behind this as told in The Titans Companion is basically that Wolfman had been fed up with editor Pat Garrahy’s mandates and manipulations for quite some time, and at a DC Christmas Party, asked to be taken off the book.  Being that the book was on the chopping block anyway, DC told Wolfman he could “have the book back” and he was given a few months to wrap things up.  He then set out to write a story that put every one of the original Titans who were still around back to some approximation of who they were.  The only restriction was that Wolfman could not use Nightwing, who was then well on his way to being entrenched in the Batman family.

What we got was “Meltdown,” a five-part story that is actually a four-parter with a first chapter that doesn’t really seem to make too much sense.  Then again, that issue is done as a fill-in by Dale Hrebik (whose only other credits are Deathstroke #50 and Annual #4) with art by Rik Mays with the other issues pencilled by then-regular artist William Rosado.  As far as storylines from this era go, it’s one of the stronger ones, although I suppose that’s not saying much.

Basically what happens is that while a fair amount of infighting happens among the team members, the Titans are summoned to Tamaran by Starfire and Cyberion–formerly Cyborg–because Raven has returned and is leading an entire legion of hostile aliens against Kory’s home planet.  After being attacked by a now-conscious Changeling, the group subdues their former teammate and Kory reveals that she has Raven’s soul self.  She is unable to heal Gar, but he is eventually cured when Raven draws all of the Trigon seeds into herself, basically revealing that Trigon himself is trying to use her as a vessel for his resurrection.

Her war reaches a critical point when she destroys Tamaran–and in one last act of bravery, Kory’s parents stay on the planet–and Starfire and Blackfire (two sisters who have had a reconciliation) lead their rebellion of sorts, finding their adversary and destroying Raven’s body as well as the evil contained within.  At the end, on a planet that will become known as New Tamaran (that is, until the Sun Eater destroys it in Final Night), Raven is good again and an ethereal/astral form; Gar and Cyberion go off to travel through space; Kory is pregnant with her new husband, Ph’yzzon’s child; and Donna Troy is still a Darkstar (and will remain a Darkstar until John Byrne gets a hold of her).  So status quo is sort of  reestablished.

Upon my reread, I realized that much like the rest of the post-Zero Hour Titans, this story is a bit of a mess.  I am not sure when Wolfman’s meeting took place in the creative process, but the first part feels like the start of an entirely different story than the one we got.  That could have been due to a different writer being on that issue, of course, but in New Titans #126, we have an Arsenal character piece that shows how the team has its problems.  For instance, at one point, the “kids” on the team play a bit of a “let’s catch you off guard with an ambush” prank and when Donna sees that Rose Wilson was involved, she goes off on them.  Rose responds with “You’re not my mother!”  It suggests that perhaps they were setting up some teen angst sort of storyline or something that would bond the kids on the team while fracturing the adults.

That never happens.  Instead, it provides a springboard for Wolfman, only taking the Titans he wants to take to Tamaran.  Mirage and Terra remain on Earth because it’s revealed that Mirage faked her miscarriage and is actually now in labor.  Supergirl is elsewhere.  Damage gets pissed off and quits, and Impulse literally misses the ride to space.  So we get the core group (with a couple of additions, like Green Lantern) and the final forced resolution of the Raven storyline.

Funny enough, I’d actually come to like some of the characters in this run.  Roy Harper’s crisis of confidence as a leader made him more interesting than he had been in the past.  I cared about Mirage and her very complex problems.  Even the mystery of Terra’s true identity was intriguing, as were character changes in people like Kory, who was becoming more of a warrior and less naive.  But in hindsight, it was time, and the bloom from the renaissance of five years earlier had faded long before.  It’s just sad that such a once-great book went out with a whimper.

Next Up:  The end of my life as a Teen Titan.