1980s

Introducing Satan’s Daughter (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Four)

A promo poster for The New Teen Titans (1984 or "Baxter" series) #1

So in making my way through the Titans Hunt storyline, I find myself putting off the end of the Hunt (aka “The Jericho Gambit”) and subsequent story arcs to flesh out the background of these characters as well as my personal collecting history.  Because when you are so into a series that you want to get every single issue going back ten years, there are definitely periods of time when what is going on in the present is an afterthought and you choose to relive the glory days of the past.

In this case, the glory days tie directly into the present as it is, because when “The Jericho Gambit” begins in issue 82, we will find out what has been hinted at for a while now–Jericho did not simply decide to betray his team.  instead, he is possessed by an evil force that has a connection to Raven and her dead father, Trigon, the raison d’être of the New Teen Titans.

In 1980, DC slotted a 16-page new Teen Titans preview into DC Comics Presents #26 and that short story starred Robin, who seemed to be having nightmares wherein he was fighting with a new group of Teen Titans.  Except half of these people were not familiar to anyone, and they weren’t really dreams but premonitions that a girl named Raven planted not only in his mind but in the minds of all the other teammates, manipulating them to team up because her father was coming to destroy the world.

Raven, you see, is an empath, and the only surviving offspring of the demon Trigon, the evil ruler of another dimension who has just discovered Earth’s existence and wants it all to himself.  Raven has been raised by the denizens of Azareth, a realm where people who dress like monk/cult members follow Azar, a pacifist goddess of sorts, and she has the power to heal other people’s wounds (and pretty soon will be able to actually manipulate emotions).  Knowing that her father was coming, she tried to get the Justice League of America’s help, and was rejected because Zatanna–the resident magician–saw something evil inside her.

The Titans do stop Trigon, sending him to a “prison dimension” and he spends the next four years manipulating his daughter in an effort to take her over, reenter our dimension, and rule the world.  What’s great about that is that it’s done subtly, through the occasional moment when Raven stretches herself too far or is too angered, or has a few panels here or there where she is behind the scenes suffering because her father’s influence has weakened her.

Trigon the Terrible: interdimensional demon. Don't ask him if you can date Raven.

Trigon meets his first defeat in issue #6 of the original New Teen Titans series, which started in 1980.  he would return with the beginning of a new New Teen Titans series in 1984, a series printed on better quality paper and sold directly to comic stores as opposed to newsstands.  In fact, the type of paper was called Baxter paper so the series is often referred to as the “Baxter” New Teen Titans series.

This new series was where I first encountered Trigon and really got to know the Marv Wolfman-George Perez era team, once again picking up one of the many back issues that Harris had gotten a hold of and that I sifted through during my sister’s piano lessons.  He had picked up issues 2 and 3 of the series, which featured Raven’s turn to evil (she grows another pair of eyes and her skin turns red) and then subjecting her former teammates to their worst nightmares wherein they face and ultimately fight and kill their darker selves.  I’d pick up #1 shortly afterward, paying only $5.00 for it because with the exception of a few very early issues or Deathstroke appearances, Titans back issues went cheap.

If you could find them, that is.  Because it would be a long time before I would get the rest of this storyline and find out how it ended.  I mean, I knew how it ended because Raven as of 1991 was still alive and Trigon hadn’t been heard from except a passing mention here and there.  But I would get issues #4 and #5 before “The Jericho Gambit” ended, tracking both down at Sun Vet Coin and Stamp, which was my “alternative” comic store, the place I went to when Bob didn’t have the back issues I needed.

This particular time in my life was when I was branching out on my own a little more.  Had I lived in a place where I could drive at the age of 15 or 16, this would have meant taking my brand new car all over Long Island to discover what comics I could find.  But I didn’t get a license until after I turned 18 and I wasn’t driving my own car until I was in college.  But I did have my bike and I did have friends who would ride insanely long distances.

the "Monster" comics shop is what was formerly known as Sun Vet Coin and Stamp. Picture courtesy of "The Caldor Rainbow" blog

My friend Jeremy was not a comic fan.  He was the friend I spent time with playing video games, watching shitty horror movies, and exploring a new thing called the Internet.  but when we weren’t screwing around at his place, we were riding to other libraries to look up books on the paranormal and to places like Sun Vet Mall.  I think he was indulging me by hanging out at Sun Vet Coin and Stamp because there honestly wasn’t anything else of interest, unless he really wanted to build model rockets.

Then again, there wasn’t anything really of interest at all at Sun Vet.  Located where Sunrise Highway and Veterans Highway meet in Holbrook (hence the name), the mall is anchored not by any department store, but by a PathMark and a Toys R Us (although back in the day that Toys R Us was a Rickel Home Center).  The mall is one level with not much else to speak of except for maybe The Gap, which was right by the main entrance, and Santa’s workshop, which was in the center of the mall not far from the snack stand that always made the place smell like soft pretzels.

So aside from throwing a few quarters into the Arkanoid machine at “The Subway,” which was a leftover relic of the Eighties, why would we want to go to the dimly lit Sun Vet Mall?  Simply put, in order to get there, we had to not only drive all the way across town, but we had to cross Sunrise Highway.

At 13 and 14 years old, this was a bit of a feat for a kid who used to have to ask his parents for permission to walk just a few blocks to the comic store or get a slice of pizza.  Sunrise highway was at the very north end of town and crossing meant waiting for a traffic light to change nad then running or riding as fast as possible across all four lanes, praying that you would make it across before the traffic started blaring its collective horn.

Possessed by Trigon, Raven takes on her former teammates.

That was the case if you were crossing at Lakeland or Johnson Avenues in order to get to K-Mart, anyway.  Crossing at Broadway Avenue and Sunrise Highway was less treacherous because there was a bridge and service roads,s o we didn’t have to dodge traffic.  The hours I spent making want lists and then combing the Sun Vet Coin and Stamp back-issue bins were just as many as those I spent poring over the prices in the Mile High Comics catalog, through which I placed comics orders for my birthday and Christmas every year.

My eventual purchase of all five issues (which are now collected in the Terror of Trigon trade) and the sixth epilogue issue brought together the culmination of a great era in Titans history.  Like I said, Wolfman and Perez had been working toward Trigon coming back and the Titans making their last stand since about 1980-1981 when the New Teen Titans series had begun.  Issues 1-4 take the team into the darkest of possible places wherein each hero is corrupted and turned into his/her darker self, but then turns on Raven (who thought she was controlling them) and kills her.  Issue #5, ont he other hand, ends in a symphony of light where the disembodied souls of Azareth use Raven to envelop Trigon and ultimately destroy him.  Of coruse, as we will come to find in “The Jericho Gambit,” thsoe souls would become corrupted and take over Jericho,w ho had once entered Raven’s body as a way to figure out what was wrong with her.  This is where I was around this time in The New Titans, waiting for the climax of The Titans Hunt, and then wondering what would happen if and when they finally escaped.

Next Up: “The Jericho Gambit” in New Titans #82-84.

The Devil’s in the Creme Filling

In the annals and aisles of snack cake history, Hostess seems to get all the recognition.  I am sure that’s because being a nationally distributed brand, it’s been easier to get a hold of Suzy Q’s and SnoBalls and the iconic Twinkie.  But while the lunches of my school days did sometimes involve me peeling apart the remnants of an obliterated Hostess cupcake, I have always pledged my allegiance and had a very fervent love for the Devil Dog.

Manufactured by Drake’s Cakes, the Devil Dog is a hot dog-shaped chocolate cake and creme filling sandwich that comes one to a pack and usually about a dozen or so per box.  It’s a lot like Hostess’s Suzy Q, except it’s far superior.  Sure, the Suzy Q is actually bigger and has more creme filling, but Hostess’s insistence on moist-right-out-of-the-wrapper cake often leads to those cakes being unnecessarily sticky and ultimately leads to the cake sticking to your hand.

That cake, by the way, is nearly impossible get off with a napkin.  I have lost count of the number of times I have purchased a Suzy Q or a Twinkie at a convenience store, marveled in disgust at how much grease was left behind on th white cardboard, at it anyway, and then had to find a place to wash my hands after I was done eating.  I don’t know about you, but this is quite irritating, especially because it shouldn’t happen.  Icing, I can understand.  In fact, anyone who buys a Suzy Q is well aware of the potential for icing fingers, much like sticking one’s hand into a bag of Cheetos will turn the fingers orange.  But the cake is supposed to hold the icing in and provide a barrier of protection from mess, not be the reason for it.

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Scary Evening

There are some kids who aren’t scared of anything and there are some kids who are scared of everything.  I spent most of my childhood in the latter camp, doing my best to avoid any situation that was a little scary, whether it be climbing aboard a roller coaster or climbing the ropes in gym class.  Scary movies definitely fell into this category.  I think that by the time I was ten years old, the scariest movie I had watched might have been a WPIX airing of Carrie (which really wasn’t scary) or an old Hammer Studios flick like Dracula: Prince of Darkness.  In other words, despite my fascination with the video boxes for horror movies, I really wasn’t up for renting one.

I can’t tell if spending my early years being relatively sheltered from the sights and sounds of scary movies had a positive or negative effect on my life.  I mean, the negative is that I was a complete pussy when it came to watching even Alien for the first time, and one scary scene could give me a really bad nightmare to the point where I insisted that my closet door be closed each night before I went to bed.  Then again, the fact that I remembered that one scary scene so well has made me really appreciate what goes into a quality horror movie.  In other words, I’m not one to sit back and simply let The Exorcist or The Blair Witch Project simply happen.  If I’m watching one of those films, I’m involved.

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Horror in a Box (Portions NSFW)

The poster for 1981’s “The Howling,” which was one video box I could never stop staring at when I was a kid.

I am not a horror movie guy.  Sure, I’ll sit down and watch stuff like Halloween or Night of the Living Dead on occasion, but I am not the type to line up outside of a movie theater on the opening night of the latest Saw movie because I am promised that there are going to be 50% more genital mutilations.  However, I’ve always been fascinated by horror films, especially those which are outside of the mainstream.

This fascination began at an early age, when Sayville’s Video Empire opened in 1984.  This wasn’t the first video store that my parents frequented–that distinction belongs to Video Village, which was located in a very small house-like building next to what was Chicken Delight but is now Hot Bagels on Montauk Highway in Sayville; and Video Zone, which was across from the Oakdale train station–and those video stores were pretty cramped establishements with very little to offer me except for repeated rentals of Superman: The Movie and video collections of Mickey Mouse cartoons which, if you waited long enough after the cartoons were over, featured a long and terrible trailer for Disney’s long and terrible sci-fi movie, The Black Hole.

Video Empire, as I’ve mentioned before, quickly became my home video store after it opened because it was on the same side of Main Street/Montauk Highway as my parents’ house was, so that meant I didn’t have to worry about crossing it to get there on my bike; and it was pretty huge for a video store.  Now, it was nowhere near the size of a Blockbuster Video but for a mom and pop operation, it was pretty large.  The children’s section of the store was right as you came in, to the right, and if you kept walking toward the counter you found that the kiddie videos transitioned into the sci-fi/horror videos.  By this time in my life I had seen Star Wars a ton of times, so I would peruse the shelves hoping to find The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, both of which had just come out on video back in the mid-1980s and were highly sought after by Video Empire’s customers.

While perusing, my eyes would eventually land on the box for one of the many horror movies available.  These included your obvious classics, such as the Friday the 13th series (which at that point was up to Part IV, or The Final Chapter), the Halloween series (at the awful Season of the Witch), or something random like Psycho or Alien.  But they also included movies that probably didn’t make a lot of money at the box office and whose studios had decided to recoup whatever losses they had by making them readily available for the bourgeoning video rental market.  If there’s nothing else out, they have to rent something, right?  I mean, it’s a decent rationale.  Eventually, while my dad tried to figure out what new release action flick to rent and my sister looked for The Last Unicorn or some shit, I would pick up one of those boxes and turn them over, reading the description.

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The Start of a Titanic Undertaking (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Three)

Now, in covering the era of the New Titans that I started reading with New Titans #71 (and wrote about last month), I intend to go in order, “chunking” the various books into the various storylines that ran all the way up until the series ended in 1996 with New Titans #130.  But from time to time I’ll be taking a detour into older issues of the series.  That’s because they both tie into the stories at hand as well as this period in my life when I moved beyond buying current Titans issues to hunting through the back issue bins looking for the older stories.

Ask any die hard comic fan and they will probably tell you exactly what issue of his title was the one that cemented his love for the characters or creative team and made him want to own every single issue, no matter what the price that his local comic shop has them going for.  It’s usually a random issue, one that comes out while he’s starting to read a title or has been reading one for a little while, or it’s a trade paperback that collects several issues and gets him wanting to buy the issues that are not only collected but were published around them.  In my case, it was neither.  My desire to collect Teen Titans back issues began in quite possibly the most random way, through The Official Teen Titans Index #4.

Published in partnership with DC Comics, Independent Comics Group (which may have been connected to the late, lamented Eclipse Comics, as Eclipse has a lot of house ads in the books) printed five issues that ran through each of the comics featuring the Teen Titans from their first appearance in Brave and the Bold #54 all the way up until the second New Teen Titans series #16 (I’ll explain about the whole 1980 series/1984 series thing in a bit).  Each issue’s entry went through the details about who the creative team was, the major characters, and an overall synopsis of the issue’s story.  Notes about the last and next appearance of each character as well as special notes were included.

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Death from Spaaaaaace!

I am sure that everyone has a movie that he’s meant to see but never gotten around to.  Moreover, I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who are weirdly obsessed with the possibility that they may watch a certain movie, yet never seem to get around to watching.  Or, as my father often says, they’ve seen “bits and pieces” of certain films.

For years, whenever I would walk into Sayville’s Video Empire with my dad, the first place I would check out would be the science fiction/horror section.  The reason for this was twofold: Star Wars movies fell under this classification and they were located along the right-hand wall next to the new releases.  On the shelves were always random movies that to this day I’m sure nobody ever rented (ah, the early days of video stores where inventory meant whatever was actually available at the time) as well as the popular flicks.  One of those was the 1984 movie Night of the Comet.

A film about teenagers having to make it in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Night of the Comet didn’t do much at the box office and I would never had heard of it if I hadn’t been watching At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert on a regular basis and saw their review, which was pretty good for a movie that was nearly a B movie and didn’t do that well at the box office. 

But the concept intrigued me: everyone in the world has been wiped out, a few teenagers seem to have survived, and all is not as it seems.  Plus, the poster (and the subsequent video box) was really cool looking.  How could you go wrong with this?

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It’s Always About a Girl, Isn’t It?

I think there is a point in everyone’s life where rock music intersects with girls.  Every one I know, including me, has a CD or concert stub that can be explained using the phrase “Well, there was this girl …”  Usually said intersection occurs during adolescence.  Mine happened at the age of seven.

Now, I’m not one of those people who has had important popular music included in every last moment of his life.  I don’t have early childhood memories of my mother playing Led Zeppelin and there’s no story about me listening to John Lennon when I was a zygote.  In fact, my nursery school playlists were more likely to includesongs like “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?” and “C is for Cookie,” and my very first exposure to popular music was through Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Released in 1982, Chipmunk Rock is a collection of late 1970s and early 1980s hits as well as a few classics, such as “Leader of the Pack,” with a cover featuring Alvin taking his place among the presidents of Mount Rushmore (a nod to Deep Purple’s In Rock album) and the jacket opened up to show the group in situations that reflected the song titles.  My personal favorite of all of the tracks on the LP was the Pat Benatar hit “Heartbreaker.”  There’s something about a chipmunk shredding a guitar solo that pumps the adrenaline of a second grader.  Combine that with Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” and Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” and I, as well as any kid my age back then, was ready to strap on a guitar, throw on a headband, and freaking wail.

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All the people tell me so …

The best songs sometimes start simply–a drum beat, a guitar riff, a hand clap, a guitar riff, or a keyboard followed by an opening lyric that every listener will remember and hopefully associate with said intro every time it’s played: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”; “I love the beautiful clothes she wears and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair”; “You know I told you once tonight that you could always speak your mind …”

For years, I’ve been trying to figure out why “What od All The People Know?” by The Monroes isn’t in the 1980s pop culture stratosphere.  It’s not without airplay and definitely not without its admirers, but it never had the honor of showing up on any of VH-1’s 20,000 1980s-related nostalgia shows from the last decade, nor have I ever heard it in a nostalgic movie trailer or seen it on a compilation (that I own or have seen in a record store).  If anything, I’d say the song is a “sleeper” of a hit, something that’s just … well, it’s just known.

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The Best Laid Plans

The Degrassi Junior High kids. Wheels and Stephanie are third and fourth from the left.

I didn’t have cable television when i was growing up.

To anyone older than me, this is not uncommon, but to people my age and younger (especially those that I have taught), not having cable and growing up with only seven channels is a completely foreign concept.  I am sure that some would even consider it child abuse that I didn’t get to watch the latest Stryper video when it ran 20 times a day in 1990, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter.  Oh, I suppose it did because I missed out out on most of The State and Remote Control when they first aired and several years’ worth of VMAs.  But for every video I didn’t watch, I caught another, way more important show, and that was Degrassi Junior High.

I don’t remember the exact day when I first watched Degrassi Junior High.  I know that I was in the fifth grade and it was probably in the winter or spring of 1988 because by the time school was out that June, I had already watched several episodes.  What I do remember, though, is that I more or less stumbled onto it because I was bored one afternoon and had tired of seeing commercials for the Craft-Matic adjustable bed on channel 11 between reruns of 1970s-era television shows.  So I flipped around and when I landed on channel 13–PBS–there was a scene of a boy and his father walking along a beach and talking about sex.  That was, as I discovered later, the midpoint of the first season episode “The Best Laid Plans,” which originally aired in March 1987.

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Shea Hello

Shea Stadium on August 25, 1985.

If you judge my love of the New York Mets by my first Shea Stadium experience, then it’s no wonder I’ve been a fan for twenty-five years now.  In fact, I don’t really know what it’s like to start following a team when they are really bad, considering that the three pro teams I’ve followed since I was a kid–the Mets, Giants, and Rangers–were all competitive in the mid-1980s. 

Then again, I hold certain members of my family and circle of friends responsible for my Mets fandom.  In the spring of 1985, I was wrapping up my time in Mrs. Holl’s second grade class at Lincoln Avenue Elementary, a class I did all right in even if my best memory is catching shit for zoning out, daydreaming, or getting easily distracted (how was I not labeled ADD?  Seriously …).  In my class was John Purcell, with whom I had spent kindergarten and who would truly be responsible for my love of the Rangers and much of my not-so-storied Swindon Row street hockey career.  But that’s a topic for another post, as he showed up in school one day having been to the previous night’s Mets game and did nothing but rave about how Gary Carter hit a home run and the Mets beat the Reds. 

I was intrigued.  I’d played for the Reds in tee ball and was playing real baseball that year–if you could call it that considering I couldn’t field for shit and spent my time at the plate dodging pitches–so I knew a little about how to play.  And I knew that there were professional baseball teams because my grandfather on my mom’s side was a die-hard Yankees fan.  But unlike my cousin Brian, I hadn’t been sucked into the Bronx vortex and after I expressed interest in the Mets, my Uncle Lou would help make sure that I definitely didn’t.

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