The opening splash page to Deathstroke #27. All of the "World Tour" issues began with similar splash pages.

There was a time in my life when I actually did want to be a comic book writer.  Okay, that’s a lie–if someone gave me the opportunity to write a comic book, I would jump at the chance, but that’s beside the point.  Comics are one of the coolest things in the world, I think, to write (especially if you can draw, then you don’t have to find an artist), but in following series that are as lengthy in numbers like the Titans, I can see one of the major drawbacks, which is having to constantly keep your audience excited.  The “Graphic Novelist” (in caps because it’s pretentious) doesn’t really have that problem because he or she can do his thing and leave satisfied.  But when DC or Marvel are looking for an ongoing series to stretch beyond issue 12 or 20 and possibly into the 100’s (although the way both companies constantly reset or relaunch stuff these days, I’m amazed anything makes it past 20), you have a harder road to travel.

That’s why I have a lot of admiration for people like Marv Wolfman.  Oh sure, he had some clunkers in his day–the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Brother Blood saga and some of the stuff that is coming down the road in New Titans are good examples–but the man wrote the same set of characters mostly uninterrupted for sixteen years, and constantly came up with new ideas, even if all of them weren’t the best.  The Deathstroke: The Terminator series falls on the side of “good idea” because while it was obvious from the outset that while Slade Wilson was a popular anti-hero due to his “pilot” issue in New Titans #70 and role in the Titans Hunt it seems pretty clear that Wolfman wanted to write more of an adventure book than a Punisher knock-off.  As the title went into its third year, he finally got that chance with “World Tour ’93,” a eight-part globe-trotting adventure that begins with the kidnapping of his ex-wife Adeline at the end of issue #26 and ends in an Indiana Jones-type fashion in issue #34. (more…)

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.

New Titans #100 is probably one of the better examples of a “sucker punch” big issue that came out in the midst of the much-maligned “Dark Age” of comics.  Oh sure, there were big events in other comics that people actually cared more about; Superman had just come back from the dead, Batman #500 came out and Azbats gave Bane a serious beatdown, and we were getting pretty close to the time when Magneto ripped Wolverine apart (which is also close to the time I stopped buying the X-books).  But aside from the moment that would basically become the genesis of Onslaught (look it up, kids), many of the “events” were pretty well-known at the time.  And I guess you could say that Evil Raven interrupting the wedding of Dick Grayson and Kory Anders was telegraphed as well, but I think that most Titans fans didn’t expect the mood of the book to change so drastically with its new art team.

To say the least, Bill Jaaska’s contributions to the title weren’t very welcomed by fans (though the editors did have a tendency to run positive letters stating otherwise), and looking at it now it looks clunky in some parts and hasn’t really aged well, but I can see where they were going for a newer, darker mood for the book.  And in order to take the book down this path, Marv Wolfman had a four-pronged approached, at least for the next year’s worth of issues.  He had the Nightwing/Starfire relationship reach its ultimate conclusion, Changeling started to lose his mind due to the manipulations of the Mento helmet, Arsenal would gain control of the team, and after nearly four years of wondering what was going to happen to Vic Stone, we finally would get the conclusion to the Cyborg story.

But since the biggest event of the previous issue was Raven kissing Starfire, it’s best to bring us back to our exploration of the Titans books of this era by looking at how Nightwing and Starfire recovered from the kiss.  Issue #101 was appropriately titled “Aftermath” and begins in S.T.A.R. Labs, where Kory is flipping out because she thinks that Raven is attacking her.  It’s a little bit different from many of the other Raven attacks we’ve seen because Kory seems to be fighting Raven’s influence and Phantasm–who at this point only seems to show up when the plot finds it necessary–uses his powers to help her fight.  It seems that they chase away the demon and Kory is back to the land of the living.

Meanwhile, Arsenal is wresting control away from a distraught Nightwing and it looks like he is about to strike a deal where the Titans may be a government-sponsored organization, something that pisses Nightwing off to no end and he and Roy come to blows.  Dick leaves the Titans to be at Kory’s bedside and Roy takes the team over, and in order to follow the story of the fan favorite Titans couple, we have to head to Flash #80-83, a four-part storyline where they help Wally West face off against a group called the Combine and an ex-girlfriend of his, Frances Kane. (more…)

When I picked up New Titans #71, which at this point was more than two decades ago, I remember reading it from cover to cover several times over, especially after I read the next few issues of the Titans Hunt and was instantly drawn into the world of the Titans.  One of the more helpful parts of that book was a very long editorial in the lettercolumn by new editor Jon Peterson, who introduced himself and answered some fan comments, then teased the readers with what was coming in the future, which included an original Titans graphic novel.

Yesterday, almost exactly 21 years after I picked up that issue, that graphic novel came out.

Entitled Games, it is a full-length story by the classic New Teen Titans creative team of Marv Wolfman and George Perez, who began working on it back when Perez returned to the title in the late 1980s (New Titans #50 and the “Who is Wonder Girl?” storyline) for what wound up being a rather short stint, and takes place during that particular time period for the team.  It revolves around a new villain named The Gamesmaster, who has been making things tough for the C.B.I. (Central Bureau of Investigation, a fictional shadowy government agency) and its most prominent agent, King Faraday.  The Gamesmaster has been committing acts of terrorism that are part of an elaborate–and very deadly–war game that he now intends to draw the Titans into.

Faraday visits the Titans and makes them aware of the situation while we see several different people getting into place for what will be an eventual takedown of each of the heroes.   But first, after the Titans refuse to help Faraday clean up his mess, he begins to mess with their lives and the lives of their loved ones–Steve Dayton is audited, Starfire is investigated by the INS, and Joe Wilson’s mother’s company is under investigation.  So, they agree to meet again and he shows them, through the use of cards that look like they’re out of a role-playing game, that the Gamesmaster knows just about everything about them.  The team mobilizes to get their loved ones to safety and while they’re doing that, Sarah Simms doesn’t make it. (more…)

You know, the 1990s take a lot of crap from comics fans (read: it’s cool to trash them on the Internet) and a lot of that crap is pretty justified (you find value in Brigade.  No, seriously.  I’ll sit here and wait.), but as I have said before and will say again, it actually was a pretty great time to be a comic book fan.  Not only were comics selling like crazy, but so many titles hit milestone issues.  Between the time I started collecting comics in the late summer of 1990 and the time I graduated high school in June 1995, there were plenty of “anniversary” issues to go around.  Either characters turned 30, 40, or 50 (such as happened over at Marvel) or titles hit an issue that was a multiple of 50.   For instance, you had Action Comics hit issue #700; Batman hit issue #500; and because they all more or less debuted around the same time after Crisis, The Flash, Superman, Justice League America, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow all hit issue #100 within a few months of one another in 1995.  And the New Titans celebrated its centennial issue as well.

Now, considering that this was the 1993, an anniversary cover could no longer simply carry a special banner (like the “Anniversary” one that DC used for the better part of a decade on the cover of any milestone isssue–in fact, the last comic I remember seeing the “Anniversary” banner on was Detective Comics #627, which was the “600th” appearance of Batman in the title).  In order to commemorate said anniversary, you needed a gimmick.  For instance, Superman #75 (the Death of Superman issue) had a deluxe edition that came in a black polybag with some stuff (you know, I never opened the polybag and wound up selling it on eBay still in the polybag); Batman #500 had an overlaid cutout of Batman swinging through Gotham over Azbats swinging through Gotham in an entirely different costume.  And the title that during its formative years the Titans had been compared to–The Uncanny X-Men–had a foil cover with the X-Men’s logo in a hologram for its 300th issue that March, a mere three months before New Titans #100 debuted in July.

Considering that since its debut in 1984 with the epic return of Trigon storyline, the New Teen Titans series that would eventually would be renamed The New Titans with #50 had gone through many ups and downs and had nearly been canceled at least once, the fact that issue #100 was hitting the stands was something pretty remarkable.  Also, the fact that Nightwing and Starfire were going to be married in issue #100 was something pretty remarkable because if you go all the way back to issue #1, they were shown in bed together for the very first time and that caused quite a stir in the lettercolumns.

But if you look at the foil-embossed cover, which is all nice and rainbow-reflective when you hold it up to the light, Dick and Kory weren’t exactly on their way to wedded bliss.  The Grummett/Vey cover (their very last on the title) shows an unmasked Dark Raven looking excessively sunburned and wearing an outfit that is something out of a bad S&M fantasy holding both the bride and groom while the Titans plus guest stars Robin and The Flash look on.  It’s a revelation of a villain whose big “reveal” we would have expected to have to wait for during the issue but I guess considering that the average Titans fan had figured out that the cloaked figure who’d made out with Liz Alderman and brought us the Deathwing (seriously … Deathwing?) for the past few issues was Raven, so at least we weren’t left feeling insulted, and we were teased from the shelves by what promised to be a decent fight. (more…)

The name is so '90s, the costume looks like he's the superhero of the Charlotte Hornets. Ladies and Gentlmen, ARSENAL!

If you were creating a comic book in the 1990s or if you were revamping a flagging title, you probably wound up doing one of four things (if not all four):  added a lot of guns and maybe some leather jackets to the cast’s wardrobe; gave the entire female cast, even the mousy girl, boob jobs; made half of the characters darker, edgier, or maybe even evil; killed someone; and hired an artist who drew like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, or Todd MacFarlane.  By the time that New Titans hit its “zero issue” (in other words issue #0) in 1994, they had either attempted or accomplished all five.  It started, of course, with issue #71, which is where we started this journey, but the process ramped up with New Titans #100, which was the conclusion to a story arc called “The Darkening.”

Yeah, they actually called it “The Darkening.”  Moreover, there was a companion story that ran in Team Titans called “The Darkening Night,” which wrapped up in that title but the implications of which were shown in New Titans #100.  It’s kind of hard to figure out the order in which to read the individual comics of these stories, as they are two separate continuous stories, but in looking at them again I broke it down by reading New Titans #97, 98, and 99, then following with Team Titans #7-10 before reading New Titans #100 (and Annual #9, which will get a little bit of a mention at some point).  I know, this is one of those “get back to the nerdery” moments here, but the only books that I knew at this time that were doing a continuing story across several titles and let you know what order in which to read those titles were the Superman books, so sometimes you have to figure these things out for yourself.

New Titans #97 begins the very last story arc for the art team of Tom Grummett and Al Vey, who had more or less been working on the book during the end of George Perez’s second tenure, which was about issue #56 or so.  I was going to miss this art team, although not too much–not because I didn’t like them, but because Grummett was already on Adventures of Superman and would be working on the regular Robin title, so at least I got to see the same pencils somewhere else.  I’ll … uh … get to his replacement in a later entry, so for now let’s just get to “The Darkening.” (more…)