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…)

I think that one of the drawbacks of Marv Wolfman’s sixteen year run on the various Titans books is that he didn’t do much as far as take time off.  Sure, that is definitely an advantage because he was able to really craft his core group of characters and have them grow in a way that seemed organic, but at the same time there were clearly periods where he was, for lack of a better word, running out of gas.  In the next couple of months, I’ll definitely be getting to one of those times as I start moving toward New Titans #100 and I get to go through at least a couple of years’ worth of Titans stories that aren’t considered the best of the bunch.

When Wolfman did step away for a moment and leave the books in someone else’s hands–like Louise Simonson, who did the Red Star Storyline I looked at last time around–the books weren’t necessarily better, but they were a refreshing “pinch hit”.  At the same time Simonson was handling Red Star and Cyborg over in New Titans, Steven Grant–he of the Punisher mini-series from the 1980s–was brought on to do several issues of Deathstroke.  I think that Wolfman was out on his honeymoon or something when these issues were due, or at least he felt he needed that break from Total Chaos.  At any rate, the Titans books moved along pretty well during this time, although I think Grant had an easier job than Simonson because he wasn’t dealing with all of the soap opera-type of stuff that had been moving its way through the Titans books.

Deathstroke was at the end of a long storyline that culminated in Cheshire’s destruction of Quarac and Slade’s telling off the U.S. government.  The Cheshire conspiracy had essentially been started back in the very first issue of the series so you are basically talking about nearly two years of story that wrapped up right before Grant came in.  Instead of starting something that was long and involved (which we will get with the “World Tour” storyline that starts with issue #26), Grant does one-offs and two-parters that remind us that the book is meant to first and foremost be an action comic.  I’d say that in ways it is definitely trying to reflect The Punisher but whereas The Punisher is a vigilante with a mission, Deathstroke is a mercenary/hitman and takes jobs.  It serves to further solidify his supporting cast (characters like the weapons supplier Squirrel and a contact named Frannie) and makes for some solid reading.

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You hate to admit that sometimes a pinch-hitter is exactly what a team needs.  I have watched too many hours of baseball in my life to see the Mets pinch hit with me wanting to pull my hair out at the supposed “intelligence” of that managerial decision.  You know, because I have this awesome track record of knowing so much about and being so awesome at baseball.  Anyway, in my experience, pinch hits usually wind up with someone like Rusty Staub or Julio Franco grounding into a 6-4-3, but every so often Kirk Gibson guts one out of Dodger Stadium.

The covers to New Titans #94-96 created a single image. It's not perfect but it's pretty cool.

I’m not saying that Louise Simonson filling in for Marv Wolfman in New Titans #94-96 was the comics equivalent of Kirk Gibson’s now-legendary homer (nor was it Rusty Staub), but I will say that her three-issue story with pencils by Phil Jiminez was exactly what the title needed.  I will fully admit that the Sell-Out story and creations like Metallik showed that Wolfman was hurting a little and probably feeling a little burned out.  So the editors gave him a break and had Simonson finally get us back to figuring out what might be going on with Cyborg.

If you recall, nearly two years earlier, in New Titans #75, Jericho had detonated Cyborg’s rocket and two issues later the team was in Russia, where Red Star and a team of Russian scientists had rebuilt him.  Unfortunately, Vic Stone is more or less a robot because his mind was completely wiped out, something we have been reminded of either through Gar leading him around by remote control, entire pages of him staring off into nowhere, and the first two issues of the Showcase ’93 series.

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The cover to the "Titans Sell-Out Special," which is kind of the beginning of the end.

One of the things I have always loved about Marv Wolfman as a comic writer, especially his Titans work, is that he had a knack for bringing the book back to the “street level” after a huge “event” storyline.  After the team’s first visit to Starfire’s homeworld (a “Titans in space” story that even after all these years I’m lukewarm to and probably should reread), they were involved in one of my favorite two-issue stories, “Runaways” where they dealt with the mafia, drug runners, and runaway teenagers.  After the Trigon storyline they had an opportunity to go camping.  After the Titans Hunt, they were in disarray but spent time (too much time, to be honest) licking their wounds before Total Chaos ramped up.

After Total Chaos, they sold out.

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