I have to admit that I was a little hesitant about getting back to writing these posts about the Titans.  Part of this had to do with my being a little burned out on Titans and Titans-related comics as I’ve been working my way through all of the Dick Grayson-related stuff over at Taking Flight, and that’s why I took a bit of a break from all of them for a little while.  Part of it, however, had to do with whether or not I wanted to reread comics that are notorious for being representative of the nadir of the 1990s.  But I have soldiered on and am going to take a look at the first two story arcs over the course of the next few weeks as a way to get this back on track to its eventual conclusion.

The New Titans limped into Zero Hour having gone through a few disastrous storylines that were most known for their rather disastrous artwork and with a new editor at the helm (and a refreshing change in the art style) went through a lineup overhaul.  Gone were the characters introduced in the Titans Hunt era and now we had a new team:  Arsenal, Damage, Changeling, Terra, Mirage, Donna Troy (now a Darkstar), and Impulse, a team that seemed more or less “given to” writer Marv Wolfman instead of having naturally come together (and he has confirmed as much in interviews about this time) and that never really seemed to gel.

I am trying pretty hard to remember what I was into around this time.  I know that Harris and I were still writing the occasional letter to the book, even if we had given up our crusade to kill Donna Troy, but I also know that I was interested in other titles, plus I had a lot going on outside of comics being that the first post-Zero Hour issues hit the stands at the beginning of my senior year of high school.  But putting my personal life at the time aside, I can see that Titans was sort of lower on the priority list at the time.  A glance at Mike’s Amazing World shows that I was reading the following in October 1994:  Batman/Detective Comics (Prodigal had started), Damage (a series I intend to re-collect, re-read and do either an episode or a post about), Deathstroke: The Hunted (which I’ll cover soon), Flash (Waid and Weiringo doing amazing work), Legion of Super-Heroes/Legionnaires (at the beginning of the reboot, which I enjoyed), R.E.B.E.L.S. ’94 (Don’t ask), Robin (natch), Spawn (collected this until about #60, don’t remember much about anything in it), and Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi (soon after, I’d lose track of the EU).  I’m sure Batman was high on this list, as was Flash (I also had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Kyle Rayner Green Lantern book and the Superman titles), and looking at some of the other stuff being offered at the time I was missing out on some stuff (Starman, for one) but really not much.  1994-1995 were kind of nightmare years in the comics industry and I know that between being a senior and starting college, I really would be kind of going through the motions with a lot of my comics collecting until around the time Kingdom Come came out and I started to get back into things.   (more…)

So sometimes there are storylines that are so huge that the issues that come after it are a bit lackluster. It’s kind of like a hangover–that there’s a letdown after a huge event.  After The Judas Contract, there was a series of stories that seemed a bit rushed as well as phoned in (with the exception of the Donna Troy-Terry Long wedding issue) mainly because Wolfman and Perez were working on two books at the same time as well as Crisis on Infinite Earths.  Perez would leave the book soon after, but then returned with issue 50 of New Titans and drew the Who is Wonder Girl? storyline as well as several subsequent issues before slowly going off pencils (handing them off to Tom Grummett) and then going off co-plotting after a while as well.  At the time, he was also working with Wolfman on the Games graphic novel, but this would mark a time when George Perez was more or less burning out and wound up leaving both DC and Marvel for a good deal of the early 1990s.  Wolfman would,  of course, fly solo on New Titans until the title was cancelled in the mid-1990s.

“A Lonely Place of Dying” was one of the biggest and best-selling Titans storylines of its time, mainly because of the tie-in to Batman, who was DC’s hottest property in 1989-1990 due to the Tim Burton film.  Plus, this storyline featured Robin, who had been killed off a year or so earlier.  So, you’d think that the boost in sales to New Titans would have been enough to keep that book going for a while.  However, that wasn’t the case and I think part of it is due to the storylines that came afterward because the title was near cancellation as it headed toward issue 71, but was saved by Jon Peterson, who had been made editor by his former boss, Mike Carlin.

I’m not going to go into great detail as to what happened between issues #62 and #69 of New Titans.  They are issues that I own and my favorite of the bunch is #65 because of the scenes between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake, which I felt really contributed to the latter’s character.  In fact, the next parts of “Taking Flight” will take a look at Tim’s final steps toward becoming Robin.  They are issues that I consider to be placeholders at best.  The art is gorgeous–Tom Grummett took over full pencils on the title and he was a great replacement for Perez.  In fact, with all due respect to Eduardo Barretto, who did a wonderful job as penciller for years, Grummett is my second-favorite Titans artist, even though the latter part of his tenure was a little sketchy (no pun intended) due to rushed deadlines, fill-in artists, and his own jobs on Adventures of Superman (and later Superboy) and Robin.  But the stories were pedestrian at best. (more…)