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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The last page of New Titans #79, which introduced the new, time-tossed Teen Titans

“Dagon.  Chatter at Ground one.”

“Already misting, Jon-boy.”

“Hi, any luck?”

“Uh-uh.  Pulled a huss.”

“What if we don’t find her?”

“We will.  And we’ll kill her.”

‘Time’s on our side.  We can’t fail.”

“So why did you call us here, Jon?”

“We don’t need to talk.  We need to find Troy.”

“Terra says she found something.”

“And I have.  Troia’s ours for the killing.”

The era of the Titans that I am focusing on is generally, at least from what I understand, controversial.  I don’t think it’s very well-liked because characters that people loved were killed off or injured beyond repair or because what the stories began in New Titans #71 eventually morphed into.  But I defy anyone who wants to piss all over this run of stories to tell me that they didn’t read the last page of New Titans #79 and get completely psyched.  I was, and I was completely incapacitated.

Summers, in the past, were never good for any of my collecting habits.  When I had first started collecting comics with G.I. Joe and The Transformers back in 1987-1988, I didn’t get past issue 67 of G.I. Joe and issue 34 of Transformers because I went away for part of July, came back, and spent so much time playing sports with friends that comics and the toys they more or less advertised took a back seat to baseball and football and then the onset of puberty.  However, between the eighth and ninth grades, I spent half of the summer recuperating from laser surgery on the scar that’s on my upper lip, which meant that I had a bandage wrapped around my face for a few weeks and really couldn’t go outside.  I’d also gone to Florida in July to visit my friend Chris and he’d not only hooked me up with a bunch of X-Men and Spawn stuff but I’d also raided his local comic store’s stash of New Teen Titans comics, getting most of the original Wolfman/Perez run pretty cheap (again, this was the 1990s when books like this were very cheap in back issue bins, mainly because they didn’t have an “X” or “Bat” in the title).

The cover of New Titans #79, a "sickbed" book for me that kept me hooked through the summer of 1991.

So I had nothing better to do with my time except read comics and watch TV and I was able to get my sister to go to the comic store and pick up my reserved books a few times.  She came home one Wednesday with New Titans #79 and soon I’d get New Titans Annual #7, which came out more or less a couple of weeks later and thankfully that annual would explain who the people in that above exchange were, or else I would have been completely lost.  I twas also the best way for the book to get involved with the annual crossover that DC had been running at the time, which was Armageddon 2001.

For a better look at Armageddon 2001, I suggest going over to one of my favorite podcasts, “From Crisis to Crisis: A Superman Podcast” and listening to their two-parter about Armageddon 2001 from November 2010 (you can look at part 1 here and part 2 here).  But in brief, it’s the story of a hero named Waverider who travels back in time to kill one of our current superheroes because that particular hero will kill all the others and become a tyrant named Monarch.  When New Titans Annual #7 hit the shelves, we were smack in the middle of the “Who is Monarch?” mystery (the answer, btw, is one of the biggest disappointments in comics), but also smack in the middle of the Titans Hunt.  Now, the way the crossovers worked, Waverider would touch a book’s main character and then we’d all see his future, and what could happen to turn them into Monarch.  So the crosover would not interrupt the book’s current story and the writers wouldn’t have to worry too much.  However, the Titans annual took it one step further and became the only annual to have serious repercussions in its book.

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The Titans contemplate death (and Gar Logan's mullet) at the funeral for Jericho while Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, looks on from afar.

Traditionally, the issues after a big storyline in a comic book are pretty tame.  Unless the reader knows that something big is right around the corner, a writer will spend that next issue cooling things down, whether it be Superman and Batman stopping a one-of villain or X-Factor going into therapy.

Marv Wolfman, over the course of his run on New Teen Titans and New Titans, became somewhat of an expert at the post-event story, starting all the way back in 1981 with “Private Lives,” the acclaimed story in New Teen Titans #8.  The team had just formed, encountered Deathstroke, and fought back both Trigon and the Fearsome Five, so Wolfman and George Perez took an issue to show the heroes getting their lives in order before ramping up a multi-issue storyline that involved Deathstroke, the Titans of Myth, and a hunt for the killers of the Doom Patrol.  Similarly, the parade/camping issue of #6 of the Baxter series came between a Trigon and Titans of Myth story.

There seems to be a pattern there.

Anyway, Wolfman seemed to be very aware that big events or moments, especially tragic ones, don’t end neatly, and many take a long time to resolve.  The most famous new Teen Titans storyline of all, “The Judas Contract” (which I will delve into one day) officially endedn in New Teen Titans Annual #3, but there was action versus one of that story’s villains–The HIVE–for three more issues, and the resolution between the titans and Deathstroke wouldn’t come up until nearly a year later with a scene in a coffee shop.

So it is with “Titans Hunt/The Jericho Gambit.”  At the end of New Titans #84, the Titans have escaped what’s left of Azareth and are sitting around wondering: a) what the hell just happened, b) what’s going to happen next, and c) does anyone have some clothes we can borrow?  When “Dirge” begins in issue #85, what happens next is Jericho’s funeral, which Slade Wilson does not officially attend (he chooses the tried and true tactic of being in the cemetery but staying far away from everyone) and that leads to resentment from our heroes, who are already acting self-righteous because he killed his own son.  Then again, you can kind of excuse it because they’re obviously working through some serious grief.

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The cover to The New Titans #82, picking up where we left off four issues ago.

Is it me or does it seem that I’m taking forever to get through coverage of what amounts to about 12 issues of Titans comics?  Well, I guess when you’re doing these once a month it is going to take a while, but in thinking of what it was like to buy New Titans off the shelf back in the early 1990s this is very appropriate.  The title, creatively, was doing very well and what the new editor, Jon Peterson had brought was the shot in the arm it had so desperately needed.  However, there were several times where it was terribly late, and that makes it kind of surprising that within a year or so it would be selling well at all.

Who knows why fans put up with it?  Perhaps having a book run a couple of weeks late isn’t that bad in the beginning of the Image Comics era of books that would ship late up to a year (to the point where it would become a running joke), although DC was able to get four Superman titles out on time each month, so it’s not like their operation was a complete disaster.

Anyway, I remember riding up to Amazing Comics each month with my money in my pocket and being excited when the book was there and a little dismayed when it wasn’t, although not having Titans meant that I could dive into the back issue bins for a few minutes and maybe add to my Wolfman-Perez collection.

It’s also pretty appropriate that I took forever to get to this point because not only had the book been shipping late, but the story itself had been dragging on for a little bit.  Not in an X-Men sort of way, but the last issue that I covered was New Titans #78 and I’m starting this with #82.  There are four issues (three plus an annual) that had a little bit to do with the story but didn’t advance it, and all of which I’ll get to next month when I take a look at the long road to the “Total Chaos” storyline.

For now, though, we have “The Jericho Gambit,” which concluded the “Titans Hunt” in New Titans #82-84.  What “The Jericho Gambit” actually means is beyond me.  Webster’s defines “gambit” as  a chess opening in which a player risks one or more pawns or a minor piece to gain an advantage in position.  No, seriously, that’s what Webster’s says.  I looked it up. But whose opening move is this?  I’d say that Jericho made his gambit back in issue #71 when he kidnapped all of the Titans or maybe even #72 when the ‘beests killed Golden Eagle in an effort to get Aqualad.  I think that they were going for a title that sounded a little like “The Judas Contract,” which is the most famous New Teen Titans storyline (and one I’ll get to at some point), but this time around there was nothing on the cover to indicate the name of the istoryline and I don’t know how much the book was advertised.  From what I remember, It wasn’t covered in Wizard (then again, DC had to kill Superman in order to get coverage in Wizard).

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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.

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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When I began reading the Titans Hunt storyline, I wasn’t a novice at comic book collecting.  True, I had just started picking up comics on a rgular basis, but prior to 1990, I had been a reader of G.I. Joe and was often seen raiding Amazing Comics’ back issue bin.  Therefore, I knew that the characters had histories and there were probably very important stories that had already been told.  But it would take a while to really get there.

As mentioned in my last entry, I bought New Titans #71 and devoured it and then picked up issue 72 as soon as it came out.  With a dead Golden Eagle and nearly dead Aqualad on the cover, this was one of those great “shocker” issues that showed longtime Titans fans taht whomever was behind the Wildebeests was deadly serious because they were not only hunting down the “core” members of the team but secondary and ancillary members.  In October 1990, I still had no idea who these people were, although I knew it wasn’t very often that heroes died in comic books and in such a brutal fashion (Golden Eagle is essentially hanged when the Wildebeest’s rope/wire is wrapped around his neck, then is pulled to the ground and beaten to death).  By the end of this issue, we know that Troia is not captured and that there is more than one Wildebeest.

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“What started as a celebration has turned into a NIGHTMARE!”

You don’t get exclamations like this on the cover of comics these days, and it’s very rare that you can look at a cover, go “Wait, what’s this?” and pick it up without having read the soliciation months before on the web followed by spoiler-filled message board and blog posts.

But then again, this is September 2010 and the comic in question with that excalamtion came out in September 1990.  It’s amazing to me in a way that twenty years have gone by since I started the eighth grade at Sayville Junior High and had just started buying comics that summer.  Okay, re-started, because I spent 1988 buying G.I. Joe and Transformers comics.  Now, though, I was into Batman, and had started collecting the two Bat-books going on at the time: Batman and Detective Comics.  Both had been intriguing because this was around the time that Tim Drake became Robin and The Joker came back after a couple of years of being “dead”.  I’d collect Batman comics for at least the next decade, but the omic that I would pick up one Thursday in that September would be New Titans #71.

Entitled “Beginnings … Endings … and (we promise) New Beginnings,” I picked it up because I saw Nightwing on the cover and having read the “Batman: Year Three” and “A Lonely Place of Dying” (not the best title, I know) storylines, I knew that Dick Grayson, the original Robin, had become Nightwing.  My friend Harris, who owned all of the “A Lonely Place of Dying” issues, recommended that I pick up New Titans.  It would actually be the start of a great friendship through comics, one that I will get to when describing those issues in which our letters were published, but at that point, I thought I would give it a try.

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