The Teen Titans have become one of the most popular DC Comics properties of them all. In the ’00s, the team made their way to Cartoon Network and since then have become a massive part of pop culture thanks to Teen Titans GO!, a spiritual sequel to the original series that was more comedic. Both of these series borrowed from the team’s long history, but there’s one part in particular that they took from: the Marv Wolfman/George Perez classic New Teen Titans. The team had first appeared in the ’60s, bringing together the greatest sidekicks in the DC Universe, but it wouldn’t be until the 1980 version of the team that they would become superstars.
The ’80s are an important era in DC history; an argument can be made that it’s the most important one. See, this was the decade when DC was able to break comics away from their image as the thing that kids read before they read novels, putting out books that made them more mature in the eyes of the general public. New Teen Titans‘ success in the early ’80s made all of that possible. In a lot of ways, the DC Comics we have today is because of this 46-year old series. However, as important as the book is, it’s also become something of a problem for the company. We all love New Teen Titans, but it’s time to realize that it led to just as many problems as it did successes.
To understand how important New Teen Titans was to DC Comics, we have to go back to 1980 and take a look at the position that DC was in. They entered the ’60s as the most powerful force in comics, but Marvel’s massive success through the ’60s and ’70s put them on the back foot. In 1978, the company decided to flood the market with titles in the DC Explosion, trying to steal back market share from the House of Ideas. However, it was a failure, with newsstands, the primary mover of comics in those days, not ordering these new titles in any numbers. This led to the DC Implosion, where the company cancelled the new titles and then some, cutting things to the bone.
Two years later, in 1980, things had gotten better, but they weren’t great. This is the world that New Teen Titans was born into. The book was massive from the start; Wolfman and Perez were two of the best creators out there, each of them stars in their own right. DC hyped up the book with a back-up teaser feature, which led to the first issue selling like gangbusters. They set Dick Grayson, Donna Troy, and Wally West up for their futures and introduced amazing characters like Cyborg, Starfire, Raven, Terra, Deathstroke, Blackfire, Trigon, Brother Blood, Jericho, and many more. The book sold at Uncanny X-Men level, vying for the top of the industry with that hallowed book. It made DC a lot of money for a lot of years, funding the more experimental books that the publisher would start putting out as the ’80s went on. Do you love modern mature readers comics? The only way we have them in the form we do now is because of New Teen Titans.
Wolfman and Perez became even bigger stars, leading to them getting Crisis on Infinite Earths and changing the face of DC Comics for decades. New Teen Titans is full of amazing stories and was massively influential, but there have been problems stemming from the book. One of the biggest is that it ultimately led to the homogenization of the Titans. See, Wolfman and Perez’s run defined what the Titans could be and everyone who came after them wanted to pay homage to their stuff. This has led many members of the team – especially the Wolfman/Perez characters like Raven, Cyborg, Starfire, Jericho, Terra, and Deathstroke – being trapped in the same cycle of stories for decades. This has damaged the team’s immensely.
Looking over the post-Wolfman/Perez years of the team, most of the runs that were actually popular did the same thing as they did. It got so boring after a while; there’s only so many times you can have Deathstroke come back or Terra come back or Jericho turn evil or Raven have the same Trigon-related story all the time. These are some of DC’s most well-known characters, but their stories are just the same thing over and over again. Wally West and Dick Grayson have been able to escape the chain of New Teen Titans and Donna is popular enough that she can exist outside the cycle and have several different stories, but so many of the team’s characters are trapped. These are heroes and villains that everyone knows, but you can only ever really recommend Wolfman/Perez stories; the rest of them are mostly reheated leftovers from their sumptuous feasts.
A few years ago, I found a lot of issues of New Teen Titans for really cheap and it is, genuinely, one of the best things I’ve ever read (none of the important ones, although I did find a few of them earlier this year). Wolfman and Perez were able to create a team that you could tell amazing stories with and the book became a key part of ’80s DC. It drove interest back to the publisher, giving them bankroll to take chances on, say, hiring British creators like Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and Dave Gibbons or putting out more Prestige Format books that appealed to a new readership, like Camelot 3000 and Ronin, which would pave the way for Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. New Teen Titans is the gift that keeps on giving. It helped shape the modern comic industry in a variety of ways and if you can get your hands on those early issues of the book (and a lot of later issues where only Wolfman was writing it are also awesome; his work with Tom Grummet is fantastic), definitely get them. They’re worth it.
However, as great as New Teen Titans was, as important as it was, as lofty as its place among the best comics ever is, it’s also cast a shadow. Look at where the Teen Titans are today; we’ve gotten Titans (Vol. 4), a good book that mostly replayed the hits, and no Teen Titans book in ages. The closest we got was Titans Academy. After Wolfman/Perez, there’s pretty much just the Geoff Johns run you can recommend. Many characters have been able to break out of the New Teen Titans vortex, but they always get pulled back in. It echoes down through the decades, sometimes overpowering the sounds of the present. It set the Titans on a path that they’ve been trapped on ever since and hopefully, the upcoming relaunch will take them in new directions.
