The Spirit of the Teens—or, Thoughts on Teen Titans, specifically A Kid’s Game
What the comic boom of the 80s did was grant a license to a lot of people not to have to actually grow up, by calling them “graphic novels”—which was a term that I hated—because they’re not particularly graphic, and they’re certainly not novels! Usually they’re twelve issues of She-Hulk stapled together. Alan Moore, in interview (2014) Some [characters], like Robin, didn’t need any changes [to their designs] at all while Superboy needed some serious attention. From a short introduction to “Mike McKone’s Sketchbook” in Teen Titans: A Kid’s Game (2004) Note that this piece contains pretty heavy spoilers for the A Kid’s Game graphic novel/collection specifically and some for Teen Titans more broadly, though not to a truly “heavy” degree in that latter case, given the sheer amount of material out there. In terms of the presentation below, when I quote from the comics, I have done my best to preserve much of the original look of the text, down to using both bolding and itali...