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 italics for emphasis to try to match the source material. I have used // to indicate a shift from one word balloon or caption box to another mid-quote, and I have adjusted the capitalization, which is essentially all caps in the original text, to be more conventional here for the sake of readability in this format.
The Teen Titans meant a lot to me when I was a teenager, which sounds pretty appropriate. I don’t remember how I first encountered the early 2000s animated series, though it was probably on a vacation, probably during a visit to one of my aunts out of state, since we didn’t have Cartoon Network at home. That encounter, however, where I undoubtedly saw some small number of episodes almost certainly out of order, sparked a passion in me for the characters and was also my gateway into superhero comics.
To give myself a little more Cred here, note that I didn’t actually start with the at-the-time current Teen Titans comic and instead, maybe as a result of looking into the show and its source material, started in my mid-teens with a box of old back issues from the widely beloved Marv Wolfman and George Pérez years. I believe the first Teen Titans comic I actually opened was The New Teen Titans #40. (Side Note: I thought “40,” remembering it was an issue about the villain Brother Blood and with him on the cover, and, Googling it, that looks like the image I was thinking of. My Titans knowledge is, sadly, overall, kind of faded. Like, I used to have Opinions about the Wildebeest Society arc and about Donna Troy’s husband Terry, and recovering some of those old memories and impressions has been a fun part of writing this essay.) For years during this period of my life, I’d scour comic shops and used bookstores for other old Teen Titans issues. My family hadn’t been inside of a comic shop until that point, so this interest of mine added a whole new dimension, or consideration, of sorts to many of our outings. I had an aunt taping me episodes of the animated series that I’d receive at certain points in the year when we met. I also got some of the DVD collections back when you had to buy two volumes to get a single season, and I sometimes rewatched an episode in the morning before school. At some point after starting my Teen Titans journey, I walked into a bookstore in the mall and, on a freestanding shelf (one of those columnular deals that are tall and narrow and have shelves on multiple sides) near the front of the store, I found the first collected volume of the then-current Geoff Johns run of the comic: the 2004 collection A Kid’s Game.
For a while there, I breathed and dreamed Teen Titans. I had dabbled in comics-making before as a kid, but it was during this period that I got really focused on comics (with a certain Titans-esque bent, naturally!) and started thinking about being a professional comics person—a bad idea, I’d learn later in life when I started hearing about the discrimination and harassment and overwork and whatnot that plague the comics industry. By that point, though, I was past my Teen Titans (and comics in general) phase. However, way back when, I excitedly bought and played the beat ‘em up video game based on the animated series, and I Identified with the tortured, goth, cool empath character Raven, and I was really into the soapy drama of it all. The social and romantic stuff, the melodrama. I did love the animated series, but I also probably latched onto the comics harder because they had more of what I as a teenager wanted from a superhero story—violence and sex and so forth. The highlight of an entire four-issue arc later in the Johns run, what Wikipedia calls “volume 3,” for me was probably one character getting drunk and propositioning another one. And that was the case for me because I was a degenerate teenager, but also, I can see/rationalize now, because I liked the interpersonal drama more than I liked the much Bigger references and crossovers and team-ups that were meant to excite fans (read: nerds). I also once pretty explicitly told someone that I liked the Teen Titans because they were like a family to one another, which is another piece of evidence pointing to me being into the property for its social elements first and foremost. While all this background is kind of laborious, I think it’s worth establishing upfront what the property means to me specifically since it lays a foundation for what I’ll say below and lets you know what I value about Teen Titans—italicized, the brand and not the actual group exactly.
I don’t think it’s particularly hard to understand the appeal of the Teen Titans, in general and as a brand, and both from the comics consumer and producer sides of the situation. For a teen audience, obviously the property or brand presents conventionally superheroic characters but with a “teen” twist. The human drama would obviously be more relatable, probably. If you were a fan of the sidekick characters themselves—often the miniature version of whatever major hero, like Green Arrow or The Flash or Batman or Aquaman, etc.—then this was a chance to see them in action on their own as well. It’s a golden opportunity from the producer side of things to write a different sort of team dynamic, where everyone is younger and more inexperienced and hormonal, and to have those characters work out their drama or baggage associated with their big-name mentors in a setting with other, similar characters. The Teen Titans were also perfectly positioned for crossover events since a lot of them had links to other titles, which meant they could theoretically draw on characters from those other series or join in on any number of crises from some corner of the DC Universe, offering some flexibility with the kinds of threats they might face, along with the additional pathos of them being so young and, thus, more vulnerable to being hurt and killed off. Having such a book just feels like a no-brainer from a business perspective.
A Kid’s Game functions well as almost a “proof of concept” for that foundational idea of the Teen Titans, despite following after decades of previous stories, or it could be said to be a quintessential representation of the idea. By which I mean that it has a little of everything, in a sense. The collection is bookended by two issues focused more so on the “teen” part of the title—light on action but with a focus on the characters (teenaged or otherwise)—while, in the middle, there’s a multi-issue story about the team facing off against Deathstroke, who is one of their iconic villains and a good early antagonist to start off a new iteration of the series. In a similar vein, an issue post-Deathstroke where the team takes on the Justice League is also just a good, obvious hook given the basic concept: the young, upstart teen heroes versus the “grown-ups,” some of whom are their mentors. Having Robin fight Batman is a certain kind of fan service, as is getting to see potential arguments regarding various characters’ power levels (Starfire versus Wonder Woman, for example) play out canonically. As an individual volume, in isolation, this is a solid spread of stories that I think does a good job zeroing in on the core elements of the Teen Titans that make them appealing. The characterization seems solid overall, with characters feeling like themselves or at least sensical: Impulse is… impulsive, a clearly less mature and experienced Mini-Flash; Robin is smart and agile and maybe just a smidge too big for his britches; Beast Boy is, despite his more senior status, still kind of a goof-off but with a maturity and focus that reveals itself when the chips are down; Raven is mostly absent in this issue, but, when she does appear, she’s cool and goth and in need of help. Classic Raven, for better or for worse. I could put together a similar sort of quick description for most of the rest of the cast if I wanted to. Overall, like I said before, they feel “right” to me now, and my impression is that I felt similarly back when I was younger.
The one character whose depiction here I have mixed feelings about is Cyborg. He’s ended up being kind of a break-out star from a series defined at its deepest level by a sense of the participants being second or third string characters (to compelling effect!), with a pretty huge upgrade from being on this smaller team composed mostly of sidekicks to being associated with the Justice League, an association that culminated in him playing a large role in the recent live-action Justice League movie. That is a pretty big deal for a character that I assume still has significantly less name recognition than Superman or Batman. Notably, Cyborg is also a Black superhero character, and one without the word “Black” in his name, and he’s also technically a disabled character, with his cyborgian enhancements that once just saved his life but now also give him his superpowers. Those noteworthy elements of his character are partly responsible for why I said “mixed” before.
On the one hand, Cyborg doesn’t necessarily feel like much of a character in A Kid’s Game beyond his role as the apparent leader of the team. He’s just the mature one—the guy in charge. He’s only teased in the first issue, but he gets a big hero’s reveal in the second when the rest of the group is struggling a bit with a fire on Alcatraz Island and he swoops in to save Superboy and Beast Boy. The fact that a Black and disabled hero gets to play that role is great, but I’m not sure someone comes away from this collection with a sense of who the character is outside that role. Contrast him with Starfire, another veteran Titan by this point. She similarly serves as a leader of the new team, but her characterization is more interesting because of her temper, or passion. When the younger heroes want to head out to deal with Deathstroke after he shoots Impulse, she threatens to use force to keep them at the tower. She later attacks Wonder Woman to force her to let Wonder Girl make her own decision about staying with the team, and she likens standing up for the younger girl to how her own family didn’t stand for her when she was given into slavery. She also gets a section of the final issue in this collection, which basically rotates among the characters and offers some insight into their feelings, that further explores her interiority as well. Overall, she’s given a winning balance of maturity, in contrast with the new blood, but also a certain roughness that puts her at odds with the very adult-seeming Justice League and her fellow Titans mentors, making her feel more like a person in her own right, with a distinct personality and motivations that define her, separate from her ostensible role as a teacher. While I won’t get into as much detail with him in order to save some space, Beast Boy also comes across as more of a character (in several senses of the word), thanks in part to getting a section devoted to him in that final issue. Meanwhile, what’s going on with Cyborg at this stage in his life is not really explored. A bio at the very end of the collection, separate from the actual issues, suggests that, despite regaining “his sense of purpose and much of his good humor” after working with the old Teen Titans, “he still misses being completely human,” but we don’t get to see that internal conflict or learn his feelings in an immediate and emotional way the same way that we do for the other characters.
Following
on the heels of all that characterization talk, it’s only fair to acknowledge
that my perspective might not be “right,” especially regarding the younger
characters. There was at least one previous team-up series featuring this same Robin,
Wonder Girl, Impulse, and Superboy before this one (Young Justice),
which I hadn’t read prior to encountering these characters in A Kid’s Game
and have since still read only a little bit of, which makes my statement about
them “feeling like themselves” complicated or even controversial and was why I
added the “or at least sensical” qualification to suggest that, at the very
least, they behaved in ways that felt like they made sense to me within this
particular spread of stories. I
was originally going to acknowledge the shift that these characters may have
undergone as more of an aside via a smaller caption on the same above image
showing off Superboy’s transformation from a more lithe, almost-pretty-boy sort
of Bad Boy, with a stylish haircut, little sunglasses, and a little leather
jacket over a skintight bodysuit, to basically a tank, a good many pounds
heavier, with a bland haircut and a uniform consisting of a regular-looking
pair of jeans and a black T-shirt emblazoned with a red Superman “S.” My
perspective on these characters was based on my first exposure to them in A
Kid’s Game, and I recognize that when I say they “feel like themselves,” I
say that looking backward at this as my formative experience with them.
Looking into the transition from Young Justice to Teen Titans online,
there seems to be a lot of controversy/discussion around the characterization
of Tim, Cassie, Bart, and this “Conner Kent.” The latter is probably one of the
more obvious examples of this transformation, with Wonder Girl as a potentially
close second, even just to me, as he’s physically transformed and also has gone
from ostensibly mimicking Superman via a form of telekinesis to, for all
intents and purposes, just being a miniature, less mature, Superman in terms of
his behavior and capabilities. If you put a picture of these two versions of
the character side by side without context, I’m not sure if someone would know
they were supposed to be the same person. The
larger point to be made here, I feel, is one that might be encapsulated by an
old bit of pop culture wisdom I think I remember seeing here and there on the
internet over the years and which is that, “Batman will outlive us all.” In
other (my) words: This world of superheroes is nearly a closed system.
Characters can enter, but they cannot leave (permanently). Inside that system,
you have an endless churn—new writers and artists making their mark, the same
sorts of dynamics and stories being endlessly re-explored and minutely altered,
and within such a system, which exists for the sake of promoting a specific brand
and making money, and so depends on maintaining a certain degree of
merchandisable recognizability, one character could, over time, effectively
become another. Given that nothing may truly exit the system, transforming one
person into another might actually be the preferred method of creating novelty
so you can keep the name recognition and not have to introduce more characters
that will more or less have to stick around forever. Rather than make a new
Robin or Wonder Girl or Superboy, the old ones can just be whatever they need
to be, and, with enough time and enough issues (which may or may not even be
accessible anymore), the link between one version of a character decades prior
and the current one might be so tenuous that anyone not already in the know
might never be, might not be able to… be.
That’s
over-thinking it, probably, but such a system of endless “churning”
re-litigation is exactly what I think of when I look at the history of the Teen
Titans as a comics property and see how, invariably, the cycle keeps
coming back to a group like the Wolfman-Pérez one endlessly. Evident in these
cycles is the ever-present tension, in not just the comics industry, between
profit and artistry: Clearly those characters in that rough configuration
represent something—a recognizable, marketable brand of nostalgia, but also, in
both a cold and calculating business sense as well as in a warm and creative
and emotional one, a certain standard of quality. Functional emotional
storytelling, or a pedigree that might feel irreplicable with something truly
new, and each more dramatic variation that fails just further drives home to
those in charge that what they need is just one more attempt at the
Wonder Girl, Robin, Raven, Beast Boy, etc. Titans to Get It Right This Time.
There’s a need for things to be simultaneously new, but also venerable and
well-known. Tim
Drake being gay or bisexual is another kind of example of this “churn” that I
was going to, in the initially much shorter version of this section, connect
with Superboy’s look and the Young Justice characters changing upon
entering this other series. It’s not that I have a problem with Tim’s sexuality
changing in and of itself—It’s just that, again, Nothing Escapes. Every
character must live forever, and that means that if DC needs more LGBT
representation, that they’re less likely to introduce some new character (who
wouldn’t be so immediately well-known or marketable, for one thing) and are more
likely to have an existing character come out. This happens in real life, with
real people who have been alive and presenting or living one way for any number
of years, but this is specifically in the world of superhero comics, as an
industry: in the context of a nearly-closed system, where no one ever dies,
where a character can be a teenager for decades and have their characterization
maybe corporately mandated but also tinkered with on a month-to-month basis,
maybe quite literally month by month and issue by issue if the creative team
behind a given book is in flux or if the character is in multiple titles at
once during the same interval of time. In the context of endless churn like
this, identities (un)naturally begin to slide. It is… kind of existentially
terrifying if you think of it as a place someone could actually end up, like a
limbo, or a hell. Or, it’s just logistically terrifying to anyone who might
want to write these characters and has to try to execute on their vision while
still meeting mandates and also reconciling so many years of previous characterization. 
The art in the issues contained in A Kid’s Game is generally great, I feel. It was actually one of the first things that caught my interest about it, after it being a Teen Titans book, that first time I picked it up and flipped through it in a store that no longer exists in a mall that has since been going the way of all malls. In trying to break down exactly what I like so much about the art of these first few issues of this particular take on Teen Titans for this piece, I’ve been struggling to get beyond “the color.” That’s what I think of when I think of the art for the majority of the collection and is what I think drew me to it years ago; however, “color” clearly isn’t it since, while the colorist for all of these issues is apparently the same (Jeremy Cox), the exact look of what I kind of perceive as “color” varies between the first six issues and the seventh, which was penciled by Tom Grummett rather than Mike McKone, and with different inkers as well. Credit can be a little hard to place with regard to individual issues in a collection like this one since some of the “credits” are removed or consolidated in ways that can make it hard to tie specific names to specific issues, especially in a later volume like Life and Death (2006) where the number of names involved in the total collection is quite large, but I think Marlo Alquiza’s inking could also play a role in what I find so absorbing about some of these early issues. I still see a similarity in the actual colors with the seventh issue, but the way that those colors… lie on the characters looks quite different, suggesting that what I liked about “the color” was actually, at least in part, McKone’s art style, plus, likely, the inking.
“Soft,” I might call it. The characters’ flesh reads well as flesh, if not exactly realistic flesh, and scenes or settings with low or dramatic lighting, like the cultists’ blood pit where Raven is revived or Titans Tower’s memorial hall of fallen Titans represented by lifelike statues, have a real sense of genuine darkness to them, with a thick moodiness and richness to the difference between well- or dimly-lit and shadowed or outright dark compositions. I’ve always been drawn to these more shadowy moments—especially one between Robin and Superboy I’ll get to later—and writing this essay forced me to think about why. While I like Grummett’s work here too, the characters in that issue look a bit “sharper” and I’m aware of more distinct boundaries between them and the environments around them and the oft-mentioned color, which is likely at least partly attributable to the inking again. I’ve stopped short of making some sort of Excel spreadsheet trying to cross-reference and pair off who did what in what issue (which penciler with which inker with which colorist), in A Kid’s Game and beyond, to try to figure out exactly what the real secret combination of ingredients is here, but I also realize that this is almost a vibes-based assessment of the visuals, in the end. As much time as I spent making art for years of my life, I just don’t have the technical language to precisely capture what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing is also colored (ha) by the nostalgia of the moment I first saw it.
If I have a notable gripe with the visuals, it’s probably how Cyborg’s sound-based weaponry is portrayed. It lacks oomph, to my eye—which makes sense given that it’s sound—but I still feel like there could have been a bit clearer, more dramatic force behind it. There are also some minor-ish quirks or bits of weirdness in both McKone’s and Grummett’s issue(s) I won’t get into for the most part—like one panel from McKone where Superboy is advancing on Deathstroke and where the former’s legs look a little oddly short and his hips oddly cocked/hourglass-shaped, or certain drawings of Superboy from Grummett where he looks like a grown-ass man instead of a teenager—because I don’t think they necessarily jump off the page if you’re not intentionally slowing down to actually examine the art and because I can’t imagine the strain of trying to crank out one of these issues on a monthly basis. They’re ultimately disposable media, made with a maximum amount of grind and a minimum amount of employee credit and compensation (broadly speaking), so the fact that they can come out looking good at all is probably a miracle. Having read beyond A Kid’s Game, specifically into the post-“Infinite Crisis,” post-one-year-time-jump, era of “volume 3,” it’s not hard to find proof of that. It's unfortunate that the open-ended, potentially infinite status of some of these series make it reasonably impossible to keep a consistent creative team for their duration, but this early combo makes for what I would argue is a compelling starting point.
One other aspect of A Kid’s Game that I want to address is how well it serves as a point of entry for someone looking to get into Teen Titans. This is just considering it in isolation again, though. In reality, at this point in time, a graphic novel from the early 2000s probably isn’t a good entry point. (Side Note: After trying to catch up with what’s been going on with Teen Titans since I stopped reading the comics back in the early 2010s, I’m going to go out on a limb and say A Kid’s Game, and maybe the subsequent rest of this “volume 3” that ran for a substantial but not at all insurmountable 100 numbered issues, might still be a really good entry point…) Pretending the early 2000s never ended, however, there are some things about this collection that make it function well as a gateway into Teen Titans despite the fact that it is not a reboot and is a follow-up to the previous continuity. One aspect of the collection that works well in this regard is an explicitly labelled “introduction” at the beginning, which summarizes the history of the property, discussing various eras and characters, establishing a continuity and making clear how this new go-round fits in. Similarly, there are dossiers/bios in the back as well for the major characters. While single issues of comics and graphic novel collections will usually have some kind of intro to the cast (if only a quick bit of text explaining the basic premise), A Kid’s Game does slightly more. The biographies themselves are not very long, but each one comes paired with a piece of art depicting the character, and the in-universe history appears alongside information about what series and issue number the character first appeared in. Like I said before, even though issue one isn’t really issue one (in that way that criticism of superhero comics’ general impenetrability usually focuses on), A Kid’s Game clearly attempts to provide a sense of its lineage. References to specific issues and takes on the property are useful information someone could use to theoretically “catch up” firsthand if they wanted, but even if they can’t or don’t want to, they should still be able to better establish a timeline of both the in-universe and real-world history of the Teen Titans thanks to these inclusions.
Aside from these elements that technically exist outside the actual stories collected here, however, the stories themselves also feel like they reasonably try to provide an introduction to the characters while still acknowledging their long history. Obviously, there’s no truly refuting the argument that series like this are “hard to get into” because just starting with something labeled “number one” doesn’t mean you’ll actually get a proper beginning or even see the configuration of characters you might expect. A Kid’s Game very much builds on previous runs of Teen Titans, as well as other series, but I think it does so mostly in an accommodating way. I hadn’t actually read any Young Justice before reading this collection for the first time, for example, and Young Justice is where characters like Impulse/Kid Flash and Wonder Girl are “coming from” (though they didn’t originate there), with the tragic events that concluded that other series, where a Superman android killed two of the older Titans, still very much a big driver of character and conflict here. And yet, I didn’t feel too much friction, as far as I remember, getting onboard. You’re able to put enough pieces together with the information that you’re given. I didn’t know anything about Superboy before reading this book back in the day, so I was initially sort of unsteady given how the first issue opens with him instead of a different character I might have more closely associated with the title “Teen Titans,” but I was able to understand him pretty quickly, in part because he does say stuff like “Cadmus Labs grafted what they could of your Kryptonian D.N.A. to human D.N.A. when they conjured me up-- // --But that human was just one of their whacked-out scientists. // . . . I’m a clone of the world’s greatest hero!” Even without my editing for conciseness, this would be pretty direct stuff, but, in fairness, not actually as blatantly expositional as it might seem out of context (when in context, it’s Superboy arguing with Superman about whether he really needs some kind of civilian life).
Not every character has an introduction this on-the-nose, but there are obvious attempts to, even if only quickly, introduce the cast and the situation to an audience with differing levels of previous exposure. That bit about Superboy’s genetics is an important piece of his history to raise because, aside from it being his introduction, it also plays into the major reveal at the end of the first issue regarding the identity of the human half of his genetic makeup. You still have to know who Lex Luthor is to fully appreciate the reveal, but that’s probably a safe thing to assume given how widespread the Superman/Lex Luthor relationship is. And if you don’t know exactly, you’ve still at least been given a sense of why a change in what Superboy thinks he knows about his background would be a big deal after that earlier conversation with Superman.
A certain amount of familiarity is assumed at other points in A Kid’s Game, but anything too specifically referential is usually more brief and passing, like some references to “Terra” that come up around Deathstroke as a bad thing he did in the past and Robin throwing the name “Jason” at Batman during their fight in order to hurt him. It’s not that these things don’t matter at all—just that they don’t matter here. When something else does, like the story of Deathstroke’s son Joseph/Jericho, another fallen Titan, it’s shared with the audience in more detail. Robin, Superboy, Impulse, and Wonder Girl being newcomers to the Titans in-universe means that, despite their actual ages in human years in the real-world timeline of comics publishing, they’re credibly unfamiliar with things in a way that lets them stand in for the audience and be given information useful to the audience. To make a long story long, A Kid’s Game doesn’t exactly just leap into things in a way that’s inaccessible, particularly not to someone who might be coming to it from the animated Teen Titans series which was running at the time—who’d be able to recognize familiar elements like Beast Boy or Deathstroke well enough and might just need to have some of the comics-specific lineage filled in—and there’s clearly effort taken here, within the issues themselves and also with the collection as a whole, to make this “number one” as much like a true starting point as it can be while also still preserving all that pre-existing continuity, hopefully satisfying both old and new readers.
The
animated Teen Titans series actually opens quite similarly to A Kid’s
Game in terms of how it relays information about its characters. There
seems to be some discrepancy about whether the episode “Final Exam” or “Divide
and Conquer” is actually the first—the former having an earlier production
number and apparently being episode one according to what I can find online,
but the latter being first on my DVD collection and very clearly being the intended
first with, for one thing, how the Titans do kind of introduce themselves
at the beginning via a more dramatic reveal and by counting off in a way that
feels particularly introductory—but either one can come first as far as the
point I’m making here is concerned. Both takes (the animated series and the
comic) largely leave the process of figuring out who the characters are up to
the audience. While the show isn’t beholden to the same previously established
continuity as the comic and so can begin mostly with just raw character rather
than a convoluted history of past relationships and events, it’s still not a
wholly dissimilar “number one,” in that there’s no big information dump in
either of the potential first episodes to establish that, say, Starfire is an
alien. Instead, you learn as you go.
I stopped reading Teen Titans and all other DC Comics titles around the time of the big “Flashpoint” event and the subsequent reboot of the universe called “The New 52.” I’m not going to get into the in-universe particulars of either of those things since A) they’re not actually important here and B) I didn’t pay that much attention even at the time. All that I really knew most keenly then was that all the titles I had been reading, which included Teen Titans, of course, but also Robin and Secret Six and occasionally others, were coming to an end. I don’t remember if I made the choice to let my Teen Titans subscription lapse before or after reading an issue of the reboot, but one plausible impression was that I had been feeling fatigued with the series for a while—both because of its creative direction and because by that point I was in college and had kind of outgrown superheroes—and the mass rebooting just gave me a reasonable point at which to exit. My local comic shop tried to get me to move my Secret Six subscription over to Suicide Squad, but I declined. I kept my Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog subscription for a couple more years (probably because that character and comic were even more foundationally meaningful to me than even Teen Titans), but it’s fair to say that the end of my reading Teen Titans at the time definitely represented a noteworthy shift in my fiction appetite. I’ve since engaged with comics only sporadically, like buying several Outsiders collections when I was in graduate school, and have never been Into them the same way as I was when I was a teenager. This was, in very hyperbolic terms, the end of an era for me.
My Teen Titans subscription actually ran for three months after the reboot, so I got to read several issues of the new version of the title, and it was, to be frank, not very good at all for reasons that are worth digging into because of how they misalign so nicely with the positive impressions of “volume 3” (or at least its beginning) that I was covering above. Saying that this new version of Teen Titans sucked is obviously a subjective opinion (at least on its face), but I want to try to prove my point here with something like science as well. To make this argument, let’s take a look at two very similar sequences from the first issues of these two different runs: specifically, the moment in each version where Wonder Girl gets her invitation to join the Teen Titans.
In A Kid’s Game, we first meet Cassie and her mother as they’re in the middle of a meeting with Cassie’s principal. The principal says that Cassie needs to be expelled from school because her superhero identity is public knowledge and the school has received FBI warnings about potential attacks by supervillains, and, also, because Cassie has been teaching the other students “paganism.” Things get heated and Cassie smashes the principal’s desk in a fit of rage and then runs out of the room, apologizing to her mother as she goes, clearly rattled by her actions. We then see two other girls in a bathroom making small talk, but they’re interrupted when Cassie comes out of one of the stalls. She tries to apologize for startling them, but they make some rude remarks about her and leave. Cassie has a brief vision of Ares in the bathroom mirror, and then Starfire shows up to extend the aforementioned offer, having witnessed everything that just went on. Cassie doesn’t want to join the group at first. She says the adults of the world are right to think that younger heroes are “callow and irresponsible [and] potentially dangerous.” It’s clearly implied that, on top of the recent scene in the principal’s office, Cassie also still feels guilty for the part she played in the death of the Titans Donna Troy and Lilith when she was still part of Young Justice. Starfire ultimately wins her over, however, when she says “As Donna always said—A warrior’s spirit never dies. I loved her very much, Cassie. We all did. And none of us want to see Wonder Girl forgotten.” The two leave for the new Teen Titans headquarters, then, with the kind-of-a-delinquent Cassie saying she’ll call her mother and let her know about the situation after they get there.
At the risk of giving a superhero comic book too much credit, I like these two scenes quite a bit. They communicate a lot very quickly and not altogether unnaturally, but, more importantly, they are very intimate and human in their tone and construction. Cassie’s mood and motivation aren’t driven by something entirely fantastical or all that distant from what a normal teenager might have on their plate if we ignore some of the particulars: She’s being treated like a problem by other people, and she’s been buying into it because of her guilt over something unrelated that she couldn’t control. Starfire’s little speech about no one wanting “Wonder Girl” to be forgotten is so great because it positions Cassie as equal to Donna by way of the vague reference to the role rather than to a specific person who’s filled it, implying she (Cassie) is part of the same legacy and suggesting the best way for her to honor the other hero is not to hide and mope but instead to continue being Wonder Girl. In an issue that has to introduce so many different characters very quickly, these several pages accomplish a fair bit of heavy lifting in a pretty economic way but without feeling insubstantial. And it’s important to note that almost every major character at this stage of the series, with the undeniable exception of Raven, who is completely absent, and the possible exception of Cyborg, who is just a voice over an intercom in the first issue, gets some kind of intro here.
Contrast that version with “The New 52” one: Rather than jumping right into a situation and learning about Cassie organically, we instead meet her driving down a California highway in a convertible while Robin spells out who she is in a sequence of small captions that essentially address the audience head-on: “Her name is Cassie Sandsmark. // She’s seventeen years old. // Brilliant. // Gorgeous. // A Free Spirit. // And No. That’s not her car. // It would be polite to say the girl has boundary issues.” Cassie gets pulled over by an excessively-muscled dude pretending to be a cop who asks for her license and registration. “I’m sorry, officer,” says Cassie, “This is my mother’s car.” In chimes Robin again: “No. It’s not.” The huge dude then lifts Cassie out of the car by the throat with one hand, but he is kicked in the back of the head and speedily dispatched by Robin. Robin and Cassie then have this rushed conversation about who he is and how she’s being hunted by an organization that’s tracking down young “metahumans.” She denies being one; a helicopter/gun ship shows up; Robin insists she use her powers and says his armored cape will protect him alone, calling her “Wonder Girl,” a name which she apparently hates. Cassie reveals her powers, of course, and destroys the automated gun ship. At the end of all this, Robin pitches her on the idea of a team-up once more: “Maybe [your life] can be something more. Something better. Maybe we can do great things together.” To which Cassie replies, “You were home schooled, weren’t you?” To which Robin replies, not out loud but in another caption, to the audience: “What does that have to do with anything?” CUE THE LAUGH TRACK (and a very-end-of-the-issue tease of an evil Superboy).
I… hated this: the way that it’s insistently snarky at the expense of genuine feeling, that it feels somehow underwritten despite the insistence on the constant back-and-forth snark, the fact that the action of the moment is so far removed from anything credibly teenager-like, and so on. Obviously, expecting one version of the Teen Titans to be written the same way as another one—to have the same plot beats or even tone—is ridiculous. These long-lived series can only survive by trying to find new ways of doing the same things over and over again, and yet, I still feel like one of these two stories is the more inherently appealing one. One of them treats the characters like human beings first and foremost and foregrounds more abstract or even universal concepts of needing friends and mentorship and a certain amount of independence and a place where they can be their true selves, while the other is just specifically focused on a goofy paramilitary organization called “N.O.W.H.E.R.E,” of all things. There are three action scenes in this one issue, while the other, older first issue has one single action scene in it, where Robin beats up the villains Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum who are menacing a young girl, but that scene is also only two pages’ long, and the substance of it isn’t even the fight—It’s Batman standing on the sidelines and trying to convince Robin that he needs his friends. The rest of the issue is mostly dialogue, and while some of the writing is cringe, like how Beast Boy says “As much as I’d like to see it, don’t get your panties in a knot!” to Cassie, there are also a lot of quiet and genuine-feeling moments—like Bart/Impulse, sitting at the top of the stairs in a state of silent and obvious unease or dejection after overhearing Flash say that he (The Flash) likes Bart but isn’t sure if he believes in him. The previously hyper-active, self-assured young hero has been silenced and stilled. Clearly, we see, there’s a real insecurity in him, and that insecurity will come out later in this early arc when he’s trapped and shot in the knee by the villain Deathstroke and is subsequently more worried about The Flash finding out he messed up again than he is concerned about the pain or his injury or the fact that the surgeon is going to have to repeatedly cut his rapidly-healing flesh without anesthesia to fix the gunshot wound.
If
I had to describe the overall tone of “The New 52” Teen Titans, it would
be “aggressive.” I get the sense from re-reading the three issues I have that
they were possibly going for something more intentionally snappy and humorous
with the writing, which might feel like the appropriate direction for a book aimed
at teens (who are notoriously snappy themselves), but I think it overshoots the
mark by not building in enough emotional weight (another key element of
teenagerdom) to counterbalance and just ends up feeling weightless,
underwritten, and kind of mean or empty in terms of the vibe. The
image of Wonder Girl above from the third issue illustrates what I would
describe as the aggressiveness of the art style—in terms of facial expressions,
posing, and just the overall look. Whether sexualizing a (fictional) teenager
is appropriate or not is a whole other can of worms I won’t open in this
ostensible “caption”—though that was/is more of an industry-wide issue than
exclusively a problem with this iteration of Teen Titans specifically, I
think—but it really is the aggressive tone more than anything else that I think
sours this version of the characters for me. It’s just such an unpleasant look/feel
that’s clearly meant to be sexy or cool but fails. The supposed-to-be sexual
tension between Cassie and Tim further just comes off as try-hard and
aggressive and weird: “Yo. Up here. And before you ask—Yes, they’re real.”
(Cassie’s first words to Tim in issue two but directed at the audience by
virtue of the panel being from our point of view); “Like you didn’t recognize
my ass in the clothing store? Right.” (Her first words to him after saving his
life later in that same issue). It is all just so… tactless, and also
personally annoying to me given how tragic and sweet the passing Cassie-Tim
pairing in “volume 3” was for how it came about as a result of their mutual
grief at losing Superboy, who they both loved in their own way, where it was
clearly a doomed relationship from the start. This take is just giving amateur
hour, Creative Writing 101 by contrast. It isn’t unique in that way,
however, as this sort of pathos-sapping attempted snappiness is something that
a lot of people have come to hate about modern writing, often of superheroes in
particular.
Or consider the first night at the tower headquarters for the Geoff-Johns-written Titans, where Superboy finds Robin up super late and they have this great conversation that’s lent a lot of power by how well the previously mentioned “color” (the art in general, let’s say) captures that feeling of being suffused in shadow at a lonely hour, with just these dim or distant sources of light around. Superboy asks Robin why they came there, and Robin starts to answer but then cuts himself off, reassesses, and then says he’s trying to figure it out too. “We came here because we’re friends, right?” Superboy eventually says: “…You gotta give me a reason to stick around, Robin.” Robin does come back with a snarky retort about Superboy being smarter than he looks, but before that there’s a single panel of silence, with just the two of them standing there in the dark, letting the moment hold. The tone overall is one of something like emotional vulnerability, and it’s a mood that I think persists during this era of the series. After the scrap with the Justice League, the two boys have a similar moment on the roof of the tower that includes Robin saying, really straightforwardly, that Superboy’s Luthor genes will never make him evil: “Because I’m going to be here to make sure. All of the Titans will be. And one of these days, I’m probably going to have to deal with something too. Something I’ll need help with—And I know you’ll be there to help me.” In the years since reading this version of Teen Titans, I have seen some criticism of Geoff Johns and his writing, and I’ll fully admit that I don’t pay attention to this stuff enough as an adult to have what you might call a “fully-informed” opinion on the matter, but even just in isolation, just looking at this one issue (and one collection), I immediately see a lot to like, even as an adult. The writing is character-forward, plenty earnest when it needs to be, and it focuses on the friendships and the feelings, which are the things that make the Teen Titans special—the “teen” parts. The intention is clearly to try to create something that feels emotionally honest and meaningful.
There are some light attempts at thematic resonance, such as when Bart mentions King Tut being a kid when he inherited his throne (“Bet it was cool to have a kid as king”) or how the seventh issue tries to form a thematic link between various characters, including Deathstroke, as they think about the concept of time, with the last words of the issue being the inner thoughts of the mercenary reflecting on the fact that he and his children and the Titans will all eventually die while trying to decide if his friend and butler Wintergreen’s final words (“I suppose it was only a matter of time”) speak to some larger truth and were meant sympathetically or if he found Deathstroke finally killing him (under Jericho’s control, unbeknownst to Wintergreen, however) to be just the expected betrayal at the end of their long association that he always knew was coming. I included that quote from comics legend Alan Moore at the start of this piece not exactly to poke fun at Teen Titans and certainly not to criticize the (valid) criticism of exactly this sort of collection that Moore offers. It was just relevant to the discussion and fun, but, also, I found myself thinking about how surprisingly satisfying of a package A Kid’s Game was upon review, what with its overarching symmetry of more character-focused issues and the balance of good Teen Titans stories in the middle. Although clearly just the first part of an ongoing series, with a lot of dangling threads left at the end, it was a much more cohesive and satisfying… unit in ways I’m not sure I fully appreciated as a kid. Moore wasn’t/isn’t wrong about the ultimate maturity of a “graphic novel” like this one, but, still, I can see in A Kid’s Game the intent to try to create something both conventionally superheroic and also something that might strike a real emotional note.
Maybe “The New 52” Teen Titans came into its own and had some good team-bonding or character moments eventually. I don’t actually know. What I do know is what I’ve said already, which is that one of these two takes seems to understand the value of the core idea of teenaged superheroes and the potential it offers, while the other does not. As a teenager desperate to be taken seriously, the story that seemed to treat teen feelings seriously appealed a lot to me. I don’t know if I would have been taken in as much by the quippier, louder versions of the characters, though if I had somehow read that version of a Teen Titans first issue at that age I might very well have found them edgy in an appealing way since I was, after all, a teenager. As an adult—as one who’s seen the media landscape inundated with quippy media—I can look at the two from more of a craft perspective and not strictly an emotional one and see what looks like objective truth. Even so, I’ve come to the conclusion in general that fans are poor stewards of the things they love, and can appreciate how, say, the still-running successor to the animated Teen Titans show that got me into the group, Teen Titans Go!, which is generally regarded as just kind of relentlessly, frivolously silly, where the original show had its moments of darkness and heart, so dramatically contrasts with that older iteration. My impression has been that it gestures teasingly toward that older series sometimes but is still its own thing at heart, and even if I don’t have a lot of personal interest in it, I can respect a (maybe) contrarian take. “The New 52” Teen Titans doesn’t so much feel like a contrarian take to me, however, as a poor attempt at capturing the sort of long-standing continuity of spirit that gets invoked when you say something like “Titans Forever.” A Kid’s Game, however, seems to channel that spirit very well.
While
not the highest quality image, I think the above scan from A Kid’s Game at
least somewhat captures what I mean about the visuals of these issues (and, by
extension, of the collection) that grabbed me as a teenager. It’s not the
actual subject matter—here, a newly-resurrected Raven fleeing from robbed
cultists in the dark woods—so much as it is the quality of the colors and
simulated lighting. The color just lies very heavily on the page, an
impression enhanced by the somewhat thicker (or maybe just rougher-feeling,
more textured?) stock of the paper, looking and feeling richer and more
distinctly “analog,” as opposed to the thinner, slipperier “digital” look and
feel of some later installments. As much as I was already into Teen Titans before
I ever picked up this book in a store, it is this overall “rich” quality of the
visuals that I feel most strongly in my memory of that moment. It’s the
impression that has stayed after all these years, so as much as I think Johns’
writing is good in this volume, I want to end with an emphasis on the
altogether more immediate and visceral response that I had/have to the artwork.
.jpg "A Kid’s Game: Raven")
