They’re a bunch of young adventurers, sidekicks, and other super-powered kids eager to grow up and face a world of danger and excitement with their heads held high. As with so many other super-teams, they’ve been through a number of incarnations and rosters, but the core idea – young heroes dealing with the approach of adulthood while reveling in their abilities and helping the innocent – remains.
They’re the Teen Titans, New or otherwise, and they’re set to come to television in live-action form in 2018's Titans, so let’s take a look at how this stalwart band of DC crusaders evolved over the last six decades – Teen Titans Go!
It all starts with the original Teen Titans back in the 1960s, a team comprised of Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, and Wonder Girl. Later joined by Speedy, Green Arrow’s sidekick, the “cool” kids team faced sociopolitical issues like the Vietnam war and racial conflict head on. A brief blip in the mid-’70s created a gap in the original team’s series, but when they returned they were joined by the African-American hero Bumblebee and split their efforts with the addition of a West Coast team (you thought the Avengers came up with that?).
This first team came to an end when the heroes, no longer strictly teens, acknowledged the passage of time and moved on with their lives. Subsequently, various versions of the team were either revived, reformed, or created from scratch beginning with a relaunch in the 1980s that cemented the Teen Titans as an intrinsic part of the DC Universe for decades to come.
Oh, come on – we’re talking about a plethora of multi-powered heroes operating in a sometimes-dizzying combination of teams over the course of six decades! Do you seriously believe I’m going to list every single power and ability these people exhibit during the course of their astounding adventures? Let’s just say that due to their widely varied origins, the members of the Teen Titans possess countless super-powers -- some based in science, some in magic, and some based in just plain old I-was-trained-by-Batman-ness -- that together make them as formidable a team of adversaries as any similar assemblage in the annals of comic book crusading, and we’ll leave it at that.
…Oh, and Robin is quite the gymnast from what I understand. Backflips and everything.
Although many point to The Brave and the Bold #54 (July 1964) as the team’s debut, that’s only partly true. The trio of Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad seen there are joined by Wonder Girl in issue #60 (July 1965), and there they adopt the actual team name, “The Teen Titans.” For all intents and purposes, then, we can consider these four as the founding members of the original Titans. Writer Bob Haney was responsible for uniting the young heroes and shepherding them through many exploits; after a third (or second official) outing in Showcase #59 (December 1965), they began appearing in their own series in February 1966. A few breaks interrupted their run until they finally disbanded in February 1978 with Teen Titans #53.
As revived by the powerhouse team of writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez in DC Comics Presents #26 (October 1980), the next incarnation of the Titans enjoyed a great deal of success and lasted through a title change to Tales of the Teen Titans and some membership turnover as Robin became Nightwing and Jericho took the place of Kid Flash, among other alterations. During this time, the team –which also included Cyborg, Starfire, Raven, and Changeling – participated in an award-winning story arc titled “The Judas Contract.” (Head here for our take on five ways Teen Titans: The Judas Contract changed DC Comics.) After 1984, drastic shifts in the title’s creators and the cast of characters attracted controversy and declining interest. Nevertheless, the Titans soldiered on through the beginning of DC’s multiple multiverse reboots. There was even a historic meeting of universes as Marvel and DC collided with Marvel and DC Present The Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans (1982).
In the ’90s, a “youthified” Ray (Atom) Palmer led a new team of Teen Titans that included Prysm, Risk, Joto, Argent, Arsenal, and a host of others. This team operated in the aftermath of “Zero Hour,” while another group assembled from past members also turned up without the “Teen” modifier. The 2000s also introduced yet another team with a replacement Robin (Tim Drake, not Dick Grayson), Wonder Girl (Cassie Sandsmark and not Donna Troy), and Kid Flash (Bart Allen and not Wally West). They were joined by a Superboy clone named Kon-El, but as the 2010s arrived, the confusion of constant DC universe rebooting led to still more permutations of the team, at times erasing the existence of past configurations and rewriting the history of the Titans entirely. In order to calm fan complaints, that history was restored in the “Titans Hunt” miniseries, and during the DC Rebirth initiative two new Titans teams were launched, with two each of the original four members joining colleagues from other past incarnations. Confused yet? Just imagine trying to summarize all of this!
A variety of live-action and animated versions of the team have been discussed over the years but collapsed before production, and the team has made a few appearances here and there, but arguably the most successful of the many recent variations on the team is a TV incarnation that later appeared in comics of their own. The Cartoon Network production Teen Titans ran from 2003-2006 and evoked the ’80s with its choice of membership – the core group consisted of Robin, Starfire, Beast Boy, Cyborg, and Raven – and adaptation of stories (including “The Judas Contract”). A follow-up of sorts reunited the voice cast for Teen Titans Go!, featuring amusing takes on what it’s like to be a Titan when not battling evil. A pair of DTV movies (Justice League vs. Teen Titans and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract) have also been released in recent years, and the characters have appeared in a variety of other series as supporting players.
…And yes, there are quite a few one-off and short-lived incarnations of this team that we skipped for reasons of brevity, but that certainly all qualify as part of the long-running saga that is the Teen Titans. If your favorite version of the team was omitted here, feel free to give them a shout-out in the comments below!
Find Arnold T. Blumberg on Twitter at @DoctoroftheDead.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire