Teen Titans, New Teen Titans, New Titans, Titans, Team Titans, Young Justice, New New Teen Titans, New Teen Teen Titans, Teen Titans Go!, S/D

I'm gonna give it a shot; it will be my first Winick purchase…I guess I'll find out how atrocious he is for my own damn self…

It's not that he's atrocious so much as it is the concept of "'Friends' with capes" is atrocious. He's just okay.

VM, please save yourself the $3 bucks, and buy yourself a Slurpee. HI DERE is being too kind -- Winick's the sort of semi-competent uninspired placeholding sub-Johns wonk that DC loves to employ nowadays in order to keep their ass-backward trains running on time. 90% of the time, he's like a cross between the good old Marvel Bullpenner chugging out 24 pages of big-zang-wow under Jim Shooter's stern heel and the post-Image hack taking "grim and gritty" to its absurd and cartoonish extreme.

it indeed is suck-ass.

1. each Titan gets a few pages where they are attacked by monsters and evil soldiers…20 pages of full page pin-up art and NO story movement…writing for the trade means nothing happens…took me less than five minutes to read…

2. Raven has now been turned, stupidly but with respect to the cartoon, into a sarcastic goth girl…

3. Starfire is nekkid, which makes me really wonder if DC is right and there are such people who would get titillated by super hero comics…too pitiful to contemplate…

4. they do seem to be rehashing two arcs I've never read…

5. and no, i don't like his dialogue and this Churchill fellow's art is ugly…

So I ain't gonna buy no more…

Slurpee RIP ;_;

Well, I liked Winick's Exiles. At first.

Winick is my least favorite writer working today.

Wow, so much hate for Winick. He's like Jeph Loeb or Bendis nowadays where there's this instant backlash for whatever he does, no matter what.

Not saying everything he does is good - anyone who does as many books as he does is bound to deliver rushed mediocrity (see: his run on Teen Titans that this thread is about!) but his stuff on Exiles, Green Arrow, and Under the Hood (admit it, as a story by itself, it was good, just what DC did with Todd outside Batman was unnecessary) is definitely recommendable fun.

(Though I have to admit anyone who describes their book as "Friends with capes" in a positive manner, that just seems... bad.)

(and are the Teen Titans even salvageable as a book concept at this point? too much history, too many characters, comes out as a crappy New Mutants/Young X-Men rip-off that it was originally accused as. Then again, JSA works, so who knows)

To be fair, Bendis and especially Loeb (and I'd group Millar in there as well) have more than earned their backlash. I will 2nd the Red Hood stuff up until they explain how SUPERBOY PUNCHED JASON TODD TO LIFE IN THE COFFIN, tho I rep it noting that it was very unWinicklike!

Also: that was Geoff Johns on the OK-devolving-to-shit Teen Titans -- Winick was on the OK-devolving-to-shit Outsiders.

Also: a world where Teen Titans is unsalvageable because of history and characters (which the Year One mini ably debunks) but a joyless continuity super-wank like JSA works is not my kind of world. (NB: I haven't touched the thing since it was rebooted, but I doubt it's any better than it was near the end of the 1st run.)

Also worth nothing -- I've been burned by Johns enough in the past that I won't go within 50 yards of anything he's involved in unless his presence is mitigated by a Grant Morrison (whose own flavor of continuity wank is more my style).

The problem with Jeph Loeb was that he was never good in the first place! The only reason I ever read his books was due to X-completism and I enjoy "Heroes" despite the writing.

Ha -- I think it was established that Loeb was all over the Nikki / DL / ATM Kid subplot for Heroes, which was scientifically proven to be 90% balls. He has his moments, tho (cf. whatever he's done w/ Ed McGuinness that wasn't related to mourning Captain America).

There was a time when Winick was pretty okay, with promise of getting good. Then he decided to write the same story in Green Arrow over and over again, let the Outsiders spiral out into crap. His Batman (or his BatMAHNKE, as I fondly remember) was very decent and mostly pretty good, though. Perhaps it's because Batman doesn't present as many calls for dialogue, which is where Winick goes from Just Another DC Hack to OMG I WANT TO PULL OUT MY EYEBALLS WITH INTERNET RAGE.

I got the New Teen Titans Omnibus Vol. 1 from the library recently. Never read any of these issues before, cuz as a kid I started buying the series around issue #30 and that was in the days before reprints and getting back issues was a random process. Generally I'm impressed by how solid it is right out the gate, Perez' art and style are so deeply burned into my mind I kind of think of it as just the archetypal 80s superhero art style, everything is finely detailed and "realistic", anatomies feel like they carry weight and substance even among all the garish colors and fight-scene nonsense. The writing is decent if overwrought and is the one place where the Ghost of Claremont's X-Men really does feel like it looms large - everyone has running monologues in their heads about their feelings during fight scenes, which is p lol. But overall I just dig the world it creates - young, urban, colorful but dangerous. I like it more than the Claremont X-Men tbh.

I've always liked that initial New Teen Titans run better than the Claremont X-Men. But it's definitely the minority opinion.

The only Teen Titans issue I've ever read was this one:

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/2/23/New_Teen_Titans_Vol_2_9.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090106023732

which I was gifted when I was maybe 6 years old, at which time the content soared over my head. Been wanting to revisit and check out the whole run to satisfy my nostalgic curiosity. Worth the read, or would I do better to explore the earlier 80s stuff?

I'd start at the beginning. The Perez run is special.

yeah start at the beginning, it's pretty fully formed from the get-go.

re: the Claremont/X-Men comparisons - there's obviously a bunch of parallels, but one of the things I think TT benefits from is having its characters situated in a quasi-realistic identifiably teen milieu. Everyone's always having so many FEELINGS in the X-Men but they're largely about things that bore no resemblance to anything I could identify, whereas in their various secret identities you'd get glimpses of the Titans leading (or attempting to lead) "normal" lives - having a boyfriend, going to college, going on a date, hanging out with friends, arguing with their parents. In between all the cosmic space battles and interdimensional demon stuff. There was a balance there that made it feel more "real".

One thing I hadn't noticed before is how Wally West is a self-professed "midwestern conservative", which kind of ties into his uptight jerkiness throughout most of the series lol

Here's how I read them in the UK:

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/200997052842-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

That weird age when you are old enough to have your mind blown by Animal Man, but also dig wearing an Atom badge

yeah, i read that too! the issue where animal man has his arm torn off by a giant mutant rat (with accompanying splash page of him bleeding out in an alley) had a profound effect on 10-tear-old me

i dunno who thought putting teen titans and animal man together in the same comic was a good idea but i salute their commitment to making bad decisions

Haha yeah - but lack of congruence aside, all those London Editions DC comics were really well-curated - introduced me to Byrne's Superman, Norm Breyfogle, Grant Morrison, Neal Adams's hairy-chested-love-god Batman... I think there was a proto-Vertigo one too, with Swamp Thing and some Howard Chaykin thing... that lasted about two issues. I have such clear memories of them - and yeah, especially that Animal Man splash page (I was 12 I think).

The US equivalent to that phenomenon was five completely random comics sealed in plastic and sold for a buck at grocery stores and the like. Maybe you guys had that, too? Still fondly recall the single issues of Alpha Flight and Micronauts: the New Voyages and Kull the Conqueror that I read over and over and over with no context or ability to really understand what was going on.

all those London Editions DC comics were really well-curated

yeah, they really were - they introduced me to so many great stories from dc history

the proto-vertigo one might have been swamp thing and black orchid iirc?

old lunch, i saw those bags of random comics a few times in the uk but weirdly more often in spain, where i'd pick them up every time i saw them in supermarkets or newsagents

no idea why or how english-language comics were showing up in bagged batches in catalonia in the late 80s to mid-90s but i loved 'em

Ha yes, family holidays where you starved for reading and were like, "Hey, a glossy magazine reprint of Star Brand in Flemish, why not?"

We could probably do with a thread dedicated to the insane variations of our childhood comics consumption. Like the campground I always went to with my grandparents, where they had a general store whose entire comics selection (in the mid-'80s) was made up of '70s DC horror anthologies. Why was that a thing? I have no idea, but I'm thankful that it was a thing.

start that thread! i wanna tell my stories of piecing together a run of green lantern: mosaic from dogeared back issues found in newsagents across devon in 1992!

Done!: Grab bags and quarter bins: your tales of discovering comics as a clueless youth

dunno who thought putting teen titans and animal man together in the same comic was a good idea but i salute their commitment to making bad decisions

this is indeed a great decision, but what was the Kevin Maguire Creeper stuff in that?

I think that's [indescribably niche trivia alert] from JLI #7, which was running as backup in the UK Superman book and moved over to DC Action after Superman was cancelled.

Cancellations were so dark and lacking in closure back then. You'd turn up to your newsagent on the regular release day and it just wouldn't be there anymore. It was like a way to practice children for experiencing death.

this is the teen titans thread

Sorry

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/b/bd/New_Teen_Titans_Vol_1_13.jpg

that's better!

Animal Man + New Teen Titans + JLI is an EVEN BETTER combination.

NTT was the only superhero comic I ever followed* as a kid, packed three or four to an issue in b&w Australian reprints circa 1986. Sometimes all the stories in an issue would follow each other, sometimes they'd be out of order, and sometimes they'd leap over to an unnumbered compilation under a Tales Of The Teen Titans cover focusing on one of the members. To tie into the other thread, I remember trying to process what i was seeing the first time I ever went into a comic shop in the city. "These are... colour reprints... of New Teen Titans comics... that haven't come out yet?"

*(as opposed to reading random issues of superheroes, or to reading every Asterix and Tintin and Footrot Flats collection and Kliban-format Garfield and MAD magazine or Kurtzman-era paperback I could find)

did the X-Men ever have an anti-drug storyline? NTT goes hard on that a couple times in typically ridiculous fashion.

more so in a series of after-school specials paid for by the Reagan govt, though IIRC the Runaways storyline in the regular book leant hard on the "drugs destroy lives and all drugs are the same. don't smoke a drug syringe, kids" vibe

I bought a bunch of the US comics on eBay about seven years ago, to try and read the era of the run I fondly recalled in a more coherent form than originally, but unfortunately it turned out that they were not actually good and looked worse in the original colour printings

lol at this: http://www.chrisisoninfiniteearths.com/2017/01/new-teen-titans-drug-awareness-special.html

i def have that book somewhere

I'm trying to get through Young Justice season 3, and at episode 10 or so and it's been rough. Does it get better? And do I have rose-tinted glasses on or were the first two seasons actually good?