Titans vs. X-Men

A Twitter comment from UK artist Randolph Hoyte alerted me to Chris Sims’s Comics Alliance essay on Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s New Teen Titans. Sims is careful to note that his assessment of that magazine versus its predecessor is a matter of taste and “probably has a lot to do with reading X-Men as a kid and not getting around to The Judas Contract until I was in my 20s.”

As I’ve noted before, Sims was twelve in the 1994, and the comics we read when we’re twelve shape our tastes and memories, for better or worse. I was in my late teens when New Teen Titans was published, and hadn’t read previous versions of the team. The magazine thrilled and pleased me by doing all I’d learned to like in superhero comics and more besides. I can reread those stories and enjoy the nostalgia, but it’s next to impossible to find the same thrill in other superhero stories—and nothing’s more disappointing than picking up a story touted as “classic” and finding that it’s, well, just a superhero comic showing the traits of the time it was written.

It’s fair to compare New Teen Titans to Uncanny X-Men, Marvel’s alternate-superhero team book of the same era, as Sims does. Wolfman, Pérez, and their editor Len Wein probably did pitch their Titans revival as a possible answer to Marvel’s mutant magazine. And the X-Men issues that Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Dave Cockrum created in the late 1970s and 1980s are top-notch.

But Sims gives more space in this essay recounting favorite moments from X-Men #132 (“Wolverine gets dropped through four floors to the sewer, then comes back at the end ready to literally murder everyone he sees”) than discussing any New Teen Titans story, for better or worse. It’s true that X-Men “feels like a product of the Modern Age,” but that’s because a big part of the “Modern Age” (at its height around, oh, 1994) was Wolverine killing lots of people. A look at The New Teen Titans should highlight its storytelling, perhaps noting some qualities that the “Modern Age” left behind.

Unfortunately, Sims’s aside about when he read “The Judas Contract” is the only time he mentions that best-remembered New Teen Titans storyline. And the only page of Wolfman and Pérez’s work illustrating the essay is one that introduces a supporting character (one whom many readers hate far more than I think is healthy). Those details indicate how glancing this assessment is.

Let’s start instead with the differences between Uncanny X-Men and New Teen Titans to isolate the qualities of each. Wolfman and Pérez worked with a different universe and characters, and they created a different type of superhero saga.

The Uncanny X-Men had the overall theme of being outcast. The Marvel mutants were disliked and hunted by authorities. Their headquarters was a shadowy private school in upstate New York. In contrast, the Titans were celebrities who worked with the government out of a T-shaped skyscraper on an island in the East River.

Even the Titans who felt like outcasts fit in better than almost anyone on the Marvel team. X-Men’s “demonic” character was Nightcrawler, who had a barbed tail, blue skin, and a habit of disappearing in a puff of brimstone. The Titans’ equivalent was Raven, daughter of a horrific giant four-eyed red demon who looked like…a beautiful thin girl with straight dark hair wearing a hooded cape. Cyborg had major body issues, but he was a big, handsome jock. In fact, as Pérez drew them, all the Titans looked like supermodels, and the one who was a supermodel looked like a Playboy fantasy. Being accepted and popular wasn’t their problem. Their challenges grew from their internal lives and their pasts.

The overall theme of the New Teen Titans was inheritance. All four of the established heroes were sidekicks or younger versions of adult heroes, with varied feelings about their mentors and legacies. The three new heroes were all at odds with their parents. (One was sold into slavery by her father, another crippled when his father opened an interdimensional rift, and then there’s that four-eyed giant red demon—the usual issues.) The magazine’s breakout villain, Deathstroke the Terminator, was the epitome of a toxic father. The villainous cult of Brother Blood was a corrupted reflection of the new “family” that the Titans were creating for themselves.

The best and most innovative New Teen Titans stories focus on family: the ground-breaking issue built around Wally West’s letter to his parents, Starfire’s rivalry with her sister, Changeling’s rage at the killers of his adopted mother, Donna Troy’s search for relations, Dick Grayson’s decision to move past being Robin, and even “The Judas Contract.” Those emotional issues reflect the superhero storytelling style of the early 1980s when the big fights were held together with extended melodramas full of thought balloons.

As Sims says, that sort of superhero saga might not be to everyone’s taste. Undoubtedly my own fondness for those stories is rooted in the fact that I was in my late teens when they appeared. But the best of Wolfman and Pérez’s work stands up just as well as Claremont, Byrne, and Cockrum’s, and may hit deeper emotions.

The Evolution of Carrie Kelley

Earlier this month, Brian Cronin’s “Comic Book Legends Revealed” series at CBR discussed how Carrie Kelley, the possible future Robin of The Dark Knight Returns, emerged from the interactions of three highly praised writer-artists of the 1980s.

The history begins in 1982 when Jaime Hernandez drew his character Maggie Chascarrillo as Robin for The Comics Journal. That was only a year after he and his brother self-published their first Love and Rockets issue, but they had been picked up by Fantagraphics, also publisher of The Comics Journal. This art was therefore, I suspect, both promotion and a dig at mainstream comics.

Three years later, Frank Miller was planning what became The Dark Knight Returns when he shared a plane flight with fellow comics star John Byrne. Miller described that conversation in an introduction to his book’s 1996 reissue:

1985. At 30,000 feet. I talk to cartoonist John Byrne about Batman. John talks to me about Robin. “Robin must be a girl,” he says. He mentions a drawing by Love & Rockets artist Jaime Hernandez of a female Robin. To prove his point, John provides me with a pencil sketch of his own.

Byrne called that a “napkin-sketch.” Here’s his tribute to the characters Miller eventually designed from 2008.

At the time, Miller was apparently not even planning to use Robin. “But then,” he wrote, “one day, I pictured a little bundle of bright colors leaping over buildings, dwarfed by a gray-and-black giant…and there she was. Robin.”

Miller tweaked the established Robin design to be even more bright than before. Carrie had the red hair that DC’s licensing department didn’t allow the first Jason Todd to keep, and she wore it swept upwards for more prominence. Instead of a dark domino mask, her eyes were covered by sunglasses with light green lenses.

The contrast in that Dynamic Duo, brightly colored versus dark gray, contributed to some of The Dark Knight Returns’s most iconic pages, such as this splash page priced at more than $100,000 two years ago.

As for Byrne, in 2005 he wrote on his website’s forum:

Some of you may recall that it was on a plane ride home from Altlanta that I suggested to Frank Miller some of the elements that became his female Robin. Those which he didn't use, I used in Radio Girl.

Radio Girl was the Cold War–era sidekick to the Torch of Liberty in a superhero universe that Byrne created in the mid-1990s.

What Could Become of the Child?

In the cover story of Batman, #122, Dick Grayson dreams about Bruce Wayne marrying Kathy Kane, also known as Batwoman, and what comes of that relationship.

Nothing good, of course. Kathy tries to horn in on the crime-fighting again, and manages to give away Batman and Robin’s secret identities. (Message: Girls screw up everything!)

That story must have generated a positive response, in the DC Comics office or from readers, because writer Bill Finger went back to build on the same premise. He created an intermittent series of six tales in which Alfred typed out imaginary stories of a future in which Bruce and Kathy had married and raised a red-haired son named Bruce, Jr. Dick took up the mantle of Batman II while Bruce, Jr., insisted on being Robin II.

What might happen? Nothing good, of course. Robin II does a good job of falling down and being taken hostage, but Batman II retains that habit as well.

So it’s up to the first Batman (sometimes accompanied by Batwoman) to rescue his successor and son, and to preserve the family’s secret identities. (Message: No one will ever measure up to the real Batman!)

The one exception to that pattern appeared in Batman, #154, published in 1963. In “Danger Strikes Four,” Dick reads the manuscript of a Batman II and Robin II story that’s giving Alfred plotting problems.

A mission calls Batman and Robin away. Dick uses an idea from Alfred’s tale to sneak past some guards, allowing him to jump onto a flying buzz bomb and send it off course before leaping back to the batplane.

But that’s not all! Back in stately Wayne Manor, Dick adapts his trick with the missile into an ending for Alfred’s story. Robin II actually gets to save the imaginary day with an authorial assist from the real Robin. (Message: Writing fanfiction is fun for everyone!)

All those “Second Batman and Robin Team” stories have now been collected in DC’s Greatest Imaginary Stories, vol. 2: Batman and Robin. I’d like to know who wrote “Danger Strikes Four,” but the volume says its scripter is unknown. (The artist on the whole Batman II series was Sheldon Moldoff.)

Batman II and Robin II made a few more appearances in the comics, perhaps most notably in John Byrne’s Batman/Captain America crossover. And they’re one of the inspirations of Grant Morrison’s current series about Dick Grayson taking over as Batman with Bruce Wayne’s son as his Robin. But with that one exception, the originals left me cold. If Robin represents the potential for growing up, it’s disappointing when his future is unsuccessful.

DC’s Greatest Imaginary Stories, vol. 2 collects three more Batman and Robin tales which never happened, and which most fans wouldn’t want to happen:

• Bruce Wayne blames Superman for his parents’ death, and plots revenge with Lex Luthor.
• Lois Lane marries Bruce Wayne, has a child with him, and manages not to reveal Batman and Robin’s secret identities.
• In a future that includes both hospitals in orbit for weightless surgery and electric typewriters, Dick is married with twins, Bruce thinks of retiring to the quiet life of a governor, and the whole story feels emotionally dead.

One recurring motif in this collection is, of all things, water-skiing. One story shows us the “Joker’s Son” on skis (his face is white, but the rest of his skin is not). Another shows Bruce skiing—with Lois on his shoulders.

As a fan of weird-ass Batman stories, I’m glad to have this collection in my library, but it never achieves the weirdness of The Black Casebook or extremes of The Strange Deaths of Batman. Instead, most of these tales reinforce the dominant attitudes of their eras, reassuring young male readers about the way the world should be.

Robin Isn’t Evil, But Batman…?

At last the weekly Robin returns to exploring how the tenet that Robin isn’t evil became an important part of what the character symbolized in the DC Comics mythos. Before the 1980s, all superheroes weren’t evil. Robin’s solo stories had depicted him as struggling to follow Batman’s model. But a new characterization showed him trying to help people with Batman as one inspiration among several.

Concurrently, DC writers were edging toward the possibility that Batman might be evil. In the early ’80s The Comics Journal quoted comics artist and writer John Byrne calling the character a “brooding psychopath.” Not everyone in the business agreed with him, of course, but that possibility became more and more central to Batman stories.

Does Batman operate so close to the edge of human endurance that he might go over at any time? Is he so driven by his mission that he’s willing to sacrifice ordinary human relationships? Is his life as Bruce Wayne such a sham that it’s made him as hollow as he acts? As his ward, Dick Grayson was Bruce Wayne’s natural foil in such stories.

In Detective, #500 (1981), scripted by Alan Brennert, Batman got a chance to enter an alternative universe where Bruce Wayne is still a boy and his parents haven’t been murdered—yet. He jumps at the chance at saving some version of his parents. Robin (already a star of New Teen Titans) races to accompany Batman because he doesn’t trust what Bruce might do when he sees his parents under attack. While Batman gets tunnel vision, Robin worries about disrupting this alternate universe before deciding what his values require. This story ends with a curious twist. Batman does save his parents, but his young alter ego nevertheless starts to dedicate himself to being a crime-fighter. That implies that Bruce wasn’t necessarily motivated by his parents’ murder; rather, their murder may have simply been his rationale for doing what he’d have been naturally driven to do anyway.

DC started to separate Batman from its other heroes with Batman and the Outsiders, #1 (1983). Scripter Mike W. Barr showed him storming out of the Justice League of America to start his own, more aggressive superhero team. A crossover with New Teen Titans a few issues later underscored the new rift and differences between Batman and Robin—the younger man is the better team leader.

Which brings us to Batman’s working methods. Back in 1939, Gardner Fox’s origin story explained that after his parents’ murder he chooses to dress as a bat to scare criminals. He became more cuddly under the Comics Code of the 1950s and early ’60s, then returned to the dark side. And any persona based on vengeance and fear naturally lends itself to questions of evil. In the early 1980s writers began to explore how close Batman came to that evil. Could Bruce Wayne be driven to kill? Does the Batman persona actually attract supervillains like the Joker? Might Batman’s methods end up producing the injustice that he wants to eradicate?

Frank Miller brought those themes to the fore in The Dark Knight Returns (1986). This volume also explored how Superman might become evil, so ready to serve “the American way” that he’s the tool of a repressive US government. Where in that book does the ideal of heroism shine purest? In its new Robin, of course: Carrie Kelley.

Miller’s vision of Batman fed into Alan Moore’s characterization of Batman in A Killing Joke and Grant Morrison’s in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, both depicting the Dark Knight as a mirror of his villains. These stories aren’t outliers in the modern Batman mythos; they’re fundamental. Most of the examples I’ve discussed are among the ten greatest Batman stories ever told as recently announced at Comics Should Be Good!

In the last two decades, Batman’s storytellers have maintained his potential for evil—never fully realized, of course—as part of his basic characterization, even in the DC Animated Universe. Meanwhile, the most successful young Robins provide solid examples of sanity and virtue. Some notable storylines:

• Knightfall: After being injured, Bruce Wayne chooses a replacement Batman who can’t stand the pressure, goes crazy, and starts killing criminals. Meanwhile, Robin isn’t evil.
• JLA: Tower of Babel: After suffering hideously effective attacks, members of the Justice League discover that Batman has assembled information on how to beat each of them, and a villain has obtained those files. The League members wonder if they can trust Batman, and their young counterparts in Young Justice wonder the same. But Robin isn’t evil.
• In one of DC’s many lead-ups to its Infinite Crisis event, Batman has created a satellite called Brother Eye to keep watch over everyone on Earth with superpowers or criminal tendencies. Naturally, this gets out of his control and threatens everyone on Earth. Meanwhile, Robin and Nightwing aren’t evil.

We can see those themes in today’s magazines and movies: Batman being driven to kill in Final Crisis, the Joker’s soliloquies in The Dark Knight, Tim Drake putting on a dark cowl in Red Robin and then having to pull himself out of a dark place, and of course the “goddamn Batman” of Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin.

COMING UP: But what about the second Jason Todd—wasn’t that Robin evil?

“Spend a Week at the ’39 World’s Fair”

I've been writing about how the British comic-book creators that DC hired to reinvigorate its line in the 1980s, such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and yesterday Dave Gibbons, found inspiration in the American comics of the 1960s that they had grown up reading.

Inspiration not just in the superheroics, but in what seemed mundane to the New Yorkers who had created those comics, such as pizzerias and apartment-house water tanks. Those details represented a different, more exciting way of life.

Where did the American comic-book artists who inspired those creators find similar inspiration in their youth? One major source comes up in Jon B. Cooke's interview with comics creator John Byrne, conducted for a volume in TwoMorrows Publishing's Modern Masters series:

Byrne: If they ever come up with commercial time travel,...I want to go and spend a week at the ’39 World's Fair. Because that was such an influence on comic book artists of that period.

Cooke: You're right! That whole Dick Sprang thing.

Byrne: Jack Kirby was drawing the ’39 World's Fair until the day he died.

Above is a magazine that DC Comics issued for the fair in 1940, showcasing the company's most popular characters. With the second issue, that magazine became World's Finest, and was published continuously until 1986. (In 1990 Dave Gibbons collaborated on a brief miniseries reviving the World's Finest name, bringing everything around again in one continuous loop of nostalgia for the future.)