The New Teen Titans Omnibus Volume 1 (1980-1982)

The New Teen Titans Omnibus Volume 1 (Collecting material originally published between 1980 and 1982/This edition 2017): written by Marv Wolfman with George Perez; illustrated by George Perez, Romeo Tanghal, Curt Swan, Carmine Infantino, and others:

The original Teen Titans debuted in the 1960's as a group of DC sidekicks. 1960's members included Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Speedy [the Green Arrow's sidekick], and Aqualad. The roster changed over the years, with an extremely unliked 1970's revival adding long-forgotten characters that included Lilith, Bumblebee, Mal, and the Geico Caveboy.

That latter-day revival made writer Marv Wolfman's pitch to do a New Teen Titans seem doomed to fail before it had even been approved for a series in 1980. Instead, Wolfman and the terrific but then up-and-coming artist/co-plotter George Perez conjured up a comic book that became DC's chief sales rival (and thematic rival) to Marvel's ascending super-team the X-Men. It helped make George Perez's reputation as the go-to artist for superhero action and melodrama, and did something similar for Wolfman's career.

Wolfman took a core group of Titans -- Robin, Wonder Girl, and Kid Flash. To them he added a pre-existing teen hero (Beast Boy, dubbed 'Changeling' for this revival). Then Wolfman and Perez added three new heroes to the mix: the alien princess Starfire; the haunted half-demon Raven; and the cybernetic Cyborg. And unlike Mal, Bumblebee, and the Geico Caveboy, these new characters DIDN'T SUCK!

The rest was history. The New Teen Titans rapidly became DC's best-selling book. As these were the days when Marvel and DC were still on speaking terms, this even led to an inter-company crossover between  the X-Men and Teen Titans that pitted them against DC uber-villain Darkseid and the X-Men's Dark Phoenix. Ah, those were the days. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Titans is certainly an 'Art Book' because George Perez was great at both bombastic battle and nuanced character descriptions and even body types. Perez's women and men actually look different from one another. This is rarer than one might think in superhero books. 

He's matched by Wolfman's densely written mini-epics. Wolfman was one of the most melodramatic of superhero writers, and I mean that in the best way. It was a time when reading a comic book could actually take more than 5 minutes because there were words in them and no one was ashamed of that fact. Such, such were the joys!

This volume contains the 16-page 'Preview' inserted with another comic book, the first 20 issues of New Teen Titans, a back-up story from one of DC's digests, and the four-issue 'Origins' miniseries that fleshed out the back-stories of the 4 less-familiar characters -- Changeling, Raven, Starfire, and Cyborg. It's all aimed more at teens than children, though Wolfman keeps the more adults problems of the Titans obscure enough to allow children to read the comics.

As all this occurred before the days of 'decompressed storytelling,' these 26 stories cover a lot of ground. The Titans battle Raven's demonic father Trigon on extra-dimensional worlds. They take on super-assassin Deathstroke (here still generally called The Terminator as these issues predate the James Cameron movie), super-villains The H.I.V.E., the Brotherhood of Evil, the original Soviet hero also dubbed Starfire, ancient Hindu gods, and the Greek Titans of myth. All that and several standalone, character-development issues. Whew. 

It all still works beautifully as long as one adjusts for a bit of period nonsense (Changeling still comes across like an ad for sexual harassment at times, or an ad against toxic masculinity, or something; Wonder Girl's civilian job as a fashion photographer never seemed like a good idea, nor Starfire's first human job as a buxom model in jeans ads shot by Wonder Girl). So it goes. Highly recommended.