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.

Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman Volume 2

Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman Volume 2 (2004-2005/ Collected 2017): written by Greg Rucka; illustrated by Drew Johnson, Rags Morales, and others: Greg Rucka is one of Wonder Woman's three or four best writers. His early oughts work on WW gave us an Amazon who fought mythical monsters, talked to the animals, and acted as the Ambassador of the Amazon Nation of Themyscira to the United Nations. 

While several long arcs continue all the way through this volume of a year's worth of Wonder Woman, there are also satisfying short arcs and single-issue stories here as well. The volume begins with the revenge of Medusa and the Gorgons against Diana and ends with Wonder Woman descending into Hades to bring Hermes back from the dead. It's all fun and engaging, with solid and occasionally inspired art from Drew Johnson and Rags Morales. 

A successful Olympian coup of the major female Greek gods over Zeus and his brothers Poseidon and Hades drives the overall mythical arc -- as Athena's Champion, WW is drafted into the conflict.  Wonder Woman's on-going battle with a shadowy, high-tech and deep-pocketed enemy on Earth continues into and through its second year. Highly recommended.

The Kids in the Hell

Brat Pack, written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1990-91; this edition 2005): When Veitch started work on Brat Pack back in late 1989, DC's ridiculous phone-in campaign to determine whether Robin would live or die was fresh in everyone's memories. Of course, this wasn't the Dick Grayson Robin, but Robin II, Jason Todd, who'd been rewritten after the company-wide Crisis on Infinite Earths to be a maladjusted teen-aged jerk...almost as if killing Robin was always on someone's mind (his original origin was pretty much the same as Dick Grayson's -- circus performer, daredevil, nice kid; after the Crisis, he was a street punk whom Batman selected to be Robin because...wait for it...Jason Todd stole the wheels off the Batmobile).

Kid sidekicks sorta worked in the 1940's, when child labour was still at least partially acceptable in the U.S., and when superhero comic books didn't strive for quasi-realism. Ostensibly, child sidekicks (Robin seemed to be about 10 at the beginning) worked as wish-fulfillment/identification figures for the child readers of superhero comics, though great American cartoonist (and once-upon-a-time comic-book sweatshop artist) Jules Feiffer once noted that he never met anyone, including himself, who identified with Robin -- kids want to be Batman.

In any case, kid sidekicks proliferated once Robin was introduced into the Batman canon in 1940; the most notable were Green Arrow's Speedy, Captain America's Bucky and, much later, Wonder Woman's Wonder Girl and the Flash's Kid Flash, though the latter two generally appeared on their own or with other teen superheroes, only teaming up rarely with their mentors (ditto for Supergirl). The first kid sidekick to die in action was Bucky, as revealed in Captain America's return to comic-book action in the early 1960's, though more than 40 years later Bucky would (like most comic-book characters) un-die.

Brat Pack meditates, sometimes horrifically, sometimes offensively, on both sidekicks and their changing meanings within comic books and the culture at large. 1950's psychologist Frederic Wertham saw in Batman and Robin an offensive homosexual couple (yeah, I know -- technically Batman would be a pedophile, given Robin's apparent age, but Wertham, like a lot of later bigots, doesn't differentiate); in Wonder Woman, a lesbian bondage queen; in superheroes an endless parade of offense to the morals and minds of America's youth. Oh, Wertham.

Veitch's thorniest problem lies in his characterization of Batman stand-in Midnight Mink as Wertham's version of Batman. Many critics characterized this as homophobia, missing the point, I think -- Veitch's commentary is on just that sort of thinking applied to children's books by adults. There's also a strong sense of disgust at how the adultification of superheroes in the 1970's and 1980's made child sidekicks logically untenable but commercially ever-necessary: corporations almost never willingly lay down a copyrighted character so long as there may be more money to be made.

Even the Robin phone-in is thrown in, as the citizen's of Veitch's Slumburg phone in to a radio show to voice their desire to see the kid sidekicks of Slumburg's four remaining major superheroes die (Superman-alike Maximortal left ten years earlier, plunging the city and the world into a crime-filled depression that they've never recovered from, and causing the remaining superheroes to become debased, ultraviolent parodies of themselves. Yep, just like mainstream superhero comics in the 1980's!).

And so another blisteringly satiric ride through superhero tropes and histories begins, along with a climax that crosses over into Maximortal. This is great, angry work. Highly recommended.