At some point in November, I started re-reading The New Teen Titans, a comic book series that was for a large stretch of the 1980s one of the most acclaimed comic books in the U.S. market — and one of the leading titles for DC Comics at a time when it was positioning itself as one of the most forward-thinking publishers out there for mainstream audiences. By all logic, such a description would suggest that New Teen Titans is an all-time classic that people place in the same pantheon as Chris Claremont’s contemporaneous run on Uncanny X-Men, or other such 1980s superheroes classics. And yet… they don’t.
The problem is, bluntly, that the last… half of the classic 1980s/early 90s run is not particularly very good. In fact, it’s so bad that it’s almost more interesting than the good stuff, for reasons that amount to little more than simply asking, “What the fuck is happening?” over and over and over again.
The “classic” New Teen Titans run starts in 1980 when Marv Wolfman and George Perez revive the 1960s team book with a bunch of new characters and a mission statement that essentially consists of, “see what Claremont is doing in X-Men? Yeah, that, but even more soapy.” It was an immediate smash hit because, honestly, it’s addictive glossy soap superheroics that very deliberately places all of the big threats as something with personal connections to one of the core cast, because everything in the damn comic is soap opera and character-driven, and that’s what makes it work. Keeping everything claustrophobically focused on its core cast is a strong enough gimmick to keep the momentum going even when you realize that some plots are going nowhere, and others are repeating over and over again. (How many times need we worry that one of the team is evil?)
And then, stunningly, everything goes to pieces. The 1980s New Teen Titans comic was successful enough that, four years in, it gets replaced by another comic, also called New Teen Titans, which gets renamed The New Titans with its 50th issue because, well, maybe teens weren’t in anymore. That second series continues until its 130th issue in 1996 or so, but here’s the thing: everything after, maybe, #62 or so is… terrible. Not just “not very good,” but, actively bad. And it’s all because the series seems to utterly forget what works.
I can’t deny it: the sudden, unmistakable drop-off in quality is what kept me reading until the end, in part because I was compelled to try and figure out if there was method to the seeming madness of dropping almost all of the pre-existing cast in any number of melodramatic ways — one is literally tied to a missile, flown into Russia, and then transformed into a mind-controlled robot; that’s not a joke — while also wondering just how crazy things could get.
There’s something compelling to me about watching artistic “flops,” or failures in some degree or another, but the fate of New Teen Titans is almost singular in the ways in which it doesn’t just lean into the skid as things start to go wrong, but almost speed up into it, too: doubling down, as if to see what might happen if the crash is harder, more violent, more destructive. You almost have to admire that sense of nihilism, if it wasn’t for the fact that… it’s kind of boring to read…?
