Lorendiac
03-31-2007, 11:04 PM
Dateline: 18 July 2039.
Three-quarters of a century after the debut of the original Teen Titans group in The Brave and the Bold #54, DC is publishing Titans Who Still Pretend To Be Teens #88 as the 75th Anniversary Celebration of the concept.
The worst thing about this issue is that they've dusted off an idea that was tried and abandoned back in the 1990s, before most modern comic book fans were even born. Not just multiple covers, which is lame enough, but multiple versions of the story! You "have to" buy five copies, one specimen of each variant cover, in order to get "all the pages" of Titans activity this month!
This approach was pioneered by Team Titans #1 way back in the dark days of 1992. The idea flopped, as far as I can tell -- my copies of all five variants were purchased from a "three for a dollar" bin just a year or two later, from a dealer who had grossly overestimated the selling power of this "nifty approach" -- but now it's attempting a comeback. (Incidentally, I've heard rumors that later in that decade, Michael Turner's Fathom #1 pulled the same stunt, on a smaller scale. Three alternate versions of one issue. You young folks have probably never even heard of Fathom! There's a lesson to be learned here!)
What with inflation, a typical newly-released DC comic book these days is going for $55.00 (although retailers will usually settle for "two for a hundred"), and I didn't feel like wasting $255.00. So I actually bought just one copy and then traded back and forth with a circle of friends until each of us had seen each version. Believe me, there's nothing here that's worth paying through the nose five times in a row for the few pages' worth of differences in each variant!
I'll walk you through the "#88A" intro story to show you what I mean.
This version of #88 starts out with Nightwing making his daily preparations. Putting in his dentures . . . smearing on the makeup to cover the crow's feet . . . adjusting his toupee to cover that bald spot . . . tightening the girdle to restrain that small pot-belly that even his rigorous exercise regime can't entirely eradicate nowadays . . . rubbing flurbiprofen on his aching joints . . . pulling on the goggles with corrective lenses built in . . . recalibrating his hearing aid . . . it's been a couple of years since they last showed us all the "behind-the-scenes" details of just how hard Dick Grayson labors to convince others, if not himself, that he's still a teenage hotshot, or barely in his twenties. Instead of pushing fifty, as this issue tells us he is.
He basically just spends this time sprucing himself up while reminiscing like crazy about "highlights" of his very long career in the superhero racket.
(Meanwhile, over in the Batman titles, Dick's mentor Bruce Wayne is still looking fit and fine at his perennial age of "thirtysomething." In the old days, Bruce used to be somewhere in the range of twelve-to-fourteen years older than Dick. Now he's probably twelve-to-fourteen years younger than Dick. If you don't remember how this was rationalized in 2025 in the "Crisis Cubed" event, then don't even ask! It's just too long and messy a story for me to go into it right now!)
In the four other versions of this issue, we see very similar scenes with Donna Troy (who still looks no more than thirty on a bad day, but is visiting her grandchildren), with Raven (who is physically about thirty-five at the moment and mentally about seven hundred and fifty if we count all that time she spent being reincarnated in other bodies in other eras, which she remembers vividly), with Gar Logan (who is, by some miracle, still physically in his teens even though no writer has ever bothered to offer any half-baked excuse for this miracle), and with Victor Stone (whose current body is synthetic and unaging, but he still has the memories of a forty-nine-year-old man with tons of experience, same as Dick Grayson's mental and physical age).
(In case you've lost track, I'll just mention quickly the statuses of each of the other Titans who are currently supposed to be on "active duty." Argent's body is about thirty and her mind has been regressed to age sixteen. Wally West's mind must be pushing fifty by now, but his old body has been replaced by a new one that's about age seventeen. Danny Chase's mind and body are both somewhere in their mid-twenties, until further notice. Terra II's age is very unclear, because we've never been sure she isn't just a "clone" of Terra I, but she looks and talks like a woman in her late twenties. And Kara Zor-El's mind and body are both around forty-five in terms of her "age" -- if we don't count the time in suspended animation -- except that she's long since been established as one of those fortunate Kryptonians who don't really age at all, in terms of gray hairs and wrinkles and such, after reaching "physical maturity," as long as she spends most of her time soaking up yellow sunlight instead of that unhealthy red stuff! Her cousin Clark still looks like he's early-thirties at worst, which means that his wife, Lois (must be at least 55), is getting more and more obsessed about using artificial means to rejuvenate her own physique so she won't look like she's robbing the cradle. This is the main reason Kara has never yet married or even settled down into a steady relationship with a "mortal" Earthman boyfriend . . . she feels it just wouldn't be fair to him, in the long run. She doesn't want to make the same painful mistake her cousin Kal made!)
After we get past those "introductory stories" in each of the five editions of this issue, we move on to the Main Story they all have in common. In a not-terribly-original move, this "anniversary" issue features a wedding! Starfire is finally tying the knot with . . . . Jason Todd!
And just let me say it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy! I've always wanted to see him get killed off and (for a welcome change of pace) STAY killed off, and it appears I'm finally going to get my wish! I mean, look at the record! Starfire married Karras back in the mid-80s, and then he got killed. She married Ph'yzzon in the mid-90s, and he died almost immediately. In the 2010s, she married Roy Harper for reasons I've never understood . . . and he died a few years later. Then, toward the end of that same decade, she married what she thought was the Resurrected Franklin Crandall, her first fiance from way back when, and we readers learned he was actually a shapechanging impostor trying to infiltrate the Titans. (I think they stole that plot twist from Tom DeFalco's work on the Fantastic Four in the 1990s, and he had probably stolen it from Paul Levitz's work on the Legion of Super-Heroes in the 1980s, and I'm not sure where Levitz had stolen it from! But I digress!) The point is -- in case you weren't reading the Titans titles back around 2022 -- that Kory's Fourth Husband eventually died a painful and humiliating death. Now she's bound and determined to tie the knot for the fifth time in fifty years! (And that's not even counting the three "close calls" she's had when she very-nearly-married Dick Grayson but it didn't quite work out.)
Over the last few months, I've seen some of my fellow Titans fans complaining in online discussions that Dick was taking the Kory/Jason engagement way to calmly. The point I've made before -- and I'll make it again -- is that Dick is capable of plotting points on a graph and figuring out the general direction of the curve. In this case, he's seen Kory lose four other husbands over the years, so he must take it for granted that there's some Cosmic Jinx that requires all of her husbands to die. And -- in an incredibly surprising plot twist by the rather low standards of the DCU where "deaths" are concerned -- none of her late husbands have ever come back from the dead! Dick's obviously figured out a way to get rid of that obnoxious little punk, Jason Todd, for good! Let Jason think he's "stealing" Nightwing's "Number One Girl" right out from under the latter's nose as a way to "score points" in their decades-old competition, and then just sit back and let nature take its course!
Of course, nobody's actually had Dick say or think all this "onstage" yet, and it's possible he hasn't worked out the logic (but unlikely). Given how Kory seems ecstatically happy about her nuptials, I figure it's a safe bet she is looking on the sunny side and refusing to worry about the high probability that she'll soon be widowed for the Fifth Time!
Anyway, if (unlike me) you manage to ignore the subtle implications that Jason is not long for this world, the wedding is well-handled.
Okay, granted, someone did try to kill the preacher (as has happened before), but this time around a whole bunch of former Titans, reserve Titans, teenaged children of Titans, etc., had appointed themselves the security force and stopped Sister Blood when she was still about a mile away from the actual spot where Kory and Jason were exchanging their vows, so that the ceremony was not disrupted in the slightest. (I thought Speedy VI (Lian) was a bit out of character in the deliberate way she broke Sister Blood's nose at the end of that scuffle, though.)
Everyone wishes Kory and Jason the best of luck, but we know they aren't going to get it! (I'm betting he won't even survive the honeymoon!)
And, just in case I really needed to say it after all this malarkey:
April Fool's!
P.S. If you want to check out what I did last April Fool's Day, just follow these links!
Notes from the Future: Batman #1035 (http://www.geocities.com/lwhomer.geo/LorendiacSuperheroWritings/NotesFutureBatman.html)
Notes from the Future: Spidey's 75th Anniversary (http://www.geocities.com/lwhomer.geo/LorendiacSuperheroWritings/NotesFutureSpidey.html)
Three-quarters of a century after the debut of the original Teen Titans group in The Brave and the Bold #54, DC is publishing Titans Who Still Pretend To Be Teens #88 as the 75th Anniversary Celebration of the concept.
The worst thing about this issue is that they've dusted off an idea that was tried and abandoned back in the 1990s, before most modern comic book fans were even born. Not just multiple covers, which is lame enough, but multiple versions of the story! You "have to" buy five copies, one specimen of each variant cover, in order to get "all the pages" of Titans activity this month!
This approach was pioneered by Team Titans #1 way back in the dark days of 1992. The idea flopped, as far as I can tell -- my copies of all five variants were purchased from a "three for a dollar" bin just a year or two later, from a dealer who had grossly overestimated the selling power of this "nifty approach" -- but now it's attempting a comeback. (Incidentally, I've heard rumors that later in that decade, Michael Turner's Fathom #1 pulled the same stunt, on a smaller scale. Three alternate versions of one issue. You young folks have probably never even heard of Fathom! There's a lesson to be learned here!)
What with inflation, a typical newly-released DC comic book these days is going for $55.00 (although retailers will usually settle for "two for a hundred"), and I didn't feel like wasting $255.00. So I actually bought just one copy and then traded back and forth with a circle of friends until each of us had seen each version. Believe me, there's nothing here that's worth paying through the nose five times in a row for the few pages' worth of differences in each variant!
I'll walk you through the "#88A" intro story to show you what I mean.
This version of #88 starts out with Nightwing making his daily preparations. Putting in his dentures . . . smearing on the makeup to cover the crow's feet . . . adjusting his toupee to cover that bald spot . . . tightening the girdle to restrain that small pot-belly that even his rigorous exercise regime can't entirely eradicate nowadays . . . rubbing flurbiprofen on his aching joints . . . pulling on the goggles with corrective lenses built in . . . recalibrating his hearing aid . . . it's been a couple of years since they last showed us all the "behind-the-scenes" details of just how hard Dick Grayson labors to convince others, if not himself, that he's still a teenage hotshot, or barely in his twenties. Instead of pushing fifty, as this issue tells us he is.
He basically just spends this time sprucing himself up while reminiscing like crazy about "highlights" of his very long career in the superhero racket.
(Meanwhile, over in the Batman titles, Dick's mentor Bruce Wayne is still looking fit and fine at his perennial age of "thirtysomething." In the old days, Bruce used to be somewhere in the range of twelve-to-fourteen years older than Dick. Now he's probably twelve-to-fourteen years younger than Dick. If you don't remember how this was rationalized in 2025 in the "Crisis Cubed" event, then don't even ask! It's just too long and messy a story for me to go into it right now!)
In the four other versions of this issue, we see very similar scenes with Donna Troy (who still looks no more than thirty on a bad day, but is visiting her grandchildren), with Raven (who is physically about thirty-five at the moment and mentally about seven hundred and fifty if we count all that time she spent being reincarnated in other bodies in other eras, which she remembers vividly), with Gar Logan (who is, by some miracle, still physically in his teens even though no writer has ever bothered to offer any half-baked excuse for this miracle), and with Victor Stone (whose current body is synthetic and unaging, but he still has the memories of a forty-nine-year-old man with tons of experience, same as Dick Grayson's mental and physical age).
(In case you've lost track, I'll just mention quickly the statuses of each of the other Titans who are currently supposed to be on "active duty." Argent's body is about thirty and her mind has been regressed to age sixteen. Wally West's mind must be pushing fifty by now, but his old body has been replaced by a new one that's about age seventeen. Danny Chase's mind and body are both somewhere in their mid-twenties, until further notice. Terra II's age is very unclear, because we've never been sure she isn't just a "clone" of Terra I, but she looks and talks like a woman in her late twenties. And Kara Zor-El's mind and body are both around forty-five in terms of her "age" -- if we don't count the time in suspended animation -- except that she's long since been established as one of those fortunate Kryptonians who don't really age at all, in terms of gray hairs and wrinkles and such, after reaching "physical maturity," as long as she spends most of her time soaking up yellow sunlight instead of that unhealthy red stuff! Her cousin Clark still looks like he's early-thirties at worst, which means that his wife, Lois (must be at least 55), is getting more and more obsessed about using artificial means to rejuvenate her own physique so she won't look like she's robbing the cradle. This is the main reason Kara has never yet married or even settled down into a steady relationship with a "mortal" Earthman boyfriend . . . she feels it just wouldn't be fair to him, in the long run. She doesn't want to make the same painful mistake her cousin Kal made!)
After we get past those "introductory stories" in each of the five editions of this issue, we move on to the Main Story they all have in common. In a not-terribly-original move, this "anniversary" issue features a wedding! Starfire is finally tying the knot with . . . . Jason Todd!
And just let me say it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy! I've always wanted to see him get killed off and (for a welcome change of pace) STAY killed off, and it appears I'm finally going to get my wish! I mean, look at the record! Starfire married Karras back in the mid-80s, and then he got killed. She married Ph'yzzon in the mid-90s, and he died almost immediately. In the 2010s, she married Roy Harper for reasons I've never understood . . . and he died a few years later. Then, toward the end of that same decade, she married what she thought was the Resurrected Franklin Crandall, her first fiance from way back when, and we readers learned he was actually a shapechanging impostor trying to infiltrate the Titans. (I think they stole that plot twist from Tom DeFalco's work on the Fantastic Four in the 1990s, and he had probably stolen it from Paul Levitz's work on the Legion of Super-Heroes in the 1980s, and I'm not sure where Levitz had stolen it from! But I digress!) The point is -- in case you weren't reading the Titans titles back around 2022 -- that Kory's Fourth Husband eventually died a painful and humiliating death. Now she's bound and determined to tie the knot for the fifth time in fifty years! (And that's not even counting the three "close calls" she's had when she very-nearly-married Dick Grayson but it didn't quite work out.)
Over the last few months, I've seen some of my fellow Titans fans complaining in online discussions that Dick was taking the Kory/Jason engagement way to calmly. The point I've made before -- and I'll make it again -- is that Dick is capable of plotting points on a graph and figuring out the general direction of the curve. In this case, he's seen Kory lose four other husbands over the years, so he must take it for granted that there's some Cosmic Jinx that requires all of her husbands to die. And -- in an incredibly surprising plot twist by the rather low standards of the DCU where "deaths" are concerned -- none of her late husbands have ever come back from the dead! Dick's obviously figured out a way to get rid of that obnoxious little punk, Jason Todd, for good! Let Jason think he's "stealing" Nightwing's "Number One Girl" right out from under the latter's nose as a way to "score points" in their decades-old competition, and then just sit back and let nature take its course!
Of course, nobody's actually had Dick say or think all this "onstage" yet, and it's possible he hasn't worked out the logic (but unlikely). Given how Kory seems ecstatically happy about her nuptials, I figure it's a safe bet she is looking on the sunny side and refusing to worry about the high probability that she'll soon be widowed for the Fifth Time!
Anyway, if (unlike me) you manage to ignore the subtle implications that Jason is not long for this world, the wedding is well-handled.
Okay, granted, someone did try to kill the preacher (as has happened before), but this time around a whole bunch of former Titans, reserve Titans, teenaged children of Titans, etc., had appointed themselves the security force and stopped Sister Blood when she was still about a mile away from the actual spot where Kory and Jason were exchanging their vows, so that the ceremony was not disrupted in the slightest. (I thought Speedy VI (Lian) was a bit out of character in the deliberate way she broke Sister Blood's nose at the end of that scuffle, though.)
Everyone wishes Kory and Jason the best of luck, but we know they aren't going to get it! (I'm betting he won't even survive the honeymoon!)
And, just in case I really needed to say it after all this malarkey:
April Fool's!
P.S. If you want to check out what I did last April Fool's Day, just follow these links!
Notes from the Future: Batman #1035 (http://www.geocities.com/lwhomer.geo/LorendiacSuperheroWritings/NotesFutureBatman.html)
Notes from the Future: Spidey's 75th Anniversary (http://www.geocities.com/lwhomer.geo/LorendiacSuperheroWritings/NotesFutureSpidey.html)