Teen Titans Comics Help...

[Bigchill]

Okay, so I have been reading some random Teen Titans comics from my local library and have been really enjoying them. So I want to start from the very beginning all the way to the current incarnation. So can someone please give me a list of all the titans comics in chronological order or can someone at least tell me where to start?

[Shawn Hopkins]

Okay, so I have been reading some random Teen Titans comics from my local library and have been really enjoying them. So I want to start from the very beginning all the way to the current incarnation. So can someone please give me a list of all the titans comics in chronological order or can someone at least tell me where to start?

The Titans have been around since the 1960s, so listing all of their comic appearances would be a chore. There is a good website devoted to the series, though, where someone has already done that.

http://www.titanstower.com/

Look under the library section.

Starting at the start, there are some Showcase Presents reprints of the very early Titans stuff. It's a little corny, though, your enjoyment will depend greatly on how much you can tolerate Silver Age comics.

You may want to skip ahead to the George Perez and Marv Wolfman New Teen Titans era of the early 1980s, though. That's probably the most fondly remembered era for the Titans and when it was most popular, rivaling the X-Men. Some great stories came out from this era including "The Judas Contract," Which deals with a major betrayal and is one of the best remembered superhero storylines of all time. This is about the time Dick Grayson ditched the short pants, too, and started being awesome as Nightwing.

[Bigchill]

Thank you so much :D

[Jin Kazama]

The trades of the current run of the title (the one that was originally written by Geoff Johns) are conveniently numbered on the spine. I love it when trades do that.

I'll also (like many) vouch for the Wolfman/Perez run. In addition to the Judas Contract storyline, they also did a great "Who Is Donna Troy?" storyline that's probably the best story done with that character. And the issue where Robin and Speedy quit was very well done, and felt more like a natural progression of the characters more than a cheap ploy to repackage them.

[Shawn Hopkins]

The Geoff Johns issues of the most recent Teen Titans are quite good. It kind of fell apart for me after he left, though. Having Wendy and Marvin from the Superfriends savaged by a demonic Wonderdog is, yep, enough for me.

One thing about reading Titans is that there's a lot of it that's just bloody horrible. Marv Wolfman kept writing the book for years after his version was good and many of the writers who took over after him were even worse. Seeing how far it had fallen by the early 90s is just kind of sad. They made Deathstroke too much of hero for my taste, he even got his own title.

It also had a spinoff, Team Titans, that's sort of a poster child for bad early 90s comics, like a catalogue of their cliches. Then Dan Jurgens came on and created a Titans book that was more about a teenaged (don't ask) Atom and some random new characters than any Titans. Then Devin Grayson did an awkward 20-something version with the original characters called Titans.

It got so bad that when they decided to restart it with the more recent sidekicks they had introduced like the Tim Drake Robin and the new Superboy and Impulse they called it Young Justice instead of Teen Titans. I guess part of that was that the Titans name was so associated with the original sidekicks, but it can't be ignored that DC had devalued it quite a bit.

I don't want to sound too negative, because, hey, I read a lot of this stuff and even the bad Titans stuff is interesting if you're invested in the characters. But I do admire you if you really intend to read it all, because parts of it can be a hard slog.

[Jin Kazama]

The late 90's version that had Arsenal, Damage, Green Lantern etc. wasn't too bad. It wasn't amazing, but I enjoyed it. Then again, I was big into those characters at that time, so that may have swayed my opinion on it. It didn't last that long, though.