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I think you're unclear on the nature of the title change in the '80s. Batman and the Outsiders was the third title that went to DC's "hardcover/softcover" program in the '80s, along with New Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes. (This fact often gets overlooked because it didn't have nearly the profile of the other two series.) Outsiders wasn't a Batman-less spin-off; it was the deluxe direct-market version of the title, and didn't have Batman because it reflected the change in the status quo. The numbering of the newsstand version carried over to Adventures of the Outsiders, just as LSH carried over to Tales of the LSH and Teen Titans to Tales of the Teen Titans; like both those titles, it featured original stories for a while and then switched to reprints of the direct-market book.

It's still true that the title (either version) didn't last long without Batman, but the newsstand/Adventures book stopped being the main version of the title once the direct market book came out, and its failure is probably less due to the absence of Batman than a) the hardcover/softcover program not being a very good idea in the first place, and b) the Outsiders not being popular enough to support 2 books, unlike the Legion and Titans.

As many people have pointed out, the problem with spinning off an edgier, more in-your-face superhero book is that it'll either a) be exactly like the old classic book or b) delvier the goods and turn into Authority, where superheroes use their powers in game-changing ways and more or less run the world. Can anyone think of a good example of a possible c) where the team's new approach is noticably WORSE than the tried-and-true? (I guess that New Warriors fight leading up to Civil War is a good example...)

Why do these Storytelling Engine article always screw up the italics tags?

I actually profoundly disagree with you on so many counts, John.

Doug is absolutely right about the hardcover/softcover program and that you've completely gotten what happened wrong. But what I would add is that the failure of Adventures of the Outsiders to take hold was the failure of the whole economic model of double-dipping both the direct market and newsstand sales on the same book. Tales of the Teen Titans and Tales of the Legion of Super Heroes didn't last much longer than Adventures did.

But mostly I disagree with your whole assessment what they were doing with the book. It's not the Justice League model at all. Batman and the Outsiders is basically X-Men / The New Teen Titans formula applied to a major hero: take some established but relatively moribund characters, add some new characters, apply interesting mysteries and backstories to all of them and stir and Batman gets to front it.

But what I fundamentally disagree with is your assessment that the Outsiders and Batman didn't mesh. I read Batman in the Outsiders when it came out and I collected it faithfully because a) it was a great team book and b) I thought (and other friends felt the same way at my local comics store at the time) *it was the best Batman book out ijn 1983*. Honestly, it was leagues better than the dreary melodramas Doug Moench was writing at the time in Batman and Detective. Maybe the team wasn't necessarily characters that fit well with Batman, but Batman was clearly Batman within them, and not some generic superhero like he was in a lot of JLA stories in the '70s and '80s (I also think there's a hell of a lot more logic to Batman fronting the outsiders than him being a member of the Justice League prior to Grant Morrison.) . Even when the stories veered into the fantastic and cosmic, Batman was Batman, serious, brilliant and a detective and a born leader. In fact, I think why The Outsiders book failed was because they had a winning formula with Batman and they took him away (which seemed to be an artistic choice as near as I read it at the time) as much as it was the fact that all the Baxter reincarnations suffered from letting the writers become writer/editors (BATO and New Teen Titans were so much better with Len Wein editing)

Part of my complaint is that you've pigeonholed what Batman 'is' and what Batman can 'do'. I think the post-Dark Knight grim avenger conception of Batman says that he wouldn't hang out with characters like Metamorpho. I think things were much more fluid when Batman was allowed to be more superheroic prior to Frank Miller and I think the line-up of the Outsiders was designed for great character interaction between the characters and with Batman.

The numbering of the newsstand version carried over to Adventures of the Outsiders, just as LSH carried over to Tales of the LSH and Teen Titans to Tales of the Teen Titans; like both those titles, it featured original stories for a while and then switched to reprints of the direct-market book.

Just to elaborate further, the idea of the hardcover/softcover format was that the newsstand book would change its name (but keep its numbering) and would come be publish new stories concurrently with the new baxter direct market book before changing over to reprint the baxter direct market book after a year. In Legion and New Teen Titans cases they became Tales of the Legion of Superheroes and Tales of the New Teen Titans, did a year publishing what was effectively 24 new issues of work (12 issues of Tales and 12 issues of the new book) before switching over to reprints.

In Batman and the Outsiders case, the situation is a little fuzzier as it stayed Batman and the Outsiders for six or so issues before it transitioned to becoming 'Adventures'. But it was still a year's worth of stories concurrent with the baxter direct market book before it switched over to reprinting.

ach! i loved Doug Moench's "dreary melodramas"... and while i also enjoyed BATO (like many other people did back then), in some way i was bothered about the way its occasionally madcap tone clashed with what was going on in Batman and 'Tec.

that being said, i agree that Batman was definitely Batman in that book.

Batman and the Outsiders is basically X-Men / The New Teen Titans formula applied to a major hero: take some established but relatively moribund characters, add some new characters, apply interesting mysteries and backstories to all of them and stir and Batman gets to front it.

That is absolutely true, Graeme, but it doesn't invalidate any of Seavey's views. The original idea seems to be to create an edgier team. Their first mission was to resist a Soviet invasion of Markovia - something the Justice League can't/won't do, but the comic quickly turned into a very straight-forward superhero comic, and some of the characterisation verged on parody. Specifically, Katana/Halo aping Storm/Kitty Pryde, Metamorpho pretending to be the Thing, Black Lightning's Claremont-like angst or New Wave and her sister reliving Mystique/Rogue story.

It’s still true that the title (either version) didn’t last long without Batman, but the newsstand/Adventures book stopped being the main version of the title once the direct market book came out, and its failure is probably less due to the absence of Batman than a) the hardcover/softcover program not being a very good idea in the first place, and b) the Outsiders not being popular enough to support 2 books, unlike the Legion and Titans.

Doug, I think that both things are true.

The hardcover/softcover scheme was a huge failure and none of the newstand titles survived it. More to the point, all the books involved lost some momentum. "Teen Titans" was equal to "Uncanny X-Men" in the mid-80s, but faded badly after splitting. The time lag was confusing and in the case of "Outsiders", I liked the direction of the newstand book much better. I dropped the Baxter book and left the title entirely once the newstand version started re-printing.

However, Batman was a huge part of the story-telling engine and taking him out of the title was a mistake. The premise was that Batman had a group of heroes that didn't quite fit into the JLA for whatever reason. Mostly, they were too "green" and inexperienced. Bats sort of mentored them and/or used his money to support their work. It made some sense.

The beauty was that Batman didn't have to be a huge part of the day-to-day operations, but he was sort of the glue that held the thing together. By removing him, the rationale behind the team fell apart.

I liked this title back in the day. Fun though not ground breaking stories. And some great issues done by Alan Davis, if I recall. The characters had potential.

I agree that the 2003 series was more of a Titans spin-off than a continuation of the Outsiders, as Batman wasn't involved and the book didn't really feature any of the older characters. They weren't even sure if it was supposed to be a 'legacy' series or not, despite Nightwing and Black Lightning's daughter being involved (don't get me started on that weird version of Metamorpho). I wonder how long the current relaunch will last, there seems to be lots of behind the scenes drama affecting the book.

The key thing about Black Lightning and Metamorpho wasn't that they'd both had cancelled titles. There were plenty of characters like that, and Rex's series was brief and a long time ago by the time the Outsiders showed up. The important thing about Black Lightning and Metamorpho was that they'd both been offered JLA membership and turned it down.

I want to add a couple of things...

For instance,

Yes BATO was the natural progression of Brave & the Bold, but you got to remember that in less than a years time, the Justice League was slated to let go of the Originals and be turned into the Detroit League.

So I don't see the story engine being "Batman's Dark ang Gritty Black-OPS Team" because in my mind Batman's Moral Compass has been beyond reproach (that was, until the Didio-Era of course).

To me, The Outsiders were "Batman's (personal) Team" ...not unlike what the Legion was to Superman, The Titans were to Robin, Green Lantern was to the Corps, Detroit to Aquaman, um... Kelly to the Bad News Bears and err... Ginger Spice was to the Spice Girls.

So the storyengine I saw was more along the lines of the 7 Samurai/Magnificent 7. That is, establised Hero puts together a team of reserves, rebels & rookies; and a "surprisingly good but unlikely team of Heroes emerges."

Removing Batman killed the team much like it did with the Legion. The main difference being that by that time, the Legion had been a decades old established institution. Plus they had Keith Giffen.

The Outsiders, or at least their Adventures, were just lame without Batman. But apparently, the order of the "post crisis" day was that neither Batman, nor Superman, could belong to any Super-Hero Team.

As for how good BATO could be? Well, I recommend #22. It's the one were they all go back to the Justice League Satellite and Batman curses everyone and their Mothers! Honestly. It's like the JLA was Batman's ex-girlfriend, and the Outsiders are his new girlfriend, and they get to watch him rant and bitch and break old photographs! It's pretty cool!!!

"Presumably, editors worried about “over-exposure” of one of their most popular characters,"

Ha! Hee! Heh!

Oh, wait, that wasn't a joke?

Clearly, the creators realized their mistake and Batman was returned to the book towards the end. However, it was too late. Batman had already taken over the Detroit kids and then moved onto JLI post-Legends. He was now in the position of leading two teams and one had to go.

I think The Outsiders problem was that not only did they take Batman away too soon, they also put them up against some really hokey villains (Nuclear Family, Duke of Oil). While this is going on, Batman and the Outsiders were fighting Kobra.

Yeah, the Outsiders' villains made Firestorm's rogues' gallery look cool. Heck, they made Blue Beetle's bad guys look cool.

"[B]ut you got to remember that in less than a years time, the Justice League was slated to let go of the Originals and be turned into the Detroit League."

And the Detroit League itself is in retrospect a pretty obvious attempt to ape the New Teen Titans/X-Men formula.

But, yeah, ultimately, I think the key to a book like this is "It's the Batman, stupid!" Even though the characters might be a bunch of third-stringers and/or lame-o types, there's some inherent interest because... well, Batman's hanging out with these guys, and if that's the case, he must have a good reason for it!

I think The Outsiders problem was that not only did they take Batman away too soon, they also put them up against some really hokey villains (Nuclear Family, Duke of Oil). While this is going on, Batman and the Outsiders were fighting Kobra.

Mike W. Barr wrote "Son of the Demon", so he knew what he was doing with characters like Kobra and Ra's al Ghul. That aspect of Batman was what drove BATO. If Barr had kept Bats in the cast and used Ra's and Kobra like Stan Lee had used Dr. Doom in "Fantastic Four", then this title might have run a lot longer.

You know, I went over the chronology of when 'BatO' switched to 'AotO', and when 'Outsiders' was released, for something like fifteen minutes solid when I was writing this, looking up release dates and checking in whatever databases I could find for information on why the second title came out, and I still managed to miss that. I blame the lack of a 'Complete History of the Outsiders' website. Gosh, you'd almost think these were third-string DC characters or something.

Even though the characters might be a bunch of third-stringers and/or lame-o types, there’s some inherent interest

They weren't lame! (At least in the Begining!)

They were the ones who told those elitist Just-Us-League to go eff-themselves! Black Lightning even called Superman a Honky!

(Well, at least in my mind he did! But I thought they were kewl, by being "Anti-Kewl!" That's why they were The Outsiders! The only thing missing from that formula was Billy Zabka!!!)