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Yunno, I was trying to figure out why I've hated Titan related material so much lately. Then DD writes an editors note in all our funnybooks saying he's taken a special interest in those properties of late.

Then it all made sense. The suddenly incomprehensible narrative. The "every issue they fight these other teens, just like last month!" sense that it was going on. Yep, that's DD.

Honestly, Teen Titans should be a bunch of kids who hang out because they have a common hobby and like each other. (See Runaways which basically has the same set up and where the kids actually get along.) The problem with the current Titans is that many of the members don't seem to like each other. (Do Robin or Wonder Girl actually like any of their fellow team members?)

"No sex?" You must not be reading Teen Titans recently. Miss Martian's picking up truckers in rest stops, and Ravager will apparently jump on anything with a Y chromosome.

'Cause, y'know, that's more "real."

^^^
Wonder Girl's kind of become a whiny *&^%$ since Superboy died. Heck, she even kicked her best friend off the team and stopped talking to her for no reason whatsoever. Robin is better characterized in his own book imo (Can't believe Dixon is gone again). Titans East, Titans of Tomorrow, Terror Titans: These story arcs have all been useless. Enough with the Titans fighting Titans. Why couldn't this be a fun book ? I have nothing to justify reading it anymore.

Blue Beetle's a good teen book. IMO.

Oh, I agree, Blue Beetle's been marvelous so far, but I think that's because he's new and allowed to change and mature. We've watched him become a hero. I fear, however, that we may soon be entering the stagnation zone, at which point the character is forced into a kind of "stasis quo," if you will.

As DB points out... for the last year and a half the Teen Titans book has consisted of various teams of *EVILLLLLL* Titans ambushing the regular Titans. You'd think by now that Robin and the gang would just stop hanging out ... I can't think of the last arc where they actually went out on a mission to DO something. Maybe to find Raven, and that was the first arc One Year Later. We've basically seen the same Titans arc 3 times in a row ... and all three were by McKeever (he co-wrote the last half of the first one). I constantly hear that he's a *good* writer, but at least on Titans I have yet to see it].

I mean, I know the Justice League is currently in cross-over hell at the moment, but normally the JLA goes out and does things -- you know, save the world. They don't just sit around in their headquarters and wait for evil counterparts/future selves to come and punk them out.

Reminds me of that South Park episode where Stan's "future self" comes around to teach him not to do drugs. "Titans, don't do bad things... or you could turn into THIS!"

I think this is the singlemost advantage manga has over american comics: people age and stories end. I always thought we should be reading stories about Superman's granddaughter and Batman's grandson or something like that instead of a rehash of same old stories updated for a new generation (new generation that is actually reading Naruto and Bleach instead of Teen Titans). Sure manga has other advantages like being more easy to jump-on and more diversity of genres (even if inside the genres are sometimes even more rigid than superheroes comics), but this one is the biggest.

I think Neil Gaiman said best: all good stories have to end sometime.

As for the Titans, yeah, is like those videogames where you fight the same enemies all the time, they just level up. In this sense the best use of the "clubhouse superhero team" are Young Justice (just kids doing kid stuff) and Young Heroes in Love (they just naturally spent more worrying about who was hooking up with each one instead of fighting crime, very Melrose Place).

I agree with Julio.
A good example is JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The story starts in the 1800s, goes on to the early 2000s, with the descendants of the first protagonist, who died in the first part.

A good enough writer can do amazing things in managing both gradual change and the illusion of change. It's part of the craft of writing american superhero comics and seriously, characters are allowed to change now more than they have in decades.

Good writing and good stories win out. They might be harder if you can't do whatever you want with the characters, but that just means you have to be all the more creative and not take shortcuts.

Not to give more credit than is due to Teen Titans and McKeever, but after fighting three villain "titans" in a row, he had it pay off by Robin and Wonder Girl getting frustrated and going on about how this WAS a problem and how they have to be more and inspire the youth. It was heading somewhere.

Granted, we'll see where he takes things from here.

Some Thoughts:

Mck: I'm pretty sure McKeever didn't write (or co-write) the back half of Titans East. Wasn't that Beechen, who was tapped to be the new writer and the replaced by McKeever?

I think Teen Titans has started to right itself a bit with the Terror Titans arc, but the problem for me has been that it feels like McKeever, particularly in the Titans of Tomorrow arc, has had to deal with storylines and plots hanging over from Johns' run. The same is true--and perhaps even worse--with JLA, where McDuffie is having to deal with not only the crossovers but tying up various threads initiated by Meltzer: Red Tornado's body, Vixen's powers, etc. I like McKeever and McDuffie both as writers, but their runs seem hamstrung by baggage.

The griping about the pointlessness of the Titans produced the following rant.

DC used to have every team with a clearly-defined role: the JLA were the earth's first line of defense, the JSA were the heroes who nurtured the history of super-heroes, the Titans were the family who understood that if anything happened to the JLA they were responsible for stepping up to the plate, and Young Justice was the future (which I think they actually came out and said in the miniseries that launched Grayson's Titans book).

Now things are fumbly. The Titans are back together for... well, no one really knows why, kicking Dick, Roy and Wally into roles they'd sort of grown out of (two JLA members and the JLA's reserve leader). The Teen Titans started off this time with a decent hook - less of a training ground, but more of a social gathering for them to blow off steam - but it's largely become a dumping ground for characters with nothing better to do and lost that concept (Ravager, Miss Martian and Kid Devil don't seem to do anything else, and neither does Wonder Girl for that matter - only Robin and Blue Beetle still cling to the idea that they're just there to get away from their normal lives). The JLA is taking seven issues to deal with Amazo and Solomon Grundy, which are decidedly small-scale threats compared to what they dealt with in the prior series. And the JSA is getting waaaaay too large for its own good. There's no defined roles for the individual teams aside from the Outsiders and Shadowpact, who at least you can point at and say "okay, they do covert strikes and magic-related stories."

For all I hated about the Obsidian Age, it really crystalised the structure of the teams in the DCU by showing how they all were, in one way or another, part of a larger organisation. Of course, keeping a structure like that in place rather than just paying lip service to it (Terrific and Mid-Nite showing up as the JLA's "tech support") needs a firm hand at editorial, and DC can't even make sure books go out without spelling mistakes right now.

But to get back to the main point: people read Robin (... until Willingham...) because it was Ultimate Spider-Man before Ultimate Spider-Man was cool: a solid book starring a likeable teen hero trying to balance his secret identity and the usual teenage problems. It's NOT a hard concept to do right. I don't mind characters not aging - in fact, I couldn't stand something like Byrne's Generations series - but there's ways to progress characters without aging them much via the team-based structure.

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