Is that Outsiders comic any good?
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I personally really enjoy the Outsiders series from 2003. It’s not perfect, but to me it basically felt like a titans series without the name.
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On ‘03 I would suggest only reading Johns run, which ends with issue 46, and I agree with the poster above that 2016s Titans is fairly solid (It does have its flaws, but it’s enjoyable). I can’t speak to the other runs though
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The original Titans Hunt by Wolfman is still my favorite. I am afraid it might seem a little too 90’s “Extreme!” if looked at for the first time today, but when I first saw it there was a real cool anything can happen vibe that I liked.
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I have an unhealthy affection for The New Teen Titans (it was one of my first comics), but I can recognize in hindsight that it’s not great. Actually, I’ll go ahead and make an even more controversial statement: There are no good Teen Titans comics.
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Including Geoff Johns’ run?
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Especially Geoff Johns’ run.
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Would you mind explaining why a bit? It’s one of my favorites and I’d like to hear another point of view
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Honestly, it suffers from all the same problems that Geoff Johns’ comics always do. Over-reverence to continuity, a near-obsessive need to write an origin story for everything, weirdly out-of-character protagonists and villains, and a strange desire to reimagine everything as dark and “serious.”
Including Teen Titans, a comic with “teen” in the name.
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Over-reverence to continuity and a near-obsessive need to write an origin story for everything.
Which opens us up to the discussion about how there are those of us who prefer continuity and those who don’t. Johns JSA is a very, very good title imo. I personally consider some of your list of weaknesses to be his strengths. That’s how it goes in fandom.
I do feel DC handles it’s legacy issues better than some publishers…cough…Marvel…cough…
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Which characters are out of character? The only one that I can remember off the top of my head is Jericho, who does some overly dark things and seems to switch sides at random.
Personally, I think what Johns does best his writing more hopeful comics that don’t fall prey to a lot of the dark and “edgy” things DC was trying to do at the time.
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I want to be clear: continuity can be used to make a story better. Think of Tom King’s Vision over at Marvel. I said “over-reverence” because I tend to find that when Johns does it, it’s actually debilitating to the story. He gets so bogged down in trying to tie everyone else’s stories together that he doesn’t end up really doing much for himself. That’s why Stars and STRIPE is, to this day, my favorite comic he’s written.
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Superboy, Wonder Girl (Cassie), and Kid Flash are the ones I remember sticking out the most. And, yeah, GJ did do a good amount of “fun” stories (Action Comics, the afformentioned Stars and STRIPE and JSA, etc.), Teen Titans was not one of those. The Trigon arc in particular was genuinely hard for me to get through, and the whole plot of the opening arc was that none of the heroes want to be heroes, which is my least favorite (and the most mid-naughties) trope in superhero comics.
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I will agree with you that after reading Young Justice and his solo series, Superboy is a vastly different character in Teen Titans than in any of his previous appearances.
I don’t agree however, that Wonder Girl and Kid Flash are out of character. The opening arc was pretty much written as a reason for Bart to grow up. He overhears Wally and Jay’s conversation about not believing in him, his friends have grown up and realized that life isn’t a game after Donna Troy’s death, and his close call with Deathstroke/Jericho really caused him to reevaluate who he is and to start taking things seriously. I get it if you don’t like the story, but to me it’s some really good character development that I wish could have been kept for the new YJ series. Sidenote - If you prefer Bart as Impulse over Kid Flash that’s cool too, Impulse is a really fun character.
I will say that the heroes not wanting to be heroes trope is also not one of my favorites, but in this context it makes some sense. They still wanted to be heroes, they just didn’t want to have their own group anymore. (Sorry if that last sentence felt out of place, I thought it was good to bring up I just didn’t really know where it should go). The group blaming themselves over things out of their control is a very human thing to do, and I think that element was well written, even if the idea of heroes not wanting to be heroes is played out.
Edit: I’m not too familiar with Wonder Girl outside of Young Justice and this series, but Johns’ depiction of her is way more consistent than later writers on the series
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I get where you’re coming from. I like the pacing. I’m a big Wolfman fan because it’s wordy and covers a lot of story.
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I dislike Superboy in Teen Titans. I appreciate how Bendis has essential erased that character with the current YJ.
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At least it’s better than New 52 Superboy. I’ve been following the Bendis YJ and reading the issues when they get added to the service, but I can’t say that I truly like it, after a year with almost no progression in the story it gets hard to be excited for new issues
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@Bpyoro Oh, it’s doa. It’s gonna get better with the new writer. It’ll find direction. I hope.
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Cassie was fine in my opinion. (Johns gets points for me on her, because he actually let her have emotions about her school being blown up (Which the Wonder Woman writers glossed over completely) and about Donnas death, along with furthering her personal plots)
The only one I really didn’t like was Kid Flash, but that was less characterization and more I didn’t like his developments. I do agree it suffered from being a bit too edgy, but that was kinda an issue with that era overall anyway.
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I’ve been reading Geoff Johns’ run and it was amazing up until I got to the Infinite Crisis. I only read a couple issues of it to see what was going on with the Titans but I didn’t read the whole thing. What happened to Cyborg. Why has he been “asleep” for the whole year? And where is Bart? After this I might read Peter David’s Young Justice.
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