The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1999: Teen Titans #20, March-April 1969

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Another of my Silver Age score at Purple Gorilla. Though, as with many older comics, there's no credits, the GCD tells me that this was written and pencilled by Neal Adams. Adams is one of those artists who flies at the periphery of my knowledge. I sometimes think that my lack of knowledge of the earlier greats is a huge absence in the comics encyclopedia in my brain, but that lack also leaves room for me to learn and discover new things. Like how great Neal Adams' art is. I've seen some of his later work in various Batman comics, and the Green Lantern/Green Arrow stuff he did, but this is pretty early work, less than a decade after Marvel and The Fantastic Four reinvigorate superheroes.

A weird, one-shot story about the Titans having to convince some other teens that the strange cult/protest group they've joined isn't as benign as they think. There's another crimefighter involved, named Joshua, who basically functions as a Batman stand-in, as far as I can tell, and who recruits the Titans because he's too old for the duped teens to listen to. And then there's that title, that I really feel must be a spelling error.

All that said, Mr. Adams' art is phenomenal. Crazy angles and figures constantly in motion, and only slightly stilted dialogue while trying to ape the teen lingo. Or perhaps it just feels that way because the language is so dated.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1576: Teen Titans Spotlight #11, June 1987

I'm really quite impressed with the quality of the stories in this Spotlight series. Both today's Brotherhood story and yesterday's Changeling/Cliff Steele story were good, solid, entertaining superhero tales. I think that perhaps some of this hinges on the stories being written more toward a reader with some depth of historical knowledge of the DCU and of comics.

Today, for instance, the Brotherhood, while recruiting Warp, are blasted to a strange, post-apocalyptic world on the verge of exploding (!!), and assist Tin, the Captain, and the Professor in escaping with the last of the planet's refugees. These three characters are, of course, the leading men of the Tintin books by Herge. The history of this doomed planet, an alternate Earth, follows the history set down in Tintin's adventures, offering a bleak, but also somewhat fitting, epilogue to the series.

Though driven by a desire to save themselves, of course, the Brotherhood actually seem to connect to Tin and his comrades, and work with some fervor not only on their own behalf, but that of the surviving humans. Is it simply the nature of Tintin's universe that the Brotherhood become...redeemable, somehow? It's hard to make these kind of decisions about B-list, or C-list, villains, as we encounter them so seldom. I know this version of the Brotherhood has appeared in the various New Teen Titans series, but is it often enough for us to get a more nuanced idea of the people on the team? Superhero teams get month upon month to tell the minutiae of interpersonal dynamics; villain teams rarely get that chance. I think we're to understand that they're constantly sniping at each other, looking over their shoulders, always expecting treachery. But if you've got a group who are ideologically on the same page, in that they believe in the same thing (they are, after all, called THE BROTHERHOOD OF EVIL!!), then why wouldn't they be able to be friends with one another?

I'm sure it's something that has been explored with other groups.

Open Letter to Gerard Way and DC Comics.

I would very much like to write a Brotherhood of Evil series.

Yrs.

Tom.

(That never works, but maybe one day.)

I like to think that the Brotherhood bonded over this event, that it somehow strengthened them as a team because they knew they could trust each other? Maybe I'll have to find all of their subsequent appearances. There really is always something to hunt for :D

"So it is agreed, if we are to escape, we must learn to work together."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1575: Teen Titans Spotlight #9, April 1987

Days 1571 - 1574 were The New Teen Titans #28 - 31, February - May 1987. They feature Cliff in much the same way the earlier issues did, as a guest from Gar's past who helps the Titans on one of their adventures. Cliff gets torn to bits, just like he used to every second issue in the original series, and, strangely, his head is attached to Cyborg's body in the last issue, which somehow helps the team take down Brother Blood. These issues were interesting in that they chronicle probably a total of a half hour or so of time, basically the whole of Brother Blood's "resurrection" and their takedown of him. Kind of cool to see such a minute dissection of a superhero battle. Also, it appears that Mento is crazy again and trying to kill Gar. So it goes.

Today's issue, however, was really fantastic. It opens with a take on the original team battling their old foe General Immortus. I"m trying to figure out if it's actually one of their original adventures or if it's a new one, and if so, where in the chronology it fits. Anything with Gar has to be after issue #100. Guess I'll just have to go back through them - *sigh* ;)

The present tense story, however, features Cliff telling Gar he's retiring, that he's had enough of the weirdness of the superhero life. Though Cliff is often written as a race car driver, he's originally meant to be something of an adventurer, and racing cars is simply one of the things he did. But now he's tired of the adventure, and is thinking of settling down on a ranch. An attack by Mr.104, an old foe of the Patrol, further cements Cliff's plans to retire. The irony of this is that his issue is just a few months younger than the first issue of the 1987 Doom Patrol series, and must have surely been in the pipeline by the time this comic went to print. Despite my misgivings over his tenure on the title, Paul Kupperberg has to be given props for his ardent desire to keep this team alive. The Patrol inspires this kind of loyalty from those who love it, I think.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I would do if I had the kinds of powers that my favourite superheroes have. I sometimes worry about whether I'd be a hero or a villain. With the Doom Patrol, regardless of era, I always feel like that's much more what I'd be like: In a constant state of healing, but with hearts in the right place.

"Burn, Robotman! Feel yourself burn!"

A pause

Don't know what I've done now, but I'm in agony in my right arm.

 Day 1569 was DC Comics Presents #52, coincidentally the first appearance of Ambush Bug, who joins the Patrol briefly later on.

Day 1570 (today) was Tales of The New Teen Titans #3, featuring Changeling's backstory. The Patrol are invoked more than they're in the story, though we get plenty of flashback, and a nice callback to Gar's earlier adventures.

Hopefully my arm will feel better tomorrow. More Titans.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1116: Teen Titans #6, December 1966

We're ending this chunk of the Doom Patrol's story with a brief tangent following Gar Logan's first attempt to join the Teen Titans. He does, of course, become a member eventually, taking the moniker Changeling, but Beast Boy still has a few adventures to go on with the fabulous freaks.

(Also, I was unable to find the second part of yesterday's story, so let's call that our end of season cliffhanger...)

There's a slightly macabre moment in this comic where the Titans pose as a troupe of acrobats to infiltrate a corrupt circus. As this is a comic aimed at younger audiences, there's no mention of Robin's origin story, but one has to imagine that this is a horrifying experience for him. Fortunately he's got a weirdly-hybridised Beast Boy to distract him from thoughts of the night he was orphaned.

Well. That got dark quickly.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 777: Dark Nemesis #1, February 1998

I don't really have a lot to say about today's comic. It's a pretty standard DC super-book from the late 90s, which means it's going to be generally pretty good (DC were having one of their upswings at the time, well before Geoff Johns got his hands on the DCU). But having read no other issues of the Teen Titans from this era, I'll admit I was totally lost on this one. The Atom is a member of the Titans? I seem to recall something about that, vaguely, but very little else about this era of the venerable super team.

It's kind of amusing that a team consisting of young people can also be venerable.

Anyway, today's featured creator is penciller Chriscross, or Chris Williams. Williams got his professional start in a pretty big way as one of the primary artists for the Milestone Comics project. Much of his work since has been with DC, though he's done some fairly substantial runs at Marvel as well. His Wikipedia entry notes that he's currently creating some graphic novels for Humanoids in Europe, and also pencilling The Midnighter. I'm on the fence about his art, I'll admit. It's very much typical of the post-Image boom DC style, in which they were getting away from the hyper-kinetic style of McFarlane or Lee and moving more to a synthesis of that style with the 80s pseudo-realistic style that I talked about with Iron Man a couple of days ago. One thing I do appreciate about Chriscross' art, specifically in this issue, is that he doesn't draw his women as if they're going to snap in half. There's an excellent shot of Scorcher and Axis (the two ladies up there on the cover by Jason Pearson) getting ready to bust the rest of their team out of The Slab, and they look like they could kick the hell out of just about anyone. It's nice to see an artist who recognizes that female bodies can be every bit as kickass as the male ones in superhero comics.

Looking through Williams' GCD listings, I'm pretty sure I have a fair bit of his work. The late 90s was one of my favourite eras of DC Comics. But I'll admit that with the amount of amazing artists that I'm seeing involved with Milestone in the early 90s, I'm getting pretty excited about reading some of those comics. I think the first issue of Hardware is somewhere in the stack I put aside for these next couple of weeks.

Looks like I did have a bit to say about the comic.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 371: Secret Origins #46, December 1989

I don't know why I was convinced that the Morrison story in this issue was the Legion one, not the JLA one.

Yesterday I said we'd be looking at an indie comic short, but the issue of A1 that I was planning on reading was quite long, and I ran out of time, so we're looking at this one instead.

Technically, this is one of the earliest Grant Morrison Justice League stories, though his issue of Animal Man that featured the JLE might have come slightly earlier. I honestly have no idea whether or not the elements laid down in this story are ever picked up again - the basic premise is that the mountain that housed the original Justice League's headquarters is sentient, and contains a record of its entire history that is activated by sound. Morrison's iteration of the Doom Patrol briefly takes up residence here, but there is certainly no sentient mountaineering in that series, even though it would have fit the Doom Patrol's aesthetic very well.

The other stories of headquarters in this issue are quite good. We are given a look into Cyborg's memories of his father, who built Titans Tower. I'm not overly familiar with the Wolfman-era New Teen Titans, and whether or not Cyborg ever articulates the feelings he has when entering the tower the way he does in this story. It's a nice touch, and inflects Cyborg's character quite nicely. The Legion story in this issue is excellent, telling the tragic tale of Fortress Lad, who turns into a fortress to protect those around him - sadly, after transforming to protect the Legion, he has his memory erased, and simply becomes the Legion headquarters. Again, I'm not sure that this ever comes up again, but it certainly adds an interesting element to all of those old Legion stories and that big yellow building.

That's all for today. I'm very tired, and feel like everything I'm writing is awkward. We'll finish of Morrison Week tomorrow with A1 #3. Onward!