The Four Color Media Monitor

Kotaku's telling us that DC is supposedly trying to mend the harm they caused to the Teen Titans, which has been going on for a long time:

[...] But then DC changed their whole universe up in 2011 and the best iteration of the Teen Titans never existed. DC Comics now seems to realize what a massive mistake that is.

If they don't revert back to the previous continuity, and better still, to the pre-2000 continuity, then I don't think they've learned their lessons at all.

[...] Teen Titans gets its mojo from being connected to history, the odd families that cropped up around the publisher’s superhero A-list. And when DC disowned that history in the New 52 reboot, they essentially orphaned the Teen Titans. A new comic out today seems like an attempt at trying to inject a sense of history back into the Teen Titans.

Taking its name from a classic Titans storyline, Titans Hunt #1 teases the idea that there was another team of young heroes before the one that Tim Drake assembled in 2011’s Teen Titans. (It should be noted that references to an older version of the Teen Titans were made in some early New 52 books but were wiped out when some of them were reprinted.) The debut issue—written by Dan Abnett with art by Paulo Siqueria, Geraldo Borges and Carlos Mangual—catches up with Dick Grayson, Roy Harper and other characters from pre-reboot Titans teams. Each of them are nagged by uneasy feelings, seemingly driven by faint memories that have either been removed or repressed by forces unknown.

It sounds like a leftover from Convergence, and if so, that's not the same as restoring it. Yet even if they are, that alone doesn't guarantee talented writing, and certainly not so long as company wide crossovers continue to devour the whole line of books. And Titans doesn't just get its mojo from history connections. It gets it from skillful writing too.

The issue goes on to introduce a new version of Lilith, mentally reaching out to Dick to start him down a trail that will presumably lead to the revelation of a forgotten incarnation of the Teen Titans. Based on the cover art and group shot in the interiors of Titan Hunt #1, this will be a team cobbled together from the reinvented members of old Titans teams. The hulking store clerk Roy meets in the opening pages is named Gnarrk, just like the prehistoric teen who ran with the old-school Titans and an adult Mal Duncan is an award-winning film composer.

Now it's becoming pretty obvious this isn't the pre-52 Titans. If it's not the Lilith Clay who was killed off in the embarrassingly bad Titans/Young Justice: Graduation Day miniseries from 2003, then it's not restoring anything. Not even the Gnaark who'd originally appeared in the Bronze Age, and whose demise in 1989, IIRC, was written far better (he may have died of natural causes).

While it’s good that DC is trying to breathe some depth into a once-great franchise, the messy continuity of the New 52 makes any attempt to recapture the special chemistry of the best Teen Titans teams much more complicated. The compressed, reconfigured timeline and sensibilities means that the relationships between this new ‘old’ Teen Titans team will likely just feel kludged together in a heavy-handed way. Maybe it’s connected to that in-development Titans tv show? Regardless, DC’s editorial powers-that-be screwed over their own legacy when they rebooted their fictional histories. This new ‘old’ Titans team may wind up looking like the old ones, but it probably won’t wind up feeling like they did.

With DiDio and Harras in charge, of course not. Going by their directions is exactly why this won't work out. Continuity became much more complicated long before the New 52.

Another reason to doubt DC really wants to fix anything is because, according to this recent news through The Outhousers, Scott Lobdell is coming back to "plot" the 13th issue of the latest ongoing volume of TT. They might say you should hope it'll only be one issue. But the quality for the TT's writing went down the drain long ago. We had Geoff Johns doing some poor takes on the characters, including a story that followed up on Identity Crisis guest-starring Dr. Light in a role that went according to what the putrid miniseries established with Arthur Light being a rapist, and later, Sean McKeever did some awful work too, with a story that saw a new take on the Wonder Twins from Super-Friends mauled by a monstrous variation on Wonder Dog. It's not like the badness that's plagued the Titans since the turn of the century is anything new. Lobdell was just another contributor to all the terrible state the franchise fell into over the past decade.

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, dreadful writers, golden calf of death, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, Titans