The Titans Companion

The New Teen Titans was DC's big hit of the 1980s, one of few that rivaled the popularity of Marvel's X-Men. It had a progenitor in the 1960s Teen Titans, about a team of grown-up superheroes' adolescent sidekicks, which was most notable for its middle-aged writer's embarrassing attempts at "hip" dialogue. In 1980 writer Marv Wolfman revived the concept with a slightly older cast, retaining Robin and Wonder Girl but creating the team's other members out of whole cloth. Drawn by fan-favorite George Perez, NTT was an immediate smash but sputtered creatively and commercially when Perez and then Wolfman departed a few years later. DC has recently launched another Titans update, and an anime-style version of the '80s team is a hit on the Cartoon Network. But it's the Wolfman-Perez series that makes longtime fans' hearts beat faster and that is the focus of Cadigan's retrospective made up of interviews with virtually every writer and artist who handled the Titans' various incarnations, and artwork, much of it previously unpublished, on every page. Gordon Flagg
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