Mountain Comics #27 – New Teen Titans #25

MOUNTAIN COMICS #27 - NEW TEEN TITANS #25

Rob welcomes fellow podcaster Tom Panarese to the cabin to discuss NEW TEEN TITANS #25 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez!

Check out images from this comic by clicking here!

Subscribe to FW PRESENTS on Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fw-presents/id1207382042

This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK:

Thanks for listening!

14 responses to “Mountain Comics #27 – New Teen Titans #25

  1. I love Mountain Comics more and more with each episode. The reminiscing of simpler times when comics and vacations with the family where the big events in our lives.
    Most of the comics I received as a kid, came from an uncle who read them, and passed them along to me. There was always a stack waiting for me when my family would go visit my grandparents. (My uncle was still a teenager living at home).
    My dad was from a large family, he had five brothers and two sisters, and every 4th of July my grandparents would have a big family cookout.
    Each year I’d arrive, my uncle would give the stack and I’d run off to a corner of the yard and read! While my aunts, uncles and cousins were. Playing basketball or touch football, I’d be sipping an ice cold soda, and marveling to the adventures of my favorite superheroes.

  2. Pan-pan! The TT and Omega Men are huge blank spots for me. I don’t know why, but I never quite took to the Titans like everyone else my age. But I enjoyed your enjoyment of this little series.

  3. Great discussion! I got most of the NTT run I had missed (due to newsstand headaches) in the mid-to-late 80s as well, including this Starfire storyline. I actually really enjoyed it. Hey, the X-Men went into space, why not the Titans? I still love the gender swap on the cover of the annual, where Robin is the “maiden” beneath the conquering Starfire, who is whupping her sister’s butt. Great stuff.

    I totally agree with Tom’s assessment of Starfire’s character. It seems few since Wolfman have “gotten” this character, and you can argue he lost his touch with her toward the end of New Titans, but at least he never made her an icky male fantasy bimboid. I can’t stand that interpretation.

    If memory serves, this MOTU preview was the first time I ever heard of He-Man secretly being Prince Adam. Obviously the creators were aware of the in-development Filmation toon, and history was being rewritten over the mini-comics’ original, more heavy fantasy backstory of He-Man being a noble barbarian who just had a magic power harness. As much as I love the cartoon, Filmation really did file the teeth down on MOTU, and sucked out some of the cool factor. Making it more…juvenile for lack of a better term is what made me drop it before the other contemporary toy lines like GI Joe and Transformers.

    Chris

    1. Btw, I have been doing a read-through of the Claremont X-Men and that book was in the middle of the first Brood storyline when the Titans were on Tamaran. That places the crossover between the two about two pages into NTT #26 and riiiiight before the introduction of Madelyne Pryor.

      #themoreyouknow

  4. On the question of Starfire, please everyone, give the Starfire solo series a go, it totally turned her character around after the horror of Red Hood and the Outlaws. The talent involved may be enough to get you to try it – it’s written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner and dream by Emanuela Lupacchino. Kory is still sexy, but that’s not all she is – she’s open with her emotions but in a dumb way, making everyone around her better. Hopefully it’s on the DC app thingie.

    Great show, I’m like Rob in not being a fan of the New Teen Titans in outer space; how do Earth folk in comics deal with being off-planet so well, I’d be so terrified of never getting home that I’d be unable to relax and enjoy any of it.

    Mind, Starfire isn’t having a great time with that sister of hers. Much as I love George Perez, I was never comfortable with Blackfire being the traditional ugly sister, with her point face and crippled body, the message being that ‘imperfect’ equals evil.

    I always read Xhal as Zhal, ie a soft ‘shall’, which makes no sense given how much I hate ‘Jean’ J’onzz.

    Could anyone ever read about ‘Gordanians’ without thinking of Dick Giordano?

  5. Impressive podcast. Most impressive. I think I have these issues in a TBS. It’s kind of a fun story. It had depth and was interesting. I wasn’t shocked by it since I read it as an adult. I.E. not in it’s run, but when I found the TBS at Barns. I read this run as a kid, but I didn’t find a comic book shop till I was 12. Still I remember Perz being awesome. And loving the art. And Wolfman being good on the writing at this time.

  6. It’s funny when I consider how many Mountain Comics crossover with my Beach Comics. This is one of those books.

    I talk about the summer this book came out. I was just starting to do odd jobs around the beach town and making pretty good coin for the time, something like $40 a week. As long as I banked most of it, the rest was money to burn.

    Around the same time, I decided I was going to start collecting titles on a monthly basis, not just based on how cool the cover was. The books then are near famous – New Teen Titans, Daring New Adventures of Supergirl, Firestorm, Swamp Thing to name a few. I even bought a fancy cardboard box and files to keep them organized (although I wasn’t bagging and boarding then).

    I actually started to read NTT with #21, lured in by the Night Force free preview. (Even then I knew a bargain.) That was a very solid Brother Blood story and so I kept on reading.

    I thought this departure into space was a good diversion for the team and gave me a sort of DC Cosmic feel with Psions, Gordanians, Citadel and Spider Guilds, and Omega Men all pretty wild. Add to that the teen pathos of the primary players and the gorgeous art and this was a big win. I still have these books; they survived the parental purge. Now I feel I need to reread!

    I agree with Tom that this period of NTT, rolling right into Terra, the Brotherhood of Evil, and more Deathstroke holds up to this day. So great.

  7. Thanks for the discussion, guys! I missed this particular issue, but I always thought the New Teen Titans had a realistically mixed attitude toward space. I mean, Starfire’s obviously comfortable there, and Raven is comfortable with weird. Robin is exceptionally bright and capable of adapting to new situations, but it sounds like that’s really being put to the test here as he is totally a fish out of water (or a bird out of air). The others are all at varying degrees of, “This is uncomfortably weird and scary.”

    What’s interesting to me is how the character of Dick Grayson developed over the years. Nightwing has a great team-up with Superman in Action Comics #841 and 842, wherein they and many other heroes and villains are kidnapped by aliens. Despite the large ensemble, it really becomes the Superman and Nightwing show, because they trust one another and have experience in the environment. It even becomes useful that Dick can read some Tamaranian. Given his experiences in Teen Titans, it seems completely natural.

    Finally, like Rob, I also appreciate that this comic made clear that the Titans were intervening in an actual war. They weren’t going to be able to tie anybody up and hand them over to the authorities, and Koriand’r’s conflict with her sister had implications far bigger than family therapy could resolve.

  8. One day in 1982, my brother brought me these five comics, all from “Nov. 82” :New Teen Titans, Legion, Warlord, Sgt Rock, and Brave & the Bold. I must have been sick, because I’d never gotten so many comics at once.
    These comics loomed so large in my memory I eventually decided to get every DC comic published in “Nov. 82”. I still need Night Force, Jonah Hex and Swamp Thing.

  9. Summer of ’82. I had just graduated from High School and finished my first semester of college. My best friend Gary and I bought and read a lot of comics that summer! The previous November we had gone to the big comic convention in Boston where George and Marv were guests. All in attendance were quite excited to see our first glimpse of Blackfire as George drew her, and explained why her costume was the way it was, on the big pad of paper on the small stage! I was very stoked for this story! We regular Titans readers had had two years of Kori, and her history, and knew there was this big story happening on another world, so it was great to get to it. (I am less fond of the story when they returned to Tamaran, but that’s another summer!)
    While the Titans were on Tamaran, the JLA and the JSA met the All Star Squadron, who had their own Annual, and the Legion were engaged in a war on darkness! Wow!

    1. Thanks, Ward Hill! I hadn’t connected all those in time. It’s no wonder we’re all comics addicts “of a certain age,” when the market was teeming with quality like that in our formative years…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *