MOUNTAIN COMICS #16 – NEW TEEN TITANS #13
Rob welcomes back 13thDimension.com’s Dan Greenfield to discuss “Friends and Foes Alike!” from NEW TEEN TITANS #13 by Marv Wolfman and George Perez!
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I have thought a lot about the Terry Long problem. My feelings as someone who read this book as it cMe out.
1) Most guys lusted after Kory but loved Donna.
2) While Terry was a ‘normal guy’ which gave nerd readers like me hope, he was also gross and terrible which also made me lose hope. I mean, it seemed like everyone … even creeps like Long … had a girlfriend when I didn’t.
3) Thrilled when he died.
Anyways, I read the Showcase revival so knew Robotman from that. Thought this issue was fantastic.
One thing I loved about Perez was that he varied body types. Kory, Donna, and Raven all have distinct looks.
Along with Legion of Super-Heroes, this was one of the pillar team comics that I collected and a gateway into the DC universe!
Yes, the density of story and character moments and seeding future plotlines and juggling current ones… a virtuoso performance by the creative team.
Hope one of the comics you read on your mountain retreats was All-Star Comics or Squadron. Would love an episode on that. Although anything with Doom Patrol is a-ok with me… they broke the mold in DC super teams and although this issue only had three surviving members and their arch foes it was a welcome acknowledgement of a bygone era.
Oh, yeah. This issue falls into what I consider the sweet-spot of New Teen Titans – the 10-issue run from 11 through 20. After the epic first year, the Wolfman/Perez/Tanghal engine was now humming at a beautiful clip, starting with the Teen Titans vs. the actual mythological Titans in #s 11-12 (a story that was actually rather dark), followed by the 3-parter that started with this issue, and then five outstanding done-in-one issues. It perfectly encapsulates everything that made the series so awesome, and addictive for young comics fans back in the day. As Dan suggested, if you were a super-hero comics fan of a certain age when these were hitting the stands (I had just turned 13 two months before this issue came out), this series was basically perfection on the printed page – assuming that mantle from the recently closed Claremont/Byrne/Austin run on X-men.
On Robotman, I first saw the character in New Teen Titans, in his cameo appearance in an earlier issue (#8 I think), and so this one and the next few issues really piqued my curiosity in the Doom Patrol. I snapped up the Doom Patrol digest published in the next year.
As for Terry Long, naturally I disliked him from the get-go, and it had nothing to do with the first reason Dan mentioned, i.e., a feeling of envy, and everything to do with the creep factor. Like Dan, even at the age of 12-13, I could tell there was something really skeevy about him (whose age was, I think, noted as 29 at one point) dating Donna, who would have been 18 or 19.
Thank you Rob (& Dan). This was a fun romp through memory lane and NTT#13. It reminded me of how much I enjoyed this book for the first five years and the early part of the Baxter run. Wolfman and Perez consistently knocked it out of the park.
I never got why so many people hated Terry Long. Some jealousy, sure, but Clark could have done a lot better than Lois, so whatever. Even though it was called the “New Teen Titans,” Dick, Donna and Wally didn’t strike me as teenagers.
Back then I wasn’t old enough for things like a drivers license or a regular job. My spending money was very limited. If I was getting a comic I wanted the most heroic bang for my buck (or 50-60 cents). That often meant JLA, or Legion, but always, always the Titans. 🙂
I have a memory of being so excited when I saw this book on the stands! I knew Robotman from the Showcase revival and a Doom Patrol reprint in Super-Team Family, so I not only recognized the character, but realized that he had changed his “new look.” Yeah, this was Wolfman-Perez-Tanghal at peak performance.
I don’t recall any strong feelings about Terry Long from when I was a teenage Teen Titans reader. I still don’t get the animosity from so many fans. There are lots of supporting characters that I dislike, but Long wasn’t one of them. If I gave any thought to the age difference between him and Donna, I later had reason to accept it. Within 5 years of of this comic’s publication, I had graduated college. Not long after that, one of my peers had married an English professor at the college. He had left his wife and children for her. Another of my professors had a wife that he met when she was 19, and he was twice-divorced. This at a school of less than 500 students! So, as far as I was concerned, the Donna Troy-Terry Long romance was the most realistic part of the Teen Titans comic! It certainly made more sense than anything else about Donna Troy after 1986!
Great episode guys! I came into NTT a few issues after this, with # 15, actually, and I was instantly hooked. I had been searching for it, but just couldn’t find it before that. I remember a Daily Planet ad for this particular issue.
I can’t really add much other than I was nodding the whole time at everything you said, particularly Perez’s Robin. The Wolfman/Perez NTT is THAT damn good, and deserves every bit of its reputation, and then some.
You know, Terry Long never really bothered me much. I’ve heard Wolfman projected a bit of himself into Terry, and visually he looked quite a bit like Len Wein. While the characters were still supposed to be 18 to 19 (except Changeling who was 16), Wolfman wrote them in their mid-20s, so the age gap didn’t bother me as much. I didn’t realize Terry was so hated until years later.
Chris
I am so glad you’ve covered this issue. This was my introduction to the Doom Patrol, and this series was my gateway into becoming more of a DC reader than Marvel. I had, of course, read DC comics before, but prior to the New Teen Titans, my comic book Earth was the good ol’ not-yet-numbered 616. As for Terry Long, he’s a character that has gotten creepier with age, for me. As a kid, I didn’t see much wrong with him, and he even served as a mouthpiece for some reasonably progressive-sounding ideas about gender relations, etc. As I got older, though, things like the age difference, the obvious wish-fulfillment author insertion, and the speaking suspicion that his very name might be a pun for “lingering” have begun to add up….
*sneaking suspicion….my suspicions don’t speak to me. Not out loud, at least.
Terry Long…..there was just something….off about that dude; was it the early 80’s ginger fro? Was it the wishy washy, half assed enlightened male schtick? Was is that he was a cradle robber? Was it all of these things? It may have been all of these things……
I started on Titans much later (many have said TOO late to enjoy it), but Rob’s enthusiasm is such that he makes me enjoy old comics by proxy.
TERRY LONG FOR NEVER!
Like Chris Franklin, my first issue of NTT was #15. I was just starting to collect comics then, and like many have said, being 13 let this book speak to me more than most. PLUS, having Wolfman-Perez at their maximum brilliance. What a great era for comics!
It showed how willing I was to “go with the flow” in my reading, because I didn’t know half of these Titans, and had never even heard of the Doom Patrol before, so the villains meant nothing to me either. And it didn’t matter. The story handled the intros, set the stakes, so just sit back and watch it play out. Today, it would take 2 recap pages to handle all of that. Another sign of how storytelling has changed in the “write for the trade” reality today.
Thank you for pointing out how bad-ass the women are in these Titans. That was always a hallmark for me in this iteration. The 3 women were easily more powerful than the 4 men on the team. That’s a rare thing, and it was awesome.
Rob certainly hit the jackpot on a month to buy comics, that’s for sure. Great episode!
My first issue of NTT was #4. I bought it because Batman was on the cover and immediately became a Titans fan. Fortunately for me, I found a TOR black & white paperback that reprinted the DCCP preview and NTT 1-3 at a school book fare, so that got me up to date on what I missed. Unfortunately for people who bought that book and hadn’t start collecting the series with issue 4, it ends on a cliffhanger.
I echo everything you guys said about Perez’s art. A lot of times artist try to be as detailed as Perez, it is to distract from story-telling deficiencies. That’s not the case with him. He is skilled at displaying a range of emotions with his characters and didn’t rely on just one or two stock expressions. His characters are good actors. One last comment. I really like how Perez subtly changed Raven’t appearance as she struggled with the evil of Trigon growing within her. She didn’t just go from being beautiful to ugly, but the change was so gradual you almost didn’t notice it. Brilliant.