Fanholes Comic Books Mutha@#$%! Do You Read 'Em?!? #139: Titans Hunt 35th Anniversary (Part 3 of 4)!
It's the 35th Anniversary of Titans Hunt! Join the Fanholes for a 4 part podcast that covers one of the most epic storyline in the history of the Titans!
I'm taking a cue from Justin and reaching back again. After I got into "Titans Hunt" and started looking for back issues, I think I started with "Titans Plague" out of the limited bins at the El Capitan Flea Market where I bought most of my new comics in that period. It had Deathstroke and Grummett art, so it looked and read similar to Hunt. I want to say that I was exposed to a patchwork of The New Titans issues before that point, like maybe #50 from the same bins, but it didn't hit right. Bob McLeod is an assimilator, and I typically struggle with what he does to pencils, but putting him over Perez still feels heretical. Like Wolfman, Perez was also suffering from a sort of block in this period, so I don't know how tight his pencils were. I also picked up #55-56, the introduction of the Troia identity, by which Romeo Tanghal was back on inks. The art still seemed drab and compromised, plus I found Donna's new look to be hideous. The magic was clearly gone from having Perez co-plot, and all that science fantasy Titans Seeds stuff was a snore. #56 was a bigger mistake though, as Mark Bright never had any business on Titans, even a terrible 1960s flashback issue about the goddamned caveman. My half-brother bought some of the "A Lonely Place of Dying" stuff new, and that was alright. Grummett was doing finishes over Perez's layouts by that point, but they were still taking a big McLeod all over everything. #62-67 is a nice prelude to Hunt by the same creative team, but most of the rest is missable crap.
I remember marveling at the Grummett/Vey Red Star cover to #77, but that El Capitan booth polybagged their new shelf books, so that's as far as I got until I bought it as a back issue. It was another "make it make sense" story. In a span of-- generously days, more likely hours, the Soviets locate Cyborg's remains, determine that he's a vegetable, and build him new tactical prosthesis from scratch. Not basic life-saving stuff, but "make him ED-209." Why? How? Wouldn't it take them longer to build off Silas Stone's tech than to create Alexi Murphovitch, who wouldn't be wholly theirs and not stand out like a, well, Black man in St. Petersburg? And the Titans just fly right over Russian airspace? I could have accepted a lot of this as "that's comics folks," but at least give me a few issues of breather so that all this stuff isn't happening between my placing an order with DoorDash and its arriving.
New Titans #78 is my first new issue. I question my memory, because I think I bought it at the Pasadena Town Square Mall, but I also had to have left it in the truck long enough for the copy to have gotten sunbleached. I've never seen anything like it before or sense, because it happened in at most hours. I actually think that we were going to leave the mall, but called back in for some reason, and it was only exposed for about 45 minutes. But I came out, and the cover was partially bleached of color and visibly shriveled. Maybe the sunlight hit a mirror just right, and it almost burned up?
Anyway, this time I got to give it a toss, and that artwork was so damned pretty. I didn't know what the hell was going on with evil Jericho and the destroyed Titans Tower. I was basically Donna and Terry in this situation, trying to catch up with what I'd missed and who these colorful new characters were. So I started putting together those flea market back issues, and kept buying the book going forward.
Looking at Mike's Amazing World, I had soured on DC Comics for a while, but just the previous month, I bought my first issue of The Sandman. I was still a committed mutie fanboy, reading most of the X-titles across the summer of Mutant Genesis. My brother was more open, picking up most of the early !mpact titles and Lobo guest appearances. I was two for two on trials though, and moved on that same month to revisiting the JLI titles for the start of "Breakdowns."
Once we moved to Colorado, the neighborhood comic shop at an enviable quarter bin. As I was getting more interested in Titans, much of the first volume passed my way, supplementing the material I got at Marauder Comics in 1989. It became clearer to me why I hadn't stuck with NTT. The Uncanny X-Men had been relaunched by Dave Cockrum, who was more than replaced by John Byrne, so that getting Cockrum back was a lull. I came in under the lovely, graceful Paul Smith, but readily embraced the chunky contemporary cool of John Romita Jr. I didn't love every X-Men artist or era going forward, but Chris Claremont admirably went with the flow, shaping the best ideas of his collaborators, and always evolving the team itself. NTT just had George Perez, and not even Perez giving his best until about three years in. The book hit its peak from 1983-84, had some really great options for successor artists, but let them slip through their fingers. I once owned a complete run of the Baxter series, but I never could read most of it. Wolfman got writers block, the same characters went through the motions for a full decade, and Eduardo Barreto was simply not suited for a flashy team book. That shit is a fucking sllloooggg. Whatever its faults, Titans Hunt looked so much better and was vastly more exciting than the vast majority of non-Perez material, and a hell of a lot of that, too. I did and do consider myself a Titans fan, but always the Hunt line-up foremost. I have and will continue to mock the more poorly thought out elements of this run, but I still hold it in great affection. Since the guys sound like they'll be reading the New Titans issues that were initially going to be skipped, I'll hold back my comments on them, but developments in those issues maintained and heightened my enthusiasm.
I'm taking a cue from Justin and reaching back again. After I got into "Titans Hunt" and started looking for back issues, I think I started with "Titans Plague" out of the limited bins at the El Capitan Flea Market where I bought most of my new comics in that period. It had Deathstroke and Grummett art, so it looked and read similar to Hunt. I want to say that I was exposed to a patchwork of The New Titans issues before that point, like maybe #50 from the same bins, but it didn't hit right. Bob McLeod is an assimilator, and I typically struggle with what he does to pencils, but putting him over Perez still feels heretical. Like Wolfman, Perez was also suffering from a sort of block in this period, so I don't know how tight his pencils were. I also picked up #55-56, the introduction of the Troia identity, by which Romeo Tanghal was back on inks. The art still seemed drab and compromised, plus I found Donna's new look to be hideous. The magic was clearly gone from having Perez co-plot, and all that science fantasy Titans Seeds stuff was a snore. #56 was a bigger mistake though, as Mark Bright never had any business on Titans, even a terrible 1960s flashback issue about the goddamned caveman. My half-brother bought some of the "A Lonely Place of Dying" stuff new, and that was alright. Grummett was doing finishes over Perez's layouts by that point, but they were still taking a big McLeod all over everything. #62-67 is a nice prelude to Hunt by the same creative team, but most of the rest is missable crap.
ReplyDeleteI remember marveling at the Grummett/Vey Red Star cover to #77, but that El Capitan booth polybagged their new shelf books, so that's as far as I got until I bought it as a back issue. It was another "make it make sense" story. In a span of-- generously days, more likely hours, the Soviets locate Cyborg's remains, determine that he's a vegetable, and build him new tactical prosthesis from scratch. Not basic life-saving stuff, but "make him ED-209." Why? How? Wouldn't it take them longer to build off Silas Stone's tech than to create Alexi Murphovitch, who wouldn't be wholly theirs and not stand out like a, well, Black man in St. Petersburg? And the Titans just fly right over Russian airspace? I could have accepted a lot of this as "that's comics folks," but at least give me a few issues of breather so that all this stuff isn't happening between my placing an order with DoorDash and its arriving.
New Titans #78 is my first new issue. I question my memory, because I think I bought it at the Pasadena Town Square Mall, but I also had to have left it in the truck long enough for the copy to have gotten sunbleached. I've never seen anything like it before or sense, because it happened in at most hours. I actually think that we were going to leave the mall, but called back in for some reason, and it was only exposed for about 45 minutes. But I came out, and the cover was partially bleached of color and visibly shriveled. Maybe the sunlight hit a mirror just right, and it almost burned up?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this time I got to give it a toss, and that artwork was so damned pretty. I didn't know what the hell was going on with evil Jericho and the destroyed Titans Tower. I was basically Donna and Terry in this situation, trying to catch up with what I'd missed and who these colorful new characters were. So I started putting together those flea market back issues, and kept buying the book going forward.
Looking at Mike's Amazing World, I had soured on DC Comics for a while, but just the previous month, I bought my first issue of The Sandman. I was still a committed mutie fanboy, reading most of the X-titles across the summer of Mutant Genesis. My brother was more open, picking up most of the early !mpact titles and Lobo guest appearances. I was two for two on trials though, and moved on that same month to revisiting the JLI titles for the start of "Breakdowns."
Once we moved to Colorado, the neighborhood comic shop at an enviable quarter bin. As I was getting more interested in Titans, much of the first volume passed my way, supplementing the material I got at Marauder Comics in 1989. It became clearer to me why I hadn't stuck with NTT. The Uncanny X-Men had been relaunched by Dave Cockrum, who was more than replaced by John Byrne, so that getting Cockrum back was a lull. I came in under the lovely, graceful Paul Smith, but readily embraced the chunky contemporary cool of John Romita Jr. I didn't love every X-Men artist or era going forward, but Chris Claremont admirably went with the flow, shaping the best ideas of his collaborators, and always evolving the team itself. NTT just had George Perez, and not even Perez giving his best until about three years in. The book hit its peak from 1983-84, had some really great options for successor artists, but let them slip through their fingers. I once owned a complete run of the Baxter series, but I never could read most of it. Wolfman got writers block, the same characters went through the motions for a full decade, and Eduardo Barreto was simply not suited for a flashy team book. That shit is a fucking sllloooggg. Whatever its faults, Titans Hunt looked so much better and was vastly more exciting than the vast majority of non-Perez material, and a hell of a lot of that, too. I did and do consider myself a Titans fan, but always the Hunt line-up foremost. I have and will continue to mock the more poorly thought out elements of this run, but I still hold it in great affection. Since the guys sound like they'll be reading the New Titans issues that were initially going to be skipped, I'll hold back my comments on them, but developments in those issues maintained and heightened my enthusiasm.