Teen Titans through the Decades

One of the things my main hobby, collecting and reading comics, offers is the ability to traipse through the decades and enjoy the same title in completely different eras. I can't think of another genre that pulls this off quite like comics. Maybe animation, but comic books offer an unbroken publication history. When doing a re-read of a particular title from it's inception to today, you can see the changes in era and culture happening slowly. If you were to pick one issue from each decade and read that, you would see the changes as being drastically different.


I think the title that most closely marries itself to the culture of the time period it's published in is the Teen Titans. Created in the 1960's, the Titans were all the younger sidekicks of the main heroes banding together. But larger than that one trick concept, the Titans were about teenage heroes getting together and having adventures.

In the 1960's, the Titans were a quant little joke. Their dialogue, culture, and youth-hipness were in the hands of middle age white men in business suits. As such, they reflect a culture that never really quite was. It wasn't until 1969 that the Titans fell into different writing hands of a much younger generation of comic book creators.


The seventies didn't see much activity for the Teen Titans. But the 1980's saw a huge boom of popularity with the "New" Teen Titans. New characters and a new approach which can be summed up with two words: "Teenage Drama".

Being thirteen in 1982 when the New Teen Titans hit their popular high point, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Re-reading those same issues thirty years later in 2012 I'm struck at how ridiculously teen-drama-ish and melodramatic everything is. It seems to me... very eighties.


In 2003, the Teen Titans got there very own cartoon on Cartoon Network. I felt the cartoon was nothing short of genius for several reasons. It looked and felt very different from other super hero cartoons of the time. It had a Japanese Anime influence with quick action, sharp art, and heavy doses of humor, drama and action.


The cartoon was definitely set up to appeal to younger kids. At the time, my son was four and my daughter was two. They loved the show. It had snappy music, colorful heroes, action, and laughter. The characters would even change into smaller, cuter, weirder versions of themselves when something silly or embarrassing would happen. The creators of the show were NOT catering to the older comic fan crowd, but definitely went for the current day audience.


However, they included the popular characters from the eighties as the main cast of the show.


And they had villains with roots in the 1960's and the silliness of the Titans title of that decade. Even some guest stars from the original Titans line-up.

The main villain was Slade, who first appeared in the eighties as "Deathstroke the Terminator" and ended up encapsulating the look and feel of comic books in the nineties with over the top violence, a silly name that sounds cool to video game players, and a costume covered in weaponry.


The producers of the show did not limit themselves by the history of the Titans. Yet they took that history and crafted it into something they could use to make nods to the Teen Titans forty year history and still have major appeal to current day audiences.

AND... in appealing to current day audiences they attempted to do what the Teen Titans have always tried to do... be modern.

It was genius.

Thanks,
DCD