Why did DC put out a hardcover version of the Judas Contract when they just put out the volume of the New Teen Titans reprinting it and have an omnibus coming out next year reprinting it?
It's a bit overkill, especially given the numerous problems DC has had over the years getting Titans reprinted to flood the market with the same story with no real additions.
Also Titans general....
A couple of reasons:
1. It's the only evergreen Titan story the series has in TPB format.
2. DC paid a huge amount of money to track down the original artwork so they could restore the artwork (all previous reprints prior to New Teen Titans V6 and V7, were heavily edited to remove the credits from the artwork. So they have to justify the money spent restoring the issues to their original unaltered form.
3. Nostalgia. The current TPB and omnibus format have the prelude issues (#39-41) in one book while the actual Judas Contract story and the aftermath stuff in another. The deluxe is based upon the original trade and includes those prelude issues with the main story.
Weren't there bits also cut from it? I remember hearing "Who is Donna Troy" cut a bunch out of the New Titans Troia arc as well, but it's hard to get a rundown of the exact edits.
Anyone wonder what would have happened had Terra not died but stayed a villain, under Wolfman's control so as to prevent other writers from retconning her good all along?
Terra could have joined the Brotherhood of Evil or been a villain fighting the Outsiders or even gotten an upgrade and became a full-on Superman villain during the Post-Crisis Superman era.
Terra could have been a great foil for Superman; legit insane super-power supremacist who becomes Clark's version of the Joker. Not to mention be a foil for Lex Luthor, in terms of making him her new sugar daddy.
Judas Contract/Terror of Trigon was released intact (though ToT is missing the epilogue issue due to it not being drawn by Perez), but the Who Is Donna Troy TPB infamously cut a lot of shit from the "Who is Wonder Girl" story; most notably all references to the Invasion storyline (where Danny Chase gets snubbed by Wally) and pretty much 80% of the epilogue in terms of cutting out the Titans returning home to find out Jason Todd had been killed (and Dick attacking Chase for not giving a shit that Jason died), along with the subsequent confrontation between Bruce and Dick afterwords. IIRC it does keep Danny being kicked out of the team though.
I think DC knew they fucked up, because a couple of months after WIDT came out, they did a "Batman in the 80s" trade and low and behold, all of the MIA material from New Titans #55 was included.
Terra Incognito also only includes the Terra subplot pages from #26-27
Terra had to die because she was insanely popular and Wolfman knew full well that an editor would go for the cheap sales boost of bringing her back/retconning her a hero in a heartbeat for a sales boost.
Which is how we got stuck with Terra II BTW, as Wolfman got assigned an editor who used the fact that Titans had stopped being a big seller, to justify overruling Wolfman and bring Terra back
Anyone got any Titans story recommendations?
Or is it one of those franchise with one or two stories and a ton of garbage that outweigh any good shit that was produced by a hefty margin?
just read Young Justice instead
This sadly.
But in terms of good stories:
Avenging Doom Patrol (V1 #13-15)
Anything Brotherhood of Evil related (V1 #28-30, V2 #26-28, 97-99)
The Brother Blood Saga (V1 #21-22, #40-41, V2 #26-32 and Annual #2)
Judas Contract (V1 #42-44 and Annual #3)
Who is Donna Troy (V1 #38)
New Teen Titans/Outsiders (V1 #37, B&TO #5)
New Titans Vs Vigilante Vs Cheshire (V1 Annual #2)
Terror of Trigon (V2 #1-6)
Origin of Lilith/Introduction of Kole (V2 #7-11)
Ghost Story (V2 #12)
Return of Red Star (#48-49)
Titans Hunt (#71-84)
JLA/Titans #1-3
Young Justice is worse than Teen Titans. At east Teen Titans has Judas Contract, Avenging Doom Patrol, and the various Donna Troy origin stories
Name ONE fucking Young Justice story that ANYONE talks about or remembers.....
This.
Young Justice was Teen Titans deballed and neutered, just like the Kid Lobo character that PAD was forced to include on the roster to try and boost sales
Young Justice was a victim of intense editorial interference. There is some nice character bits, but all of those were superficial as hell.
PAD wasn't allowed to do anything remotely edgy, especially since the asshat Batman editors were still pissy as fuck that DiDio let PAD use Tim Drake and micromanaged the hell out of PAD in terms of them vetoing pretty much every storyline he wanted to do with the character.
Problem with Titans is that most of their good storylines were either long-runners or one-off/small scale stories.
Even Judas Contract kind of falls flat in that it only reprints about three issues worth of build-up to it and even skips the reveal issue where Terra is revealed to be a traitor.
The fact that the series has never been properly collected also adds to it's fail in that as time passes by, the legacy of the series and the Wolfman/Perez run in particular, fades away in terms of people forgetting how revolutionary it was at the time.
Teen Titans and the NTT is one of those things that I've wanted to like but I just have a hard time getting into it. To me of the "popular cape book featuring a team of largely younger heroes" comics being published it lagged far behind Legion, Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants.
Wolfman was great on Tomb of Dracula and decent on Spider-Man but it seemed like he was trying to play catch up to Claremont and Levitz/Giffen and his stuff just doesn't hold up near as well.
I wish I never learned that X-Men/Legion of Super-Heroes (which was supposed to be a Claremont/Cockrum book) got axed in favor of X-Men/Teen Titans because the former is a far more natural pairing than the latter.
>Who is Donna Troy (V1 #38)
That has some fantastic panelling.
It seems like Teen Titans has been a mess to collect. Do you know if the most recent trades have been doing an okay job?
The new TPB line has been aces, but not the perfect collection as it omits a digest only story with Speedy meeting the new team from the second TPB, that is in pretty much every other hardcover collection (the original and new omnibuses and archives).
Also, the upcoming omnibus is ending at a bad spot (V3 will end with V2 #9). V2 #12 would be a far better ending point since it's the last issue before Crisis and #13-34 basically consist of several intricately connected serialized storylines that needs to be collected in full.
I had no idea this had happened, holy cow
You know, I've come to realize that I am totally unaware of what books really got affected by CoIE. Did the Titans have to reboot, or was altering Donna's history the only real change?
They dragged their feet on addressing the elephant in the room regarding Donna until 1989.
IIRC originally "Who was Wonder Girl" was going to be a stand-alone graphic novel but editors (wanting to boost sales of the title, which had gone downhill after it was taken off the newstand) got it moved to the main book. Games then got made the replacement graphic novel, but shit happened and it didn't get finished until 2010 (with major changes, as the original ending had Dick murder King Faraday and his rival, after they maimed Danny Chase and murdered the white woman who worked with crippled children that Cyborg was always pining after).
WIWG sadly created a major domino effect: it negated pretty much all of the previous Titans of Myth stories (V1 #12, V2 #7-11) that it basically erased the origin story that Wolfman did for Lilith and fucked up his plans for the "Children of the Sun" (demi-God children of Thia who were secretly plotting to kill the Titans).
Children of the Sun were wrapped up in the 1989 annual in god-awful fashion (they were retconned as being a doomsday cult created by a scientist who Cyborg's dad knew and who were targeting the Titans to get at Cyborg).
Titans mainly fell apart because of the bullshit "direct market" move; the title never recovered from being moved off the newstand (to the point that they kept Tales of the Teen Titans book going until the end of 1988). Also, post Brother Blood/Mento defeat in #23-34, the book never found a new villain.
Wildebeast never took off, everyone HATED Godvia, and then there was Danny Chase; a literal cancer upon the franchise.
There was a reason WHY Jason Peterson (editor of the book during Titans Hunt) was able to hijack the book from Marv Wolfman as far as controlling what Marv wrote. The book was pretty dire for a good period of time in the late 80s that not even Perez's return could move the dial much.
Of all the books that got fucked over by Crisis, All Star Squadron was the one that was killed the worst.
The last "real" issue was #60 and #61-67 were origin stories that were planned for Secret Origin that got burned off in ASS due to Roy Thomas being butt-hurt that arrangements made to allow ASS to exist in a sort of "non-canon limbo" where Crisis didn't happen got overruled.
It was replaced with Young All Stars, but Roy was so butt-hurt that Silver Age Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Aquaman got erased from canon, that he created replacements for them and had the cast of ASS that people LIKED (Liberty Belle, Firebrand II, Tarantula, Johnny Quick) demoted to extra in favor of god-awful expies of the Big Guns
I'm still kind of pissed they didn't just keep Donna's origin intact by doing some time travel shit. WW goes back in time and saves Donna from the fire and finds out from Dick and the Titans that she has to send Donna to Paradise Island to be raised, so she can become Wonder Girl and help form the Teen Titans.
Perez was still writing the WW book and would have been in a position to redo the Post-Crisis origin he created for WW to fit Donna into the new backstory.
Thanks for the detailed response!
>Titans mainly fell apart because of the bullshit "direct market" move; the title never recovered from being moved off the newstand (to the point that they kept Tales of the Teen Titans book going until the end of 1988
I don't have the stats, but I think the same thing happened with LoSH and the launch of vol 3.
They waited a bit to address the Superboy elephant, and did so in a way that shouldn't have been possible with how CoIE panned out, leading to another bungled explanation/part-reboot in the later volume.
Legion managed to do good for a while but fell apart because
1. Superman editors decided to be dicks and reneg on their promise to let the Pocket Universe explanation stand to preserve Legion lore
2. Giffen got so pissy that Levitz sided with the Superman editors, he stopped having very much to do with the writing of V4, resulting in Tom and Mary fucking shit up and driving away readers.
Is Games worth buying? My local Ollies has it for around $5.
>Giffen got so pissy
I would buy a book detailing the sequence of behind-the-scenes events leading to Giffen blowing up the moon and later Earth
I'll always have a grudge against Crisis for ruining my three favorite 80's series: NTT, LoSH, and All-Star Squadron