"A Day in the Lives" is important for the character building; it laid some excellent groundwork in there.

The next issue was pretty underwhelming, then the Terminator return wasn't quite up to issue 2. They go into the whole mythological Titans, which didn't do a whole lot for me, either. The Doom Patrol legacy follows, which was quite good and an excellent Gar storyline. Really, I find the series picks up with the start of the second year and starts building to a stringer momentum.

Ah, the danger of taking creators at their word!

Here's Raven in NTT #4 (pencilled by Perez);



I like the story Perez has constructed from memory, but it doesn't hold.

"its no secret many a New Teen Titans fan were not pleased with Swan's work on the title?"

Having SUFFERED through countless "Dreaded Deadline Doom" fill-ins by other artists (or just plain REPRINTS under new covers for some other story that would arrive a month late), seeing Perez blow yet another deadline didn't surprise me that time.

But seeing one of DC's BEST artists fill in-- and the style being a PERFECT FIT-- was a wonder! That may have been the moment when I realized that Perez belonged at DC more than he ever did at Marvel.

New Teen Titans #6 (April 1981)



"Last Kill!"
Script: George Pérez (plot); Marv Wolfman (plot, script)
Pencils: George Pérez
Inks: Pablo Marcos
Colors: Jerry Serpe
Letters: John Costanza

Grade: B


Another extremely mixed issue that phones in so much while also doing so much right at the same time. The concept of Azar remains as simplistic and ill-considered as ever, even while we get a paltry origin for the sect of wizard pacifists. Trigon remains woefully inconsistent in his plans for the conquest of our dimension, which seemed pretty low priority to him when he broke through the barrier and then casually wandered around last time.  Suddenly, the stakes matter to him and he's acting like he didn't already pass up an opportunity to do all this just last issue:



Heck, Wolfman can't even keep his sense of scale consistent:



1. Aren't they outside of Earth and its dimension right now?
2. Isn't Trigon invading the ENTIRE dimension, not just one planet?



Ohhh. Now he's invading our universe...


But Wolfman does finally complicate Trigon when he hesitates after Raven openly defies him and opts to die rather than stand by his side. It's a minor moment that passes quickly, but it's incredibly significant to me. It's the first moment in which Trigon ceases to be a one-dimensional villain, existing just to create conflict. He is now a father -- the worst father who has ever existed, but still a father, complete with conflicted love/hate feelings towards his offspring.

Well done.


Raven gets a little more complex, too. This is the first time Wolfman explains her being an empath, naturally feeling all the emotions around her at all times and able to heal by absorbing the pain of others. The little duel Wolfman and Perez depict over the fate of a little girl who calls Trigon a "monster" is a powerful, if heavy handed, illustration of the contrast between the two:








But the true star of this issue proves to be Arella. Last issue, I argued that she was perhaps mainstream comicdom's first depiction of a battered spouse, both physically and emotionally. Wolfman and Perez drive that home more clearly this time around as they delve into her past relationship with Trigon, all of it reading as a vivid and startlingly realistic allegory for an abusive marriage:





Arella's hiding among the clerics of Azar, unwilling to face her abuser again until her daughter's well-being is placed in jeopardy, becomes a very understandable conflict, as a result:





...her final sacrifice all the more touching and meaningful because of its clear real-world equivalent:



How many real-world battered women and men stay in the home, "blocking the doorway," in order to shield their children from the horrors behind it?



Wolfman and Perez still clearly haven't fully considered this plot, nor the forces involved, but they do so much right with the characterizations and symbolism that it's largely forgivable. As with the last two issues, I got extremely bored halfway through and often had to re-read pages as my mind was wandering, but the end absolutely warranted the effort this time around.


IMPORTANT DETAILS:

- So the Titans finally do the thing Raven supposedly assembled them to do in the first place, working together to defeat Trigon:





It's still illogical as a pay-off. Why didn't they do this last time around, how could Raven have known this would work since the key ingredient was Arella and Raven had no idea she'd get involved, how could Vic's circuits possibly be designed to handle and amplify Starfire's blast, and most importantly...




"I learned of you six, EACH with the specific abilities I needed to defeat Trigon" my ass. They totally forgot about Changeling and won the day anyway.

But it's still a powerful moment that, if you don't think about it too carefully, validates the team's existence and gives it a rebirth of sorts after it fell apart with the revelation about Raven's lies two issues back. A nice little bookend to the first major story arc of this series.


- Perez is back on art, and boy does it feel good. He's still got a lot to learn about faces, but man did I love this spread:






MINOR DETAILS

- Perez and Serpe makes absolutely no distinction between young Arella and Wonder Girl:




- Make up your mind, guys. Is Trigon a horrific unholy demon capable of being summoned by a satanic rite, or is he a sci-fi galactic warlord:



Suddenly, he's Darth Vader, about to prove a point by blowing up Alderon.


- This sequence makes no damn sense. Robin tells Kid Flash to scout Trigon's planet at super speed, and just as he does so, Trigon's pet monster somehow manages to get in his way at even faster speed:



...but, best yet, the rest of the team is now somehow there:

Okay, this was the issue I saw on the stand, not 4 or 5 (I haven't gone back to check my collection). You posted the images that have been popping up in my head. I do recall the sequence with the child and it was pretty strong stuff, for the era. Give it 5 or 6 years and comics are offing people left and right.

Everyone who worked at Marvel in the 70s seemed to be big on staircase across infinite voids. Must have been a lot of Escher prints in the Bullpen.

The fans I remember buying TNTT at the time did not think Swan was a perfect fit for a title that--under Perez's artistic charge--was creating a new, exciting language at DC. To many, Perez was part of a still building future of comics (started a few years earlier), and Swan's style was not.

I think I like this issue a lot more than you do. I thought it was very, very good. It's scary and it does a good job at building up the mythology. I love the environs and the creatures. Trigon looks much more impressive drawn by Perez than by Swan. The two page spread (at east across the bottom of the pages) of the floating staircase toward Trigon's dimension is epic. It's beautiful but scary, and the type of thing that Perez does amazingly well.

But yes, consistency is a big weakness. Also, Wolfman and Perez have a tendency to quickly reverse the fortunes of the Titans from victory to defeat (and vice versa) in ways that don't seem earned. For instance, Trigon easily beats the team only to be defeated by them fairly quickly later. I'm not a fan of villains that are shown as too uber-powerful, which makes their failure to kill off all the heroes confusing. Trigon blows up a planet with little effort, but couldn't do that to Earth after he's retrieved Raven. And yet he has trouble with the Titans.


Yup. There's all the aspects of horrifically bad parenting, especially domineering, brutal fathers.



This is an amazing sequence in that it really captures the horror of Trigon. I'm a bit surprised to see something like this in a comic of this era: a little kid graphically obliterated. I wonder if there was parental backlash. And we see the martyrdom (and/or masochism) of Raven as she takes on the girl's suffering.



I think I sort of got this, but it didn't fully register before your review. Yes, definitely a very strong way to depict terrible human behavior in a fictional fantasy setting. It's really scary to see Trigon's transformation from his false guise, and it symbolizes how abusive husbands or boyfriends might appear wonderful at first before showing their abusive side. This is also a part that seems to push the boundaries of the Comics Code Authority.

Arella's hiding among the clerics of Azar, unwilling to face her abuser again until her daughter's well-being is placed in jeopardy, becomes a very understandable conflict, as a result:


Good analogy.


At least it's sort of paid off. I'm willing to accept it as cloudiness to whatever precognition Raven is working with.

Arella's origin does have a bit of Dungeons & Dragons moral panic. "I rejected religion, embraced the occult." Despite the darkness of this issue, this is Pollyanna-ish naivete in my opinion. Every major religion has some awful sects or practitioners, who use it to justify awful things.

While the collective recollection on this thread is that the Kid Flash/Raven thing doesn't really end up going anywhere, it's one of the most interesting parts of these early issues. Kid Flash thinks to himself that even though Raven manipulated him, he still loves her. The messy, confused, conflicted nature of both their feelings has quite an impact.

Also, I love Raven's aesthetic. It's nice to see her face in the latter part of the issue. Extremely long-term foreshadowing: I remember Raven's face will have significance in the future.