Oh, I don't know; I could see Raven and Zatanna hitting the shoe stores together, checking out the sales.

If Perez wanted to have fun, he should have done a sight gag of Raven opening her closet and have it filled with shoe boxes, because she keeps snapping off heels during combat.

Well, you could do that with any female superhero. They all wear heels, and it really doesn't make any sense.  Look nice, but makes no sense. Good luck fighting supervillains in those things.

New Teen Titans #8 (June 1981)



"A Day In the Lives..."

Script: George Pérez (plot); Marv Wolfman (plot, script)
Pencils: George Pérez (breakdowns); Romeo Tanghal (finished art)
Inks: Romeo Tanghal
Colors: Adrienne Roy
Letters: Ben Oda

Grade: B+

Contrary to what the cover and title may promise, these are not 25 pages of pure and unhindered character development. A significant amount of time is allotted to a non-sensical Raven conflict that is lighter on significance than Perez and Wolfman might like us to believe. Raven considers becoming a student at "Manhattan University" (I guess DC was afraid NYU might sue?), and, immediately upon checking it out with her soul self, she conveniently wanders upon three terrorists who have taken hostages and are about to blow the place up.

Ugh.

She saves the day, but as she is doing so, Perez and Wolfman decide for the first time that Raven has a five minute limit on how long her soul self can be apart from her body. Wow. EXACTLY 300 seconds. Funny how nature and magic conform to our artificial measurements of time. Anyway, after a really long, prose-heavy, and generally unnecessary struggle, she discovers it's actually pretty damn easy to push past the five minute limit. And this somehow gives her a renewed sense of purpose since the followers of Azar were wrong. I really could have done without this segment.


Fortunately, in the moments where Perez and Wolfman stop pushing an obligatory conflict on us and trust that they can maintain our interest with pure character-building, they fare much better.


Precious little time is spent on Dick, but we are told that he is now working at a circus again (a nod to the events of DC Comics Presents #31, which are about to continue into his new backup feature in Batman, beginning next month).


Gar also doesn't get much attention, but that's likely because a second conflict introduced here and being set up for next issue is going to feature him heavily.


Donna and Kory get a little bit of on-panel time where we finally learn Donna's day job is as a relatively high-profile freelance fashion photographer, and that she is dating divorcee Terry Long. Donna is getting Kory into modelling, apparently her skin and hair tones being just within the realm of human possibility to the point that no one really questions it.



and a completely heinous and unnecessary complication is first suggested in there clearly being mutual attraction between Terry and Kory:



I don't remember this from my previous readings and sincerely hope it's going to get abandoned. I used to LOVE Terry and Donna together -- a truly normal and loving post-feminist relationship. Don't f**k with my adolescent impressions, please!


Raven's conflict really doesn't convince me she has grown all that much, and Perez and Wolfman's attempts to finally explain how her soul self works is weirdly contradictory, even within the span of a single comic book page:





So...she isn't tangible, but she can affect tangible things??


But the real star of this issue is Vic, who has (by far) the most significant and powerful character evolution within these pages, first visiting his pre-accident girlfriend:





And then (perhaps a little too conveniently) stumbling upon new purpose in Central Park:





This scene always resonated with me as a kid, and I wonder if it didn't subconsciously help inspire me to become a teacher.

By the way, we discussed Sarah Simms earlier in this thread, and why Wolfman and Perez abandoned what was clearly originally intended to be an interracial romance between her and Vic. Ready to resume that discussion?


Oh yeah. Whining Wally ain't gone yet, and I have to wonder WHY. All the introspection Perez and Wolfman try to give to him which largely comes of as whining is ultimately handled far better with Dick. But I suppose it was ambitious to have a costumed hero spend significant time debating whether or not he wanted to continue devoting his time to that pursuit. Then again, hadn't Peter Parker done all that (better) almost two decades earlier?



And, speaking of that aspect of this story, I'm a little bothered by just how patriarchal Perez and Wolfman depict this family that's clearly being passed off as their concept of the middle class ideal nuclear unit:



Mom does all the work while dad sits back and is the credible voice of authority, reason, and merit in the West household. Even a decade earlier, this depiction would have felt more than a little outdated.


And, once again, I have to note the continuing evolution of Perez's art. He isn't trying anything as big and ambitious as we saw from him in New Teen Titans #6, but he's taking more time with the fine details, especially faces, and proving just how brilliantly he can work with smaller panels and story moments for perhaps the first time:





IMPORTANT DETAILS

- 1st appearance of Terry Long, Donna's divorced boyfriend.

- 1st appearance of Sarah Simms and her students. Vic begins working with them.

- Donna is a professional photographer

- Kory becomes a model

- Dick is now working at a circus

- 1st appearance of The Puppeteer



MINOR DETAILS:

- Well I guess we're retconning this little lapse of logic from NTT #2:



with the opening of this story:



unless Perez and Wolfman are suggesting Earth gets colder than Tamaran in Winter, but warmer than Tamaran in summer. Maybe Tamaran always maintains the exact same axis angle in relation to its sun??


- Man, this depiction is offensive and unnecessary:




- I'm bothered by the fact that Gar drives around in a high-priced sports car and parks it right out front in Vic's slum:



Not only doesn't he need it (dude can fly anytime he likes), but it really doesn't suit the persona we've seen previously where Gar doesn't feel like he fits within the billionaire lifestyle into which he has been thrust. Plus, can he even be old enough to legally drive on his own yet??


- This may be my favorite image of Vic ever.





Last issue, I noted that Perez and Wolfman tied up nearly all of their plot points and character arcs. Now, they're setting the bar higher and making it clear they are far more invested in personal journeys than super-powered ones.

I mean...it's realistic. No matter how good a heart someone has, getting into a serious exclusive relationship with a dude who is at least half metal is a difficult decision to make. Sex and physical attraction have got to factor into the equation, there. For Sarah to just ignore that because she's such a good person is unrealistic and (perhaps) unfair. I could fall in love with someone who isn't physically complete, but it's not the kind of thing that would happen casually. There would have to be a profoundly deep connection, earned over a long period of time, before our romantic connection would outweigh the other factors. Things like a warm, deep, flesh-on-flesh hug, Sarah would be saying goodbye to that forever. You really really need to know the person you are choosing is worth something like that. Of course, some people very much are.




The difference being that Perez and Wolfman are clearly judging the belitting of the women. Not so much the portrayal of Italian Americans.



Yeah...

I certainly question it.

I know this is a superhero comic and I'm supposed to suspend disbelief, but I find it really hard to belief no one's looked at this gold-skinned woman with knee-length auburn hair and failed to at least notice a resemblance to a certain alien superheroine sporting the exact same skin and hair.

Maybe it's the time that's passed from the first time I read it but I find it to be an average issue. C+ at best. Of all the small vignettes , I would have rather have seen more about Dick in the circus.

Shax, I'm surprised that you didn't like the Raven interlude.  Wolfman was defining the  abilities and Limits of a relatively new character.  And the time limit flaw is something that all characters that do that astral type separation have . I think Negative Man from the Doom Patrol has the issue. 

The Vic portion was okay and introduces his ex girlfriend as an unsympathetic person. Don't worry she gets a taste of Karma later on in the series.

It wasn't until many years later that I heard that Terry Long was considered a type of perv , that might possibly have been dating student after student. He certainly flirts with Kory , which is a kind of sleazy. 

As I said, It's possible I don't think much of this issue because it's 39 years old but , at the time, it was an important piece in building the newcomers. It's a common thing to have a down issue after high action arcs in the comic biz, this fills the bill.

This all might have been designed to coordinate with this story that would be hitting shelves with a cover date of March 1981.



In it, Dick is first reunited with Waldo the Clown, whom he knew while still at the Circus with his parents. By the end of the story, it's suggested Dick will be hanging around for a while to reconnect. Perhaps someone at DC was considering giving Dick an ongoing (backup?) solo feature over at DC Comics Presents, where he'd continue to reconnect with his past by rejoining a circus?

Or it could just be a massive coincidence.




I considered noting that, but the guy hiring Donna for the jeans ads (not the walking Italian stereotype) notes that what makes Donna so in-demand is her classical aesthetic taste -- essentially her Grecko-Roman upbringing on Paradise Island. And the Greeks and Romans LOVED their nude and partially nude women. So I think these things might not be in conflict for Donna.

And, from a feminist perspective, Perez is an equal-opportunity cheese-cake himself, often designing costumes that have the men showing as much flesh as the ladies, sometimes more (could you imagine a woman wearing Cyborg or Nightwing's original costumes?? That's A LOT of chest!), so I doubt he saw a problem with this.




Interesting. Certainly, the classy, feminist, shy guy who gets the amazon would be a tempting avatar for the writer. But then does Wolfman think Terry's panting after Kory is acceptable?




Well said, all around.