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New Teen Titans #18



"A Pretty Girl Is Like a-- Maladi!"

Script: Marv Wolfman
Pencils: George Pérez (breakdowns); Romeo Tanghal (finished art)
Inks: Romeo Tanghal
Colors: Adrienne Roy
Letters: John Costanza

Grade: B-

Hey Kids! Now that we're finally done mining Doom Patrol continuity, Marv and George are actually bringing back someone from the original Teen Titans run!

Omigosh! Is it Speedy?

Nope. He just came back in the NTT Blue Ribbon Digest. Granted, most readers of this comic wouldn't have even seen that story, but technically he's been used.


So is it Aqualad?

Nope. Same problem.


Okay, is it Mal or Lilith?

Nope. Much as I'd personally love to see those two return, Wolfman essentially wrote Cyborg and Raven to be Mal and Lilith. Might seem a little redundant having them stand side by side.


Then it must be Hawk and Dove!

Uh, no.


Okay, so it's a more minor character from the original series. Someone who only appeared a few times, but was still memorable. Mr. Jupiter? The Gargoyle? The Mad Mod? Garn?


Nope, nope, nope, and nope. It's (are you ready for this)...

STARFIRE!


(crickets)



With 62 published appearances across two decades, the original Teen Titans run generated quite a few memorable allies and villains who all would have been fun to resurrect for a one-shot nostalgia trip, but Marv and George aren't really interested in that. There's a reason why they didn't ask who to bring back for this story in the letter column, and there's a reason why they can bring back a character from the original run while Marv states in the letter column of this very issue that:



Let's be clear that Marv and Len wrote one classic Titans story. They plotted the aborted concept for the infamous Teen Titans #20, Marv wrote the B-story to Teen Titans #22, and Dick Giordano claims they pitched the concepts for Mal and Lilith, but they only ever wrote one complete Teen Titans story, so of course that's the one Marv is dredging up here.

And "dredge" is the right word for it. He belabors the Titans reminiscing so many specifics from such a forgettable story, and even has Kid Flash play out his prejudism/intolerance towards the Russian Starfire once again, just so that Marv can drive home the same idea about stereotypes a second time.

It's just not a story nor character worth remembering, but it's all we're going to get from classic Titans history for a while yet because it's Marv's, and we already know Marv's a little petty when it comes to this stuff.


So we've got Starfire back, and Marv wastes no time explaining the name confusion:




and wastes little time after that playing up Kid Flash's distrust of Russians. Some of the back and forth is pretty good:




In fact, this particular exchange felt eerily like it was straight out of 2020:



MAGA?

Of course, even though Marv writes this story like we were all there for the original and remember it clearly, he apparently expects us to forget that Wally already had the same transformation he'll make by the end of this story at the end of that story.



Oh well.


By the way, George can't resist making Starfire's hair more thick and frizzy, just like he does with so many other characters:




Anyway, I'm always fascinated by dangerous virus/plague stories, and this one definitely got my attention. Once again though, perhaps this story feels too real for 2020:



Of course, check out how careful Vic isn't being later in this story:





As for the plot itself, it was utterly predictable. It ends like the final revelation was supposed to be a big twist for the reader (as well as Wally), but it was pretty obvious from the first page that Starfire was Maladi's fiance, and we kept getting more and more obvious hints:



Still, it was a touching idea. It just could have been delivered better.


And Marv and George do their best to continue to splice deep characterization into an otherwise busy plot:




But sometimes it feels downright forced and out of place:




Finally, Perez's breakdowns were particularly alive as of this issue:











A wasted trip down memory lane that stranded us in the wrong chapter of classic Titans history, but it was generally well-executed and eerily current all the same.


Important Details:

- Marv is intentionally vague about how long it's been since the team last met Starfire (15 years earlier by real-world time), repeatedly having the characters refer to it as having happened "a few years back":



Titans chronology was pretty much doomed from the start of this volume. Never mind Gar suddenly and inexplicably being younger than the rest of them. They were clearly older teenagers by the end of the original run, were still older teenagers for the Rozakis run, and here they are in the Wolfman/Perez run still being depicted as teens. Let's be generous and assume they were sixteen by the end of the original run (unlikely. They definitely seemed older). So the long span of time in which there was no team, and Mal was dutifully manning the Titans listening outpost, as well as the ten Rozakis adventures that ensued, only made up a year or so, leaving the Titans around 17 when that book ended. It's clearly been a while since that run when the team is reformed for this book, and we've now had 19 adventures here. So the Titans are 18? 19? Any older, and they can't be the New TEEN Titans.

Marv eventually solves that problem by changing the title of the book to "The New Titans" six years from now, but yeah -- one just has to accept that most comic series have wonky internal chronologies. I just keep expecting more from a book that is written on a more sophisticated level than its brethren. rberman, care to discuss how the X-Men handled this in contrast? I know Claremont was originally very explicit in dating things like what year it was when young Ororo was caught in an Earthquake and having Charles and Cain Marko fight in the Korean(?) War together, but that he later backed off from providing real world dates and removed such references in his Classic X-Men reprints.


- The Titans are now working with King Faraday.



It made sense for the Titans to have a government contact, but the characterization here isn't winning me over.



Minor Details:

- Why did Robin make the explicit point that only Raven could infiltrate the hospital?



We just saw Gar tracking Starfire as a fly in a previous scene. And aren't we now playing up the fact that Dick is a master detective? Why not have him go undercover as Dick Grayson? I mean, everyone on the team already knows who he is, and Starfire would have no reason to assume Dick Grayson is robin.


- Going along with the idea that Dick is a master detective, why is the ENTIRE team tracking Starfire in a giant, unorganized clump for two days straight??




- Who was the first team to have a vanity meeting table shaped like the first letter of the team name? The Avengers? I know (the original) Atari Force did it too.

While we conservatives roll our eyes at the latest "conservative = intolerant" caricature from the pen of one of those no-good dirty New York liberals, it's at least an attempt at characterization, recognizing that characters from different American subcultures ought to have different viewpoints on real-world matters, and yet can still work together. I daresay we'd see even less of this in modern comics than in the 80s.


This is where I have questions. Starting with "Is Marv Wolfman ignorant of science, or just ignoring inconvenient truths?"

Russian Starfire says it's a "deadly bacillus," when refers to an elliptical-shaped bacterium, like Escherichia Coli.



But you don't "irradiate" someone with a bacillus. You "infect" them. Wolfman wants his threat to be (1) radioactive, and (2) contagious. Radioactive particles can certainly spread, but don't bring "bacillus" or "plague" into the equation then. The doctor certainly thinks it's radiation poisoning, not infectious disease. Not that this doctor is old enough (or the correct nationality) to have been on the scene at the cleanup after Hiroshima.



This is one of these convenient fictional diseases that is completely cured if you're sick less than two weeks, but that definitely kills you if you're sick one day longer. I guess the disease was contained in this file folder buried in the Russian archives, which the old guy gave to Maladi (fun name). So he's dead too, right?



I guess that's how Russian Starfire knew what symptoms to watch for in the customs agent. His superiors discovered the sick Russian clerk, who confessed to his plot. And he somehow the clerk had the authority to send Maladi to America for a month, presumably on the dime of the Russian government, whose solution to this threat was to send a superhero undercover to track down and kill his own fiancee. Cold!

What did Maladi do in America for a month, anyway? She thought she was supposed to deliver this file to a Russian agent, but that was a ruse. Did she just wander the streets of Manhattan for a month, hoping someone would contact her, and never getting contacted by (or trying to contact) the KGB or Russian embassy? Speaking of the Russian Embassy, did they really give Russian Starfire permission to talk to the Titans alone, without a political handler present, about his murderous mission? What if he had told them the truth, instead of jumping out the window? Or maybe that's what they told him to do.




In the forward to one of the collected editions, Wolfman said he just wanted the series to be called "The Titans" in the first place, but a trademark issue forced the series to be "The New Teen Titans" on the outside, and he tried to ignore that on the inside. Except for Gar, I read the characters as early 20s. Most of them live independently, no parents in sight for a variety of reasons.

In X-Men and New Mutants, Claremont engaged in plenty of timeline prestidigitation based on the kind of story he wanted to tell at any given moment. Colossus certainly wasn't written like the high school student he supposedly was. Cyclops was still called "The young mutant" even 1993 (post-Claremont, in X-Men Unlimited #1). Kitty's age flipped back and forth between 13 and 14 despite multiple Christmases being shown. Nothing unusual for comic books. Even that Superboy story we were dissecting was set in the late 50s, which would mean that by 1975 (when the present day airplane scene occurs), Clark Kent is in his late 30s.




Yeah, that was dumb. The reason was just to give Raven a needed moment of characterization, wandering amidst sick people and being sickened herself empathetically. Her slinky gown and forehead pendant (and weird face) are not exactly inconspicuous in a hospital setting.



Two other things I noticed: Isn't "Kryszewski" a Polish name, not Russian?



And did NYC elevators still have human operators in 1981?

I was thinking that he was a Polish national who now lived in America. But you're correct that he could be American-born. As for his age, a doctor in the field is going to be mid-20s at a minimum. 35 years later he's going to be 60. Does this guy look 60? A young 60s maybe... but judging by his paunch, he doesn't work out a lot.


I figured that since he handed Maladi the file without wearing gloves, and she's shown to have acquired the illness from this, that he must also have acquired it, though we're not shown or told so.

According to an interview from The Comics Journal #79 quoted in this post by Chris a year ago:

WOLFMAN: I can’t take out Teen, for very totally different reasons. Neal Adams registered or trademarked something called The Titans for his portfolio and we could not technically take out the word teen. So it will always be the Teen Titans, even if they are 80 years old.

You know, I was always aware that Ambush Bug was out there, but I'd never actually read it. I just skimmed the first mini; that was pretty funny, albeit crammed with DC in-jokes, very much in the vein of what John Byrne was doing in Sensational She-Hulk. A proto-Deadpool or Squirrel Girl in some ways. I see that the various Ambush Bug stuff has never gotten a proper anthology re-release. Too bad; I would get it.

Regarding Superboy's story, someone said that we shouldn't judge it too harsh and with a modern sensibility, and of course readers of that era were perfectly ok with it and surely no one at the time saw anything wrong in the actions of the Super-Teacher. After all, well, those were different times.

Well, these are two letters commenting the story.


The relevant parts:


And


So, the point that the Super-Teacher actions were at least morally objectionable wasn't a totally alien and inconceivable concept for the sensibility of that time. But, evidently, it was for Superboy.

That's how I understand it. I never saw one of these, myself, so I can't speak from firsthand knowledge.



It's not a bad theory at that!

Wasn't this a big part of Reagan's campaign and image, though - that Republicans represented America's heartland? Obviously, it's a generalization, but it jibes with my memories of the time period. Midwest Conservative, East and West Coasts liberal.