What If The New Teen Titans Generation Succeeded The JLA After CoIE?

[Lee Stone]

I'd say more like Avengers and X-Men.

Rankings-wise I'd put Defenders as more Doom Patrol or Outsiders. Reasonably well known, but not exactly A or even B-List as solos apart from Doctor Strange and Hulk....

Yeah, I just didn't use X-Men in my analogy because there are some that think being an Avenger ranks higher than being an X-Man. And I was trying to avoid the idea that the Justice League is a step up for Titans, or virtually any superhero team.
Avengers and Defenders, at least the original team, had been seen as more as equals, especially with the founders.

[Timothy Hunter]

If there was a time to do it, this was the optimal time. I would have been fine with gradually retiring them the JL characters and letting the Titans slide into their space, and doing experimentation across the whole company to create new mythologies.

But do it that way, not pass down the mantles. Especially at that time, the Titans were their biggest property and Dick proved he didn't need to be Batman to be successful. I dislike this whole notion that the Titans need to graduate from their property to the JL. It undermines everything they have accomplished on their own, and has stuck around so long now that it creates the stigma of the Titans being a dead end until they move on instead of being what they once were: the DC equivalent to the X-Men. Nobody wants to see graduating to the Avengers as the permanent endgame for the X-Men, so why should the same be true for the Titans? Only five of them are connected to JL members, when the majority are not League affiliations they lose the need to be connected.

I doubt Dick would be Batman in B89. Or else they'd need a different director than Tim Burton, he was barley interested in doing a CBM with the actual Batman.



I'm not so sure. Bruce and Clark are carved in stone as being Batman and Superman as far as the larger general populace is concerned. Casuals know their names without having read a single book. I doubt they care only for the mantles. Superman in particular has never been a mantle in any way that matters. Some imaginary stories from the 60s don't count because they happened every month and were quickly forgotten. Superman is Clark Kent is Superman.

Their core themes stick around more or less throughout the reboots, and that's not getting into the fans who actually still like multiple takes and still wouldn't want replacements. Them being more archetypes than firm characters with arcs actually in some ways makes them stronger and more versatile than the next generation down.

Let me reiterate myself. I am not trying to insinuate that the Titans are lesser than the Justice League. That was not my intention at all. However, it can be argued that the Titans are the next generation of superheroes, after the Justice League. They might not be inferior to the Justice League, but there has been a precedent set by DC that their main superhero team has the word 'justice' in their title. From the Justice Society to the Justice League. If DC were to make the decision to consciously show that the 60s sidekicks were the leading generation of their universe, it would make sense for them to be part of a team with a moniker, similar to, if not exactly like the Justice League. Additionally to the point, if DC were to make it the official status quo that Dick Grayson, Donna Troy, Wally West, and other heroes of their age range were the leading heroes of the current DC status quo, as have Bruce Wayne, Diana Prince, and Barry Allen before them, it would he rather anticlimactic for them to stay as the Titans, in my opinion.

[Aahz]

DC's offical timelines are usually fairly consistent about Dick becoming Nightwing less than a year before Crisis, Knightfall taking place about 3-4 years after that, and the "Big Guns" JLA forming the year after.

I dinD't had the time to look up the timelines.
But if the "Big Guns" JLA really formed like you said about 4-5 years afer COIE, that the Titans would have been at that point at a more appropriate age and experience level to take over.
Dick allready becoming Batman after being Nightwing for just a year seems for me still to fast. And Roy, Donna and Garth were still only Speedy, Wonder Girl and Aqualad, and hadn't moved on to Arsenal, Troia and Tempest at that point.

The main point of inconsistency appears to be the length of time he spent as Robin before becoming Nightwing. The offical timelines favor 3-4 years, however at least one writer threw in a reference that suggested 10-11 (Wolfmann IIRC) and one of my favourite timeline sites argues well in favor of a 8-year middle ground (based on him being in 7th grade during early Robin stories and celebrating his 20th birthday about the time he changed to Nightwing).

Dick was 19 when he became Nightwing, he had his 20th birthday during CoIE, and like you said he became Nightwing about a year before that.

[Shamrock Holmes]

Dick was 19 when he became Nightwing, he had his 20th birthday during CoIE, and like you said he became Nightwing about a year before that.

Agreed, I don't think a great deal of thought was put into trying to make the Silver Age material fit in the 1990s. It's a little difficult to judge from the art, but Dick certainly doesn't look 16 in the early SA books and 17 during TT vol 1, which the implication of 3-4 to Nightwing at 19-20 would suggest.

[Sutekh]

It's Ross yet again indulging his inner "Silver-age traditionalist" by having the heroes he grew up on "solve everything" before they retire or die, and having the next generation, instead of proving themselves heroes worthy of their predecessors, learn only that they are not needed.

Eh, if you want to dress up and play superhero in a post-superhero world, just go where the crime is.

"Huh, our parents changed the world, for the better, and now it's kind of boring here. What's this I hear about an Earth 3? Sounds like a real crapshow, and I bet that they could seriously use some heroes over there... Who's with me?"

[caj]

I still think the JLA and Titans can co-exist. I remember how excited I was when this came out (although I'm still confused as to why Flash wasn't in the issue):

[Thaxander12]

Robin scared the crap outta me