Well put.
My thinking in keeping them mostly on the sidelines is, I think they’ve moved past the Titans stage. It’ll always be “their” team, but they don’t really need it any more, and having them on it, or AS it, makes it more a Young Adult Titans. The newer generations need a way to establish themselves the way Dick & Co. did. These OG Titans need to be fielding solo series, or prominent support roles in established books, joining the Justice League...
One major drawback these heroes face IMO, is at DC it’s basically just the JLA. At Marvel, characters that started as teens and have been allowed to mature (the OG X-Men for example) have different teams doing different things they can all be part of, to include non mutant teams like the Avengers. They don’t all need to crowd into one team and be seen as pushing older heroes out. It’s just a more fluid situation.
DC set it up in a way that it’d make sense for the JLA to be the next step for the Titans, leaving YJ to graduate to the Titans, and so on...but that’ll never happen so there’s a huge bottleneck of characters that will never be allowed to go anywhere.
The best DC can do is keep rotating them amongst themselves and try and make it interesting.
Taking Dick & Co. out of the equation at least frees up a little space at the lower level.
I think DC really needs to break the expectation that the Titans need to graduate to the JL. it shouldn't be a stepping stone. It's difficult to do when the five leads are former sidekicks and still very visibly tied to other franchises, but not impossible. We just need the right writing talent. I don't think any Titan needs to be on the League except for Wally as the Flash. The expectation kind of created the bottleneck, but even then it wasn't as bad until Tim's generation took the Titan name and added the Teen back. I think the only generation that should be called Titans is Dick's; firmly drop the teen at this point, and I don't want to see any other Robin as part of that group ever. The nexts gens of sidekicks can GTFO and carve out their own niche.
Pushing them into solos may be a good idea in theory, but I just don't think any of them are designed to sustain a solo at this point besides Dick (with the notable exception of Wally, but he needs to be the only Flash to do it, and that avenue is closed). And even Dick mainly carries one under the Bat-brand. And I think that's ok; they were designed as an ensemble cast to build each other up, sometimes that means the characters can't really go off on their own and have the same impact. It's why very few X-Men other than Wolverine can last long out in the wilderness on their own.
Which really was a bad idea. It didn't used to be this way. Maybe with the original Teen Titans (though really, they seemed as much a social club as anything in early days), but not with the NTT. They were their own thing, and not treated as junior league for many years. YJ, again, specifically being kids (as were the original Teen Titans), were kinda grow-into-JLish, maybe - they were certainly more explicitly and directly monitored than the original TT were) but I'd have never expected them to become a new Teen Titans. Terrible decision, IMO, I also don't like "mixed" teams, where some members are explicitly junior and meant to learn/take orders from others, so that factors in. As does my annoyance in the lack of allowing Raven and Gar to be grown ups. But the YJ name didn't keep (though there's a resurgence now, of course), and then there's Damian with his TT instead of doing his own thing. Also don't think Robins should always be leaders, but that's a separate issue.DC set it up in a way that it’d make sense for the JLA to be the next step for the Titans, leaving YJ to graduate to the Titans, and so on...but that’ll never happen so there’s a huge bottleneck of characters that will never be allowed to go anywhere.
One thing that made the early NTT different as a team to me (and probably non-coincidentally more X-Menish) was that for the most the part they all in lived in one city (speedster exception), and didn't have their own books. They were a team first and foremost. The JL or even YJ are more spread out and have things going on in other cities and such. It's also a reason I could see Titans-membership not being a permanent thing - life takes individuals in different directions and they don't all have flight powers or super-speed jets to take them back to NYC at a moment's notice. I didn't like Wally's waffling over whether he wanted powers or to be a hero, though I acknowledge it as the sort of angsty storyline characters have occasionally been given since the bronze age (well, probably earlier, if we want to talk about Peter Parker and how many times he'd ditched that Spider-Suit over in his NY). The powers/health issue was even odder. I'd probably have had him pulled too many ways and end up saying "this team is a full time job and I already have a full time job" because before the Post-COIE retcon, Wally wasn't a sidekick, really. He was a solo hero in his own city. That's the way I'd define them differently - the Titans (adult version) is a full-time gig, where the JLA is a supplement to solo heroing. Only one kid-team at a time, and it's a part time gig for its participants.
Last edited by Tzigone; 10-12-2019 at 02:50 PM.
Riv86672, I agree with you on at least some of the Titans moving on. I'm not sure if it's best to keep the Titans name for newer team or have them define their own. Practically speaking, there's a lot to be said for name recognition and marketing on Titans, but it can also theoretically be problematic if people are expecting a certain group when they pick it up and don't get it (and you have to address gradual cast changes v. abrupt shakeups). Then again, we've probably already moved past that, since we went from the Fab Five to having Lilith, etc. and then of course the NTT and on to Tim's team. Thematically, I like each group of young ones choosing their own name (I'm not fond of adult-legacies, though I didn't used to mind them), but I'm not sure that can outweigh the business perspective issues and brand recognition. I don't know that I'd keep them in a certain age-bracket, but it does help for a certain degree of relatability between characters and younger characters are more likely to be the phase of life that suits the setup. Though Donna managed while married. For some characters, those who never plan to leave the city, it might work for very long-term.
And, of course, there's the issue of whether the characters are able to support solo books.
I think the line-ups of each team would play a factor in distinguishing them.
DC has a lot of characters that work best in teams.
More than one team can accommodate.
While some readers would blindly buy a JLA book or a Titans book on name alone, there are readers that would buy Team X (whatever it's called) if Vixen, Zatanna, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Firestorm, Cyborg, Fire & Ice, Starfire, Nightwing, Huntress, Power Girl, Wildcat, Batgirl, Batwoman, Green Arrow or Black Canary were in it. (Or whatever character is someone's fave.)
It really wouldn't matter why the team came together or what their 'mission' was.
Only that their favorite character was on the team.
"There's magic in the sound of analog audio." - CNET.
What were the other two?
I don't think the ship has sailed. If Hickman's on X-Men for as long as he was on Avengers, that's three years. He could easily be Bendis's successor on LOSH, there's every chance his run won't last that long (I'm betting on two years).
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