Originally Posted by
Comic-Reader Lad
Some people brought up the X-Men, but while NTT and LSH were popular in the 1980s, they don't have the fundamental gravitas at their cores that X-Men does.
The X-Men has the persecuted minority angle at its core that can withstand years of bad stories and directions.
With NTT and LSH, all of the best stories have already been told with those characters, so all the later revamps tried to do was "recapture the magic" -- in other words "rehash the past." Even worse, when they weren't rehashing the past, the new stuff they were coming up with wasn't as interesting.
Another important factor is that, while the X-Men characters are a team, there have been several of them that have broken out and become fan favorites as individuals. Wolverine is the most obvious, but also Rogue, Gambit, Kitty, Storm, Phoenix, Deadpool, Cable, and others. No, most of them can't support a solo book for very long, but fans do like seeing them together and having writers explore their pasts.
Whereas, none of the individual Teen Titans or Legionnaires have achieved that kind of fame on an individual level. No one really goes apeshit over Star Boy or Pantha -- not even Cyborg. It's true that Starfire, Raven, and Changeling did drive storylines in the early years of the series, but Wolfman and Levitz really didn't deep dive into the characters and give them fully fleshed out backgrounds the way Claremont did with the X-Men.
I think that's where NTT and LSH eventually lost steam. They were more plot driven than X-Men. Even when X-Men was uninteresting or downright bad in terms of storylines, the depth of the characters relationships with each other kept readers coming back. They became more real to their fans than the NTT or LSH did to theirs, and so when the direction was unpopular or the storylines were uninspired, fans were more willing to bail.