TEEN TITANS: the Geoff Johns run

For the past week or so, I've been working on a review of Craig Thompson's Blankets; it's an impressive and beautiful work that evoked an especially personal response from me, given how similar my religious background--and just as importantly, my relationship to it--seem to Thompson's.  Perhaps because it's so personal for me, I'm having a hard time organizing the points I'd like to make about it.

Setting something aside and switching gears for a while gives my subconscious a chance to sort things like that out for me.  The recently-released omnibus of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's classic run on New Teen Titans arrived for me not too long ago, and I've been looking forward to digging into it.  A funny thing happened as I started to (re)read it, though.  I began to remember stuff I'd read online about the latest (at least until the reboot) version of Teen Titans (with which I'm not at all familiar).  Like comics creator Tim Seeley complaining that it's "GORIER" than his own gruesome horror title Hack/Slash.  And J. Caleb Mozzocco's horrified review of, "A couple of very violent Teen Titans trades."  And this sequence from Sean Whitmore and Brandon Hanvey's webcomic Comic Critics: 

When I saw that Geoff Johns had written the first 45 issues, I recalled Sean T. Collins cluing me in back during Blackest Night that Johns has long been notorious for over-the-top scenes of dismemberment and evisceration. 

And suddenly I had to check it out.  It seems that my immersion in a sensitive black-and-white autobio indie comic gave me a perverse appetite for seeing lots of brand-name superhero teens in technicolor costumes get fed through a meat-grinder in as exploitative a manner as possible.  (And yes, I have read most of The Boys, but I wanted to see it played straight, without the dark humor, scathing irony, and meta- bullshit that someone like Ennis or Veitch brings to such material.) 

Well, I've made it through the entirety of Johns's run, and I'm sorry to say, it was nowhere near bad enough to satisfy my craving.  I found shockingly few "Hey Kids! Comics!" moments, to my great disappointment.

In fairness (?), both Mozzocco's review and the Comic Critics sequence refer to issues after Johns's departure, so maybe if I just keep plugging, things will take a welcome turn for the worse. 

Since I'm on the topic, I might as well say a little more about how I found the issues I've read so far.  The truth is, they're thoroughly mediocre.  I didn't have to struggle to make myself keep reading, but neither did I feel engaged at any point whatsoever.  I would never recommend them, and I'd say so if anyone cared to ask, but if someone piped up to praise or defend them, I'd probably just shrug and say, "Suit yourself."  There are some things they get pretty far wrong, though, that I think are worth mentioning.

Most discussions about the kinds of fantasies that find expression in superhero comics center around the superpowers/abilities and their use/abuse, but when I think about my love of bronze-age Avengers, X-Men, and New Teen Titans, two other kinds of fantasies were crucial to my enjoyment.  You may have noticed these are all team titles, and I'd say the fantasy of being part of a team accounts for much of their appeal.  Obviously, "being part of a team" isn't some exotic experience only available to costumed superheroes, but superhero team comics offer a concentrated dose of what's pleasurable about it, like having each other's backs and working together to accomplish something.  As for the second kind, there's also very much a "lifestyle fantasy" thing going on with amazing cribs like Avengers Mansion, the X-Mansion, and Titans Tower.  Back in the day on both X-Men and Avengers, John Byrne drew lots of absolutely drool-worthy interiors.  Tying this in with the team fantasy is the fact that the superheroes are sharing these sumptuous digs with other superheroes, who are mostly attractive and fascinating people.

Johns certainly gets that these are important fantasy components of superhero comics.  He gets it so much, in fact, that he foregrounds them as the very reason this batch of Teen Titans gets together in the first place.   The idea is that the Teen Titans will hang out together on weekends, and Titans Tower is the peculiarly awesome clubhouse where they get to kick back and chill.  They yammer constantly about being part of a team, being there for each other, being friends, being family.  This is where it really goes wrong, because this stuff is best left implicit and left in the background.  Johns is hamfisted about it from start to finish, and it gets hokier with each tiresome reiteration.

Then, apart from all the talk, these themes really don't get supported, and sometimes even get undercut.  Even though the lifestyle fantasy is explicit and central to the premise of the title, we seldom get much sense of what it's actually like to hang out at Titans Tower.  For being so supposedly close-knit, there's also an awful lot of squabbling--at one point, so much that other superheroes start to suggest maybe they should break up as a team.  Done right, this would come off as the natural love-hate everyone has for those closest in their lives.  Johns does it wrong, though, so instead of the squabbling seeming to be an expression of their closeness, it just clangs discordantly against their claims to be so close.           

All right, so I'm probably just throwing good time and money after bad, but I'm going to keep on at least through the two trades Mozzocco reviewed, in the hopes of getting to some properly horrid gorn.  I want to see a Titan die, dammit!