Stan Lee expertly blended the trials and tribulations of teenage life with slam bang superhero action in his groundbreaking work on The Amazing Spider-Man and that has been a recipe for successful comics ever since. Marvel has used it well in titles like Nova, New Mutants, and New Warriors. DC's New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez was one of the best examples of the formula. The first 50 issues of that title have stood the test of time, and are still fondly remembered today.
;)
ReplyDeleteAwesome cover! I like how you mention the first FIFTY issues of Titans...HA! I think after that, they started to experiment with the brand, and Crisis took off and the Titans were never the same afterward.
I think it was '84 or '85 that the Titans started to unravel...
Nothing beats the class New Teen Titans! That lineup was awesome. (But where's Changeling?)
ReplyDeleteIf you squint real hard you can see a green flea...
ReplyDeleteWolfman had a good run, but I think after the Terra saga, it was kinda downhill from there. I thought Jericho was a great addition, and was really dismayed when he turned into a villain in the most poorly written story ever. I was also pissed when Kole (a girl with crystal powers) was created, just to die in the Crisis event. Then there was Azrael, I don't know what happened to that character cuz I was no longer reading the Titans at all by the early '90s. What happened to Azrael?
ReplyDelete@Anonymous: The Azrael character in New Teen Titans was an amnesiac alien who was fooled into thinking he was an angel. After he learned he was really extraterrestrial there were numerous opportunities to make interesting use of him:
ReplyDelete1)Invasion (1989): with all the aliens coming to Earth he should have confronted some of them to learn more about himself.
2) Panic In The Sky (1992): ditto.
3) Zero Hour (1994): when the Legion came back to the 20th Century I thought for sure he would meet Dawnstar and we would learn that he was her ancestor; it didn't happen, now she no longer exists.
4) JLA/Titans (1999): He appears in this mini-series briefly.
5) Our Worlds at War (2001): really just a sequel to Panic In The Sky.
6) Rann/Thanagar War (2005): with all the Hawkpeople in the air he very well could have been in there somewhere.
After that there was a return to having annual 'events' (starting with Infinite Crisis) where as many characters as possible were shoe-horned into two page spreads. The problem with finding him using term searches instead of a magnifying glass is that DC has about 6 or 7 characters named Azrael. My best guess is that he was in one of the 'event' comics (like those people hired to fill empty seats at televised awards shows) since DC has shown no interest in using him where he'd tie into the plot. It's true that his greatest enemy, Brother Blood, has been appearing in Animal Man, but in New52 stories they may no longer have any connection.
Plbfsda, just goes to show you how downright sloppy and careless DC became by the late '90s and throughout the 2000's. Marvel, notwithstanding their "mutant" takeover, fared much better.
ReplyDelete@Rap Superstar: Marvel only fared better because a judge forced them to. During the 90's they lost hundreds of millions pursuing acquisitions faster than any sane person could expect their investments to recoup. They filed for a form of bankruptcy that put them in receivership and all major decisions had to go past a judge instead of the higher-ups. For the first time in years you could get T-shirts with Marvel super-heroes in children's sizes because of that judge. The Masterworks program (which shut down after Jan. 1994) started up again. Movies went into production (they previously made money by selling options on characters then withdrawing all support for producing the movie). There were about a hundred other no-brainer decisions that turned Marvel around. The best decision was to jettison the twenty or so sub-imprints and replace them with three or four (like Marvel Knights and Max).
ReplyDelete