tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post7808984007475258548..comments2024-03-21T22:36:54.451-04:00Comments on HISTORIES OF THINGS TO COME: Generation X Goes Back to the Future 6: Thirty Years of DC's New Titans - A TributeLC Douglasshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-57679441296542762762019-12-12T20:20:20.787-05:002019-12-12T20:20:20.787-05:00Thanks Kuno, still waiting for justice - for legac...Thanks Kuno, still waiting for justice - for legacy characters and the JSA original characters too.LC Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-63088594097391912232019-11-01T19:59:17.388-04:002019-11-01T19:59:17.388-04:00Really,really good post.It's a shame that the ...Really,really good post.It's a shame that the Titans are often seen as the ''junior JLA'',in the Wolfman/Pérez era,they really came into their own.I think the next step was to treat them as adults,and highlight the difference between them and the JLA.Devin Grayson's run isn't as beloved as Johns,but honestly,I think that the direction Grayson took,that arguably followed Wolfman more(Technis Imperative is the best example),was the direction the series should have took.In retrospective,Johns didn't bother to make the new legacy characters(the YJ generation)stand out from their mentors enough(in the case of Bart Allen,nor even that),and often rehashed old themes and storylines.Honestly,I don't think it deserves the praise it often gets,but that's just me.But then again,I kind of enjoyed Johns run...so there.Kunohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11796300155877631086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-11751162914902417252016-07-16T14:51:11.133-04:002016-07-16T14:51:11.133-04:00Hi Matt,
Not sure to what you are referring. My b...Hi Matt,<br /><br />Not sure to what you are referring. My blog is apolitical. The focus on the Titans is generational in part, but I was interested in comics in the early Millennium because they are popular cultural expressions of American heroism, at a time when Americans have been challenged in terms of national values and ideals. LC Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-39744990714146666852016-07-16T10:28:04.457-04:002016-07-16T10:28:04.457-04:00When your only tool is a hammer, every problem loo...When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you everything through a political lens, everything appears political. Doc Savagehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08783244633195233970noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-69389710017119602052010-10-05T19:30:32.929-04:002010-10-05T19:30:32.929-04:00Hi icon, thanks very much for your comments. Re. ...Hi icon, thanks very much for your comments. Re. the DNAgents and Project Youngblood, yes others have mentioned it to me, and I remember it vaguely from the time. <br /><br />As for Terra, my opinion is that there were many, many hanging plot threads hanging around her. Subsequent writers even inserted some major ones in the Millennium crossover. I think they did that because people look at the Judas Contract one of two ways. They either think there are no more stories to tell about Terra, or they think there are more stories to tell. It depends whether you believe Wolfman's explanation or not. Some people do, some don't.<br /><br />Nightwing: I took that from comments characters made in the Titans 99-2003 series and from the Flash series when Wally was joshing around with Dick. Also there's a reference to him having loads of girlfriends and liaisons in Winick's Outsiders, IIRC - it may have been in the Titans series. Dick went to see Batman because his life was falling apart, and one of the things that came up in their conversation was his complicated love life.LC Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-45272067677239647482010-10-05T14:38:54.492-04:002010-10-05T14:38:54.492-04:00Fascinating reading, and very well thought out. A ...Fascinating reading, and very well thought out. A couple of points though, if I may.<br /><br />Your analysis of the Judas Contract is most interesting, I'd always considered the "destruction" of Terra as more of a "culmination" (albeit a very negative one), it was how she was always meant to be and how she was always meant to end, after all.<br /><br />Your Recombatants mention is a little off, they weren't so much named after Replicants as they were a mutual injoke character exchange; they map perfectly to Eclipse Comics DNAgents (who were also artificial, genetically engineered superbeings) and appeared in the same month as Titans analogues "Project Youngblood" met the DNAgents in their own series, and met a similarly final end in the same issue.<br /><br />I also have to debate your description of Dick Grayson as promiscuous, that was certainly never a character trait in the 1980's and 90's. He was, at worst, serially monogamous and as far as we know has only had something like four bed-partners in his entire life (Kory, Babs, Cheyenne (during the deeply weird Bruce Jones run in the mid 00's) and a retconned in "first affair" in his Robin days first mentioned in Wolfman's run on the Nightwing solo title). Even factoring in pre-Crisis he had only a couple of apparently chaste girlfriend, and one vampiress seductress.<br /><br />All things considered (Looks, position, wealth) the kid might have been mainlining bromide! :)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-36904622774862565032010-10-03T22:19:43.367-04:002010-10-03T22:19:43.367-04:00I dunno about social values. I DO know about hero...I dunno about social values. I DO know about heroes I was rooting for/Identified with.<br /><br />And speaking of LOTR, look at the absolute quagmire the attempted prequels have turned into.Jayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12259914990173033280noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-38723852600456565512010-10-03T21:23:11.805-04:002010-10-03T21:23:11.805-04:00Don't get me started on what's been done t...Don't get me started on what's been done to Raven! Oh god. The Terror of Trigon was one thing, because she more or less triumphed. It was a tight, neat, scary story that really worked. The Darkening was far worse, and nothing Johns did, no toon mashup, no superficial Gar-Raven ship could paper over the cracks created by that story; they just promise its continuation. In the Darkening, Raven did things that couldn't be erased by her 'triumphing over Trigon.' She had to atone for real crimes, and she has never done that. She could have been built up after 1985 as an amazing transcendent figure in the DCU; instead we had her brainwashing and torturing the Titans leader. A character with the potential to become one of the greatest superheroines ever created was turned into a cheap emo goth girl who's going to turn evil again. So you could be right about Terra. If restored in the past after the Judas Contract, she would likely been broken down or turned evil; the same goes for Lian Harper. They would not have been able to resist the evil mother's influence thing. This is a separate thing though - about why female heroes are degraded and why editors in the modern era of comics have destroyed ships - as with Spiderman and Mary Jane. I never really liked the idea of Scott Summers and Emma Frost either. But turmoil sells.<br /><br />Fortunately, I don't look to comic books as the main repository for social values (LOL). Maybe we need to pull back from particular characters and specific stories. The real issue is how the comics industry is changing and being merged with digitial, video game and film formats. Death, violence and sex are eroding heroism, but that's because they sell. The LOTR was an interesting case, because it was successful financially, but its message ran against widening the moral vacuum.LC Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-30984757017026899032010-10-03T19:51:44.730-04:002010-10-03T19:51:44.730-04:00Ah, well see, I AM a depressed cynic. Though in t...Ah, well see, I AM a depressed cynic. Though in that sense I am exactly like my boomer father. The difference between him and me was on specific issues, not general outlook.<br /><br />What led me to be so was the circumstances of life I experienced. The death of Terra II was the death of my hope for comic book superheroes, or more accuratey, the death of the last of those characters I was holding out hope for. My political idealism died during the election of 2008, not after it's result. (I always knew Obama was part of the game. My despair came when the Libertarians nominated Bob Barr, a flat out Republican. I have no truck with the Tea Partiers for similar reasons).<br /><br />You discovered Krul didn't want to fix Terra; I discovered Meltzer liked heroes being broken. Wether he Gen X creators have different values than the Boomers is not really relevant, if their value are also bad.<br /><br />And think of this; if we DID get Terra back--mine or yours--she would, at best, wind up in the same place Raven is now. Even if we win, we lose.<br /><br />Your continuing optimism is admirable, but I wnoder how many brick walls it's going to run into before it burns out.Jayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12259914990173033280noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-40892944119778126482010-10-03T16:12:56.635-04:002010-10-03T16:12:56.635-04:00And to add to the thought above, I'd say this ...And to add to the thought above, I'd say this 30-year heroic crisis under Boomer writers and editors at DC is a by-product of a larger crisis of faith that Boomers had in themselves as the 80s, 90s, 00s wore on. They started off with these idealistic goals; more than any other youthful cohort in modern memory, they wanted to change the world. They thought they could do, be, have it all. Then over time they got bogged down in failure, because no one could achieve what they thought they could. While outwardly reasserting their confidence, I think there was a creeping self-doubt.<br /><br />By the 80s, the NTT were a Gen X team, but everything that happened to them reflected Boomers' story-telling and editorial mandates, and perhaps Boomers' quiet generation-wide worry that they couldn't live up to their 1968 ideals. <br /><br />In the modern Titans' series, so far (with the exception of Johns's TT run) you see Gen X characters bogged down in a projected Boomer crisis of failure. <br /><br />I argued that began in this franchise with the Judas Contract. In what other story would you have a young female character fail so horrifically, and be sacrificed to build up male characters (although I think the net effect on Gar was negative, because as the hero in that story he could not save the girl). Over time, the creators convinced the fans to cheer on the destruction of a 16 year old girl and believe that all the blame could be laid at her feet? Then - *give the villain the chance to tell the moral of the story at the end*? And then convince the fans to cheer that on too? How? Why is that right? It was so deeply disturbing. I think some people blame the character for what happened to her (and so believe the line that her creators gave) and others blame the creators themselves, and so feel there's more to the story, because the outcome was so utterly hopeless. Either way the message was: welcome to the era of trashing heroic conventions.<br /><br />In other words, you can have creators who are masterful and talented, but their underlying intentions will play out in the stories. And imo those underlying intentions included a general sense that their generation somehow did not and could never live up to bright, shiny 1968 ideals.<br /><br />Gen X writers and artists who are coming up will reflect that problem at first. The question is whether Gen X ultimately has something different to say with these characters. Xers have said over and over they're not the depressed cynics that Boomers say they are. (That assumption fits nicely with Boomers' own creeping worries about themselves - failure begets failure.) In other words, themes in comics are part of a society-wide process of disenchantment and soul-searching, which Boomers don't like to admit they're dealing with. My question with this post was, can Gen X creators start coming to the table with a different set of values that could be the silver bullet? There's more than evil and failure in the world, even when people are intrinsically imperfect, and good sometimes triumphs, right? It's a LOTR type thinking. Insurmountable odds, everything looks hopeless, yet there is this sliver of a possibility that there is another way to find heroism and hope again.LC Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-38508126163709020632010-10-03T15:27:34.080-04:002010-10-03T15:27:34.080-04:00It does repeat itself every generation, although p...It does repeat itself every generation, although people thinking of themselves in wide collective terms as 'a generation' is modern. I'm not up on how the JSA really greeted the arrival of the JLA in the original comics, since the JSA was the original team and for awhile the JLA were the Boomer-era upstarts. But it's obvious that in Titans, the Young Justice newbies were presented as Gen Y characters. Tim Drake mentioned it several times, as did Ravager, identifying the YJ characters with 'our' Millennial generation. The closest the NTT ever came to that was during the 1990s, but their experiences in books from 1990 to 2003 were as Gen X as you could get (running ouf of money in the 90s recession; deciding to sell out; some members raising kids for the first time; some getting married, some almost getting married; the Titans series from 99-2003 was the core 5 living through Gen X problems (minus the tin foil hats I hope!)). So although lots of fans wouldn't see these stories in a generational light, I took my theory for this blog post straight from the books themselves. But there are lots of other 30th anniversary angles one could pick, how the Titans grew up into being JLA (which I've said I don't like much); how they fit in the DCU; or a negative comment could have been made about how the team is now shattered.<br /><br />As for Meltzer and Krul, I just don't know. I still think they have a trick or two up their sleeves. And the reason I think this is because they grew up with these characters. They know them the way some Gen Y fans know Conner Kent. You couldn't write Last Will and Testament and not know the Markovs backwards and forwards. As for Rise of Arsenal and Blackest Night Titans, we haven't seen the end stories from those arcs play out yet. We also haven't seen Last Will and Testament play out yet. <br /><br />I'm hoping that in the next year or two they will start to correct the damage that's been and being done. But I concede that they and Johns helped cause some of the damage. So you may be right. And the damage may be so deep that it could take 15 years to correct. But I still think this is a process: DC has successfully trashed old heroic ideals. Now they could go either way - are they going to screw it up and keep going the low road down to the bottom pit of hell, or give us a new type of heroism and some new cause for hope? That's really the question. We've had 30 years straight of heroes losing and losing and losing. So we learned they could lose against villains; then we learned they could lose their ways; then we learned that they could lose themselves. Fine. DC's point is made. So the question is, does DC have the guts to show the heroes doing something that will restore the fans' faith and show the heroes come back and start winning, despite the fact that yes, the world is dark, violent, and terrible?<br /><br />And - your posts never antagonize!LC Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-34580222218319052232010-10-03T10:47:34.824-04:002010-10-03T10:47:34.824-04:00It is interesting to me that you see this as Boome...It is interesting to me that you see this as Boomers versus Gen X and/or Y. I see it as human nature, repeating itself, regardless of generation.<br /><br />We have already discussed how each of us became aware separately that certain Gen X comic book writers--Meltzer in my case, Krul in yours--are not interested in fixing the problems. I don't see how this bodes well for the future, nor do I dismiss these two examples as anecdotal.<br /><br />As usual, I hope my post does not antagonize.Jayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12259914990173033280noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-34712784215993774132010-10-02T13:19:02.642-04:002010-10-02T13:19:02.642-04:00Thanks Jay. I don't know how much Wolfman and...Thanks Jay. I don't know how much Wolfman and Perez and their successors intended the Titans to 'be' Gen Xers. Nobody even called Gen Xers that until the 90s - because of Coupland's book. I think it's more likely that they were aware of what appealed to teens at the time and incorporated stuff as they went along.<br /><br />As for fallible heroes, I agree. Let's say that the Titans *aren't* the Xer stereotypes they are on the surface; and they *do* represent emotional values - love in spite of huge obstacles (Vic), friendship (Donna; Hawk and Dove), passion (Kory), trust (Gar), loyalty (Dick and Wally), devotion (Roy), emotional healing (Raven), etc. Then the question is why their biggest stories involve them failing catastrophically (rather than succeeding)? There are very few success stories - Who is Donna Troy? - is one of them; but it was quickly dismantled by subsequent origin stories for Donna that took power away from the original story about Donna and Dick. Why have all the Titans' relationships failed (while the current ones are hinted to fail)? Why aren't these heroes achieving victories - why couldn't Gar save Tara and Wally save Raven - right at the beginning? And so on ...<br /><br />I think it's because heroic values are crumbling and transforming everywhere, not just in comics. Part of this is due to the Boomers' deliberate attempt to wipe them out. They replaced old ideals intact at the end of WWII with new concerns; and to some extent what they did had to be done. But that process has now reached its end point.<br /><br />So I think what we're looking at is the failure of old ideals, and even of Boomers' newer values; and we live in a transitional period when new ideals haven't fully arisen yet. I'm writing another piece on the 'revolving door of death' during DC's millennial crossovers (pre Blackest Night) to see if there are signs of new heroism in the deconstruction of old heroism. In short, I think there will be a correction.LC Douglasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04250961297714038453noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2905155363976375938.post-51765498621783424942010-10-02T06:13:36.649-04:002010-10-02T06:13:36.649-04:00Well written as always, but the fact that the Tita...Well written as always, but the fact that the Titans were meant to embody real world personality traits, for their generation or any other, is part of the problem in and of itself, and set them up for the fall. If not Judas Contract, then it would've manifested in some other way.<br /><br />Maybe it was when they decided Roy should shoot up in the first place. Or maybe it was when Stan Lee created angsty, vulnerable Spider-Man. Whenever and however it happend, what set the Titans--and all other superheroes--up for the fall was when it was decided to treat them as *flawed, vulnerable mortals* rather than larger-than-life characters that rose, overcame, and saved the day. In other words, *heroes*.<br /><br />Once they started being 'people' first and 'heroes' second, the clock was ticking. And everyone lost.<br /><br />So I put no faith in the Gen X writers now 'in charge'. They still answer to boomer generation publishers and Editors-in-Chief; and even if they didn't, they have been shaped by that world. The world that says that heroes die, and nobody cares.Jayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12259914990173033280noreply@blogger.com