The Teen Titans weren’t the first teen superteam, but they have become the most popular of all time. DC revolutionized the teen superhero as we know them, introducing us to young heroes starting with Dick Grayson’s Robin. Robin became a superstar, and we’d get more young heroes over the Golden Age, sidekicks like Speedy and Wing and heroes like Star-Spangled Kid (who was a teen with an adult sidekick Stripesy). As the years went on, more teen sidekicks would be introduced, like Kid Flash, Aqualad, and Wonder Girl, and in the ’60s, as youth culture became more powerful, DC Comics decided to bring together the sidekicks in their own team and the Teen Titans were born.
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The Teen Titans combined the best teen heroes over the decades, and the group has had its ups and downs. The team found their greatest success when Marv Wolfman and George Perez teamed together for New Teen Titans, a book that become one of the bestselling comics of the 1980s. The popularity of the team would ebb and flow over the years, and we’ve reached a point where the team is no longer around. While there are some who miss them, I think the Teen Titans being gone is the best thing that can happen to the DC Multiverse.
The Teen Titans Are a Relic We No Longer Need
One can’t deny the impact of the Teen Titans. The team came around at just the right time, and created a group that put a spotlight on the new generation of heroes. The original Titans stories aren’t extremely popular, but they introduced a lot of really cool heroes, like Lilith Clay’s Omen, and set the stage for the next evolution of the team. New Teen Titans is an amazing work, and it is one of the most important comics of the 1980s. Without it, there’s a good chance that DC would have gone the way of the dodo, as Marvel had been destroying them since the 1960s in sales. It was that important.
Of course, all good things must end, and eventually the Teen Titans would lose their popularity. DC would try again in the ’90s, introducing an all-new team (led by a de-aged Atom) that also failed. Young Justice would become the home of teen heroes in the decade of extreme, but eventually, that would give birth to a new volume of Teen Titans, one that combined members of the New Teen Titans with ’90s teen heroes like Tim Drake, Cassie Sandsmark, Bart Allen, and Superboy. This volume of the book was great for a time, and made people remember why the team was great. And then the New 52 happened, and destroyed it all.
The New 52 wrecked every teen team in the DC Multiverse. Teen Titans during the New 52 was abysmal, and ran the fans off in droves. Since then, DC Comics has tried to bring the group back, but failed every time. I think the problem with the team is that it’s become so connected to the New Teen Titans version, which was popularized in the greater pop culture by animated series like Teen Titans and Teen Titans GO!, that any time the publisher tries something different, it doesn’t work. The success of that version has become an albatross around the neck of the group.
Right now, DC is putting out Titans, a book made up of alumni of the team as grown up heroes. It’s been a pretty great book (and the DC Rebirth Titans was one of the best team books of that era of comics), and it wets the whistle of fans looking for Teen Titans content. On top of that, there’s really no teen heroes that need to have their own team; most of the teen heroes we have right now get trained within their own “families”. The group was once extremely important to the DC Multiverse, but they’ve outlived their usefulness. The most popular members have a new home, and there’s no one that can fill out a teen version of the group. The Teen Titans were great, but it’s about time to let them rest.
DC Can Do Teen Heroes Without the Teen Titans
DC Comics is in a very interesting place. There are multiple generations of heroes all working together. Something like the Batman Family or the Flash Family has older heroes mentoring young ones. For years now, the Justice Society have worked with the legacies of the Golden Age heroes. In the far future, we have the Legion of Superheroes. There are so many places for teen heroes to go and learn, to hang out with other young heroes that we really don’t need the Teen Titans anymore. They were great at one time, but now, they’ve become surplus to requirements.
Honestly, if DC is going to bring back a teen team, they’d be better off using Infinity Inc., a team that doesn’t have the same legacy as the Teen Titans, one that isn’t already pigeonholed in the minds of fans. That’s the problem with the team; everyone wants the Teen Titans of their childhood back, but that doesn’t work with a team meant to bring together the new generation. We have the Titans. We’re getting the Legion of Superheroes back. We should be getting a new Infinity Inc. We don’t need the Teen Titans anymore. We’ll always have the great older stories, and that’s enough.
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