DC has plenty of incredibly popular teams. The best known is obviously the Justice League, the very pinnacles of heroism manned by some of the most recognizable characters on the planet. Another of the better-known teams is the Justice Society of America, the Golden Age team that fought in World War II and set the stage for all of the amazing heroes that would come after them. The Legion of Super-Heroes is the far-flung future team that shows how far the world has come and promises a better tomorrow. However, amongst all of these teams, one stands to be the greatest of all, but is being massively underutilized.
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The Titans are the grown version of the Teen Titans, sidekicks and young heroes who have matured both in age and effectiveness. Comic readers can literally watch them grow from a ragtag team of kids who are in way over their heads to one of the most capable teams of heroes on the planet, and it’s an incredible journey. They’ve been repeatedly set up to take the reins as the greatest team there is, but DC continuously knocks them down. The Titans have the potential to be the best, and while DC is wasting them, all they have to do is fix these few big problems.
Trapped in the Past
To establish what’s wrong with the Titans and how DC is ruining them, let’s briefly look at what makes them such a good team. The Titans are a family as much as they are a superhero team, and they’ve shown repeatedly that they have a perfect mix of professional and personal love and respect for their teammates. That care which serves to elevate their teamwork, and it’s what makes them so great. Some of their best stories play into the connections between the team members, and it’s why stories like “The Judas Contract” and “The Terror of Trigon” have so much weight and staying power. They’re just as steeped in emotions and character interactions as they are superhero action.
However, that’s where the biggest problem lies. Those stories are remembered and loved for a reason, but they’ve become so ubiquitous that DC hasn’t ever moved on. The Titans are stuck in a rut. While they’ve been set up, especially in recent years, to be the next generation’s Justice League and stand on equal footing with them, all they do is live through the same repeating referential storylines over and over. Every couple of years, Deathstroke will return for a “final” bit of revenge against the Titans, or something dark will come up about Raven’s past, or something similar.
Even when they do introduce new ideas like Titans Academy, they are still stuck in nostalgia bait like introducing Red X into comics. DC is obsessed with shoehorning nostalgia into every Titan storyline, and it’s hindering their supposed growth as a team, because while we are told they are given more responsibility and prestige, all we ever see in their own stories is more of the same.
The Titans Need to Move Forward
What the Titans need more than anything is a new direction with a solid creative team behind them. The team has a pretty set-in-stone cast for the most part, but that doesn’t mean that the stories have to go in circles. The seeds for them growing have already been built into the mythos of DC, as Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths established them as the team everyone can fall back on. We need more stories of the Titans standing up and showing that they are deserving of that position, more situations that they handle that connect them with the wider superhero world. Instead of keeping them in the dark except for big events, let them swing big and take on cosmic foes like Mongul, Despero, or their own original threat built up to a level like the other villains named. All the Titans need is a little push or to stop being held back.
At the end of the day, the Titans are a team with infinite potential, but DC isn’t doing anything new or exciting with them. It wouldn’t take much more than giving them their own niche and letting them act as the generation connectors they are, but instead, they’ve just languished in between the League’s shadow and the light they already lived in for years. The Titans need an entirely fresh start without constantly trying to bridge back to the past. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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