DC’s hit Teen Titans graphic novel series has arrived with its latest chapter, and this time around writer Kami Garcia and artist Gabriel Picolo have brought the beloved Titan Starfire into the spotlight. Teen Titans: Starfire takes place after Dick Grayson joins the team in Teen Titans: Robin, and while Starfire is the lead, the new chapter also brings Cyborg into the mix along with Kori’s sister Kira. Fans will get to know Starfire in a completely new way, which means that while this is wonderful as a continuation of the Teen Titans story, it’s a perfect introduction to the character if you’ve never jumped in. ComicBook had the chance to speak to Garcia all about creating this new version of Starfire, delivering the long-awaited team-up of the Titans, and more.
Meeting Starfire in a New Way
As Garcia and Picolo have done in previous books, the Titans characters you know and love have received a modern refresh that still retains the core of each character with a few modern present day touches, and that remains true of Starfire as well. “Well, you know, to stay consistent with the series, Gabriel and I really wanted to make her very relatable. But also, we want all the characters to seem like regular teenagers. So, you know, you can’t, like, you can’t look at them and tell that they are the Teen Titans that we know and love,” Garcia said. “So even though she’s a redhead, she has more of a natural skin color in this. She actually doesn’t know she has powers at the beginning of the story, And then you get to see her find out she has powers and find out how those work.”
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“Our premise is always that the reader should be able to pick up the book and learn everything that they need to know about that specific character through the book so that they don’t have to go back and find the whole run of comics, with the hope, obviously, that they would go back and read the other runs and information about the characters as well,” Garcia said.
As for Starfire’s powers, fans will step on the rollercoaster ride of her new powers alongside her, and Starfire’s unique skillset also allowed the team to shake things up a bit, both in terms of action and in terms of storytelling opportunities.
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“I focused more on her power bursts and her energy bursts, and also she still has the ability to understand multiple languages and things, which is kind of fun to experiment with a teenager because it kind of, to her it seems like it happens overnight,” Garcia said. “One minute she only speaks English, and the next minute she can understand people who are speaking other languages around her. So that was kind of fun, especially because I am terrible at speaking foreign languages, so I love the idea of being able to suddenly understand everyone.”
Another important element of the book is something close to home for Garcia as well, and allows the team to provide more opportunities for fans to feel seen. “She’s also invisibly disabled in the book. She has a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which actually is something that I have, and it’s not really, you know, part of her powers, but to me, it was a fun spin because I really want all, everyone, and especially all teenagers who read the books to feel seen and to feel like there’s someone they can identify with in the books,” Garcia said. “And there are a lot of invisibly disabled people in this country, you know, with everything from POTS and Crohn’s and EDS and PCOS, and very often those things are not talked about very much. And I just like the idea of having such a fun, cool character experiencing that to kind of show that you can still have any sort of disability and be a hero.”
The importance of all fans feeling seen has been a part of the series from the very beginning, and that goal actually resulted in a changing of the color palette after the series’ second graphic novel. “That’s one reason why our series started out with kind of a limited color palette, and as we moved to the second book in Beast Boy, we really decided to go more full color, mainly because there are so many biracial and multiracial characters in the books. And we really wanted to make sure that people weren’t defaulting white and assuming that, you know, all of these characters were white, because really, Raven and Dick are the only ones who are,’ Garcia said. “So we really wanted to make sure that everybody else is represented properly, and we put a lot of effort into that.”
“And I think one of the things, you know, going back to the disability, one of the things that made it really perfect for Starfire to be invisibly disabled is because Cyborg is in this book and he is visibly disabled. Cyborg has always been a character with prosthetics, robotic prosthetics, and so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to be able to have a character on the page with visible prosthetics, and then a character on the page who has an invisible disability but is also profoundly affected by that,” Garcia said.
A Lovely Friendship
Victor makes his debut in Teen Titans: Starfire, and it doesn’t take long for a wonderful friendship to begin. Victor and Kori have a lot in common, and the more they learn about each other, the closer they become.
“They have so much in common, because another aspect is when they become friends, Cyborg is very estranged from his father and has a very, as in canon, has a very fraught relationship with his father. And even though Starfire lives with her mom, you know, her mom is kind of this absent figure. She’s very wrapped up in her engagement to a new character we introduce, and she doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the girls. Now Starfire is in college in the story because we really wanted to keep Dick and Starfire older than the other characters, but she is living at home while she goes to college,” Garcia said.
“So, you know, she has this kind of… she loves her mom, but her mom isn’t really around. You know, Cyborg is also in college, so you have these characters who are becoming friends and really have a lot of kind of things in common, even though they don’t even realize it,” Garcia said. “And I just love to also have them be friends because as I was writing Starfire and Cyborg, they really seem like they would be friends, aside from disability and everything else. She’s very sweet, he’s very kind, but he is kind of introverted and, you know, doesn’t open up to a lot of people. And I think the fact that she is very kind and accepting allows them to become friends.”
A Tale of Two Sisters
Another important character in Kori’s world is her sister Kira, who is known as Blackfire in the comics. Kira and Kori both gain new abilities throughout the story, but they are very different in how pretty much every other way. While there is love there, the relationship between the two is tenuous at best, with Kira having a bit of a mean streak.
“Yeah, absolutely. So in this story, mainly because, you know, Kori Anders’ name lends itself to the nickname Kori, and Blackfire’s did not. So we renamed her Kira, and it’s fun because Robin is really a story about brothers, and then those two brothers, Dick and Damian, becoming part of our forming Titans crew. And this story is really a sister story with tension and some kind of problematic relationship,” Garcia said.
“Although you can tell that Kira and Kori, Kori adores her sister and Kira really does love Kori, but she does have a little mean girl streak for sure. And you will see as the story goes on, because of a relationship that Kira is having, her relationship with her sister actually becomes kind of more and more strained. And by the time that Kira, Kori, and Cyborg meet up with the rest of the Titans, you start to see the kind of cracks that are going to fracture the group,” Garcia said.
Titans Together
Ever since the original graphic novel, fans have been excited to finally see the group come together as a team, and Teen Titans: Starfire brings the final puzzle piece to the table. Garcia has been looking forward to this day as well, and fans will get to see the team in all its glory in the series’ upcoming sixth volume.
“Our group that has formed, you know, Max, Damian, Dick, Raven, and Beast Boy, are kind of set off on this path and they will meet up with Starfire and Vic. We kind of already released the cover for six, which is Teen Titans Together,” Garcia said. “So it is really fun to get to finally see the whole team, and I’m actually writing six, and Gabriel is starting to draw six while five comes out. So it’s going to be really fun to see how people react.
While fans will have to wait bit longer for that team-up, they can find a variety of fun easter eggs in Teen Titans: Starfire, which has become a tradition in the series’ other installments. “And also, there’s a lot of Easter eggs, which is always my favorite part. Like, I love to go back, and actually, because I love the canon characters, I love to go back and see, like, what little Easter eggs we can add for our future books. But also for the readers who are already longtime Titans fans and have been reading the runs for years,” Garcia said. “I didn’t just come to the Titans with this series, so I want people that are my age reading who remember all of the iterations of Titans to also enjoy these books and find a lot of fun things in them that maybe other people don’t notice.”
Teen Titans: Starfire is now available in bookstores and on Amazon.
Are you excited for the big Titans team-up, and what did you think of Teen Titans: Starfire? You can talk all things comics and DC with me on Threads and Twitter @mattaguilarcb!
