Dusting Off : Tales of the Teen Titans #55
Every Wednesday we carry on turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty move backwards withdraw from issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was in the first place published.
The first half of the ‘80s was a good time for character-driven, functioning-packed team books. At the same time as Marvel were making all kinds of information with Uncanny X-Men, though, DC had their own crack at the idea with Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s New Teen Titans, a fantastic series that drew together a disparate group of young characters and forged stable bonds between them, saw genuine and realistic character growth (when Dick Grayson eventually decided to give up the silly green underpants of Robin and become Nightwing, it was in the pages of Titans quite than Batman that we saw it happen) in addition to some cracking conduct stories.
Incidentally, don’t be confused by the title of the book – Tales of the Teen Titans was, in the score, the original New Teen Titans series, retitled after #40 but retaining the numbering so that a new New Teen Titans rules could be launched (featuring parallel stories, it was printed on better-prominence paper and designed solely for the direct market in a time when, unlike nowadays, ordered comics usually made it to both newsstands and the specialist shops). This soft-cover then turned to reprints after #58, with the only “new” stories coming in the help volume of NTT. Alright, so you can be a bit confused if you want.
Anyway, #55 provides what is essentially the capstone to the paragon Judas Contract storyline. In an attempt to fulfil a contract on the heads of the Titans from day one taken on by his deceased son, the mercenary Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson had manipulated the work together by placing the young villainess Terra in their ranks as a “new fellow”. After turning on the team, and indeed on Deathstroke, Terra was killed in activity – but not before Garfield “Changeling” Logan had fallen in pleasure with her. Unable to accept Terra’s betrayal, Logan blamed Deathstroke for by hook “turning” her, and pursued a bloodthirsty vendetta against the characterize-of-villain (to be fair, it did also have something to do with the fact that Logan himself had been “killed” by Deathstroke, albeit afterward rescued by Amazonian technology).
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