Dusting Off : Tales of the Teen Titans #55
Every Wednesday we attract turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty uphold issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was at 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 depiction with Uncanny X-Men, though, DC had their own crack at the idea with Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s New Teen Titans, a out of sight series that drew together a disparate group of young characters and forged experienced bonds between them, saw genuine and realistic character growth (when Dick Grayson when all is said decided to give up the silly green underpants of Robin and become Nightwing, it was in the pages of Titans to some extent than Batman that we saw it happen) in addition to some cracking function stories.
Incidentally, don’t be confused by the title of the book – Tales of the Teen Titans was, in deed data, the original New Teen Titans series, retitled after #40 but retaining the numbering so that a new New Teen Titans order could be launched (featuring parallel stories, it was printed on better-distinction paper and designed solely for the direct market in a time when, unalike nowadays, regular comics usually made it to both newsstands and the authority shops). This book then turned to reprints after #58, with the on the other hand “new” stories coming in the second volume of NTT. Alright, so you can be a bit at sea if you want.
Anyway, #55 provides what is essentially the capstone to the outstanding example Judas Contract storyline. In an attempt to fulfil a contract on the heads of the Titans in the first place taken on by his deceased son, the mercenary Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson had manipulated the gang by placing the young villainess Terra in their ranks as a “new colleague”. After turning on the team, and indeed on Deathstroke, Terra was killed in vitality – but not before Garfield “Changeling” Logan had fallen in leaning with her. Unable to accept Terra’s betrayal, Logan blamed Deathstroke for foul “turning” her, and pursued a bloodthirsty vendetta against the sufficiently good-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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