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News: Gettin' Geeky |
Gettin' Geeky: Superheroes race to the rescue on DVDs and in lively book
Thursday, February 2, 2006
By Tim Clodfelter
• Teen Titans: The Complete First Season ($20) is a lively, and at times over-the-top, series featuring some of DC's youngest superheroes. The team, led by Robin the Boy Wonder, fights assorted supervillains including the nefarious Slade (whose comic-book name, Deathstroke the Terminator, proved a bit too edgy for a children's cartoon). The animation is heavily influenced by Japanese anime, down to the ridiculously catchy theme song by pop duo Puffy AmiYumi.
TEEN TITANS ANIMATED SERIES (2003-2005)
The comic-book incarnations of the Teen Titans are also featured in The Titans Companion, a new book from TwoMorrows Publishing in Raleigh.
Over the course of 222 pages, the Companion ($24.95) examines the history of the team, which started in the 1960s as a way to gather the youthful sidekicks of other superheroes. Robin was there, as were Kid Flash, Speedy (the sidekick of the Robin Hood-like Green Arrow) and Aqualad. Oh, and there was also Wonder Girl, who was actually the teen version of Wonder Woman, not a sidekick (continuity was a bit lax in those days, and Wonder Girl's origin was reinvented many times over the years).
The Companion goes all the way back to 1965. But the book focuses much of its attention on the past 25 years of Teen Titans, particularly the era in which writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez created some of the most compelling, character-driven stories in comics history.
They mixed old characters with new ones, creating a lineup so iconic that, more than 20 years later, the Teen Titans cartoon series would be based almost entirely on their early work together.
Companion author Glen Cadigan interviews Wolfman, Perez and many other comics creators who have had a hand in weaving the saga of the Titans.
One particularly intriguing aspect of the book is the look at how different teams have to build on - or deconstruct - the work of previous teams in an attempt to tell fresh new stories of characters whose continuities have been so thoroughly written and rewritten over the years.
The book is heavily illustrated (in black and white), including plenty of rare drawings from the private libraries of comic collectors.
