What to do for this weeks column…then I saw the preview of Newsarama and I knew. Reflect on the everchanging state of the many,the brave, the emo, the Teen Titans.

When I was very young, I knew just about what any young girl knew about superheroes. I knew there was a Superman, Batman, Robin and Wonder Woman. I knew the basic facts of each origin, save a few. (I’m pretty sure I didn’t know Robin’s parents were circus acrobats, or “Wondy, Wondy, I made you outta clay”) Thanks to my dad, I even knew from his occassional ramblings that a Flash, Captian America, Green Arrow and Green Lantern existed. I also knew about Speedy, as my Dad had the famous Green Lantern/Green Arrow cover proudly displayed in his office. (“Good Lord, my WARD, Speedy is a junkie!“) Heck, I knew the Green Lantern oath, as Dad had it memorized and would randomly recite it sometimes (which is why I get a chill as much as any fanboy when I hear it recited…it brings back when I was seven and Dad said it to some chick who was buying an elmerald ring at our jewelry show.)

But I was never really interested. I was a geek though. I read books, I watched cartoons with fervor unmatched. The Rescue Rangers, Cam Jansen, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, I had superheroes in abundance, I just didn’t recognize it.

I remember flipping past Cartoon Network and seeing a random clip of Teen Titans. Some random orange chick in a miniskirt was talking to a kid who was probably Robin. I reflected on how these superteams always seemed to have a token girl and she always wore some short skirt and talked in a high pitched voice. That was why superheroes weren’t for me. I couldn’t stand that token girl.

But, I watched Cartoon Network a lot, and discovered they had not ONE but TWO girls on the team. And the other one wore short hair, and no skirt (a leotard, but being a former gymnast I had no problem with that…I just hated skirts very much at twelve, especially minis) and was all sarcastic and did magic! That was cool. I’d never seen a superteam with more than one girl (My main exposure being Superfriends reruns and Fantastic Four stuff I vaguely remembered from when I was…well, four). So one day, I sat down and watched a whole episode of Teen Titans. It was “Birthmark”, which was centered on Raven, the one I’d dubbed the “not-token girl”, and it was a mighty cool chase episode, and with magic and Zombie!Slade and…I was hooked.

It happened slowly, that I became addicted to the Teen Titan cartoon. It was mostly Raven I liked at first. She had a CLOAK (I love cloaks, they may play a big factor into which characters I like actually, considering who my favorite superheroine is now) and she was cynical and sarcastic just like me, and she did cool black magic and kicked butt and hated her dad (feelings I was very much sharing with her at that time) and she didn’t take ANY crap. I loved her. I had no idea there could be cool girl superheroes. And at this point in my life? I desperately needed a cool girl superhero.

Eventually I grew to like the other characters too, a lot, even Starfire. And the storylines were so exciting, I loved the Terra thing and the Trigon thing and the big fight scenes. I realized I really liked action scenes, something that had never even occurred to me before. I started getting DVD’s and showing the cartoons to my parents…Dad was delighted I was showing an interest in superheroes. I was devastated when the show was canceled, wrote letters and all that.

The point of this long winded origin story, is the Teen Titans cartoon got me into comics. Because I eventually went on the Internet to learn more about it, and started hearing about the comics, and in vague curiosity about them, read excerpts and comic profiles and backstory. The outfits cracked me up, especially Starfire’s. I realized I was LUCKY it had just been a crop top miniskirt ensemble for the cartoon. The comics Raven wearing heels and a skirt was weird, and she struck me as pretty boring and whiny without the attitude of Toon!Raven (still does, and it’s even worse when they try to make her more like Toon!Raven, because they CAN’T, so it comes off as a pathetic facsimile. Might as well let her be herself)

The history of the characters confused the heck out of me as told in the profiles. Raven has died three times? Starfire’s planet kept getting blown up? The team has gone through HOW many incarnations? What was WRONG with comics? Why couldn’t they keep it simple like the cartoon?

I eventually picked up a modern Teen Titans comic, “Beast Boys and Girls”. I didn’t understand it completely, but I liked it. I started learning about other comics, especially the Bat-Universe (my first exposure to it was someone talking about Stephanie Brown. History in the making!). I went to a comic store I found, picked up some old Teen Titans, Robins and a Batgirl trade, and bing bang boom the rest was history.

I grew to very much love the old 80’s Teen Titan comics, despite their datedness. They were what my beloved cartoon had been built on, and they were just as sweet and awesome. The modern ones, I grew to love less as I delved into Young Justice, Robin, Impulse and such and saw how the younger characters had been so much better before. Soon, the love dwindled to like, and like dwindled to tolerate, and I considered dropping when Adam Beechen came on (I’d LIKED his episodes on the show, ‘specially “Haunted”, but by that point, I familiar enough with Batgirl…and my suspicions he still couldn’t write her, or much else, were confirmed…) but I heard Sean McKeever was good, so I stayed. Liked the first three issues of his run, but then the emo cranked up so high at issue #55 (Woo!  Breakups, bitchfights and sobbing over Conner! Never gets old!), and I was so sick of Whiny!Cassie, I dropped it.

I kept up through scans_daily, checking for when it was safe to come back. After all, I still loved Teen Titans at it’s core. I knew in the comics that signing up for it was basically a death warrant, the team had been a mess for years, and the whininess of all of them has gotten to the level it was basically a joke, but my comic roots were in Teen Titans and I would always have affection for them.

This does not mean I was crazy enough to pick up Titans past issue one. Dropped that crap like a hot potato.

However, recently I picked up an issue over Christmas because it had Spoiler in it, and it was decent. No one was overly whiny (except Bombshell), Steph, Jaime and Traci got a good show, and Wonder Girl, despite her hideous costume, was back to acting like a decent human being and was going to be leader while Tim went off to sulk in Gotham! A fan of Cassie from Young Justice and her leadership skills there, I’ve decided to stick around and see where this goes.  So far it’s been decent. But fair warning, as soon as the team becomes a hopelessly dramatic,  incompetent, constantly dying pile of emo again, I’m running for the hills.

No matter what a mess Teen Titans can be or ever is, I will always like it very much. At it’s purest, it’s a very awesome team of teen superheroes with their own cool villians, where anything can happen. And if wasn’t  for that cartoon, I may not be writing this column at ALL.

I should mention I love Teen Titans: Year One. Sure, the writing was problematic at TIMES, but it was funny and cute and pure and teenage superhero-y, and I want to have that art’s BABIES.

Teen Titans Go!