Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Oh Yeah, That Forum: The Titans The Titan du jour!

I love Bumblebee, and one thing I didn't appreciate about the JLA/Titans story was how they made her out to be a D-rate hero. Supergirl (Matrix) goes to Zauriel, "Look at who you're assaulting? What can BUMBLEBEE do to you?", while Gar goes, "The gang's all here... and I do mean EVERYONE."

Good thing animated Bumblebee showed them.

Re Donna and family, I can't think of anything more to add. Wonderful posts.

You're right- I changed it after your tip. Guess I woefully underappreciated good Hestia myself! Forgive me, goddesses (never a good idea to insult a god... )

Maybe that underappreciation has extended to Donna.

Whereas even in this period, I think of her as the heart of the team. Even when there isn't a team. She also had a close friendship with Lilith. And I think she was closer to Garth/Aqualad/Tempest than anyone outside of maybe Grayson.

You now who I always wanted to see her paired up with? Either as a better friend or as a lover? Red Star.

An especially creepy image of Terra:




It's kinda the opposite of Dave's Bumblebee image.

Just to get some Eduardo Barreto goodness out there ...
<span style="font-size: 24px;">JERICHO</span>








He was actually a fantastic cover artist! His Raven, Starfire, Wally as Flash, and Donna were especially beautiful.

Not a big fan of Jericho, but I *love* the art of him Mr. Barreto did for Bill Walko!

Jericho is probably the ultimate example of "the whole not being equal to the sum of the parts" for me.

He ticks a lot of boxes that I like but for some reason I just don't really like the character -

* A (rare) blonde male hero... check.
* A very original power... check.
* A power that creates interesting visuals/stories... check.
* A great name... check.
* A funky costume that just lands on the 'great' side of the line between 'great' and 'awful'... check.
* An interesting back-story... check.

And yet... I'm just not that into him. I have no idea why.

IMO his best showing was as the villain in Titans Hunt. That was such a great twist and his ultimate ending there was tragic but necessary. As much as I HATE it when characters get killed off in comics, sometimes the story really earns that death - and Marv Wolfman is one writer who was really able to make a death seem important and necessary to a story - Terra, Jericho, Golden Eagle, all the deaths in Crisis - every one of them had an impact on me.

I would have preferred Jericho stay dead after that story, but unfortunately they decided to bring him back and turn him into a full-on murderer (rather than just one who had been possessed by some mad spirits) who killed Wintergreen in Teen Titans and then some random civilians in that wretched DCU Decisions series, and then had the Titans promptly forget all of that and allow him back onto the team!?!

That type of crap writing is exactly why DC needed to be rebooted. A shame then that those writers are still with the company.

Not a big fan of Jericho as well. He just didn't work, despite all of what Blacula listed above.

In GAMES, it was revealed he's a bit of a playboy too - one page showed him dating as many as seven women all at once. Yet, that didn't make me like him any more, even though I know he's probably really giving love and not just using them for sex. I dunno why. He's written as a really great, sensitive, caring guy, but I just find him *meh*.

I like that idea. Both Donna and Red Star know what it's like to balance human passions with their high power levels and their duties to others. If snyone could really relate to Leonid on a deep level, it would be Donna. It's certainly more believable than Red Star and Pantha...

I thought Jericho was a real jerk to Kole especially after they made such an effort to say how sensitive and nice he was.

He was always like "I'm just not that into you Kole."

... and Kole is awesome.

I did like his costume (a bit dorky but beautifully done) but, I'd prefer to have Raven be able to possess people as one of her powers rather than have Raven and then this other guy that can do one thing.

I really did like his inclusion in the Judas Contract but maybe making him a full Titan after that is what failed for me. I mean he was ok .... but ... I much prefer most if not all of the other Titan's getting screen time than him playing his guitar shirtless.

I liked Jericho, but he felt, at times, a little too much like a writer's pet. (Even in his introduction, where Dick is all crazy impressed by his power, despite being in bed with a hot alien flying super-strong person who can blow up buildings by pointing at them.)

I did like the idea of a child of a major foe becoming part of the team, and I loved the way that Perez depicted his eyes turning black, except for the green irises, when he used his power. That was a really striking visual.

The mute thing, while diverse and whatever, seemed like a narrative hindrance, in the sort of way that having him be in a wheelchair or something, would not have been.

In the end, he succumbed to the 'children of bad-guys must inherit their parents mad/crazy/evil' curse, and flipped out. In comic-book-land, being a criminal or assassin or whatever appears to be an inheritable trait...

Of the various Titans who have been 'hard done by,' Jericho feels like one of the more egregious examples to me. Introduced as a big deal new character, didn't really ever make the splash he seemed to be intended to make, and then villain-ized and discarded.

Unlike Terra, who was created to fulfill the horrible destiny planned for her, Jericho's turn to evil felt far less organic and more 'I'm done playing with this toy, so, in a fit of pique, I shall utterly wreck it!'

I love you for saying that, Peebz!

In fact, if Jericho had let Kole come along with them to Tamaran - she'd be alive right now!

Jericho must die! (kidding)

His recent bouts of insanity/evilness are also a major waste of his return. Ah well...

<span style="font-size: 24px;">GAR LOGAN </span>

I had a huge, and I mean <span style="font-size: 18px;">huge</span> crush on Jericho starting pretty much from when he first appeared.

<span style="font-size: 18px;">So</span> not interested in anything to do with him turning crazy-evil.

And now, an important message for whoever came up with such an utterly dumbass idea... <span class="spoiler_containter"><span class="spoiler_wording">Click Here For A Spoiler</span><span class="spoiler_text">Shut up, DC! La la la... fingers in my ears! <span style="font-size: 16px;">I can't HEAR youuuuu!!</span><span style="font-size: 11px;">And by the way if you were drowning I'd throw you a rock! Ppphhhtt!</span></span></span>

In one of the last episodes of the Teen Titans anime series, Jericho and Mal/Herald/Hornblower/Gabriel/Vox/Whatever team up to rescue the rest of the Titans from the Brotherhood of Evil.

We get to see how absolutely A-list the powers of these two actually are.

Poor Gar, overshadowed I always liked Gar. Not when he was first a member; oh, I like that he matured and how his wisecracking was a way to hide his insecurities blah blah. The biggest appeal for me, though, was in later years when he became sort of the bridge between the older Titans and the younger ones.

His powers are useful, although his always becoming green animals limits their utility in subterfuge and espionage.

I've always found myself preferring characters who can use animal abilities without actually shapeshifting into animals (Animal Man, Vixen), or those who can take on the form of a single animal (Wolfesbane), to someone like Beast Boy / Changeling.

Too often, IMO, Garfield has highlighted how unprepared some artists are to handle illustrating a variety of animals. George may not have gotten all of his details exactly right, but he at least seemed to give it a good solid effort.

In the last twenty years, I've seen a half-dozen artists take on Garfield's shapeshifting, only to reveal that they appear not to have even *tried* to Google a picture of a wolf or whatever, before drawing Gar turning into one.

He's gotta be a wicked challenging character to prepare for, artistically, since, unlike Chameleon Boy, who can take on hundreds of forms, but isn't expected to 'get them right' (since they are mostly made-up alien beasties), we all have ideas of what a horse, boa constrictor, eagle, bear, etc. look like, and the majority of comic book artists seem to be able to capably draw humans and gorillas, and everything else is gonna be a crap-shoot...

That was a *GREAT* episode wasn't it TT#1!

As for Gar Logan - great character. I used to really like him. I just love the weirdness of a character that turns into green animals. Who even thought that up? And he was even more weird/hilarious back in the old days when they weren't green but had that little tuft of hair or whatever it was on them to identify him.

He's also an example of a writer taking a little-used, D-list older character and breathing some new life into them with some TLC. Instead of just killing them off for bathos for the big-shot, A-list characters. Marv Wolfman did a great job of mixing the old with the new in his Titans run actually.

After he left however, Gar Logan's cache really dropped unfortunately. No one's really known what to do with him since. I totally disagree with IB about him being a good link between the older Titans and the younger ones. Making him the elder statesman amongst the Young Justice crew pretty much killed his character for me. It was a bad fit IMO - not every character needs to 'grow up'.

And don't get me started on that icky Raven non-romance that some fans seemed to be wanting to graft onto the characters. That was fan-fic invading the books at its worst.

Raven and Garfield have had a strange journey, romantically.

She started out using her empathic powers to make Wally fall in love with her so that he'd join the Titans.

His big romance was with Terra, and it's impossible to say how much it mattered to her, since she was so far past 'unreliable narrator' by the time she threw it in his face as to render what she said to him almost meaningless (since she was deliberately trying to both hurt him and kill him at the time...).

The hopeless romantic in me, back in the day, wanted Kid Flash and Raven to eventually move beyond the 'you made me fall in love with you to use me!' drama that got pretty much abandoned, and develop into a real relationship.

Terra could have been redeemed or returned in a mature story arc, by someone like Wolfman himself, but other attempts to do so have, IMO, have fallen flat, and I've never really felt a connection between Garfield and anyone other than Terra, Kory & Donna, Elasti-Girl, Victor and Dayton. None of them but Terra were suitable romantic interests, and a returned Terra would have required better writing than we've seen since those days, IMO.

Indeed, her last crazy over-the-top rant could easily be read as her attempting to virulently deny that the moments she shared with Gar meant anything to her, since she considered that side of herself weak and pathetic. It's not an uncommon thing to see in film or novels, a character who is trying to be 'hard' and expresses contempt for 'weakness,' only as a mask to cover their own insecurites and fear of being vulnerable.

There was a scene in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show where Buffy's mind is switched into the body of a rival Slayer named Faith, a 'bad-girl' who has gone completely off the deep end, and vice-versa. Faith, in Buffy's body, is beating the holy crap out of Buffy, who is currently trapped in her body, punching her in the face over and over, screaming about how much she hates her, and there's no missing the subtext, that she's screaming into her own face how much *she hates herself.*

That's kind of where I felt Terra was heading. Like some of the Thunderbolts, many years later, growing to enjoy the pretense of playing hero and living that life, until the line blurs and they suddenly realize that they like the people they are pretending to be, better than the people that they've been in the past, I think Terra's violent rejection of the life she had as a Titan stems from how much it was affecting her, to have friends who weren't just looking out for themselves, or using her, or whatever.

Unfortunately, when she was brought back, there was the 'is she, isn't she?' teasing, and no dealing at all with these sorts of issues. What could have been a complex and rocky road to redemption (with some backsliding and false starts, perhaps) was instead just sort of 'left for later,' and then, there never was a 'later.'

That's a relatively common issue with serial comics these days, is that writers introduce concepts that they intend to milk over a slow burn of a dozen issues or so, but then the situation changes, or the creative team is swapped around, or the comic is cancelled, and the idea is just flat-out abandoned, leaving dozens of instances of characterization that just sort of fell apart, because the writer decided to eke it out over a time period that he simply did not have the luxury of counting on.

(Pretty much every Alpha Flight reboot has suffered from this, IMO. Whatever grand ideas the writers had never amounted to a fat stack of jack, because they dragged it out until the book was cancelled, and then whined about how great it was going to be if they'd only had another year to dither around and spin their wheels...)

Changeling was always one of my favourite Titans up until around the aftermath of Titans Hunt when Wolfman jumped the shark. When I played superheroes as a kid I always used to be him.

I love quirky powers, and I loved that despite his absolutely messed up past Gar was always generally pretty angst-free. Back in the classic Titans days, Gar's insecurities and fear of losing his loved ones would come up every now and then, but they were always dealt with in a really mature way and it wasn't something we needed to be smacked across the head with every three issues like Batman's MY PARENTS ARE DEEEEEAAAAAAD (in fact quite a lot of the Titans could probably teach Batman a thing or two about healthy grieving)

The 90's weren't really kind to Gar, and I don't think he's ever recovered. Even though he's Vic's best friend he wasn't seen as being part of the core Titans in the JLA/Titans mini and he wasn't really a core player in the Titans at all again for a long time. Then he inexplicably takes on a more serious characterisation when he does come back, but changes his name back to the more juvenile Beast Boy. The Beast Boy name works perfectly for toon Gar; it's silly for the regular DCU Gar to go back to that after years of being called Changeling and when he is specifically trying to present himself as a more adult figure.

I also hate the Raven thing. With a passion. Then again, I could rant for another few paragraphs pretty easily about how much I hate what they've done to Raven now, so maybe I'll just leave it there...

Apparently Cyborg is wildly popular? who knew ... but he's been on two cartoons ... decades apart, and is not only alive in the new 52 but in the Justice League!

Best friend of Gar Logan and the future Robotman! He's been unlucky in love though. and life sort of ... considering the whole accident that required he be turned into a cyborg.

btw it is 2013 can't they find some non metal body parts ... things have come a long way ... we can grow skin in the real world! is cloned body parts so hard to beleive in the comic world!

There was the two parter where he had Promethium fleshy bits grafted back on. Everything in Titans is made of Promethium. But the Fatal Fearsome Five bust in as he's recuperating. Poor Victor ends up melting on the sidewalk.

Poor Vic.

I confess, he has never been my favorite, not like I don't like him but ... he seemed too broody in the original Titans series and I always preferred characters with innate powers.

tv star




chillin with the justice league in the early 80s




doing drugs




ice skating with kids




THERE'S EVEN A BIZARRO CYBORG!




really I mean, he's cool an all but what is with the popularity???