Marv Wolfman and George Perez celebrate 25 years of the New Teen Titans at Comic-Con International!
In 1980, everyone was looking for change. DC Comics was experiencing a
slump in sales, and fans were interested in seeing their superheroes
embark on more complex adventures. Meanwhile, on the creative side,
author Marv Wolfman wanted to move away from writing two-man teamp-up
books like World's Finest and The Brave & The Bold,
while artist George Perez was interested in leaving Marvel Comics for
DC. Wolfman figured that was creating his own comic he'd find his
opportunity, so he approached DC editor Len Wein, whom he'd worked with
on the Teen Titans in the late 1960s, and pitched his take on The New Teen Titans. Problems solved? Not quite.
"We pitched it to [then President] Jenette Kahn, who wasn't all that
thrilled, because she didn't really like the previous version," explains
Wolfman. "To which we said, 'We'll do it better'."
Kahn agreed to give them a chance, and Wolfman set about finding an
artist to solidify the deal. He came across Perez, who was known for
working on team-oriented action books, but Perez had other aspirations.
"The only reason I said yes at all was because I was interested in
doing the Justice League of America," laughs Perez. "I said if I could do an issue or two of the JLA, I'd do Titans."
Most of DC's new titles were being cancelled after six months so everyone assumed The New Teen Titans
would be destroyed by poor sales faster than Brother Blood could ever
hope to accomplish. But fans immediately flocked to the multifaceted
characters, intricate artwork, and pulse-pounding plotlines that
elevated Wolfman and Perez's "Just Little League" because what was
currently being published. Soon the title was rivaling the X-Men.
books at Marvel - indeed, the companies eventually published an epic
crossover starring the two teams - and DC fortunes began turning around.
Today, the Teen Titans have seen a dramatic resurgence, with an animated
series on Cartoon Network, a besting-selling comic written by Geoff
Johns and toy lines based on the team's various incarnations but none of
those beloved characters would be saving the universe at all if it
weren't for Wolfman and Perez's success 25 years ago, which is why
Comic-Con International is celebrating the Titans' anniversary at this
year's convention.
We took a moment with this dynamic duo to discuss their early work and
the elements that turned a group of teen heroes into comic book legends.
Comic-Con International: Unlike most team books at that time, Titans. took great pains to focus on the characters' everyday lives as well as their adventures.
WOLFMAN: You need the real life to make the hero life that much more
special, [and] my belief is that Stan Lee got it right in the
beginning. Peter Parker had a real life and you cared more about the
supporting characters than you did about Spider-Man's villains, as good
as some of them were. I felt that we were getting away from that, and
thought that comics needed to be grounded [like they] had been in the
'40s and '50s.
CCI: That grounding affected other books, particularly the Batman titles with Dick Grayson's transformation from Robin into Nightwing. How did that come about?
WOLFMAN: From the very beginning I was interested in making all the
Titans stand on their own, so I had been aging Dick Grayson
intellectually as well as physically and George had visually turned him
into a young man as opposed to a young boy. At the same point in the Batman books, their feeling was that Robin needed to be young, [but] because Titans
was the number-one book, I convinced them that they should create a new
Robin and let them keep Dick Grayson. That was the reason for the
change into Nightwing.
PEREZ: The name Nightwing was already used in the Superman/Jimmy
Olsen stories but it was such a good name that Marv and I settled on it
because we couldn't think of anything better. One of the things I did
do, which I don't know if Len [Wein] agreed with, was giving him a deep
plunging V-neck. I'm a firm believer [that because] we do a lot of
cheesecake in comics that a little beefcake was definitely in order.
Nightwing had an enormous female following who loved him as Robin, I
guess it must have been the bare legs and gave him a little more chest.
So the Robin Rooters, which were the names of the Robin groupies, became
Wing Nuts.
CCI: What's it like seeing these characters brought to life as an animated series?
WOLFMAN: I'm thrilled and love the show. What I really like is that
they found their own take the same way George and I did when we came
onto Titans. By having it so far off and yet at the same time
having Starfire, Raven, Cyborg and all the villains - and I'd say 95% of
those villains are characters created by George and me or by me after
George left - it's a thrill because they're finding new ways of doing
what we had done, and they're doing it with respect.
CCI: This year's also marks the 20th anniversary of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the miniseries that revamped the DC Universe. Did that come about because of Titans?
WOLFMAN: No, Crisis was something that conceptually goes back
when I was a kid. I always wanted to see all the characters get
together but I didn't have any storylines. Years later I [got a letter]
from a fan saying DC continuity makes no sense, and I said something
like one of these days we need to fix this. That afternoon, while
waiting to go to a convention, the idea came to me. [DC] had not been
thinking of this at all.
CCI: Did the idea of drawing almost every characters in the DCU intimidate you?
PEREZ: No one has ever accursed me of saying, "Oh my God, I Can't do
this!" [he laughs] I always wanted to do a lot of characters and as
many costumes as I could. When I heard about Crisis on Infinite Earths
I said I would love to draw it. Suddenly it upped the ante for them
because now it was with somebody who could do a more complicated story
and who wouldn't try to find the easy way out. On the contrary, I would
find the hardest way to do a scene in order to put more information on
the printed page.
CCI: How do you each think the other person's work has influence the comic book industry as a whole?
WOLFMAN: George was the first person, I Believe, who really worked
at giving characters completely different body types and body language.
If you could silhouettes of all the George's characters you could tell
who they were even if they were dressed in different clothing simply by
the way they stood. Secondly, George's absolute love of the material for
doing comics, just came through like nobody's business. This was not
somebody who did it as a profession and had gotten staid with the
material. It was not boring, it was constantly exciting because George
was constantly excited about doing it. I think that really reflected on
the next generation of comics [artists].
PEREZ: I think Marv has proved that you can be intimate and earth
shattering at the same time. One of Marv's greatest gifts is his handle
on characterization. He was able to do it so successfully, not only on a
team book like Teen Titans , which had essentially seven lead characters, but even on a book like Crisis on Infinite Earths
where you had hundreds of characters. It's the same thing in comics as
it is with movies. We sometimes lose sight of character-driven stories
in exhcnage for a lot of flash and bombast, but I think if people reread
some of the [comics] that Marv and I worked on together, even now, they
see that there was a great love for the characters [and that] ends up
producing a far better story. And there never can be enough good stories
in comics.
NEW TEEN TITANS #1 (Nov 1980)
ART OF VINTAGE DC COMICS: NEW TEEN TITANS #1 (Sep 2010)
MAESTRO #2 (Variant Cover) (23 Sep 2020)
