Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

The first half of the ‘80s was a good time for character-driven, action-packed team books. At the same time as Marvel were making all kinds of history with Uncanny X-Men, though, DC had their own crack at the idea with Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s New Teen Titans, a superb series that drew together a disparate group of young characters and forged strong bonds between them, saw genuine and realistic character growth (when Dick Grayson finally decided to give up the silly green underpants of Robin and become Nightwing, it was in the pages of Titans rather than Batman that we saw it happen) in addition to some cracking action stories.

Incidentally, don’t be confused by the title of the book – Tales of the Teen Titans was, in fact, the original New Teen Titans series, retitled after #40 but retaining the numbering so that a new New Teen Titans book could be launched (featuring parallel stories, it was printed on better-quality paper and designed solely for the direct market in a time when, unlike nowadays, regular comics usually made it to both newsstands and the specialist shops). This book then turned to reprints after #58, with the only “new” stories coming in the second volume of NTT. Alright, so you can be a bit confused if you want.

Anyway, #55 provides what is essentially the capstone to the classic Judas Contract storyline. In an attempt to fulfil a contract on the heads of the Titans originally taken on by his deceased son, the mercenary Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson had manipulated the team by placing the young villainess Terra in their ranks as a “new member”. After turning on the team, and indeed on Deathstroke, Terra was killed in action – but not before Garfield “Changeling” Logan had fallen in love with her. Unable to accept Terra’s betrayal, Logan blamed Deathstroke for somehow “turning” her, and pursued a bloodthirsty vendetta against the sort-of-villain (to be fair, it did also have something to do with the fact that Logan himself had been “killed” by Deathstroke, albeit subsequently rescued by Amazonian technology).

And so we come to this issue, billed as a final confrontation between the two men, but which turns out to be something rather different – having cleverly scuppered Wilson’s trial so that the mercenary would go free, Logan tracks him down with the intent of killing him – but finds, upon arrival at their meeting place, that “Deathstroke” isn’t there – it’s merely Wilson, out of costume. Wilson, somewhat resigned to his fate and weary of the endless game, helps Logan realise that he simply can’t kill, and the pair of them eventually end up talking over coffee.

What sounds like an anticlimax, however, is a brilliant piece of character study. Since his introduction way back in the second issue, Slade had always been one of the most interesting characters in Titans – while a mercenary and a killer, his code of ethics and the background and history (revealed bit by bit over those fifty-odd issues) that drive him make him a character that, as the title of the issue puts it, deals in “shades of grey” rather than the black-and-white villainy that someone like Logan expects to see. This particular issue appears to be setting out to draw a line under the character once and for all – and it’s only a shame that that didn’t end up holding true, and that – while still morally ambiguous – the character became more clearly defined as a villain in the years that would follow. Logan, meanwhile – never one of the most interesting of Titans characters in the early issues – had already begun to “grow up” and show a bit more depth by this point, and while his rage at Terra and Deathstroke had threatened to turn him into a stereotypical angry fighty teen, Wolfman reins it in and makes it an important watershed moment in his character, without letting it consume him.

By this point George Perez had left the book, which is a great shame – his brilliant work was just as much a factor in the book’s success as Wolfman’s writing, with his strong sense of character design really helping to define the Titans, and his innate ability to squeeze an incredible amount of action and story into a relatively small space meant that each 22-page issue felt twice as long. Still, Ron Randall’s clear work is hardly a vast shift in style, and as with almost all the artists and fill-ins that succeeded Perez, there’s a noticeable continuity of design, which helps with the feeling that the entire five years-or-so run is one massive story.

Having only really discovered recently just how good the Wolfman/Perez Titans is, it actually makes the supreme hideousness of Judd Winick’s Titans series all the more evident. I’d absolutely love for someone to do some new stories bringing these characters back together, and examining how the relationships between them might have changed. Unfortunately, Winick’s book is about some completely different characters (well, some cardboard cutouts) who happen to have the same names. But don’t let what’s generally been done with the characters in the decades since (Donna Troy, anyone? Anyone at all? No?) put you off – as far as grounded (though occasionally set-in-space) and deeply human (though, y’know, superhuman) superhero comics go, New Teen Titans is an absolute classic, and well worth a look. Particularly, incidentally, if you’re exactly the type of Marvel fan that DC were shamelessly trying to attract with it.

Tags: Marv Wolfman, Ron Randall, Teen Titans
Publisher: DC, Dusting Off