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StitcherTape #7: The New Teen Titans
The Seventh Tape: DC Dave and Doug Adamson play Tape #7, which looks at …
The New Teen Titans
With co-host Davo
Timestamps:
- 4:22 – Crisis News
- 6:21 – Davo
- 27:07 – Promo: Caline A Vlada Tale of the Damned Kickstarter
- 27:59 – The New Teen Titans
- 1:16:39 – Infinite Earths Spotlight
- 1:25:13 – Promo: The Fantastic Pour
- 1:26:10 – Notes from the Multiverse
Leave comments for this episode and view episode related images at our website at: The Monitor Tapes.com / 7
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Caline A Vlada Tale of the Damned Kickstarter
‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ smashed DC continuity — here’s how 4 changes would’ve saved the day by Diane Darcy, May 29, 2025
New History of the DC Universe
Music: Achilles
Kevin MacLeod incompetech.com
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
Hello Tape-Heads!
Long-time listener, first time harasser. I’ve been listing to all of this podcast and there are so many comment that I should have sent! I’ll try to catch up a little.
Regarding Lois Lane a couple of shows back. I think you and your distinguished guest were far too dismissive of the stories of 1970s Lois, aka Earth-1 Lois. You focused on those stories form the Mort Weisinger era, and not the woman who was seen ripping the descriptor “Superman’s Girl Friend” from the title of her own comic (See Lois Lane #80 {okay, that was a Weisinger book}). From the early 70s in her own title, through her series in Superman Family, the focus of these stories was on Lois the reporter, not Lois the wannabe bride. For this young reader starting circa 1975, Lois in the comics was decidely different from Lois on TV. Her life and character was not defined by her boyfriend. She was her own woman. She, like most of the Superman family, was shown to have grown and developed beyond previous depictions. Once the movie came out, most of these developments regressed, IMHO. Not only was she a constant in Superman titles, she had her own strip in Supergirl and an excellent 2 issue mini-series in 1986. Her stories mostly did NOT involve Superman directly!
Regarding the most recent episode focusing on the Teen Titans, this is something that picks at my Crisis scab. I was there before day one. Even though I am listening to your show, overall I do/did not like Crisis On Infinite Earths. I don’t like the story. I don’t like the results. I don’t like the legacy. The things I liked were what your guest did not like, all though DC characters drawn by George Perez. I’m the guy that wanted to see the Atomic Knight. And Mlle. Marie. And Tommy Tomorrow. And Anthro. And Firehair. And The Gay Ghost. I was/am captivated by depth and breadth of DC characters. Psycho Pirate was a fine choice for the story. Harbinger and Pariah were made up for the story and were nothing more than propellants. Psycho Pirate at least had faced the Justice Society. I do subscribe to the Batman and Robin theory, however. The Titans. Here is one of the largest reasons that Crisis fails for me. Wolfman was not going to get rid of his babies. He created Kole in order to excise her in Crisis and reflect some of the heat, but his originals (Starfire, Cyborg, Raven, Jericho) and his revamps (Nightwing, Changeling) were never in danger. As a result, the continuity that emerges from Crisis is DC trying to appease old fans and new fans. “Everything is changed! Everything happened as it did! (Sort of). Dick is Nightwing. He used to be Robin. He was Robin at least 10 years. That means Batman has been around at least 11 years. But Wonder Woman wasn’t. Now she’s brand new. Where does Wonder Girl come from? That’s a problem for later! Like Hawkman! All those Justice League stories? They happened! Except for the Wonder Woman parts. Oh, and the Superman parts. Oh and the satellite parts, I guess, since that was built with Kryptonian and Thanagarian technology. But the stories still happened! Except for the parallel world stories. The only thing that survived the Crisis was the death of Mr. Terrific, which couldn’t have happened! And don;t get started on The Legion!
If DC and Marv had played fair with the rest of the DC books, Batman would have ended before it was re-booted. It wasn’t, because they wanted to keep Dick as Nightwing. Batman’s continuity stayed and Flash’s continuity stayed. And the stretch marks from those pieces being forced into place still show prominently.
What a rant! I think I’ll find that article you referenced and see if I’ll get angry all over again or find a fellow spirit.
I agree with big chunks of this rant, Terry, although I enjoyed Crisis much more than you did. And it’s certainly true that Psycho-Pirate, while not an A-lister, doesn’t belong in the same category as the made-for-Crisis characters
Terry,
Welcome! Thanks for joining us. I honestly can’t wait to have a discussion with you some day. That’s a whole podcast right there! Those are very legitimate thoughts on the subject. And I as much as I love Crisis, those lumps are exactly was 13 year old me wondered about when he asked that panel at SDCC “why didn’t you just reboot DC?”
Someone basing their fandom on a single character… I’m just not seeing it! 😀
DC must have agreed with Davo about introducing new characters just for a Crisis, as I recall, for every subsequent Crisis, and a few other cross-over events, most of the baddies are people whom we’ve met before. Even if it was in this Crisis, but that still counts, right?
The Titan’s aren’t my team, and I know them better from the animated show, but your guests enthusasm for the team just shines through. Though I’m disappointed that Doug didn’t explain how over here Tara (rhymes with Kara) and Terra are said differently herer, so the “joke” about her name(s) just doens’t work here, and confused little Symbols when I was (a klot) younger!
Being called a friend of the show and told I’m right about something by Martin, I’m not sure there’s a greater honour!
First, terrific episode to all involved! Doug, I think you’re going to have to stop insulting yourself for laughs. You have fans now, and you don’t want to insult us by implication.
Second, Davo, you rocked this! Thanks for the praise to me as a past guest, but your reflections and analysis were outstanding, and they spurred great thoughts from DC Dave and Doug too. (Hey, is this the first episode in 3D–Doug, Dave, and Davo?)
Doom Patrol is the other team that’s a de facto family of sorts, although the Chief’s machinations may ruin that dynamic. They have each other partly because they have no one else, and that feels a little like family.
I find Geo-Force as a character inoffensive, but that isn’t exactly praise. His name should’ve been Landslide.
Thanks again for the great show and for the intro to Brain Ladle!
I like to think of Geo-Force as being pronounced ‘Joe Force’. It’s just more fun, so much less awkward.
Really liked this episode!
One of the things that is going to be interesting about this show is seeing fans of specific characters or group talk about the Crisis through that lens. I am a drive-by Titans fan so hearing Davo speak about the Crisis from that angle was completely fresh.
I don’t think I realized just how much they are in the book, definitely more than the then-JLA. More than the Legion I’d say. So they were THE team.
Great work!
Thanks for another fun episode, it felt very hot under the Florida sun, I’d happily have teleported into the pool, electrocution risk aside.
What a treat to hear a new voice, hello Davo, I enjoyed your insights… and I disagree that we shouldn’t have had space given to the likes of the Wild West heroes, it showed the breadth of the DC Universe, and we got to see George join different locales and historical costumes.
The reason Marv and George had the likes of Pariah and Harbinger in the book was that, at least according to interviews at the time, because they were taking some big characters away from DC, they wanted to contribute something new as well – could anyone argue that the addition of Lady Quark and Dr Light II didn’t make up the loss of Supergirl and Flash?
On the subject of Nightwing, he has had some good looks… for other people. The point of Robin was that he was a bright hero, a contrast to Batman – giving up his own colours for Batman‘s grey and blue, he may as well have called himself Bat-Teen. He should have taken the name Flamebird, meaning he’s still a bird, and he could be bright.
As a collector of both the Legion of Super-Heroes and the New Teen Titans at the time, I was happy to see the characters so active, but not necessarily the main focus of the event. The insight that the Titans, given their power level, would be focused on helping bring people to safety, doing support work when needed, fighting in teams when needed, and so on was one I hadn’t considered before.
I’ve started reading the series again with my son, and it’s trippy to hear him talk about bits and pieces of Crisis and DC Multiverse lore coming largely from the animated movies and series as we do. But I do hope to let him know what the universe before the Crisis had been…
Another fantastic episode, and Davo was an exceptional guest! His concepts about leadership and that every situation requires and Batman and a Robin was insightful, and frankly genius. Really gave me a lot to think about, and this idea should be taught in leadership classes.
There was a comment in this episode about reading CRISIS and feeling there were too many minor characters and cameos. While I can see it feels overwhelming to someone reading it today, it’s worth bearing in mind it was purposefully written to celebrate 50 years of DC Comics continuity. So the large number of cameos was really to help acknowledge and celebrate DC’s entire 50 year history and stable of characters. While that might not serve the storytelling well, it served the anniversary purpose.
Thank you for the plugs for the Fire & Water Podcast shows like WHO’S WHO and WHO’S EDITING! Much appreciated!
I commented the other day on another post (about the Superman 2025 movie that I had less favorable reaction to) that I only recently discovered this podcast. I just finished episode 7, so it’s going to be a while before I catch up to the present, but I wanted to give some general thoughts on the show specifically related to Crisis.
I’m really enjoying the podcast so far. I actually stumbled upon you guys accidentally when I was looking for another Crisis podcast (which I eventually found and didn’t like nearly as much), so a very pleasant and serendipitous discovery. I have a very complicated relationship with Crisis, so maybe I’ll just mimic the intro questions that you ask all of your guests.
WHAT IS MY CRISIS ORIGIN STORY?
I’m a Gen-Xer. I was 12-years old in 1985 and bought issue number one off the racks at a local convenience store (along with Who’s Who number one). Using the Mike’s Amazing World of Comics site, I was recently able to triangulate that I first started reading comics regularly in July 1984, so about six months before Crisis. I grew up watching The Super Friends, watching the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, watching syndicated reruns of Batman ’66 and The Adventures of Superman. And prior to 1984 I would buy the odd comic book here and there. So I wasn’t a total neophyte to DC’s characters. But the cover to Crisis number one both baffled and fascinated me. I recognized Superman (but why was he so old?) and Green Lantern (but why didn’t he look like the version from The Super Friends?), but everyone else was completely alien to me. That cover image was compelling enough that I just had to buy it and understand what was going on.
There’s been a lot of talk in the 40 years since Crisis (including on your show) questioning whether or not the multiverse really was too confusing for readers to understand. As a 12-year-old in 1985 immersing myself into the DC Universe, I got the idea of the multiverse pretty quickly. But there’s a wide gulf between understanding the multiverse and liking the multiverse. There’s this concept called Occam’s Razor that says that says that when solving a problem, the simplest solution is almost always the best solution. And I apply that philosophy to storytelling as well. For me, the multiverse was an unnecessary complicating factor in the storytelling process. I think it’s great that Jay Garrick and Barry Allen met in Flash 123. Doing so introduced that idea of generational succession in the DC Universe that I think is a big part of the DC brand value proposition. But why couldn’t they have just met by having Barry run down the road from Central City to Keystone City? Why complicate things by introducing trans-dimensional Earth hopping? I would argue that there’s nothing inherently gained by doing that, especially when the real value to the story is simply the two characters meeting (which could have been done much more simply than the multiverse story that we got).
My view is that, if you’re going to do a multiverse story, then you have to go all in on the multiverse concept and approach it from a logical perspective like Rick Remender “Black Science” or Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” stories, where the entire point of the story is to examine the underlying logical framework of how a multiverse would actually work if it existed. But DC multiverse never did that. Douglas has commented about how illogical it is for America to have discovered Europe in the Earth-Three universe, and I agree. It’s a half-thought-out idea that’s tossed off without considering what any of the logical ramifications of that would be. One could argue: These Silver Age stories are just children’s stories, so I’m over-thinking it. But I would counter that: 1) I was a child in 1985 and I was asking myself these same questions, and 2) “His Dark Materials” is also a children’s story yet it still put in the intellectual rigor to examine the multiverse concept. And my view, then and now, is that if a writer isn’t going to do the hard work necessary to tell a logical multiverse story (even when applying a suspension of disbelief), then just eliminate the concept entirely.
Case in point: For me, those early issues of Justice League International–which included characters originally from Earth-Two (Dr. Fate), Earth-S (Shazam/Captain Marvel), Earth-Four (Blue Beetle), and Earth-One (pretty much everyone else)–were so much more compelling because the writers didn’t have to go through the narrative contortions to explain how and why characters from four different universes were gathering together. By having all of them just live in the same universe to begin with, it allowed the creative team to just get right into the story itself. And to me, that’s the real value of Crisis: It allowed creators to present interesting stories without any barriers to entry for new readers. Again, not that new readers couldn’t have figured things out eventually, but why put up unnecessary barriers to begin with if you can just avoid them entirely from the very beginning?
(My vote for absolute worst DC multiverse story was that two-part origin of Black Canary from 1983 that appeared in two issues of Justice League of America written by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway. It’s downright comical in how astoundingly complicated and convoluted the writers made her origin story in an effort to “fix” a largely irrelevant “problem.” Compare that story to the revised post-Crisis origin of Black Canary by Alan Brennert and Joe Staton that appeared in Secret Origins number 50. In just 20-plus pages, they streamlined her origin into an actual story with emotional resonance that tied together not just the two Black Canaries (mother and daughter), but also Wildcat, Alan Scott Green Lantern, The Reaper, and Batman into an elegantly designed history of super-heroes in post-Crisis Gotham City.)
WHAT DO I LIKE BEST ABOUT CRISIS?
First and foremost the artwork by George Perez and Jerry Ordway (as well as Dick Giordano and Mike DeCarlo). But beyond that, the best thing about Crisis is the post-Crisis DC Universe that it ushered in in its wake. People are very critical of the post-Crisis universe 40 years later because it wasn’t a perfect continuity fix. But I’m of the view that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And while not perfect, the post-Crisis DC Universe was exponentially better than the pre-Crisis DC Universe that preceded it. To borrow a phrase from John Byrne, just clearing away all of the accumulated barnacles and rebooting most of the characters (either a hard reboot or soft reboot) was incredibly exciting to experience. These 30-, 40-, and 50-year-old characters suddenly felt fresh and new and relevant to my generation. They didn’t feel like the paunchy, tired versions of the characters of the Bronze Age DC Universe. In many ways, what I was experiencing in the post-Crisis rollouts that began in 1986 is what I imagine Marvel readers felt when reading those original Marvel comics as they were released in real time in the 1960s (and what I imagine that younger readers today feel as they read the Absolute Universe reboots of those same characters). Hard reboots are good. Each generation wants their own version of these characters. They don’t want (or deserve) to be tethered in perpetuity to their parents’ or grandparents’ versions of these characters.
The post-Crisis DC Universe also led to new styles of storytelling. DC’s embrace of the mini-series, as well as higher fidelity production formats (like the Prestige Format, the Deluxe Format, and the New Format (all with better printing, paper, and binding)) inspired creators to tell longer-form, self-contained stories that were visually, stylistically, and narratively more ambitious. The real legacy of Crisis is all of those now-evergreen, standalone, post-Crisis stories that DC keeps perpetually in print in Deluxe and Absolute Editions, most of which were released between 1986 and 1990-ish (with a few coming as late as 2000-ish):
The Dark Knight Returns
The Man of Steel
Batman: Year One
Wonder Woman: Gods and Mortals
Shazam! The New Beginning
Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters
Blackhawk: Blood and Iron
The Killing Joke
Cosmic Odyssey
Black Orchid
Hawkworld
Arkham Asylum
Adam Strange: Between Two Worlds
The Atlantis Chronicles
World’s Finest
Twilight
The Golden Age
Selina’s Big Score
DC: The New Frontier
These post-Crisis books are the stories that define DC to this day. And I would argue that none of them would have come to pass without Crisis. And that’s what I love the most about Crisis.
WHAT DO I LIKE LEAST ABOUT CRISIS?
A lot of your guests seem to have danced around this without coming out and explicitly saying it, but as grand as Crisis is, and as much affection as I have for it, it’s not a particularly well written story. Some of your guests have mentioned how unnecessarily verbose the prose is in Crisis, and while I agree with that, I’m also willing to grant it some slack as that was the style of writing that was in fashion at the time. Other guests have mentioned how much exposition there is in Crisis, and that’s something I’m less willing to forgive. But the biggest sin in Crisis is that there is no protagonist, no one character through whom the story is told. I know that some will argue that with a cast of characters as vast as Crisis has, it wouldn’t be appropriate (or even possible) to single out just one character through whose point-of-view we see all of the action. But I would counter that Star Wars (both the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy) has a cast of characters that is just as sprawling as Crisis, yet that story still has a protagonist (actually two: Anakin is the protagonist in the first three chapters before becoming the antagonist (SPOILERS), and Luke is the protagonist for the last three chapters). The same is true in Zack Snyder’s Justice League trilogy (MoS, BvS, ZSJL) in which the origin story of that version of the DC Universe is told through Superman’s eyes. Crisis not having a protagonist, I would argue, prevents the story from having any easily discernable narrative arc. I did an end-to-end re-reading of Crisis about a year ago and it just felt like a series of episodic events most of the time with no glue holding them all together. That said, there are some really amazing isolated sequences in Crisis (at least a dozen or more), but none of them feel narratively or thematically connected together in any meaningful way. And because of that, Crisis will always be one of those books that I perpetually dip into here and there but which I find it hard to imagine that I’ll ever read in its entirety again.
IS THERE ANYTHING THAT I WOULD CHANGE ABOUT CRISIS?
Others have said this, but if the post-Crisis relaunch had been better coordinated then I think DC should have done a hard reboot of all their series and started all of them over again at number one. But this was the first time this had been done, so I’m much more forgiving about this than some readers are. Also: a rebooted origin for both Supergirl and Power Girl isn’t that difficult. Bruce Timm and company’s origins for both characters in the Superman and Justice League Unlimited animated series were simple, streamlined, and entirely logical. I don’t know why the DC writers of the 1980s struggled so hard to solve that problem.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE EARTH?
Being as how I’ve established that I don’t like the multiverse, my reflexive answer would be the streamlined post-Crisis DC Universe (from roughly 1986 to 1990-ish). But if I’m playing along with the spirit of the question, I would pick Earth-21, the home of Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, my absolute, all-time favorite comic book. DC: TNF is as close to a perfect comic as you can get, and it demonstrates how you can bring all of these characters together into a single, streamlined, narratively coherent universe. In one of my many head canons, I like to imagine that Crisis was immediately followed up by DC: TNF as the official, self-contained post-Crisis DC Universe. I know that it’s probably well outside the stated purview of this podcast, but I’d love to listen to you guys discuss DC: TNF in relation to Crisis at some point.
Anyway, thanks for indulging my ramblings. Like I said at the beginning, I’m really enjoying this podcast and I hope to catch up with you in real time in the next month or two. Keep up the great work.