I Admit I Continue To Be Curious

Teen Titans 1
DC Comics
Will Pfeifer, writer
Kenneth Rocafort, artist

I grew up with the members of The New Teen Titans in the 1980s. I don't pretend that I followed the team in their Silver Age incarnation (1966-1978), although I have since read and enjoyed most of those issues. I wasn't even on board in 1980 when the New team debuted in DC Comics Presents No. 26 between the pages of a Superman/Green Lantern tale. But I discovered the title in 1983 in a story I've told here before and followed the title going both forward and backward, eventually collecting the entire run.

I decided to try the next incarnation of the team (1996-98) led by a de-aged Ray Palmer Atom when Dan Jurgens relaunched the title shortly after Zero Hour, and I enjoyed the new characters he introduced to the team name, although in all honesty, my favorite issues were the later ones when the original team members came back into the narrative.

I liked even more when Geoff Johns relaunched the title (2003-2011) with the next generation of Teen Titans. A big part of the appeal of that version was the continuity that was established with the formation of Young Justice, and then those characters' "graduation" to the name Teen Titans, while the original group members dropped the no-longer-accurate modifier and became just the Titans for a couple more iterations.

But I dropped out when the New 52 came along. One of the goals of the relaunch was to shake things up and draw in new readers. Teen Titans was one of the titles that changed the most. Despite some early confusion, the entire history of the group was jettisoned, and the personalities of the existing characters were changed pretty drastically along with bringing in a number of newer characters. I'm not going to say the title after the makeover was bad, but I'd lost my connection to the characters and thus, the title.

Then, a few months ago, I reread the H.E.R.O. series from DC written by Will Pfeifer. Not long before that, I'd reread his fantastic run on Catwoman. After both those titles, I decided to give the fresh relaunch of the New 52 version of Teen Titans a try with Pfeifer at the helm. It's too soon to know much about the direction of Pfeifer's run with only one issue under my belt, but he does have me curious.

As far as I know, not having read more than an issue or two of the previous series, it seems that Pfeifer has elected not to drastically reboot the team again to start his run. I know some of the names, but that is about it with the members of the team so far. But in this age where real teens' lives are consumed by electronic devices, Pfeifer has chosen to make said devices a commanding presence in his story — the Titans use social media and electronic gadgetry to communicate with each other as they take down a group of terrorists holding a school bus of students hostage. Bystanders on the street also record many of the events using their own cellphones and tablets. It even seems that the leader of the terror group is using tech-savvy to lead and control his or her own minions (the lead villain's gender wasn't clear to me from the art, but I think the character was referred to as "she" once).

While I'm not familiar with the revamped history of older characters like Beast Boy, Red Robin, Raven and Wonder Girl or the back story for New 52 newcomer Bunker, I liked what I read in this issue. And Kenneth Rocafort's art, while not always to my liking, works in many scenes of this book. I'm sticking around for more before passing any kind of final judgment, but I'm sticking around.