Category: Comics

Posted on
by

[Starfire circa 1990]The Teen Titans’ Starfire is an alien princess from the world of Tamaran. A virtual paradise, populated by a proud, but beautiful and sensual warrior race. (Think of co-ed Amazons without the attitude.) When Starfire—or, rather, Koriand’r—was a child, the world was invaded. The war went badly, and the king ultimately agreed to sell his daughter into slavery in exchange for Tamaran’s freedom. (Years later she escaped her captors and ended up on Earth.)

Tamaran’s story unfolded during the 1980s in The New Teen Titans and The Omega Men (which featured Kory’s brother). Koriand’r returned home to help stop a civil war, but then her sister wrested the throne from their father. Komand’r (a.k.a. Blackfire) surprised everyone by becoming a much better—and fairer—ruler than anyone expected. Eventually Kory returned home to stay.

As The New Titans wound its way to a close in 1996, the story returned to Tamaran, now embroiled in a new war—one which ultimately destroyed the planet. The survivors settled on an uninhabited world to rebuild, dubbing it New Tamaran. (New Teen Titans #126-230, 1996)

Then things got nasty.

Just a few months after the final issue of The New Titans, DC published a prologue to the year’s big crossover, The Final Night. The sun-eater, before setting its sights on Earth, destroyed New Tamaran utterly, with no time for an evacuation. Starfire, exiled just hours before by her suddenly-evil-again sister, was believed the only survivor.
Continue reading →

Posted on
by

Class Dis-mythedPhil Foglio once again illustrates the Myth Adventures universe in the next book in the series: Class Dis-Mythed.

I don’t know how much of it is Jody Lynn Nye’s influence and how much of it is just Robert Asprin being re-energized about the series, but since they started collaborating the books have improved drastically. The new ones have much more of the feel of the early series, before Asprin burned out on it and spent a decade working through writers’ block.

(via the Studio Foglio newsletter.)

Posted on
by

A thought: the original Teen Titans are beating the Justice League when it comes to passing on their super-genes. Leaving out possible-future stories and backstories, it comes down to just Aquaman of the core group, and Green Arrow as the most prominent member outside the “Big 7.”

As for the original 5 Teen Titans (now in their mid-twenties):

Speedy – now Arsenal, has a preschool-aged daughter, Lian (by way of international super-villain Cheshire).
Wonder Girl – now Troia, had a son Robert with her husband, but both were killed in a car crash.
Aqualad – now Tempest, has an infant son Cerdian with his wife Dolphin.
Kid Flash – now Flash, nearly had twins, but a villain beat his wife Linda so badly she not only miscarried, but lost the ability to have any more children. Update Nov. 2005: Time travel altered the attack, and Linda gave birth to healthy twins (who have yet to be named in print).
Robin – now Nightwing, no kids.

And of course if you do add in future stories, all five had children in Kingdom Come… who came back to visit the present-day mainstream DCU in “Who Is Troia?” in 2001.

Admittedly the mortality rate is high, but the 60% 80% birth rate certainly beats the core League’s 14%.

Posted on
by

There’s an interesting similarity between the covers of the latest issues of Teen Titans and Astonishing X-Men.

Professor X and Superboy

For those who may be wondering why Superboy is bald: he’s a clone of Superman, but Earth’s cloning technology isn’t up to creating a 100% Kryptonian. So they used human DNA as well to create a hybrid. Early in this series he discovered the human donor was Lex Luthor. He’s been a bit… conflicted about that discovery.

Posted on
by

Looking at the list of “most popular” links on Del.icio.us, it seems someone has scanned the entire Book of Bunny Suicides and its sequel, both by Andy Riley.

Good grief, people—you can pick up the book for $7.00 at any bookstore. I can understand posting a couple of excerpts, but from what I can tell, these people have scanned and posted the entire book. They haven’t even credited the source! In the blog postings that show up on a “bunny suicides” search, most of them don’t even seem to know where the cartoons are from. Heck, even with pirated MP3s you usually know who sang the song.

Google has pulled a few of the sites from their index in response to a DMCA complaint. (Interestingly, Google themselves linked to the Chilling Effects entry.)

It always amazes me how rude people can be.

Book of Bunny Suicides Return of the Bunny Suicides