March of the Titans: Team History, Part 1 - Atop the Fourth Wall

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara does a retrospective on the Teen Titans, starting here from the swingin' 60s! http://atopthefourthwall.com Originally uploaded March 4th, 2013. ORIGINAL INFO: March of the Titans begins with a look at the history of the team! From the swingin’ sixties through the New Teens of the 80s! Then, the team history concludes with the Titans Hunt and the underrated 1996 team! RUMINATIONS: And thus begins the grand experiment! I can’t remember what was the final impetus for me to do “March of the Titans.” Maybe it was the changing of Tim Drake’s origins, maybe it was the trade paperbacks of the New 52 Teen Titans books that cut out any references to past Titans teams, but for whatever reason, I felt like talking about the team that actually got me to start reading comics. However, THAT book had a crapton of backstory attached to it, so while I had no problem reading it with the brief information I had on the characters, I knew the viewers would want some background. And hell, by this point the Continuity Alarm gag had all but been retired because people WANTED to hear the backgrounds of storylines and characters, so devoting some time to look over their history would go over well… and it did. I didn’t really realize just how much people loved these until the following year, when I did a major poll for to see about favorite episodes and the like and the March of the Titans episodes got a ton of votes. The first part details the complicated history of the team from their inception to around when Danny Chase joined the team. I actually did read all these books, some skimmed more than others in the early days, but it’s a bit of a rush to reexplore all this stuff and rediscover why I love comics to begin with, and in particular the serial storytelling in them. Sure, I’d love for there to be more stand-alone stuff, but the New Teen Titans showed how you could have an ongoing narrative without resorting to multi-parters stretched to fit the trade.