Teen Titans #38 - "Through These Doors Pass the Bravest Titans of Them All"

[perletwo]

Was cleaning up a closet last weekend and came upon my cache of original Teen Titans floppies. Here's a little treat from 1972, "Through These Doors Pass the Bravest Titans of Them All," or as I like to think of it, "That time Donna shaved her head and crossdressed for justice!" I've got six pages of an 18-page story, and therefore am cutting the Mal sequence down to a mere preview image.



That's Mal having a flashback to a childhood beat-down, to explain his heretofore unheard-of fear of wide open spaces, which he must overcome in order to repair a lunar landing guidance module.



We open with this charming image of Lilith dancing. (Also, Mantovani, Donna? Really?)



Just a reminder: In the DCnU, Lilith now looks like this and uses her telepathy to torture children. Yay nU!

Anyway, all three Titans deny having ripped off Lilith's record, and invite her to take a telepathic peek into their brains as proof; with a little reluctance, she does, and declares them innocent. No, it was Titans' mentor/sponsor Mr. Jupiter who took the Doors off, and they watch her storm into his office and have unheard angry words with him. She returns with a new platter...



The Titans split up, and Mal walks into a drugstore and onto the Moon; see preview image above. Naturally he sucks it up and does his heroic job, wakes to find himself still in the drugstore, and feeling much better about things.

Meanwhile, Donna steps onto a bus and finds herself instead on a train crossing the Turkish border with hunky superspy Cal Tremaine.



I'm sure Hippolyta would be very interested to hear that, Donna. Anyway, she sucks it up, takes the razor and trench coat, and they make for Customs.



Oh sure, Donna, break that poor hairdresser's heart.

Meanwhile again, Dick has found himself in the cockpit of a plane; he's test-flying it over the ocean, and sees a stranded pilot on a sinking downed plane. He tries for a rescue, and fails.



That's...actually not too far out of line with canon, considering as a younger kid he'd've been admitting failure to the Big Bad Bat. His dilemma here: File the falsified report, or admit he tried and failed. Of course, he sucks it up and tears up the fudged report and 'fesses all to the panel.

All three Titans converge on HQ, hot to find that rascally balloon vendor.



Both the strange music and the hypnotic gas inside the balloons were part of the process of making them suggestible, he explains, and then their own subconsciouses filled in the rest. Naturally, they're all perfectly thankful for this bit of 'dickery. *shrug* Go figure!



So there you go - not bad for an ish where nobody even makes it into costume!

Comments

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

This is one of the first comics I owned. The plot was pretty confusing for a six-year old and I could figure out who Lilith and Mal were, but on the whole I liked it. Even moreso when I found out who The Doors were and heard "When The Music's Over." Now that I think about it, though, there wasn't much electric guitar in the song and it really isn't conducive to dancing like Lilith does here.

[bradygirl_12]

I'm digging the artwork here, baby! ;)

But it's a cool story. The Bronze Age was good for allowing their heroes to be flawed (even though you sometimes got that in the Golden and Silver Ages). It must have been tough for Dick to live up to the Bat's exacting standards but he manged to do it, even as a kid. And it speaks volumes that Bruce respects him so highly and considers him "The toughest of us all". Gods, I love that quote! ;)

[icon_uk]

I remember this fun story, and yes the art is pretty groovy. I particularly love the casual acceptance of the deranged nature of the plot... Dick's rocking that striper T-shirt, and his big blissful grin as he's "unwinding" (So THAT'S what they called it back then) and then buying random balloons from weirdly dressed strangers suggests that Timothy Leary had probably been spiking the Titan's Soder-Cola.

And in fairness, we don't know that that was Lilith in the DCnU, that was someone called Omen, who may, or may not, have anything to do with Lilith (Who I suspect has gone the way of Donna, Wally and most other heroes of their generation)

[perletwo]

No, I had to look it up in the TT: Culling trade, but I found it. In the Dark Omen chapter of the Culling arc, when Omen split Skitter and Celine apart, Celine said "You are interfering in things you cannot understand, Omen...or should I call you Lilith?" I'm not real familiar with Celine/Skitter, but I was assuming she has something to go on there.