Friday, 1 July 2016

Batman, The Teen Titans & The Runaways

Unfortunately, there never was an issue of B & B where Bats met Joan Jett, but Bob Haney gives her old band a cheeky namecheck here anyway. No, this is from the era where the Teen Titans were in the doldrums, having had their book cancelled a couple of years before, and now were resorting to the odd guest slot and offscreen mention.
So Bob and Jim Aparo brought 'em back here, although Wonder Girl and Kid Flash spend most of the story out of costume, which hardly seems fair and annoyed me intensely at the time. Marvel did the same thing in that early issue of Team-Up with the X-Men running around in their civvies for no good reason. If you haven't seen a favoutite character or characters for a while, you want them to do the hits, so to speak. Anyway, this is, of course, wonderful stuff regardless, and surprisingly for a Haney story even makes sense.
Still think we got swizzed on the costume front, though.


  1. Can hardly wait for the next issue hen Batman meets ? and ? is drawn for the first time by Jim Aparo!!!!! By the way, dig those crazy layouts by Aparo on this job. Just amazing stuff.

  2. Not just swizzed on the costumes...this is Haney scripting the Titans, daddy-o! Where's the hip Haneytalk? What they're spoutin' is strictly squaresville!

  3. Actually, there was a reason for the X-Men being out of costume in that issue of "Marvel Team-Up." Their own comic had been canceled, and then revived as a reprint series--meaning that the actual "X-Men" comics being published at the time of that issue of "Team-Up" showed them in their original costumes, not the ones they had adopted by the time their original series ended. In other words, newer readers expected them to wear one set of costumes, older reasons another; showing them out of uniform was a way to finesse the issue.

    Around this time they also turned up in an issue of "Avengers," and there they were simply shown in their old costumes.