Like the first volume, TEEN TITANS Silver Age Vol. 2 won’t be for all tastes — if your idea of the Titans is shaped by the Marv Wolfman/George Perez version of the 1980s, this is way more simplistic and lighter on character. That said, I find the team good, light-hearted fun with some great art, mostly by Nick Cardy (who did both of today’s Titans covers. The Mike Friedrich/Gil Kane story behind this cover, for instance, has a loser teenage villain who can’t convince the adults he can take down the JLA — so hey, why not crush the Titans to prove himself? They’ll fall before his genius! (spoiler—nah, you can figure it out for yourself, right?).
The volume is also interesting from a comics-history perspective (something I blog about at Atomic Junk Shop). Instead of Bob Haney, who co-created the team and wrote every story through #17 we had younger scripters include Friedrich, Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. That led to a good-guy Russian, Starfire—
— and what would have been the first black DC superhero if the publisher hadn’t gotten cold feet. There are wilder changes in store for the team after this TPB wraps up with Teen Titans #24 — I’ll be blogging about them at Atomic Junk Shop, sure enough.
Tom Gauld’s YOU’RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK is a delightful collection of his absurdist newspaper cartoons: Dan Brown uses a time machine to write all of Shakespeare! The secret origin of swearing! We learn the the errors in Dan Brown’s latest novel (“The Oval Office does not have a hidden wishing well.”)! I’ve never heard of Gauld before, but I like his stuff.
One of my favorite 1980s comics was Power Pack by Louise Simonson and June Brigman (who did the cover) wherein the four Power siblings receive superpowers from a friendly alien and proceed to fight off an invasion, then various supervillains, without their parents knowing. None of the later creators handled the kids so well so when I learned Simonson and Brigman had returned for the POWER PACK: Into the Storm miniseries, I took advantage of subscribing to the Marvel app and read it.
The Power kids and their buddy Franklin Richards are looking to have a quiet summer on the beach (Sue and Reed Richards have agreed to let their kid stay with the Power family) but they once again get involved with malevolent aliens, good aliens and the need to shield their parents from knowing the truth. Can they pull it off? I thoroughly enjoyed visiting with these kids again.
GLASS BOTTOM BOATS & MERMAID TAILS: Florida Tourist Springs by Tim Hollis was LeAnn’s gift from my Amazon list, by a writer who specializes in looking at Southern tourism from the days before Disney and Universal were the default destinations. Here Hollis looks at famous and once-famous attractions such as Silver Springs, where my family used to watch river life through the glass-bottomed boats, Weeki Wachi with its mermaids (Hollis notes its pop culture fame came when the real park was fading into oblivion) and multiple smaller and less successful ventures. While the theme park era dealt many of them a deathblow (a number of them are now state parks) the interstate highway did as much damage, as the new roads meant former roadside attractions were now way off the beaten path. A specialty book but great if this interests you.
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