Marv Wolfman and George Pérez talk about how they
came up with the now-classic team!
George Pérez Speaks
[From FOCUS ON GEORGE Pérez]
MacDONALD: The New Teen Titans. How involved were you in the concept of the new characters?
Pérez: Conceptually, the characters were mostly worked on by Marv Wolfman and Len Wein, since both of them were the ones who were instigating the revival of the Teen Titans. Len was the one who wanted a mystic-type character, which led into Raven, Marv wasn't all that much into doing another mystic character, having done Dracula for so long. But, since Len was the editor, Marv said, "Okay, fine, we can work on that."
The Starfire character was something that Marv did want to do, he wanted to have a strong female alien character, and the Cyborg character was just a popular concept. They wanted to have a major black character in the DC universe who could hold his own. And trying to sell it was still a 'bit tough until, for whatever reason, I said yes, and they went to Jenette saying, "If we do the Titans book, we have George Pérez agreeing to do it." And we sat down, then I became involved, so I started becoming involved in the concept of the characters from that point on. I worked first from a visual point of view, devising the feline look to Koriand'r, off the basically Red Sonja look at first. Joe Orlando was the one who came in after seeing the original drawing and saying, "Make her hair a little longer," and little did he know what he wrought. And, the Raven and Cyborg characters, like Starfire, were designed once. They were all designed once, like Raven's costume, which was a slight modification of my own choice. But they said, "Design a few designs per character." To me, that seemed like work. So I designed them once, and I figured if they didn't like it, then they could show me what they did want. That's a lot easier than trying to second-guess them without really knowing if the first one was all right or not.
And they bought all the character designs. Len was the one who mostly did the modifications for Changeling's costumes. I had that little fake belt buckle put in the middle. It was just the basic design of Spider-Man's costume, and so we had to put trunks on him, and that little belt buckle in there, just to break that area of white, because it was obviously going to be attributed to the old, original costume. And my one big suggestion for Changeling was that I was not going to have his hair come onto the character, whatever creature he'd turned into, and the fact that we could have a green face on a regular body, I thought that was rather silly. So we decided to go with the full green character.
MacDONALD: Before that what he changed into wasn't all green?
Pérez: Right. When he was Beast Boy, he would turn into, take an example, an orange tiger with a green face, and his own hair.
MacDONALD: (Laughs)
Pérez: There was this green face on the top of an animal.
MacDONALD: Yeah, that must have looked rather silly, I must say.
Pérez: If we're going to revive this character, let's not get ridiculous about it. And starting from about issue #8, probably, was the real first issue that I came in as a full plotter. Marv and I both really felt that if this strip sold after issue #8, then we knew we'd gotten a special book on our hands. Issue #8 was a very well-received issue. It allowed us to open up a lot of subplots into it, using the characters. From that point on, I knew this was the book I was going to stay on, for, at the time, a long foreseeable future. I thought it was going to be a lot shorter, but that's when the real enthusiasm came on.
[George Pérez Interview from Wizard #35 1994]
[...]
Lets get back to that in a moment. I want to go through your early days on the Titans. When Marv called you an said he wanted to do a new version of the the Titans, how much had he already formalized then?
The characters were pretty much already conceived and blueprinted to a limited degree, by Marv and by Len Wein, both of whom were big Titans fans in their youths. This was a big break for them.
They already knew what kind of characters they wanted: a cosmic character, a cyborg, and someone a little more magical. They gave me the names and where they wanted to go with it, such as Raven's soulself, which I visualized as [the Larry Trainor version of] Negative Man [from the old] Doom Patrol. I went home and designed each character once, came in with the designs, and they liked them all. I removed the belt from Raven's outfit, and Joe Orlando came in and saw Starfire and said, "Make her hair longer," and created one of her strongest visual trademarks.
My early designs didn't have the identifiable facial features [the characters] later developed; that didn't come until I started casting them in my mind and using real people as my influences, mostly friends of mine. Raven changed so drastically that we did a story in Titans showing that the facial changes were a manifestation of her powers.
Pérez on Jericho
From the Judas Contract Trade Paperback:
Then there was Jericho. Marv wanted to introduce a new member to the Titans to replace the departed Kid Flash. However, he had the character's name (an unused character who was to have appeared in the original 1960s Titans series) and the notion that he would be an offspring of the villainous Terminator, but nothing more. After weeks of pounding our heads against the walls, we had all but given up. We couldn't think of anything for Jericho. Then it hit me. Overnight, I came up with the concept, personality, and design for Joseph William Wilson, the newest Teen Titan. Joseph, or Jericho, was the first Titan I ever designed solely and as such, he was more of an artist's character than a writer's character. By making him mute (and forbidding poor Marv the use of thought balloons for the character), I was forced to convey Jericho's personality through body language and facial expressions. Such subtle nuances would have been unthinkable for me when I first started the series in 1980, but Marv was so confident in my improved abilities that he accepted my version of Jericho, who was a lot tougher for him to write.
Marv Wolfman Speaks
From the New Teen Titans Archive, Volume 1:
I'm often asked how we came up with the New Titans. The answer is both simple and very complex. It is my belief that the best characters have strong, traumatic origins that you can constantly revisit and find new wrinkles to play with. Superman s origin echoed the biblical story of Moses. Doomed to die, an infant was sent by his parents on a journey to another land where he grew up to become a great hero. Batman watched as his parents died. Spider-Man let a burglar kill his favorite uncle and from that day on, his guilt motivated him to combat crime. These heroes were born of tragedy, and the trauma that created them continued to motivate them throughout their adventures. Psychologically speaking, we are what we were.
The New Titans would be created in the same way, and their origins would control their later actions. Starfire was an alien Princess whose weak-willed father, Myand'r (meander) sold her into slavery in order to save his planet from destruction. Raven's mother was an Earth woman raped by an interdimensional demon. In order to save Vic Stone's life, his father had to turn his son into a living cyborg.
Are you sensing another pattern? The Titans' origins all stemmed from parent/child differences. The theme for the Titans began and remained young versus old. Son and daughter versus father and mother. These universal conflicts, understood by all teens as they grow up and separate from their parents, could be revisited time and time again. I believe they gave the Titans a depth of character that had not, up to that time, been often seen in comics.
There was more. I believed the Titans themselves needed to be emotionally at odds with each other even while they needed to be friends. To facilitate this I set up two theoretical triangles, one for the male characters, one for the female. For example, put Wonder Girl at the top of the women's triangle. Donna Troy came from an Amazon race who believed not only in peace, but were also warriors. On one corner of the triangle put Raven, whose interdimensional society were extreme pacifists who would never fight, not even to save their lives. On the other corner put in Starfire, who comes from a pure warrior culture. Three sides of the same coin, so to speak, with enough in common they could be friends, but with enough differences that would keep them at odds. This fundamental conflict, one hoped, would create good stories.
Also take a look at them emotionally:
Raven was shy and introverted and found it difficult to confide in others. Starfire was outgoing and pure, lusty emotion. Wonder Girl, once again, was directly in the middle. The same kind of triangle was created for the guys. Robin, later Nightwing, was the level-headed and capable leader who, because he was kept on a tight leash by Batman, often felt inadequate for the task at hand. He also had a need to prove himself to Batman. Because everyone in his life had died on him, Changeling believed he had very little to offer anyone and covered it up with an outward bravado. Cyborg was a logical scientist type who rejected that approach to become an angry young man. Nightwing's logical approach to life and anger toward his "parent" was shared by Cyborg while his feelings of inadequacy were shared by Changeling. Cyborg and Changeling had also been physically altered by their parents, and that helped bring them together.
The characters were created so they would play off each other, but they were still only words on paper. They needed to have real life breathed into them. That happened when George Pérez came onto the scene.
On Terra's creation:
[ From the Judas Contract Trade Paperback]
I love puncturing balloons, and I decided if some fans thought we were an X-Men clone, then why not play with them a bit? The X-Men had just introduced a new member to their group, a young 14-year-old cute-as-a-button girl with incredible powers. I'd do the same. I'd play her first as a villain, then seemingly reform her and have her join the Titans. Only I'd have her constantly lie to the Titans, change her stories, do suspicious things, and, in general, make her a louse. I could do that, I knew, because comic book convention would demand that readers ignore all the evidence and assume she was a good girl. After all, the X-Men's Kitty Pryde was a heroine, so even the lying, cheating, conniving Tara Markov had to have a heart of gold.
Right?
Wrong. From the very beginning Tara was conceived as a villainess. It was the first time a member of a super-hero group ever proved to be a spy (not a traitor-she was always working for The Terminator). Playing on the comic readers' expectations worked.
The Tara Markov story threw everyone for a loop. Reader response ranged from hailing the stories as a Titans high point to "How dare you make her evil," (as if I had ever given the readers any reason to think she wasn't) to "For what you did to Tara Markov, I am going to kill you." We sent that death-threat to the police. Unlike our pen-and-ink created heroes and heroines, the writers and artists of the Titans are all too mortal.
Marv on Jericho
[Marv Wolfman Interview • Amazing Heroes #50, 1984]
It's quite ironic that the demise of such a twisted character as Terra should also mark the debut of such an uncorrupted character as the newest Titan, Jericho. Joseph Wilson, the sole-surviving son of the Terminator, is quite an enchanting character and, as we see in the first Baxter book encounter with Raven and Trigon, one who is selflessly courageous.
"Partially because he is mute, he has developed the ability. and the actual interest, to listen to people," Wolfman says. "He is one of those types who, because of the kind of nature he has-a very easy, caring nature- people unload their troubles to him. There are people like that, and he's one of them. The fact that he's a listener, since he can't talk, makes hint a very good person for people to care about. Raven finds that she is drawn to hint, because he's one of the few people who has spent most of his life listening to people, as oppose to just hearing what they say. He likes people.
Joseph has the soul of an artist, a warm, loving, caring He does not harbor grudges, nor is he someone who enjoys the concept of fighting (though he will when he has to). He's someone who's inspired by a loving soul more than by anything else. He paints, is a musician, is into the Arts. He's very bright, and not at all naive. He knows what's going on; he's just a person who very much believes that there can he good in people, sees good when there is, and does not necessarily hate people because they are not good. He knows the score, he just chooses to walk by himself in many ways, though he is with the Titans."
