How George Pérez Give the Titans Distinctive Looks
[From Comics Feature #19, 1982]
Pérez: [...] it's like Marv manages to split his brain into seven characters, which I have to do visually. One thing I wanted to do with the Titans-and I'm proud of the fact that I've gotten a few compliments on it-is that even without the masks, and even if 1 were to remove the hairlines, you can tell that they're seven individual faces. They each have individual faces. Raven is very angular, very high cheekbones, very straight-nosed, with an upper lip slightly larger than her lower lip, and, of course, an incredibly large forehead. The very round face of Starfire-the eyes give her away (laughs), and slightly more chiseled, square jawed yet softer features for Wonder Girl, for a totally different look. I tried, at one point, drawing their faces side by side, not even drawing their hair, and in the cases of the girls not even drawing their eyes, and I actually had people able to tell who the characters were.
And the one that was the biggest challenge, by not putting any highlights on, was to differentiate Robin from Kid Flash. Before, they tended to have the same exact face-I was guilty of it, when I started. I made a point of suddenly drawing in Kid Flash's cheeks-making him angular. If you look at a lot of pictures of Mikhail Barishnykov, to give him that very slender look. And, of course, very, very strong legs. The fact is that I'm trying to draw his arms less bulky but keep his legs very muscular. That man must have calves like iron. And Robin's face is more round; Dick Giordano set the standard for what Robin should look like, because he corrects all the artwork (Howell laughs), so-Burt Ward had the perfect face, even though he was a mite on the old side. That roundish face, with that hairstyle.
And Gar, I just made him look very young. I made his eyes larger, his nose smaller, and his chin is smaller, so it looks like a weak chin, but it made him look like he was only 16 years old. Suddenly it became a character we can work with-he now looked different enough that if we draw him in certain reactions, you expect a certain way he'll always react to a situation. He either gets heavy sighs when he sees Starfire, or he has that woeful, wounded-puppy look when he's in sympathy with Cyborg. Of course, Cyborg's the easiest person to worry about-he's the only black member of the group. But I didn't want him to look like just a white man dipped in caramel - I wanted him to look like a black man. I made him bigger than the others, very bulky and all, and finally, I developed the fact that all of them. had to have individualized faces.
Sarah Simms' is a little different. I try not to make it look like when they take off their masks, each whole face changes, also. I was so guilty of that when I first started in comics. Everyone had the same Steve Rogers face when I first started the "Avengers." All these lantern-jawed characters. You put a mask on Thor, and he would have been Captain America.
[From COMIC SCENE #7 magazine]
Pérez stopped to laugh and then admitted that Starfire was created as the group's sex symbol. "When the book developed a fan following and we knew the characters meant something to these people. We knew Star-fire couldn't just remain a bubblehead, she has to have a character of her own which Marv developed wonderfully."
As fans may have noticed, Pérez has a fondness for drawing women. As he puts it, he enjoys drawing "healthy" women, but over the years he has refined his drawing style and "the women have thinned out finally, because they were too thunder-thighed in the beginning. Starfire is the most zaftig of the group. Wonder Girl is very attractive, she has a starlet's figure; she is perfectly assembled. I find her the most alluring, most satisfying woman in the lot. She is the one Titan I would most like to meet.
"Raven has developed, recently, a dancer's body in which her breasts have gotten smaller. I gave Raven a body based on a young lady, Fran McGregor, who's built with a very attractive dancer's body. She goes to the same school as my wife, Carol.
"Lately I have been making the characters look more like people I'm basing them on. Changeling, for example, has become Mickey Rooney; his face is very young now."
[from Comics Interview #50, 1987]
[...]
ANDY: When you started developing the individual characters, the individual faces of the TEEN TITANS, who did you base the characters on? You've often said that Changeling was a young Mickey Rooney. But who were the others in real life?
GEORGE: In real life, let's see now... Koriand'r, she's so many characters I've used: Marilyn Monroe, my first wife, oh gosh, there was a stripper somewhere, ..... . (Laughter.) She was so many. Originally, Raven was Persis Khambatta, the actress who played in the first STAR TREK film, and later became a young lady named Fran MacGregor, who was a dancer, and I used some of her features, particularly her figure, for Raven.
Cyborg was originally a young Jim Brown, the football player turned actor. Dick Grayson was primarily Burt Ward - he had a very physical face, but it worked, so I used Burt Ward as the original one. And Wonder Girl originally was Marie Osmond. (Laughter.) And then I kind of gave her a much more stately face as opposed to a wholesome all-American face as the years went on. But originally she was Marie Osmond. And that was upon Marv's suggestion. And Kid Flash was Ron Howard, not as much facially as opposed to character-wise. The face I just basically leaned out; he developed the body of a dancer, which I also gave to Jericho later, when I gave him the body of, like, Mikhail Baryshnikov type. And Jericho's face was based on a cross between Terry Austin and David Morse, who plays Dr. Morrison on ST. ELSEWHERE.
ANDY: What about Tara?
GEORGE: Tara was just a cute little girl, although I based a little bit of that on my wife Carol's sister, Barbara. A little upturned nose... Barbara does not have the teeth that Tara had. I wanted Tara to be a girl who looked normal. Which also means her death caught everyone even more offguard.
[...]
Speedy and Aqualad? Nicest guest stars. I like Speedy/Aqualad because of the limitation of his powers. He's nice - nice visual - but now that Robin's wearing his Nightwing costume, he's the only one that's showing his bare legs. Again, a nice little sexiness about him. I always like that kinky hair, and I deliberately gave him a more Italian looking face-
ANDY: Sort of like Patrick Duffy?
GEORGE: Actually, I based it on a girl's face. I dated a girl, she had very strong features, and I matched them, made them a little more masculine and made Aqualad out of her.
[...]
ANDY: Speaking of designing faces, when did you start to change Raven's face solely for the lead in TITANS Baxter #1?
GEORGE: When we received a letter from someone saying "Hey, you know, I've noticed that the face has been changing, you're making her look almost demonic, was that deliberate?" It wasn't, then, but it became that way from that point on! (Laughter.) That's when we decided to use that scene inside TITANS #1, based on that one letter. lt started as something I was doing because I was adapting my style. Then I suddenly decided to use a story element. The face was changed, but it wasn't because George Pérez style was changing, it was because it was a deliberate change. So it was an accidental deliberate change.
