Hey guys! Happy Friday! I hope you all have fun this weekend it being Easter and all. Today I decided to pick a topic for a comic book discussion that is of interest. I'm going to be talking about teen comics that came out from 1991 until 2003. But I'm not just going to talk about American comics. I'm also going to be mentioning a couple of Manga series as well. This is not going to be a definitive list or anything. Far from it. It's just a few that I've read at least one issue of at some point in my life. Also, I'm going in fairly chronological order here, so let's get started.
First up is Codename Sailor V by Naoko Takeuchi. This was the precursor to Sailor Moon and ran for 15 chapters from 1991 until 1997 in the Manga magazine, RunRun. The Manga volumes were released from 1993 until 1997. The story is about Minako Aino, who is chosen to become Sailor V, a superhero who fights crime in Tokyo, Japan. As the series goes along Mina discovers more about her role as Sailor V and about the much larger picture. If you've read this series, you can tell just how much Naoko Takeuchi re-used in Sailor Moon right down to Minako's personality being similar to Usagi in Sailor Moon. Of course Minako actually gets better with her new abilities much faster than Usagi, but honestly, that's just because this series was short compared to Sailor Moon and she didn't have as much time to flesh Minako out. When Kodansha Comics re-released the series in 2011, I picked the two volumes along with the first few volumes of Sailor Moon and I was startled with how similar the two books were. Alright so let's move on to the next book.
In 1992 Super Sentai was a pretty popular series in Japan. Naturally, Naoko Takeuchi was a fan, and as a result she redeveloped her Sailor Soldier concept into a mash-up of Super Sentai with the equally popular Magical Girl genre to create Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon or Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon as the Manga became known as here in North America. While 14 year old Usagi Tsukino is the main protagonist of the series, and it initially focuses on her life as a junior high school student and as Sailor Moon, she is joined by (initially) four other girls including Minako Aino, a.k.a. Sailor V or Sailor Venus as she is now known as. So it takes the superhero team concept, including a sixth member who is different from the core group of five (Tuxedo Mask), from Super Sentai and combines it with the concept of a teenage girl given magical powers to fight evil with the assistance of a talking animal. I didn't read the Sailor Moon Manga until I was an adult and Kodansha Comics re-released the paperbacks here in North America, but the Anime came here in 1995 to capitalize on the success of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and I watched that with my siblings all the time. The Manga is pretty good though.
Now moving on to DC Comics, we come to one of my favourite comic book series of all time, Robin, starring the third Robin, Tim Drake. While previous Robins, Dick Grayson and Jason Todd, occasionally went out on cases on their own, Tim is the first Robin to be almost entirely his own character, apart from Batman. And even though Dick Grayson had his own solo series in Star Spangled Comics from 1947 until 1952, I don't think many people actually remember that it existed. Tim Drake actually had three mini-series prior to the monthly title coming out, with the first one starting in 1991 right after Tim officially became Robin. But then Knightfall happened and suddenly Jean Paul Valley became Batman and Tim was no longer welcome in the Batcave. Even after Bruce Wayne returned after Prodigal, Tim continued with his own adventures until Robin was cancelled in 2009 following Bruce's supposed death in Final Crisis. What made Tim Drake unique from Dick Grayson, is that Tim had his own supporting cast, including the villains he fought. Occasionally he'd fight a Batman villain, but mostly he fights his own bad guys.
Probably my favourite supporting character in Robin is Stephanie Brown, a.k.a. the Spoiler. Originally introduced in Detective Comics #647, Steph became a staple of the Robin comic and was almost a secondary protagonist because she and Tim were the characters who had story arcs throughout the series. Steph even became Robin for a little bit in 2004 after a storyline where Tim's father discovered Tim's secret identity and reacted badly to it. Once Robin was cancelled in 2009, Steph went on to become Batgirl in her own series, Batgirl. So that was pretty cool. I also like how Nightwing shows up from time to time in Robin too. I've never had the chance to read the entire series, but aside from owning several issues, I've also read a bunch in trade paperback collected editions.
While I never read Impulse, I am quite familiar with the character. Bart Allen was a member of Young Justice, and then as a member of the Teen Titans after he became Kid Flash. I also remember seeing advertisements for his solo series in various DC books from 1995, as well as an article in the Summer 1997 issue of Disney Adventures. I don't know much about it, aside from the fact that, like Tim, Bart has a solid supporting cast such as Max Mercury. Of course it totally makes sense because Mark Waid wrote the first 27 issues of the series, and created Impulse during his time as the writer of The Flash.
In the same issue of Disney Adventures that I read about Impulse, there was a blurb about a comic book called Leave It to Chance about a girl named Chance who helps her father solve supernatural mysteries. And that's all I know about it. I've never read an issue, I've never even seen an issue in person before. I just know the name and the basic premise from the blurb in that issue of Disney Adventures.
1998 was the year where teenage superhero comics were really starting to become popular at DC and Marvel, as three books came out that year that had teenagers as stars. The first one I'm going to talk about is Young Justice which was sort of an in between book between volumes of Teen Titans. This had the now classic team-up of Robin, Impulse, and Superboy and was probably the book that made Superboy a popular character since the solo title starring the character following Reign of the Supermen, didn't do quite as well. I've only ever had one issue of this series, issue #2, but I loved Peter David's humour in it and the banter between the three heroes. I find that the late 90s and early 2000s really made the sidekick characters into heroes in their own right, separate from their Justice League and Avengers counterparts and were the beginning for teenage superheroes that had no adult counterparts.
Next up is Spider-Girl, about Spider-Man and Mary Jane's daughter, in an alternate version of the Marvel Universe, who takes on the Spider mantle after Peter retires, becoming Spider-Girl. Unlike with the other characters I've brought up, Mayday Parker's supporting cast is pretty much made up of the kids of people that Peter Parker went to school with like Flash Thompson and others. So unlike Robin and Impulse, Spider-Girl's supporting cast, including villains, is tied much closer to Peter's history as Spider-Man. This series is really hard to find nowadays, but I managed to get the second issue at a local comic book sale.
The final series to be started in 1998 (of the three I'm talking about) was the debut of a team that would not really be known until they were turned into an animated movie by Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2014. That team was Big Hero 6 and the book was Sunfire & Big Hero 6. In the late 90s Marvel was starting to find influence from Manga and Anime with this book which would later lead to the Marvel Mangaverse in 2000 and books like Agent X which was written by Gail Simone. Of course Anime had taken the world by storm with Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, and Pokemon among others, so it made sense that Marvel would want to cash in on that craze with comics that had similar art styles to Manga titles. I mean if you look at Sunfire on the cover of issue #1, he looks like he could be a Saiyan from Dragon Ball Z.
In 1999, a character was created that would also remain obscure until 2020 when she'd get her own TV series. That character was Courtney Whitmore, a.k.a. Stargirl, created by Geoff Johns. Of all the characters written by Johns, Courtney is nearest and dearest to him because she's based off his late sister, Courtney. While Stargirl has mainly been in Geoff Johns's run on JSA, she did have a 13 issue series that ran from 1999 until 2000 called Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. which was written by Geoff Johns. She hasn't had a solo book since then, though like I said, she's become a popular member of the Justice Society of America. People are loving the show as well, whose Showrunner is the character's creator, Geoff Johns. I haven't seen the show yet, and I don't know a whole lot about the comic, as I've never come across it at any comic book store, geek sale or comic book sale. The entire series has been collected in trade paperback recently as a tie-in to the TV series so depending on how I like the TV show, I might buy the trade and read the comic.
In 2000, Joe Quesada decided to revamp Spider-Man, going back to the character's origin for a more modern audience. He hired Brian Michael Bendis, and Ultimate Spider-Man was born. This had Peter in high school again, though this time around his best friend was Mary Jane Watson, and I think Harry Osborne was a friend of Peter's as well. Also, Uncle Ben and Aunt May are made younger and Aunt May is more tech savvy, similar to what DC tried to do with Jonathan and Martha Kent after Smallville started in 2001 whenever they did an updated origin story for Superman. I've only read a few sporadic issues of Ultimate Spider-Man so I'm not super familiar with this series as I wasn't reading current comics in 2000, and had no idea what Marvel Comics really was, outside of Spider-Man: The Animated Series from the mid 90s. Now we're going to get into three series that started in 2003 that I really enjoyed what I've read of it. One is from Marvel Comics, one is from DC Comics, and the third is from Image Comics.
I still wasn't reading current comics in 2003 so I didn't discover Brian K. Vaughn's Runaways until Brad lent me pretty much all of the trade paperback collections in 2009, going up to the beginning of the series's third volume. I absolutely loved it. It got made into a TV series for Hulu a couple of years ago and ran for three seasons. The comic is about a group of kids who discover their parents are actually supervillains as part of a secret organization, so they run away from home and decide to take their parents out by any means necessary, while there's a traitor among them. This series started at the height of the teen drama craze in the early 2000s when Smallville, Degrassi: The Next Generation, The O.C., and One Tree Hill were hugely popular.
The next book I'm talking about is Invincible by Robert Kirkman with art by Corey Walker and Ryan Ottley. Of the three books I'm talking about that came out in 2003, Invincible is the one that ran for the longest in terms of consecutive issues, as Runaways has come and gone in small increments, and the next book I'm going to be talking about, Teen Titans, only ran for 100 issues from 2003 until 2011 when DC revamped their continuity and began the New 52. Invincible on the other hand ran for 144 issues from 2003 until 2018. I've already reviewed the first issue on this blog back in November but I love this series, even though I've only read up to issue 8 as that's all I have in trade paperback form. Kirkman, who created The Walking Dead in 2003, after he created Invincible, wrote the series for all 144 issues and is now writing the episodes for the animated series based on the comic that's on Amazon Prime now. Walker did the art for the first seven issues, and Ryan Ottley took over starting with issue #8, though Walker returned for issues #127-132. So I thought that was pretty cool. I definitely wanna see the show as well as read more of the comics because I really enjoyed what I've read so far.
The final book I want to talk about today is Teen Titans. Now the Teen Titans have been around since the 60s, but this incarnation was written by Geoff Johns for the first 46 issues, with Adam Beechen taking over with issue #47, and included many of the characters featured, or introduced, in Young Justice. As with other comics from this era, I didn't read Teen Titans when it first started. Instead I read a couple of the trade paperbacks when I borrowed them from the library years ago, just before the series ended in 2011. I haven't read all of it though and I would definitely like to because I love Geoff Johns's work alot. While this comic never got a TV show adaptation, Titans is kind of an amalgamation of every version of the Teen Titans and there are definitely elements taken from Johns's run since he's one of the executive producers on the show, though he's not the Showrunner like he is on Stargirl.
As I said at the beginning, this is not a complete list of comics aimed at teenagers by any means. It's just meant to be a list of ones that I've read or that I would like to read. Of course I didn't include series that began in the 40s to the 80s like The Amazing Spider-Man, Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld, Superboy, the original Teen Titans, X-Men, or The New Teen Titans. I also didn't mention Archie Comics as a whole. These are just the ones that I probably would've read had I been reading current comics in the 90s and early 2000s.
That's going to be it for me for this week. I will be back next week though when I will be taking a look at Super Mario Bros. 2 (the North American game), the Walt Disney Gold Classic Collection VHS releases, and the final issue of Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys: The Death of Nancy Drew. So until then have a great weekend, Happy Easter, and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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