Set Description:
Synopsis: This is a pretty poor starter set of the initial Teen Titans run with just 37 of the books.
Background: The Teen Titans are a team of teenage superheroes, many of whom have acted as sidekicks to DC's premier superheroes in the Justice League. The original team later becomes known as the Titans when the members aged out of their teenage years, while the Teen Titans name is continued by subsequent generations of young heroes.
The team made their first appearance in 1964 in The Brave and the Bold Issue #54. At that time, the team was formed by Kid Flash (Wally West), Robin (Dick Grayson), and Aqualad (Garth) before adopting the name Teen Titans in Issue #60 with the addition of Wonder Girl (Donna Troy) to their ranks. They received their own magazine with the publication of Teen Titans #1 in January 1966.
Over the decades, DC has cancelled and relaunched Teen Titans many times, and a variety of characters have been featured heroes in its pages. Significant early additions to the initial quartet of Titans were Speedy (Roy Harper), Aquagirl (Tula), Bumblebee (Karen Beecher), Hawk (Hank Hall), Dove (Don Hall), Harlequin (Duela Dent), and three non-costumed heroes: boxer Mal Duncan, psychic Lilith, and caveman Gnarrk. The series would not become a genuine hit until its 1980s revival as The New Teen Titans under writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez. That run depicted the original Titans now as young adults and introduced new characters Cyborg (Victor Stone), Starfire (Koriand'r), and Raven (Rachel Roth), as well as the former Doom Patrol member Beast Boy (Garfield Logan) under his new alias of Changeling, who would all become enduring fan favorites. A high point for the series both critically and commercially was its "The Judas Contract" storyline, where the Teen Titans are betrayed by their teammate Terra (Tara Markov).
The 1990s featured a Teen Titans team composed entirely of new members before the previous members returned in the series Titans, which ran from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Subsequent stories in the 2000s introduced a radically different Teen Titans team made up of newer DC Comics sidekicks such as Robin III (Tim Drake), Wonder Girl II (Cassie Sandsmark), and Impulse / Kid Flash II (Bart Allen), as well as Superboy (Kon-El), some of who had previously featured in the similar title Young Justice. Later prominent additions from this era included Miss Martian (M'gann M'orzz), Ravager (Rose Wilson), Supergirl (Kara Zor-El), Kid Devil, and Blue Beetle III (Jaime Reyes). Concurrently, DC also published Titans, which featured some of the original and 1980s members now as adults, led by Dick Grayson in his adult persona of Nightwing. DC's The New 52 reboot in 2011 later brought new characters to the founding roster, including Solstice (Kiran Singh), Bunker (Miguel Jose Barragan), and Skitter (Celine Patterson), although this volume proved commercially and critically disappointing for DC. In 2016, DC used the Titans Hunt and DC Rebirth storylines to re-establish the group's original founding members and history, reuniting these classic heroes as the Titans, while introducing a new generation of Teen Titans led by Robin V (Damian Wayne) with Aqualad II (Jackson Hyde) and Kid Flash III (Wallace West) as the team's latest members alongside team mainstays Starfire, Raven and Beast Boy.
The Teen Titans have been adapted to other media numerous times, such as the animated television series Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go!, and the live-action television series Titans. Within DC Comics, the Teen Titans have been an influential group of characters taking prominent roles in all of the publisher's major company-wide crossover stories. Many villains who face the Titans have since taken on a larger role within the publisher's fictional universe, such as the assassin Deathstroke, the demon Trigon, and the evil organization H.I.V.E.
Our Collection: What can I say, this set pretty much sucks. The fact the we now top the registry is simply a function of the fact that the people buying these books currently have never entered them into the Registry. But don’t get the misimpression that these books are not popular, they most definitely are, so much so that we have lost auction after auction in our efforts to expand our set. The registry points currently awarded by CGC for these books in no way reflect the books rising popularity in the collecting world.
I am not going to do a full write-up of our set this year because it has such a long ways to go to be considered a respectable effort. We do have a few nice books, but in current market conditions, I don’t see us devoting the money necessary to track down all the missing books in high grade.
I will just say that, if registry points are supposed to bear any correlation to fair market value, these books are due some massive revisions. For example, a Brave and Bold #54 9.8 recently sold on CL for $100,000, yet that book only receives 5200 Registry points. Similar examples appear throughout the early issues of this one. These are currently very hot books.
|