Category: Tales from Earth-Prime
Last article published: 5 December 2020
This is the 8th post under this label
New Teen Titans #20 (June 1982) features a forgotten multiversal story in which Dr. Igor Igorigorigorivich, self-styled archenemy of the Titans (they've never heard of him), discovers Earth-Prime and abducts DC staffers from our plane of existence so he can grill them about the superheroes' secrets. This short 5-pager is chock-full of inside jokes that are not funny to the reader, but I'm sure were a riot to the creative team. Chief among these are Marv Wolfman and George Perez, though the weird swipe at editor and part-time Terry Long lookalike Len Wein is... uhm, weird.
You KNOW this is our Earth because Wolfman prefigures here his well-documented writer's block, some time in the future. Was he already struggling with this in '82 at the height of the Titans' popularity? Obviously, he's going to have to swipe THIS story and put it in a comic, like say if it was low on page count. But it's George who's going to have to draw it.
Though there's a jab at Perez's weight, Wolfman is taking himself down first and foremost. Traitor to the heroes? About to spill Dick Grayson's secret identity and... well most of 'em don't really have secrets. Anyway, the Titans show up just in time to save the Earth-Prime captives. Igorigorigorivich does have a few technological tricks up his sleeve though, so the boys get up to some metafictional action. Perez will later withhold the backgrounds, robbing the mad scientist of much of his weapons.
This would have worked better if Tanghal had refused to, thereby involving the rest of the creative team in saving them. The deus ex machina (below) would then have seemed like a helping hand from letterer John Costanza:
But however it happens, the Titans overcome Igorigorigorivich and Boris and the writer/artist team get to meet the Titans in the flesh:
Home just in time to make a few more dumb jokes and glimpse cameos of Karen Berger and Adrienne Roy (Dick Giordano had appeared earlier) before the final panel.
So I guess all these guys got wiped out in the Crisis, eh? Ironic.
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