Pull List Maintenance – Dropping Titans

Many will say I should have done it long ago. But I couldn’t help myself. I love the characters and I just kept hoping they would turn things around. But with the new direction of Titans becoming Titans: Villains for Hire I am finally dropping the book. To me it doesn’t even really feel like dropping a book. I feel like my book was canceled and this new thing with a similar name is popping up at the same time.

I understand that the Titans book needed a new direction. The book has been without a strong direction since it came out. All the writers had been able to come up with was Titans fighting other Titans. I could forgive the first story with Raven. It was a way to bring the team back together. Fair enough. But the whole Jericho thing dragged on forever and seems to not really have had much of a point.

So then half of the team went and joined the JLA. Okay, well some of them were already members and seemed to be pulling double duty just fine, but I can understand that for continuity and such it is easier to have them more prominently featured in just one of the books. Fair enough (just don’t tell Batman and his 8 other books…). And Red Arrow has been…on second thought, let’s not talk about that. Or else this will turn into a maiming/killing Titans rant, and that’s not the point here.

What DC decided would be a great solution to the new direction and new team member problem was to have Deathstroke, sworn enemy of the Titans, set up a new team of villains and become some sort of mercenary group. Under the Titans name. His team includes Cheshire (who almost makes sense, as she has a connection to Titans member Roy Harper/Red Arrow) and the Tattooed Man (who makes no sense as I was pretty sure that after Final Crisis he had become somewhat of a reluctant hero but is not palling around with straight out villains again). There are other members but I don’t know who they are and am already so against the idea that I don’t care as it won’t change my decision about dropping the book.

There are a lot of characters who have ties to the Titans. The decision could just as easily (and for me more satisfyingly) been to bring back some of the older Titan supporting characters and to give them stronger roles. The argument could be made that these old character wouldn’t have a strong fan following and so couldn’t support a book, but I disagree. The Titans (and Teen Titans) have a very strong fan base and many of them have long memories. And if the team was a mix of existing Titans and old Titans there would enough consistency to keep the fans on board. To me, this makes sense. A lot more sense than what they are doing.

Now I’m not against Deathstroke having a team or another villain book being out on the market (I know some people are already comparing the premise to Secret Six). I just really don’t like that it’s under the Titans banner. I already had to watch my favorite team fall apart, and now I have to watch their name be dragged through the mud. But I’ll be watching from afar. Titans: dropped.