Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Oh Yeah, That Forum: The Titans Countdown-- A Titan Dies?

Sure looks like yet another funeral on the cover featured on Newsarama !

Seriously... at this point it's just becoming self-parodic!

A new death or an old favorite death?

Teen Titans = the real Doom Patrol?

I'm willing to bet the death will be one of the lesser-known "1-year Gap" Titans.

As long as it isn't Miss Martian or Li'l Barda!!

Could all the hype be about the same death?

I reluctantly ask if identitifying just what flower it is heaped on the grave could be significant.

Or maybe they're finally giving Lilith a funeral and acknowleging *her*. That character's shoddy treatment still leaves a bad taste in my craw.

I can't see it being a 1YG titan. Robin looks pretty broken up to me. Maybe it's a Robin supporting character and his friends are there for support?

Robin needs a break from death around him, too.

I'm thinking it's the same death Nightwing and Donna are mourning on the other cover. Just who would both versions of the Titans mourn?

Well, we know it ain't Changeling or Cyborg or Archer-chick (Arrowette?). Who is that next to Changeling? Batgirl? Batwoman? Raven? I can't remember who has red ovals on her belt like that...

'Cause if it's Batchick, that puts Raven in the 'conspicuous-by-her-absence' seat, of characters that have been teamed with both Nightwing and Robin.

Like Lilith, Raven's powers have always been quiffily defined, and it's dramatically challenging to have Robin / Nightwing do the detective thing when the empath can point a frosted nail and say, 'guilty,' or the characters be all concerned when one of them gets hurt, only to have the healer say, 'he's cured already, stop angsting and fetch me a diet soda.' With her new power to resurrect dead characters, like Joey, she's quickly turning into DC's own Scarlet Witch, and that's never good...

Starfire and Kid Flash, while former Nightwing team-mates, probably wouldn't prompt Tim Drake to tears, since he didn't know them so well.

Of course Match could turn out to be Conner, and die again, just to annoy everyone. But while that would mess with Tim's man-crush, it probably wouldn't exactly devastate Nightwing.

Ah, and the one person who has never been a Titan, but who is really important to both Nightwing and Tim Drake.

Batman! If Marvel can kill Captain America for a summer, then surely DC can kack off Batman for a summer!

And then they can have four Batmen show up to take up the slack. One african-american inventor who uses a bat-battlesuit, another who is a teenaged clone of Bruce Wayne (and secretly, also the Joker!), another who is made of bat-shaped energy and a mad killer bat-robot...

Or it could be Alfred. He's always been popular with the bat-wards. Assuming he's not dead already and I missed it.

What other cover?

And, Set: Raven is the one with the red ovals on her waist.

Never mind, I see the B&W thumbnail of the cover you mention up there. Now I just need to see a larger version to make out who is on it.

Okay, now that we know who the newly dead Titans are someone please explain to me why Tim and Cassie are so broken up about it. I'm not sure that Tim or Cassie even knew L'il Frankie nor were they teammates of Terra. If that's Terra's grave, then it should be Gar who is all broken up.

Three more Titan deaths...

Guess that fulfills the quota for this event but now we have "Countdown" coming up, so which 3+/- Titans are we going to see killed off in that? (and let's not forget, the mini event "Amazons Attack" should be good for at least one more Titan funeral )


It just makes me sick!

Not to sound shallow, but what's with the uproar over deaths in comics? I understand these are favourite characters, but they are fighting violent criminals here.

Whether a Titan or a JSAer, it's unrealistic to expect all these characters to engage in combat and not die.

I think part of it is that many of us remember a time when deaths of protagonists in comics were actually meaningful events. When Ferro Lad died destroying the Sun-Eater, that was a huge deal. Even though I didn't start reading until many years after that story, the death still resonated.

These days there's so much death, and it seems to be treated so casually. Terra and YF didn't die making an heroic sacrifice that allowed the villain to be defeated, they were just killed in the course of a battle in which they were, ultimately, pretty ineffective. Plus, the deaths were particularly graphic.

Plus there's the whole "revolving door" aspect of death, which deflates the impact of it. Who's died this month? Who's come back to life this month? Deaths really seem kind of pointless when half the time they're undone.

There's also the fact, in the case of the Titans, that these are teenagers. They're kids. While it may be more "realistic" to expect a significant number of them to die fighting violent criminals, it's pretty unrealistic to think that anyone would actually permit teenagers to go out there fighting such violent criminals, especially given their death rates. It's one of the ways in which the move towards "realism" in comics seems to be very selective.

The very idea of the Teen Titans seems to belong to a much more idealistic setting. Yeah, kids can put on colorful costumes and go catch criminals! The whole idea is pretty fantastic to begin with.

There was something I was reading recently on the whole "golly gee whiz" bright-eyed optimism of the Silver Age, and it made the point that it wasn't because the writers during that period were naive or unaware of the horrors of the world that they painted things in that way. On the contrary, many of them had fought in the World War, and seen horrors and violence and evil that most of us couldn't imagine. It was partially because of that they wanted to create a fantasy world in which good clearly had the advantage over evil.

I think in some ways what annoys me is that the death is rarely a character who is regularly used in comics. So many of the Titans-related deaths have been characters who were in limbo, and are just dusted off to be cannon fodder against an Uber-Villain that they haven't a prayer of defeating.

I mean, Pantha, Wildebeest, Risk (who was maimed), Bushido, Terra... none of them had been seen lately, and were brought back for a few panels just to up the gore ante.

At least in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the deaths felt more... meaningful, somehow. And several prominent characters were killed as well.

I think the Titans have sacrificed enough former members to the gore factor of today's DCU.

What annoys me is that it seems as if the writers are trying to outdo each other in the number of deaths they can portray. Comics shouldn't be about body counts.

Can't these writers tell a compelling and thrilling story without killing off a bunch of people? I'm starting to believe that they can't.

How exactly did any of these moments advance the story? Would this story have been less compelling if Black Adam had not killed Terra? Or any of the others? What exactly did their deaths accomplish or add to the story?

And the gore....did we have to see Father Time's face ripped off? Young Frankenstein's arms torn from their sockets? Black Adam's fist completely piercing Terra's chest?

Silver Age Ferro Lad's death was never shown. We last saw him flying into the center of the sun-eater. We didn't need to see his body being ripped apart by the explosion and his body parts, blood, and tissue strewn across the galaxy. Yet his death resonated.

I realize we will never go back to the days when comics were fun, facinating flights of fancy in which the characters were heroic and the writers knew how to tell stories that sparked your imagination and made you smile and dream about being in such a wonderful world.

That door, I fear, was locked shut when TPTB started drawing up lists of heroes that could be killed off as part of the annual house cleaning called Crisis (fill in the blank)

Don't get me wrong, I think death should be used to mean something. And "Dead is dead" is the best thing to come out of Marvel during the Bill Jemas years (too bad it didn't take.)

With only a handful of Golden Agers available to us, and the untouchability of the JLA icons, the Titans are the only killable characters. (Partly because everyone has been a Titan at this point.) And I think the idea behind the killings is to demonstrate Adam's (or SB-Prime) ruthlessness. Sometimes in war, death isn't honourable, it just is.

And with the Terra death, they were opening the door for a new character. Sure, she wasn't a profile player the last few years. I think that's partly why they are bringing in a new one, to revive the concept.

Readers seem to want their cake and eat it too. Super-heroes fight the good fight, never getting old, never changing, never dying. That's fine, but not if they still have to account for 10 or 20 or 60 years of continuity.

I would have liked to have known at least a LITTLE something about Young Frankie before he was offed. I have a weird feeling he'll be back, but still...

The whole Terra thing was just not needed, although I suspected something like this when the first clues that new Terra wasn't old Terra were revealed.

What's really awful as well is that now there is absolutely NO WAY Black Adam will ever be redeemable. And this after 52 made me LOVE the Black Marvel family.

RIP...........it has been spoiled....from Comic Bloc and DC Message Board......many of you will not be very very happy....I am not happy!!

So ........................., RIP, we hardly knew you. You've been mysterious and fun to us. Farewell. With all loves and hugs.

Gah! I just read the spoiler by accident!

My heart goes out to a certain poster on this board - it's never easy losing a favourite!

But how totally weird that they would choose the death of THAT character to kick off this big comic EVENT! I'm actually pretty intrigued to see where the story goes from here.

What's really frustrating though, is knowing that they chose that interesting character to kill while the uber-annoying Mirage, Argent and Jericho are kept around. Since TPTB seem to be so intent on killing Titans may I please submit those 3 for the chopping block.

It better not be Ravager! I'll be hella-pissed!

If it's Duela, maybe she still has a multiverse counterpart around somewhere.

TT's should change their names to Doom Patrol Junior.

I should say that everyone is someone's favorite and, while I'm not especially fangirly about Mirage and Argent, I do like their potential. And Jericho-- I think his presence in TT v3 has really added something. I, for one, like him.

That said, I'm rather disappointed about the Titan that dies. It's not really fair, since that character had a lot of potential, too.

DAMN YOU DC!!! *scowly face*