Aw Yeah, Titans!

WONDER WEDNESDAY

On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

No boys allowed!

Tiny Titans: Return to the Treehouse #5, DC Comics, December 2014.

It’s been a rough week around here, so I need some fun comics. And they don’t come much funnerer (sic) than Tiny Titans, Art Baltazar and Franco’s adorable series featuring elementary school versions of the Teen Titans, which has somehow outlived many of the characters it’s based on. Unaffected by the New 52 reboot, it still features characters like the original Wonder Girl and Kid Flash who no longer exist in current continuity, and others like Cyborg and Starfire who have been retconned into never having been Titans at all. (In fact, the latter is true of most of the team.)

I mention this, of course, because a recent issue of the current Tiny Titans: Return to the Treehouse miniseries features Wonder Woman. In this particular series the Titans’ treehouse is missing, and they’re on the lookout for a new one. That quest takes them to Paradise Island—the old-school version, on which men (or boys) can never tread. Fortunately, in the Tiny Titans reality that just means that boys have to wear pink slippers as long as they’re on the island.

They arrive in Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, but no sooner have they left than the Cheetah (here again, the old-school Priscilla Rich version) fiendishly makes the plane impossible for them to find again—by painting it with camouflage paint! So of course now they can’t see the invisible plane anymore, because it blends in so well with its surroundings.

First rule of Pet Club is you do not talk.

Oh yeah, and the Cheetah has an intelligent pet cheetah named Chauncey, because a lot of characters in this series have Super-Pets. Robin even has a pet robin in a miniature version of his outfit, mask and all. And of course Wonder Woman does, too—her pet kanga, Jumpa.

This makes all the sense in the world!

Both Wonder Girls are pretty prominent in this issue—Donna Troy, who sadly doesn’t exist anymore, and Cassie Sandsmark, who’s received a hoochie makeover in the New 52.

There’s a bit of cuteness involving Raven’s dad, the demon Trigon, practicing taking over the world, which is fine as long as he wears the pink slippers.

Deathstroke brought pancakes!

And even more adorableness when Wonder Woman builds the Titans an invisible treehouse, which they like a lot, assuming they’re actually in it and not just….you know…in a tree.

Aw yeah, invisible treehouse!

The best thing about this comic—and this series—are the running gags. The occasional callbacks to the camouflaged invisible plane, the slippers, the pancakes. Even a seemingly throwaway joke during a discussion of parallel earths about a falling coconut coming from the coconut earth turns into a battle between the Coconuts of Justice and their alternate-earth doppelgangers, the Secret Oranges of the Justice League. As is often the case these days, the all-ages comics turn out to be way more entertaining than the mainstream stuff.

I think maybe it’s a metaphor.

Plastic Man #20, DC Comics, March 2006.

Speaking of fun comics, albeit a darker one, I was recently rereading the final issue of Kyle Baker’s Plastic Man series, which was full of mockery of exactly how grim and humorless DC Comics had become. In Baker’s parody, not only Billy Batson, the little boy who turns into Captain Marvel, been killed, but it’s pretty clearly implied that Doctor Light raped his corpse. And yeah, that doesn’t sound much like lighthearted fun, but that’s exactly Baker’s point—it’s not much of an exaggeration of how grim and often disgusting DC’s regular superhero line had become by this point.

“Like that’s Light’s new power now.” Seriously, it was like he’d become Dr. Rape.

The story’s just packed with these barbed references, such as this bit about the ridiculously skimpy new outfits a lot of superheroines had been given:

No exaggeration here at all, actually.

This was not long after Wonder Woman killed Maxwell Lord and everyone was guilt-tripping her about it pretty much nonstop, especially Superman. And that brings me to my favorite moment in the comic, a Mad Magazine-style bit in which Wonder Woman keeps killing the Batman villain Ra’s al Ghul, who keeps falling into his Lazarus Pit, being resurrected and then killed again by WW, while Superman yells at her, “Stop killing that guy!”

I love this so much.

You may notice that I haven’t even mentioned Plastic Man. Well, he’s there, of course, finishing up his storyline, but what I love here is all the stuff going on in the background. Sadly, DC would only double down on its “the grimmer and grittier the better” approach, which makes Baker’s takedown of the early excesses of this trend even more appreciated. Sadly, it meant that there was no longer much room for comical comics such as Plastic Man.