Teen Titans Go! (comic book)



Teen Titans Go! is a Comics series that ran for 55 issues from 2003 to 2008, based on the animated series Teen Titans, itself based on an older comics series of the same name. Like the cartoon, it is Animesque and intended primarily for pre-teen boys, but did not shy away from somewhat darker material as the series progressed. It featured one-shot gags in the page margins presented by chibi versions of the cast, as well as continuations or expansions of plotlines from the series. Most issues, however, presented stand-alone plots.

As expected, the series features the Teen Titans: Robin, Starfire, Beast Boy, Cyborg, and Raven, five young costumed superheroes, and their adventures in Jump City. Some issues shift the focus onto secondary characters such as Larry and Terra, or even villains like the HIVE Graduates, in addition to some characters from the original series who did not appear in the cartoon, such as Rose Wilson, Geo-Force, and Wonder Girl.

"Raven: Please. You got this idea from... some old comic book."
 * Adaptation Expansion: Backstories, expanded filler, and even post-Season 5 ideas are given deeper detail all throughout the comic's run.
 * All There in the Manual: The name of the city was never stated in the series proper. The tie-in comic named the city as "Jump City" and the fandom took this and ran with it.
 * Alternate Universe: Issue 48, "Wrong Place, Wrong Time", goes through a few of these in an attempt to get Killowat back to his own world, starting with the world of the Teen Tyrants.
 * Animesque
 * Art Shift: From issue to issue due to a rotating number of artists.
 * Ascended Extra: Remember that goth kid from "Sisters"? He and Raven are dating.
 * Backstory
 * Issue 45 covers Beast Boy and Cyborg (two-parter).
 * 46 covers Starfire while also introducing her long-lost brother, Wildfire.
 * Half of Issue 47 covers Robin.
 * Issue 51, Metamorphosis, covers Terra and her brother Geo-Force.
 * Baseball Episode: 33, "The Strangest Sports Story Ever Told". Which, amusingly, features a Shout-Out to the Young Justice comic with the same plot:


 * The Cameo: One of the issues include a cameo of Batman himself, watching the Titans from afar and proud on what Robin has become.
 * Christmas Episode
 * Issue 25, "Secret Santa".
 * 37, "Winterlude", is set the day after Christmas (though probably not the same Christmas as issue 25), and is narrated poetically in the style of Twas the Night Before Christmas. Which is a Shout-Out to a similar issue from Young Justice.
 * City of Adventure: The city from the series is finally named here: Jump City.
 * Dial H for Hero: Issue 52, period.
 * Distaff Counterpart: Issue 41, "Bad Girls", introduces Pink X, Mad Maud, Joystick, Marionette, and Daughter Blood.
 * Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Issue 41 and Issue 44 show that Kitten doesn't just use her father, Killer Moth, to get what she wants all the time; she does sincerely love him too.
 * Excited Show Title!
 * Expy: Ice Kate and Kid Cool are teenage versions of Golden Glider and Captain Cold.
 * Fish Person: Gill Girl from issue 10.
 * Freudian Excuse: Red Raven, in her self-titled issue 44 (a continuation of 42), attacks and destroys anything having to do with fathers (Founding Fathers display at the museum, Fathers Day gifts at stores, etc.).
 * Give Her a Normal Life: When Geo-Force finds out whats happened to Terra, he doesn't bother revealing himself to her, noticing it's the first time he's seen her happy.
 * Humongous Mecha: Issue 9 introduces the Titans Go-Bot 5, which the team uses to fight Gizmo's giant robot. It's later used to fight a Professor Chang-controlled Beast Boy, a.k.a Garsaurus Rex.
 * Legacy Character: An interesting variation: issue 54, "Makes You Wonder", features Cassie Sandsmark attemping to usurp Donna Troy's position as Wonder Girl.
 * Lotus Eater Machine: 38, "It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod World"
 * Magic Skirt: Weirdly disregarded for issue 20; turns out Blackfire wears shorts under her skirt.
 * Mars Needs Women: Or rather Braboldian scientists want superpowered females for their experiments; issue 36, "Troy". If that's not Getting Crap Past the Radar, I don't know what it is. Except maybe Trope Overdosed.
 * Me's a Crowd: "Pieces of Me": Raven's "emoticlones" are let loose by accident and several of them run amuck throughout the city.
 * Mythology Gag:
 * Issue 18 has Larry put the Titans "all back the way you should be":
 * Starfire acquires her mainstream version's hair and exclaims "X'Hal!"
 * Beast Boy gets his old Doom Patrol costume.
 * Robin gets an older version of his costume. With no real pants.
 * Raven gets a lampshade hung on her more goth-like appearance.
 * There's also the Terror Titans of Issue 48, three of whom are Red Robin, Arsenal and Tempest -- the same names used by certain older versions of Robin, Speedy and Aqualad. As their team name indicates, they're decidedly twisted versions.
 * That same issue features Raven opening doors to various alternate realities, including the original-flavor Teen Titans from the Silver Age and, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it peak, Secret and Lobo of Young Justice.
 * There's a story where Kitten, angry with her father, starts committing crimes while claiming to be the daughter of other villains to get his attention. A couple of the identities she adopts (Gemini, daughter of Madam Rouge, and Ravager, daughter of Slade) are actual characters in the standard DC universe. On top of that, at one point a frustrated Robin says that it's probably The Joker's Daughter playing a prank.
 * In issue 39, a Valentine's Day issue, Speedy and Chesire get hit by an arrow and fall in love. In the comics, they briefly fell in love and had a child together.
 * Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: According to the Wildfire issue, Blackfire has sold off Starfire to the Gordanians to keep them from invading Tamaran, If you've seen the episode "GO!" from the TV series. You can tell how this little plan turned out.
 * No Nudity Taboo: Starfire, according to the end of Issue 8.
 * Painting the Fourth Wall: In "Magic and Misdirection", Mumbo opens a trap door that makes Beast Boy fall out of the panel. Starfire and Terra follow, and we're treated to a few pages of them wandering around the borders of the page while Super-Deformed.
 * Recursive Adaptation
 * The Reveal
 * Issue 16 has a pretty big surprise for the Titans, especially Beast Boy.
 * The first half of issue 47, "Regarding Robin", reveals without a doubt that Robin is in fact Dick Grayson.
 * According to "Metamorphosis",
 * Are we not mentioning that  It makes you wonder what Season 6 might have been like...
 * Rise of Zitgirl: Raven in issue 5, "Monster Zit".
 * Secret Legacy: Terra,
 * Shipper on Deck: In "Pieces of Me", Starfire expresses her belief that Beast Boy and Raven should be together. More than once. And she isn't particularly subtle about it, either.
 * Starfire also pretty vocally ships Cyborg/Sarah Simms, playing cupid for them and arranging their date in the Valentine's issue Teen Titans Go! #27.
 * Robin takes Starfire on a date in issue #4, with Beast Boy and Cyborg following along to annoy him with advice.
 * Shout-Out
 * Riddle in issue 9 says "A game in which only winning move is not to play. What I am?"
 * In issue #20, we can see that Speedy's handle in multiplayer game is Shaft, which is also the name of Speedy's Expy from Youngblood.
 * Snap Back: There are stories that clearly take place after the fifth and final season of the show, and yet nearly every villain in the show's run was frozen in the end...
 * Presumably they got unfrozen (perhaps so they could stand trial) and subsequently escaped. After all, prisons have a remarkably low success rate at holding supervillains...
 * Super-Deformed: Other than the margin-gags, there's also issue 18, "When Chibis Attack". Raven even explicitly refers to their tiny counterparts as "chibi".