James Nicoll Reviews

Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s The Judas Contract is a superhero graphic novel, collecting The New Teen Titans #39 & #40, Tales Of The Teen Titans #41 – 44, and The New Teen Titans Annual #3.

The New Teen Titans! Very much like the Teen Titans… BUT NEW!

As far as all but one of the New Teen Titans are concerned, their primary concern is Brother Blood, a cult leader whose manifestly malevolent ambitions are curiously impossible for the American press and the American government to see. The lone dissenter is unlikely to clear up her teammates’ confusion, as she is the real threat.

Reformed at the behest of witch Raven, the current lineup of teen heroes is Raven, Dick ​“Robin” Grayson, Wally ​“Kid Flash” West, Vic ​“Cyborg” Stone, Gar ​“Changeling” Logan, Princess Koriand’r AKA Starfire, Tara ​“Terra” Markov, and Donna ​“Wonder Girl” Troy. Four (Robin, Kid Flash, Changeling, and Wonder Girl) are former kid sidekicks¹. Starfire is a refugee, Raven is cursed, and Terra is flat-out evil.

While Raven suspects that something is wrong with Terra, the rest of the team accepts Terra as yet another kid with a tragic backstory² and a desire to do good. Changeling in particular is too besotted with the moderately-bucktoothed minx to worry overmuch about all the lies he’s noticed and the fact that Terra’s backstory doesn’t make much sense.

While the New Teen Titans confront, are captured by, and escape Brother Blood over and over and over, an entirely different scheme plays out. Terra is a spy working for Slade ​“Deathstroke the Terminator” Wilson³. Deathstroke has a contract to capture the New Teen Titans for H.I.V.E. (the Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination)⁴. For months, Terra has been his mole inside the New Teen Titans, methodically gathering information.

Deathstroke’s plan goes almost perfectly. Almost every New Teen Titan is easily captured. The only two exceptions are Kid Flash, who retires and leaves the team before the kidnappings begin, and a temporarily-without-superhero-ID (identity) Dick Grayson, who manages to escape because Deathstroke got overconfident.

What can a highly skilled, formidably experienced but powerless teen⁵ can do to rescue his friends? Enter Deathstroke’s estranged wife Adeline. She provides Dick with valuable information in the form of an interminable infodump, an ally in the form of her superpowered son Joseph ​“Jericho” Wilson, and the excuse for Dick to reveal his new (and long trousered) superhero ID, Nightwing.

Nightwing and Jericho easily infiltrate the H.I.V.E. base…nearly as easily as Terra surprises and overpowers the pair.

~oOo~

Before I get to the heart of the story, one cannot help but notice how relentlessly gullible the American press and American government are where the manifestly evil, self-serving cult leader Brother Blood is concerned. One gets the sense that if Brother Blood were American and ran for president, he’d easily get elected, possibly in two non-consecutive terms. Where do authors get their crazy ideas⁶?

Rereading this venerable classic, one is struck by the monotonous regularity with which the New Teen Titans get captured. Part of this is narrative contrivance⁷. Part of it is their comprehensive lack of teamwork and their inability to learn from experience.

As the graphic novel’s introduction explains, the seed for this arc came from fans pointing out the similarities between Marvel’s X‑Men (a flagging title successfully reinvented in 1975 by Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum) and DC’s New Teen Titans (a flagging title successfully reinvented in 1980 by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez). Wolfman decided to lean into that. The X‑Men had recently added young Kitty Pryde. Wolfman would provide the New Teen Titans with their own adorable, young recruit… who would be pure, unredeemable evil.

Wolfman and Pérez subtly signal that Terra is one of the baddies by giving her a slight overbite, a modest bustline, and scenes with Deathstroke in which she cheerfully brags about being evil while smoking, wearing eye-shadow, lounging around half naked, and having presumably torrid-but-thanks-to-the-Comics-Code off-panel sex with the much older Deathstroke. To quote Wolfman’s vision of reader reaction ​“Whoa, good God! This little girl is a slut!”

I am not sure how old Terra is supposed to be. I am sure I am much happier not finding out the answer to that question. In Wolfman’s defense, the Terra-Deathstroke is not the creepiest relationship in Reagan-era DC Comics. Terra-Deathstroke is at worst the second creepiest relationship in DC Comics. Hal ​“Green Lantern” Jordan was banging a thirteen-year-old.

This seems an appropriate moment to warn readers that some aspects of the comic did not age well.

The narrative makes it clear that Terra is a homicidal sociopath. Unusually for villainous team efforts, Deathstroke and his faithful manservant Wintergreen are keenly aware of the inherent drawbacks of a plan that depends on a violent lunatic with superpowers and a hair-trigger temper. They persist because her utility just barely outweighs her drawbacks.

The graphic novel presentation of the arc suffers in comparison to the monthly comics. In the comics, the revelation that Terra was a villain came after a long build-up. In the graphic novel, that’s revealed early in the volume. This considerably undermines the dramatic tension. Instead, the tension is whether or not the New Teen Titans’ ability to escape needlessly contrived death-traps can be outmatched.

Pity, because I remember the original run as being effective. Ah, well. Can’t step into the same river twice and all that. There are moments that still work, in particular Changeling’s trauma once he begins to faintly grasp that the girl ranting about how much she hates him while she is trying to kill him might not in fact be quite as fond of him as he hope⁸. I think we’ve all been there. Otherwise, I don’t think this can land with modern readers the way it did back in 1984.

The Judas Contract is available here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books). The Judas Contract is listed here (DC Comics), but I don’t think it’s possible to buy it directly from DC.

1: Kid-sidekick-adjacent for Changeling, who I think was a full member of the Doom Patrol, but also the adopted kid of two older Doom Patrol members.

2: As I recall: Raven’s dad is pure evil, Robin is an orphan, Cyborg’s mother is dead and his dad is kind of a dick, Wonder Girl is an orphan, and Starfire is a former slave. Oh, and Changeling was orphaned twice. As far as I recall Kid Flash’s home life seemed fine but later on it turned out his dad was working for the bad guys. In that context, ​“unhappy home life, has powers/training, wants to punch crime” is a perfectly reasonable backstory.

The New Teen Titans have funding out the wazoo. You might expect that this island of misfit toys could afford an on-call therapist. Nope. Probably for the best. Most mental health professionals in DC Comics are deranged supervillains.

3: No relation to any time-travelling robots.

4: I think H.I.V.E. invented the acronym first and then worked out what each letter stood for.

5: As Batman’s former sidekick, one might presume that Dick has the Justice League on speed-dial. Too bad that not only does this never occur to Dick, The Judas Contract appeared during the era of the Detroit Justice League. Don’t ask, the answer will make you sad.

6: USA delenda est.

7: Speaking of narrative contrivance: part of Dick Grayson’s arc is that he gives up the identity of Robin on the grounds that a superheroic ID he adopted when he was eight no longer suits him. At a dramatic moment, he steps out of the room where he is conversing with Adeline and Joseph about his pals’ kidnapping so he can change into and reveal his brand-new identity, Nightwing.

When Nightwing re-enters the room, he discovers Joseph took the time to put on his own superhero costume. Why did neither just wear the costumes to the meeting? Well, there wouldn’t have been a bold reveal.

8: As I recall, Changeling concluded that Terra’s increasingly deranged, hateful ranting and murder attempts had to be because she was a sweet, innocent girl who was brainwashed by Deathstroke. It took a few issues after the end of this arc to accept that she was just a baddie who really did hate him.