Team Titans

This article is about the comin book. For for the esports organization, see Titan (esports).

Team Titans
250x450px One of five alternative covers for Team Titans #1. Art by Will Blyberg and Kevin Maguire.
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
Schedule	Monthly
Format	Maxi-series to Teen Titans
Publication date	Sept. 1992 – Sept. 1994
Number of issues	24 + 2 Annuals
Main character(s)	Mirage Terra Redwing Nightrider (Dagon) Killowat Prestor Jon Battalion
Creative team
Writer(s)	Various
Artist(s)	Various
Creator(s)	Marv Wolfman Tom Grummett

Team Titans was a comic book published by DC Comics that spun out of DC's New Titans series. It began in September 1992 and ended in September 1994. The Team Titans were first introduced as a shadowy group stalking the Titans. Their backstory was revealed in New Titans Annual #7 by writer Marv Wolfman, and were popular enough to merit their own series, which Wolfman also wrote. Phil Jimenez and Jeff Jensen took over writing duties with issue #13, and co-wrote the book until its cancellation.

Background information

While Wolfman was initially given the title indefinitely, he chose to leave the title in order to devote more time to his two other books, New Titans and Deathstroke. Creative differences between the new writing staff and editorial, combined with flagging sales, led to the book's cancellation in the Zero Hour crossover event.

The unfortunate part of that was we had no idea that what they wanted was DC Comics' X-Force. They, DC management at the time, saw Team Titans as this answer to Rob Liefeld's X-Force, and what we wanted to do was something much more character-driven [and] self-aware, something more like Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. So from literally the first issue, it was a struggle editorially to the point that the book just fell apart on us completely, and a long-term story that we had planned got condensed to four issues. Then Zero Hour came along and undermined everything anyway.

After Zero Hour, the remaining Team Titans members returned to Wolfman's New Titans book.

Story

One of several Team Titans teams from the future, they function as a terrorist cell fighting against a world dictator, Lord Chaos, the son of Donna Troy and Terry Long. Sent ten years into the past, their mission is to kill Donna and prevent his birth. They eventually convince Donna to give up her powers, ensuring her unborn son would be equally powerless. The Team Titans struggle to carve out lives for themselves in their alternate past. Their alternate-future Nightwing comes back in time and briefly joins the team. This version of Nightwing, attacked and corrupted by a dark version of Raven shortly after his arrival, changes his name to Deathwing, and served as her assistant.

During the Zero Hour event, Killowat, Redwing, Dagon, Prestor Jon, and Battalion are all revealed to be from a false time-line, created by the villainous Monarch to act as his sleeper agent assassins during the time crisis. When Monarch (who had turned himself into the time-villain Extant) is defeated, his false futures are destroyed, and the heroes from those futures are erased from existence. Mirage, Terra, and Deathwing survive. It is later established that they are from the current time-line, and were shunted through time and given false memories by the Time Trapper, who wished to use them as sleeper agents against Extant.

In the wake of Zero Hour, Mirage and Terra join the main Titans team. While it was sometimes hinted that Terra may have been the original Tara Markov of the main DCU time-line, the 2008 Terra mini-series established that she was a young woman from a society of non-humanoid subteerranians of similar powers who had been surgically altered to look like the original Terra, and who subsequently had amnesia. While Deathwing's true identity is never disclosed, it is firmly established that he is not the future version of Dick Grayson.