Judd Winick On Titans East

Newsarama reports: "Next week actually sees the start of the ball rolling which will eventually result in the classic Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans (Nightwing, Starfire, Beast Boy, Raven, Cyborg, Donna Troy, and (former Kid) Flash) coming back together in a new Titans ongoing series, written by Judd Winick, with art by Ian Churchill. That series will launch in early 2008."

Newsarama: First off Judd - the upcoming Titans, as neither you nor DC has made any bones about hiding, follows up from this month’s Teen Titans East Special. Draw the line a little bit connecting the two…given the respective teams in the books, it feels as if there’s a strong possibility that the “Titans East” didn’t work out, and the original members felt it was their place to come back…or something like that…

Judd Winick: Or something like that…[laughs]. I guess the best way to put it is that the Special is the first chapter. The discussion came out of the idea that we originally wanted to bring back the original Teen Titans from the Marv Wolfman/George Perez days. We like the team, it’s a classic combination that works, and all of us were really, really interested in putting them back together. Dan would go from convention to convention and at virtually every panel, someone would ask if him if DC was going to launch a Titans East book, and the fans would go wild.

So in the back of Dan’s mind, that was where it started – if we were going to do “Titans East,” we should do the Wolfman/Perez team. Not some combination of new folks, but the originals. So from there, we came to the idea of making a “Titans East” project a first chapter, something that leads – somehow – to the creation/reunion of the original New Teen Titans characters. And it all gelled. That’s why there was a very brief fake-out where we showed the cover to Titans East, which got us the response of “What the hell is this?” from the fans who were asking for a Titans East team book. We expected that reaction, and we got it. So we had our fun.

The Teen Titans East one shot deals with these characters who are not very well known, which, for me was sort of a nod to some of the real big misfires of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when they would put together some of the worst teams imaginable under the biggest banners. I think everyone who’s been a DC fan for the past 20 years has had a “This is the Justice League?” moment. So that’s where it all began, and that was the idea behind it – this would be the first chapter of a larger story that was going to bring the original team back together.

Read the whole interview here.