I've never read much Teen Titans. What I know of the original Bob Haney '60s madness is from mid-2000s comics bloggers who loved to gawk at the bizarre plots and poor attempts at hip lingo. I've seen bits and pieces of the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans that seemed to adapt the Uncanny X-Men formula to DC far more successfully than the Detroit Justice League. But the early-2000s volume, written initially by Geoff Johns, is the only one I actually bought for any extended period of time.
Johns took some of the Wolfman/Perez crew - Starfire, Cyborg, Beast Boy, eventually Raven once he resurrected her - and the core Young Justice crew - Tim Drake Robin, Superboy, Impulse, Wonder Girl - and tossed them together, as a sort of mentorship program or something. I didn't start buying the book until issue 11, by which point Impulse was calling himself Kid Flash after getting kneecapped by Deathstroke adopting a "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger," idea.
Looking back, it feels like a grim book, though how much of that was by design, and how much was reaction to what other writers were doing I'm unclear of. There's an arc where the team ends up in a future where Robin, Superboy and Wonder Girl have grown up into cold, totalitarian types. Subsequent writers on the book would return to that notion, but I was long gone by then.
Brad Meltzer kills off Tim Drake's dad in Identity Crisis, so Johns does an issue of Tim trying to avoid dealing with it, because he's afraid the grief is going to make him more like Batman, or more specifically, like the Batman he became in that shitty future. That's actually not terrible, which is probably why that issue is one of two that hung on.
But this is when Johns puts forth that the human half of Superboy's DNA came from Lex Luthor, as an extremely heavy-handed thing about whether Conner was going to be a hero or villain. It's a perfectly Johnsian, extremely literal idea. Can't be that Conner struggles to live up to Superman's standard when he grew up in a lab, where adults intended to use him. Nope, gotta be that the Worst Guy You KNow is the other half of his genetic makeup.
Between that and the shit DC pulled with Cassandra Cain not long after, there was an ugly strain of genetic determinism running through their books. Your biological parent (who you have almost no contact with and actively despise) was evil? You'll be evil, too. Sorry, them's the rules. For some reason.
Johns started something where Ares seemed to be trying to twist Wonder Girl to his side, but that seemed to fall by the wayside, and Cassie was largely relegated to "Superboy's girlfriend." Not an improvement from the increasingly confident leader she'd been evolving into in Young Justice. Johns brought in the new Speedy, Mia Dearden, then had a running mystery about the unknown arrow in Roy Harper's old quiver that Cyborg gave her as a welcome gift. Johns kept teasing moments where Mia would get ready to use the arrow out of desperation, only to have something interrupt. We finally learn during an Infinite Crisis tie-in it's a Phantom Zone arrow, which she uses against Superboy-Prime. It holds him for about three panels. Definite, "that's it?" vibes there.
I gave up on the book after the second One Year Later story. Johns tried another mystery, this time about which Titan over that unseen year was a traitor. Except the traitor was a character we met an issue or two prior to the reveal, and there was absolutely no build. The way the team was being written, nobody seemed to want to be there or liked any of their teammates. None of them were close friends with the traitor, we were shown no touching moments of emotional connection or camaraderie, so who cared?
The book went through several writers after that, and from a distance, what seemed like a lot of depressingly gory or grim stories about young heroes getting mauled or killed for no particular reason or payoff. I remember some positive buzz about JT Krul and Nicola Scott's run just as the book was wrapping up, but I can't see any book with a large amount of Damian Wayne being worth my time.
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