schizoauthoress:

Teen Titans

From 1996 - 1998, the Teen Titans were taken in a different direction.  The classic team didn’t appear for a while — in fact, they didn’t know about the new team when it was being formed.  The connection to the original team was mainly Mr. Loren Jupiter for quite some time.

The core of the team were four human-alien hybrids who discovered their powers and alien heritage on their sixteenth birthdays.  This was Risk, Argent, Joto, and Prysm.  In the beginning, their team was rounded out by the Atom — a Ray Palmer who had been deaged to a teenager and was no longer with the Justice League (a fact he lamented repeatedly).  The mysterious Omen brought in Mr. Jupiter.

The team was expanded to admit Fringe, a fellow alien hybrid; Roy Harper gained his ‘Red Arrow’ costume during this run; and Captain Marvel, Jr. (known to the team as CM3) joined after a membership drive.

They appeared in 24 regular issues, 4 ‘Double-Shot’ issues teamed up with more popular teen heroes, and 1 Annual.  The team wasn’t very popular, and were replaced with “The Titans” v1.

The only carry-over member to the Titans team was Argent, Toni Monetti — and though she was returned to relative obscurity when The Titans ended, she’s had the most satisfying character arc and the best treatment of the v2 team.

schizoauthoress:

H’san Natall Sleeper Agents

The H’san Natall are an empire of aliens with technology that far surpasses that of Earth.  They are masters of genetic manipulation. Years before the first issue of Teen Titans v2 took place, the H’san Natall (or perhaps their Psion scientist slaves) abducted several human women for genetic experiments, implanting the women with hybrid progeny afterward.  All of them gave birth on June 21st, and it is on the sleeper agents’ sixteenth birthday that the story begins…

The Psion scientists are from another race of aliens, and they — at least the group of them stationed on the moon Titan — are slaves of the H’san Natall.  They were tasked with retrieving the eight sleeper agents on Earth, and some of them made the trip while a few others stayed to monitor the ninth hybrid — a young woman raised in a VR environment based on 1950s sitcoms and fantasy.  In the VR world, she was only ever called “Princess”, although her real name was Audrey Spears.

Only three of the eight sleeper agents were recovered by the Psions at the time, and they escaped with the help of the Atom (who had stowed along) and the girl from Titan.  These four — Cody Driscoll, Isaiah Crockett, Toni Monetti, and Audrey Spears — and the Atom were called the Teen Titans by the press.  The fifth H’san Natall hybrid, Fringe, was born in the town of Leesburg (the same town that Linda Danvers, the gestalt Supergirl, was from) and later discovered near there by the team.

The sixth hybrid was actually working for Dark Nemesis, who were hired to fight the Teen Titans.  We never discovered her real name, but she went by the codename Scorcher.

Based on what the Psions said at the beginning of the run, and what fellow H’san Natall alien N’takki said near the end of the run, there are still three sleeper agents we never saw.

And now we never will.