When nailing down a classic character, getting the right influences can be key. For the cast of Titans on DC Universe, they went to exactly the right place.
“As soon as I found out about the audition, I went straight to a comic store with my dad and my dad came with me and we got the first volume of the 80s Teen Titans comics and we devoured it and we also got the new volume of the spinoff Raven series, also written by Marv Wolfman, which was good to read because it’s closer to my age,” Teagan Croft, who plays Raven on the show, told Comic Book Resources. “It’s closer to the way I was portraying the character.”
Wolfman is the right place to go: his run on The New Teen Titans in the 1980s is considered the definitive take on the team, putting Cyborg, Raven, and Starfire into the mix for the first time and defining the superheroics-meets-teen-soap vibe that the team would be known for.
Ryan Potter, who plays Beast Boy, had a similar experience digging into the good old stuff. “I watched the animated series growing up. I went out and I bought the [Marv] Wolfman/[George] Perez series,” Potter shared.
“I got one through eight, and someone told me I think it goes up through 12. It could go further than that — like the volumes, not the individual. As many Beast Boy comic strips exist online, I pulled up as well, because finding physical copies of the slightly more obscure comic issues of like Doom Patrol, where the Changeling disappears for an episode. It’s a lot harder to find that now, simply because this title, this almost-franchise, has history and it goes back and some of these are collectors’ items now.”
It’s nice to know that, whether or not you dig Titans, it has a lot of DNA from those old runs in it. At least, from the actors’ perspective.