Paneling: New Teen Titans #20

Everybody loves Terry Long.

Women want him.

Men want to be him.

Even after their divorce, his ex-wife remained obsessed with him.

He had it all. The perfect man. Everyone’s fantasy made flesh.

That is, at least what writer Marv Wolfman would have had you believe.

This is because, most people – myself included – assert that Terry Long was a self-insert character for Marv, someone who was a few years younger, arguably better-looking, and a total babe magnet who had pulled himself the ultimate baddy in the form of Donna Troy AKA Wonder Girl, a gorgeous Amazon ten years his junior.

In the real world that is not scripted by Marv, everybody hates Terry.

EVERYBODY.

Not one person – except maybe Marv – is sad that he’s dead.

But what’s long been funny to me is that in one story in which Marv inserted his actual self rather than having Terry as a proxy, we were presented with a very different view of the writer.

The panel in question is featured in a backup story in this issue.

The main story is brought to us by…

Writer	Marv Wolfman
Cover Artist	George Pérez
Cover Colorist	Anthony Tollin
Penciller	George Pérez
Inker	Romeo Tanghal
Colorist	Adrienne Roy
Letterer	Ben Oda
Editor	Len Wein

…and while it seems likely that the same team – or at least most of the same team – gave us the backup feature, that’s just an assumption, because…

The story titled, “A Titanic Tale of Titans’ Tomfoolery!” focuses on a mad scientist who has discovered the existence of another Earth.

Specifically, Earth-Prime, which is our Earth (or near enough). It’s a world without superheroes, but it’s a world that does have comic books, comic books that might reveal the secrets of the superheroes who do exist on the scientist’s Earth.

Specifically, his arch-enemies the Teen Titans. Now, he’s never faced off against the Titans before, but that’s not stopping him from claiming them as his arch-enemies. After all, every evil scientist worth his salt has an arch-enemy, and he’s just getting ahead of the curve by choosing his. He figures that he’s got a better chance facing off against some teen heroes.

As the caption says…

The scientist uses a device to transport Marv and George to Earth-One so that he can get information from them about the Titan, but they are unwilling to cooperate.

Well, Marv is mostly unable to cooperate after getting zapped.

Once he regains consciousness, Marv is more than willing to spill whatever beans need spilling.

Fortunately, the Titans themselves burst in to save the day and to save Marv from his own cowardly instincts.

And that brings us to the panel I wanted to focus on, which is the second panel on the story’s fifth page in which we see that the real Marv doesn’t quite have the same swagger of his fictional alter ego.

Before Marv can make too much (more) of a fool of himself, he and George are zapped back to where they belong, and the story ends with George carrying Marv the way some would say he always did…

It’s just a silly little story that rounded out an issue that contained a considerably more serious main story, and it’s one I didn’t actually read until relatively recently.

I’d started picking up New Teen Titans a few issues prior to this, but as I’ve mentioned many times, my access to comics wasn’t always consistent, so I frequently missed some, though I don’t think I missed any starting with the issue after this one.

But the end result is that I didn’t read this story until I started picking up the trade paperback volumes collecting the series sometime this century.

I had read the main story somewhat closer to its release as it was included in a digest collection of the (previous) year’s best stories that DC put out.

Getting back to my actual point, when I did finally read this one, that panel stood out to me because it was such an interesting contrast to the way Marv – whether intentionally or not – presented himself as an author self-insert in the form of Terry Long. Especially when paired with the other bits in which he presents himself as being a sniveling coward, or, when viewed through the eyes of his collaborator, a deluded fool.

He had the opportunity to have the beautiful young women in the Titans swooning over him and the young men to fawn over him like he was the greatest thing since sliced bread the way they did for Terry, but he chose to go in a completely different direction.

Even the people he worked with seemed to view him with a certain amount of – comedic – contempt.

I just find that kind of fascinating, and it potentially provides a lot of insight into what role Terry Long actually played for his psyche.

Not being a psychologist, I’m not even going to try to unpack any of that, I’m just noting that I see it there, ripe for examination.

If I had read this back when it was first published, I don’t know if it would have stood out in quite the same way, as at that time I hadn’t yet recognized Terry as a self-insert and honestly hadn’t been that exposed to him yet. So this is something that is interesting – to me, anyway – only in hindsight.

Still, everything else aside, Terry Long was the worst. All my homies hate Terry Long. Rest in Piss, bozo.

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