Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and fifty-fifth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Scott Lobdell initially planned on his New 52 Teen Titans series to carry on from the previous volume.

STATUS:

True

In 2011, J.T. Krul's run on Teen Titans came to a close with Teen Titans #100...

Then DC launched their "New 52," where they restarted all of their titles with #1s.

Teen Titans was one of the books relaunched, with Scott Lobdell writing the series with Brett Booth on pencils...

The New 52 was a confusing mixture of continuity, with some titles, like Green Lantern and Batman, seemingly continuing storylines from before the reboot while other titles, like Superman, were fresh rebooted characters.

As it turned out, Teen Titans was one of the books that was completely rebooted, as Kid Flash made his debut in the first page of the story...

Tim Drake, Red Robin, also seems to not know any of these heroes...

However, when Scott Lobdell sat down to initially write the new series, that was not the case at all.

He explained it to my pal, Albert Ching, at Newsarama back in 2011...

I have to say I don’t really see things as being that dramatically different as much as I am seeing things being dramatically the same.

Tim Drake is still Red Robin, Cassie Sandsmark is still Wonder Girl, and everyone is still pretty much exactly who they are, just with a little custom fitting.

My first draft of Teen Titans read as if it were Teen Titans #101 — maybe a brief few months after [J.T. Krul]’s run which was ending with issue 100. People were very excited and supportive of it, but soon it was decided I didn’t go far enough: they wanted this book to feel like an issue one, not a continuation of a series cancelled by low sales. They wanted readers who were picking up Teen Titans #1 to feel like they were picking up the first issue of a new series… and so that is what Brett and I delivered.

Having said that, when the idea of Teen Titans was first created it was a book about sidekicks hanging out together. But we’ve come a long way from sidekicks – which was reflected first in Marv’s run where they are all their own super heroes, and later in Geoff’s run, where Teen Titans became about the newer generation of heroes being shown the ropes by the most recent generation.

Because that had all been done before (and done so extremely well by those guys) I didn’t feel like it was in anyone’s interest in going back and retelling those stories. I wanted to look at the idea of the Teen Titans if they were being formed right here and now. What would bring them together, and why would they stay together?

Again, Marv and George and later Geoff and Mike have given us some of the best comic stories of the past 30 years. Nothing I’m doing will change how great those stories were and will be now and forever.

It's funny, because Lobdell did some fan questions stuff leading up to the series and he was all about "everything is still in continuity" until, well, it turned out it was not. It was clearly a bit of a last minute switch thing that Lobdell just had to make do with in the comic.

Thanks to Albert and Scott for the information!

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In the latest TV Legends Revealed - What scandal did NBC not allow Quantum Leap to feature on the series?

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