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Here's a bit of Marvel history you might not have known. In the wild comic book days of the 1990s, Marvel Comics took a look across the street at DC's Teen Titans and said, 'Hey, let's do that.' It lead to the (rocky) creation of a team called the New Warriors, and now, thanks to one of the folks who was around the House of Ideas at the time, we're getting a bit of insight into the time period.

Our historian for this tale is none other than Tom Brevoort, who writes a regular substack you've probably seen referenced on Popverse before (what can we say, Tom? We're fans). In the most recent issue, Brevoort begins a new installment detailing the entire New Warrior saga, beginning even before he was brought on to help with the book. It's from this first entry that we learn of the comic's Titan-envy, or at least, the envy that started the idea.

"The New Warriors had been created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz," Brevoort writes, "[...] they were conceived as something of a Marvel answer to DC’s Teen Titans—young heroes who would have their own ideas about how to fight injustice that maybe didn’t line up with those of the more established adult heroes."

Pretty interesting idea, right? And right off the bat, Brevoort says they were successful in earning a comparison between DC Comics's youth-oriented superteam and themselves. The only problem was that it wasn't exactly the Teen Titans that the execs at Marvel were probably hoping for.

"We in the office were not kind to the New Warriors. They were derided as a tone-deaf out-of-touch attempt by middle aged men to write a book about young people, which came across as authentically as Bob Haney’s Teen Titans had in the 1960s."

In case you weren't aware, the Teen Titans Brevoort is talking about here were the original, silver-age cornfest that consisted entirely of JL sidekicks. Popverse has talked about this team before, if you'll recall, as well as the fact that they exist as a kind of worse alpha test for the now-popular Teen Titans the comic book world has come to love. And just like the Titans, the New Warriors would come into their own, something Brevoort credits to the "triumverate" of writer Fabian Nicieza, editor Danny Fingeroth and artist Mark Bagley.

"The team took the characters seriously," current X-Men editor Brevoort writes, "gave them rich backgrounds and internal conflicts and connections, and put them in gray area situations where the right thing to do often wasn’t very clear-cut. It was really a terrific book."

But hey, even the best of comicdom's superteams have their hardships, right? Both on the page and off of it. Brevoort ends this chapter by teasing his own involvement in the comic after its Issue #53, as well as the the departure of Nicieza and Bagley and a collapsing speculator market having a grim effect on the barely formed New Warriors. What happens after that? Well, you'll just have to tune into Brevoort's substack to find out.

Get ready for what's next with our guide to upcoming comics, how to buy comics at a comic shop, and our guide to Free Comic Book Day 2025.