Teen Titans Go!

The comic based on the show based on the comic.

Teen Titans Go! is a comic book series that ran for 55 issues from 2004 to 2008, based on the animated series Teen Titans, itself based on an older comics series of the same name. Like the cartoon, it is Animesque and intended primarily for pre-teen boys, but did not shy away from somewhat darker material as the series progressed. It featured one-shot gags in the page margins presented by chibi versions of the cast, as well as continuations or expansions of plotlines from the series. Most issues, however, presented stand-alone plots.

As expected, the series features the Teen Titans: Robin, Starfire, Beast Boy, Cyborg and Raven, five young costumed superheroes, and their adventures in Jump City. Some issues shift the focus onto secondary characters such as Larry and Jinx, or even villains like the H.I.V.E. Five, in addition to some characters from the original series who did not appear in the cartoon, such as Ravager, Geo-Force, and Wonder Girl.

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Tropes used in Teen Titans Go! include:

• Adaptation Expansion: Backstories, expanded filler and even post-Season 5 ideas are given deeper detail all throughout the comic's run.
• All There in the Manual: The name of the city was never stated in the series proper. The tie-in comic named the city as "Jump City" and the fandom took this and ran with it.
• Alternate Universe: Issue #48, "Wrong Place, Wrong Time", goes through a few of these in an attempt to get Killowat back to his own world, starting with the world of the Teen Tyrants.
• Animesque
• Art Shift: From issue to issue, due to a rotating number of artists.
• Ascended Extra: Remember that goth kid from "Sisters"? He and Raven are dating now.
• Backstory
  • Issue #45 covers Beast Boy and Cyborg's.
  • Issue #46 covers Starfire's while also introducing her long-lost brother, Wildfire.
  • Half of issue #47 covers Robin's.
  • Issue #51, "Metamorphosis", covers Terra and her brother Geo-Force's.
• Baseball Episode: Issue #33, "The Strangest Sports Story Ever Told". Which, amusingly, features a Shout-Out to the Young Justice comic with the same plot.
• Butt Monkey: Dr Light is the butt monkey of the show and is always getting injured or beaten.

Raven: "Please. You got this idea from... some old comic book."

• The Cameo: Issue #47 includes a cameo from none other than Batman himself, watching the Titans from afar and proud of what Robin has become.
• Christmas Episode
  • Issue #25, "Secret Santa".
  • Issue #37, "Winterlude", is set the day after Christmas (though probably not the same Christmas as issue #25), and is narrated poetically in the style of Twas the Night Before Christmas, which is a Shout-Out to a similar issue from Young Justice.
• City of Adventure: The city from the series is finally named here: Jump City.
• Crossover: With Dial H for Hero in issue #52. The Dial's stealing other Titans' powers for Robby to use instead of granting him whole-new ones, though. Robby gives the dial up once he finds out.
• Distaff Counterpart: Issue #41, "Bad Girls", introduces Pink X, Mad Maud, Joystick, Marionette and Daughter Blood. They're all the same girl, though: Killer Moth's daughter, Kitten.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Issues #41 and #44 show that Kitten doesn't just use her father, Killer Moth, to get what she wants all the time; she does sincerely love him too.
• Excited Show Title
• Expy: Ice Kate and Kid Kold are teenage versions of Golden Glider and Captain Cold.
• Fish Person: Gill Girl from issue #10.
• Freudian Excuse: Red Raven, in issue #44 (a continuation of #42), attacks and destroys anything having to do with fathers (Founding Fathers display at the museum, Fathers' Day gifts at stores, etc.).
• Give Her a Normal Life: When Geo-Force finds out what's happened to Terra, he doesn't bother revealing himself to her, noticing it's the first time he's seen her happy. Terra, spotting and recognizing him, watches as he leaves.
• Humongous Mecha: Issue #9 introduces the Titans Go-Bot 5, which the team uses to fight Gizmo's giant robot. It's later used to fight a Professor Chang-controlled Beast Boy, AKA Garthasaurus Rex.
• Legacy Character: An interesting variation: Issue #54, "Makes You Wonder", features Cassie Sandsmark attempting to usurp Donna Troy's position as Wonder Girl.
• Lotus Eater Machine: Issue #38, "It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod World".
• Magic Skirt: Weirdly disregarded for issue #20; turns out that Blackfire wears shorts under her skirt.
• Mars Needs Women: Or rather Braboldian scientists want superpowered females for their experiments, as seen in issue #36, "Troy". If that's not Getting Crap Past the Radar, I don't know what it is. Except maybe Trope Overdosed.
• Me's a Crowd: In "Pieces of Me", Raven's "emoticlones" are let loose by accident and several of them run amuck throughout the city.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Issue #18 has Larry put the Titans "all back the way you should be":
    • Starfire acquires her mainstream version's hairstyle and exclaims "X'Hal!".
    • Beast Boy gets his old Doom Patrol costume.
    • Robin gets an older version of his costume. With no real pants.
  • Raven gets a lampshade hung on her more goth-like appearance.
  • There's also the Terror Titans from issue #48, three of whom are Red Robin, Arsenal and Tempest — the same names used by certain older versions of Robin, Speedy and Aqualad. As their team name indicates, they're decidedly twisted versions.
  • That same issue features Raven opening doors to various alternate realities, including the original-flavor Teen Titans from the Silver Age and, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it peek, Secret and Lil' Lobo from Young Justice.
  • There's a story where Kitten, angry with her father, starts committing crimes while claiming to be the daughters of other villains to get his attention. A couple of the identities she adopts (Gemini, daughter of Madame Rouge, and Ravager, daughter of Slade) are actual characters in the standard DC universe. On top of that, at one point, a frustrated Robin says that it's probably The Joker's daughter playing a prank.
  • In issue #39, a Valentine's Day issue, Speedy and Cheshire get hit by an arrow and fall in love. In the comics, they briefly fell in love and had a child together.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: According to the Wildfire issue, Blackfire had sold off Starfire to the Gordanians to keep them from invading Tamaran. If you've seen the episode "Go!" from the TV series, you can tell how this little plan turned out...
• No Nudity Taboo: Starfire, according to the end of issue #8.
• Painting the Fourth Wall: In "Magic and Misdirection", Mumbo opens a trap door that makes Beast Boy fall out of the panel. Starfire and Terra follow, and we're treated to a few pages of them wandering around the borders of the page while Super-Deformed.
• Recursive Adaptation
• The Reveal:
  • Issue #16 has a pretty big surprise for the Titans, especially Beast Boy. The child Starfire has been spending the day with at the mall, trying to help him find his parents? He's their ally, Wildebeest!
  • The first half of issue 47, "Regarding Robin", reveals without a doubt that Robin is in fact Dick Grayson.
  • According to "Metamorphosis", the schoolgirl from "Things Change" is Terra. Geo-Force can tell.
  • Are we not mentioning that Ravager (AKA Rose Wilson, Slade's daughter) appears and attacks the Titans... and then joins them? It makes you wonder what Season 6 might have been like...
• Rise of Zitgirl: Raven in issue #5, "Monster Zit".
• Secret Legacy: Terra. As it turns out, she's the princess of a kingdom.
• Shipper on Deck: In "Pieces of Me", Starfire expresses her belief that Beast Boy and Raven should be together. More than once. And she isn't particularly subtle about it, either.
  • Starfire also pretty vocally ships Cyborg/Sarah Sims, playing cupid for them and arranging their date in issue #27.
  • Robin takes Starfire on a date in issue #4, with Beast Boy and Cyborg following along to annoy him with advice.
• Shout-Out
  • Riddle in issue #9 says "A game in which the only winning move is not to play. What I am?".
  • In issue #20, we can see that Speedy's handle in multiplayer game is "Shaft", which is also the name of Speedy's Expy from Youngblood.
• Snap Back: There are stories that clearly take place after the fifth and final season of the show, and yet nearly every villain in the show's run was frozen in the end...
  • Presumably, they got unfrozen (perhaps so they could stand trial) and subsequently escaped. After all, prisons have a remarkably low success rate at holding supervillains...
• Super-Deformed: Other than the margin-gags, there's also issue #18, "When Chibis Attack". Raven even explicitly refers to their tiny counterparts as "chibis".