So over the course of the last few years, I have started on four distinct comics reading projects: G.I. Joe, The X-Men, Star Trek, and the Teen Titans. My intent with the first two was to read up to a certain point, with G.I. Joe involving all of the trades that I owned and the X-Men involving everything from the first Lee/Kirby issue to the end of the Chris Claremont run. For Star Trek, it’s a huge task–I have a DVD-ROM of nearly every comic produced from the 1960s until the early 2000s, which is hundreds of books and I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the second DC TOS series, with so much more to go. Plus, I’ve stalled out on that, choosing to read other stuff.

And then there are the Teen Titans.

My intention here was to read everything from The Brave and the Bold #54 all the way up until Teen Titans #100, the last issue before The New 52. I owned all of those books in either single issue or trade, and hadn’t read a bunch of them in a very long time if not at all. Plus, I had been steadily buying the trade paperback collections of The New Teen Titans, so reading those would count toward my Uncollecting mandate.

But then I hit issue #49 of the Baxter series and just didn’t want to keep going.

It’s not like I don’t enjoy those issues or anything like that; it’s just that the prospect of having to labor my way through the post-Total Chaos books (especially the post-Zero Hour books) wasn’t pleasant. I also knew that I was definitely going to hold onto every comic starting with DC Comics Presents #26 and ending with The New Titans #130. Sure, many of them aren’t particularly valuable, but those were the Titans books I read and collected during my formative years. They mean a lot to me.

But the rest of them? Well, the more I looked at the stacks of shortboxes in my closet, the more I wanted to just sell them off. So that’s the decision I made. I would sell everything that was not from the Marv Wolfman run, but not before reading it first.

So that’s where we are. I’ve re-started with the 1996 Teen Titans series by Dan Jurgens, and will move my way through The Titans, Teen Titans, The Outsiders, Titans, and even the last year or so of Justice League of America where the team was mostly comprised of former Titans like the Dick Grayson Batman, Cyborg, and Donna Troy. I haven’t read a lot of these books since they were first published, so a read-through was definitely in order. Plus, when you have already made your mind up as to what you’re going to do, it’s kind of freeing.

I’ll still review them, though. After all, we’re 20-30 years removed from a number of them, and in that time the Titans’ popularity has skyrocketed, so it would be interesting to see how things evolved into the places we are today.