A couple weeks ago I snatched up most of Superboy and the Ravers from a back issue bin. This was a series that ran from 1996 to 1998, Superboy’s second ongoing series from that era. It was a teen team book in a decade where teen teams were nearly as hot as they were the previous decade, thanks to Generation X at Marvel (a team that’s been completely forgotten since) and Gen 13 at Image (a team that can still be visible today whenever WildStorm nostalgia hits DC). DC launched a new Teen Titans with Dan Jurgens, and Ravers, neither of which were nearly as popular.
But I loved Ravers. Still do. Obviously the idea hinged on a somewhat desperate grab for hip readers, teenagers literally attending an intergalactic rave, a party scene, but the characters who ended up coming together were far beyond that concept from the beginning. It’s really as if someone in editorial pitched the gimmick, and writers Karl Kesel and Steve Mattsson actively thumbed their noses at it.
Because the Ravers turned out to be a bunch of misfits. Take Half-Life. (Please!) There’s no way this kid would’ve been accepted as one of the cool kids. The whole point of the character was that he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was an outcast. That’s him on that cover to #3. Need I explain? He’s the reason I was never convinced Marvel had the market on misfits, which its fans have claimed for half a century. Marvel’s monsters are for the most part headcases. Unless your name is Ben Grimm, the writers continuously stretch credulity to pull any of it off. Half-Life is Ben Grimm if Ben Grimm didn’t have the Fantastic Four constantly around him to give him a context he of course constantly ignores, because Marvel. Half-Life has the Ravers around him, sure, but the thing is, the Ravers aren’t a family. They’re not really a team, either.
They’re more like a club. No one’s impressed Superboy is there. This isn’t really a Superboy book at all! That’s what’s so great about it. It turns out all these characters are just trying to find themselves, to where they might actually fit in. You’ve got an actually organic gay superhero named Hero. Yeah! His superpower is actually the H-Dial, which in his context is a vest. You’ve got the most lovable Khund warrior ever, Kaliber, whom DC tried its best to turn into a breakout character in Genesis. You’ve got Sparx, still my favorite Bloodlines creation because of her appearances in Ravers, who grew up in a family of superheroes but never felt at home until she found an actual group of peers. Probably the closest its members came to generic was Aura, the alien princess trope.
For nineteen issues, this group of friends struggled to keep things together, and fittingly, at the end, they go their separate ways, and basically none of them is ever heard from again, except of course Superboy. They were a club of heroes. Their adventures were far more about telling their stories than the adventures of the Ravers themselves. This became my favorite kind of superhero storytelling, in large part thanks to Ravers. I cared about Half-Life. I was happy when Hero found Leander (I was just getting into Greek myth at the time, so synergy like that was welcome!). This wasn’t teen drama. All these characters were thrust into the world and forced to find their own way. Just imagine where they went next…
I like comics that feel like the characters are telling you about themselves. I like great storytelling, but I need to care about the characters themselves. Ravers was an unexpected way to discover this. When it’s one character in their own book, Mark Waid’s Wally West, for instance, struggling to understand his own legacy, that’s easy. Do with it with a whole cast? Maybe that’s asking too much. I can completely understand this not be a popular, bestselling comic. But it’s still one of the best, and no comic has come along remotely like it since.
