Champions...of Digression!

It's our birthday! We've been doing an episode a week of Teen Titan Wasteland for a whole year now! Huh, you'd think we'd be better at it by now. We celebrate this anniversary episode by drinking too much and talking about comedia dell'arte, old possibly fictional Sega CD games, juvenile delinquent fashion trends of yesteryear, and the fact that Hub is still very frightened of Nancy Reagan. Oh, and I think there might be something about a comic book in there somewhere. Enjoy!

Our hosts don their red velour track suits and tackle issue #47. For some reason, Speedy doesn't trust the creepy clown faced daughter of a super-villain who wants to be a Titan, Aquaman is a proto-underwater-WebMD, and Mal gets all biblical on a lame bad guy and his doppelgänger.

Sweet sassy molassy! It's our 50th episode! Rozakis cooked up a doozy for us. It's Violin vs. Shofar, Carpenters vs. Wings, and Hub's love of this comic book vs. Hub's irrational fear of Nancy Reagan! T-Keee-Yorr! Submit your Clooney/Marmaduke mashups and your original Casio shofar compositions to [email protected]

Wow! This issue might be the weirdest one yet…and it isn't even written by Bob Haney! How can this be?! An angel punches Mal in the dick, Aqualad is back, and we see the formation of a rock band that features shofar solos as the Titans face their most deadly foes yet…a sextet of middle aged hoodlums opposed to gentrification! All this, plus another installment of Hostess Fruit Pie Ad Theatre.

A new era of Teen Titans begins! Off to kind of a rocky start to be frank, but on the plus side there's a pretty sweet Hostess Fruit pie ad. So there's that.

This is a weird, dark issue. Seriously. Also, Payton Manning dies in it which is odd seeing as it came out in 1973. But, it does feature some syrup chugging, Speedy trying to milk a bull, and some pudgy demons playing volleyball. Enjoy! Enjoy!

Hoo boy. I know I've said this before, but this might be the weirdest issue yet. We've got enchanted bugs and salamanders, Wonder Girl strangles another feline, there's a giant horned skull cave in the Yucatan jungle, and we meet a rich old hobo wizard butler named Johnny Carpetbag. He's not as cool as he sounds. Also, in the synopsis Hub makes a ton of references to the one Kafka book he finished. Spoiler: it ain't 'The Castle'.

The Titans journey to the ancestral home of Mr. Jupiter (the richest and therefor most trustworthy man in the world). We learn how to double kill a racist ghost, wonder if Speedy ever eats a bowl of catsup, and find out that blows to the head may cause amnesia, shrinking, or super powers.

So what we got here is a pretty straightforward story about cryptozoology, salmon malfeasance, mind control, and Scottish mysticism. Unfortunately, our hosts had a bit too much to drink, so they mostly talk about Ian Anderson, C.H.U.D.s, and whether or not farting into a pie has ever resulted in a fatality. Yeah. It's one of those episodes. Sorry.

We're back! And so is everybody's favorite temporally displaced cave-teen, Gnarrk! Points of discussion include: Kelsey Grammer, subterranean xenophobic Native American frat guys, Werner Hertzog, and the controversial Equal Butts Act of 1970.