Teen Titans originally was DC’s response to Marvel’s X-Men. © Cartoon Network.

Dr.T: When I remember the series from the 1980s, the New Teen Titans could be a pretty adult comic book at times, what with inter-dimensional rape by demons, traitors who committed suicide and some adult-style relationships including a broken heart or two. What sort of challenges did you face in turning this kind of material into an animated series?

GM: When you’re working on Batman you’ve got 40 or 50 years worth of material to take and distill down into its best parts. Same for us. We kind of have to take into consideration that we’re not making this cartoon just for fans of the comic book, the ones who know all the backstory and know all the continuity. We have to tell the Starfire story in half an hour! I think we took all those things into consideration, but there’s just some things you can’t do for children’s programming. David Slack, the story editor, and I even talked to Marv Wolfman about it. He said, “You know, if I was doing the Teen Titans today, I would do them completely differently than how I would have approached them in the ‘80s.” Because in the ‘80s the Titans were sort of a response to what was going on with Marvel Comics and the X-Men.

Dr.T: One of the most unique aspects of this Teen Titans series is its visual style, a merging of American animation and anime. Sam Register describes your look as “Murakanime.” How did you come to develop this style and what influenced it?

GM: (Laughs) Well, I think the Batman and Superman series I worked on was part of that. When those shows were being done, no one else was doing those kinds of things. Batman is more filmic and more film noir, and even the kinds of stories that were being told in the two series, I don’t think anyone had ever done that with comic books before in an animated context. So, when we talked about doing Teen Titans we wanted to go in a different direction than what Bruce [Timm] had done with the other DC properties. We were fans of anime for years while working on the other shows, and it seemed natural to use that as the new direction to go in.

Today’s generation is growing up with Pokémon and all the shows now available on Cartoon Network — Cowboy Bebop, Gundam, other things like that — I think they’re used to that. When we were growing up, I think anime was considered really foreign, really different. I came in at like, the tail end of The Amazing Three and Gigantor. I grew up with Speed Racer and Kimba, and then, in the ‘80s, with Akira. It was kind of always there, but I think the direction Bruce wanted to go with Batman was a little more traditional, a little bit more “pure.” I had seen a lot of different things being done with anime, and I thought that was a wonderful opportunity to tell stories in a different way, a very stylistic way. So it just seemed sort of natural that a hybrid would occur.

Superfriends provided humor, even if it wasn’t always intentional. Photo courtesy of Cartoon Network.

Dr.T: After the overwhelming success of anime in America, audiences seem more ready to accept facial and physical distortions, or characters going way off-model for a couple of shots, and you’re integrating those elements into the new series. Do you sort of feel that you’re pioneering a new style for American audiences?

GM: I don’t think I am — maybe it’s new to western superhero fans who aren’t used to that sort of thing. Even though we’ve added humor to a superhero show, it’s not the same kind of humor as the Adam West Batman or like Superfriends. You’re laughing at the show. I don’t think we’re making the characters silly. And a lot of the animation is actually being produced overseas, so it just seemed natural to use what they do best, you know, to bring the two styles together, the U.S. animation side and the Asian overseas animation side.

I think that the Titans kind of has a sixties-seventies feel to it, but it’s not retro. I like to describe the Titans as having the feeling of the Nick Cardy Titans mixed with the Wolfman/Perez characters. The Nick Cardy Titans are really colorful — I don’t want to say psychedelic or groovy, but they’re very charming. The Wolfman/Perez Titans was during an era when everything got heavy and serious, so we took some of the ‘60s feel and mixed it with the ‘80s. Did you feel that it was pure, still kind of true to the comic?