Argent
Argent by Oliver Nome (RIP)
21 years ago - Toni Monetti is born the daughter of a former US Senator (although truly the result of an alien breeding program).
7 years ago - 14-year-old Toni is teleported to her alien progenitors ship where her skin turns silver & she develops her plasma powers. She escapes back to earth with the help of Starfire & Nightwing, and joins the Teen Titans West. She goes with them to Tartarus to rescue Lilith Clay from the Elder Titans of Myth.
6 years ago - 15-year-old Toni & the Teen TItans West try to stop the Ravens from stealing a nuclear weapon, but are decimated when Cheshire detonates the bomb in Qurac. She is relatively unscathed, and helps Roy Harper protect the other survivors.
4 years ago - 17-year-old Toni is invited to join the reformed original Titans. She discovers that her father has been laundering money for organized crime, and helps the Titans stop him.
3 years ago - 18-year-old Toni is injured fighting Brainiac drones with the Titans, and chooses to begin attending classes while she rehabilitates.
now - 21-year-old Toni starts working as a solo hero while continuing to take classes.
Argent is part of a weird little chapter in the history of the Teen Titans, but she's gone on to become a well-remembered character nonetheless. She's been a part of several arcs of this classic team, and whenever groups of former members gather, she's always one of the first characters you see. We've tried to give her her due, but there always seems to be the sense that she's always just one story away from really stepping into the limelight.
Argent's Comic HistoryAs of 1996, the existing Titans series had petered out and weren't really drawing the same level of fan interest. Dan Jurgens, the extremely successful writer of the Death of Superman story, was tasked with creating an entirely new team with an entirely new story. These new heroes were a group of alien hybrid teens, each with their own powers and each fulfilling a specific character archetype. They were joined by team leader the Atom, a classic Justice League member who had been de-aged during the Zero Hour crossover.
The book isn't bad, let me just say that... it's a good read and the characters are fun. Jurgens is a good writer... but he was also almost 40 at the time he wrote the book and it showed. None of the teenagers on the team read like teenagers. This is probably true of EVERY group of teenage heroes, but the fact that we were meeting all of them for the first time probably made it more obvious. |
Another awkward part of the series is the intensely gratuitous sexualization of Toni. This is obviously what she was created for; the Teen Titans famously feature Starfire as a member, and so this new team wanted a deliberately sexualized character of it's own. Clearly a lot of effort went into the design here, because even as she was put into a costume meant to show off as much of her body as possible, it's still impossibly a very good design, with clever use of color and negative space. Jurgens' writing and worldbuilding continued to be stellar, and his art was fantastic. Ultimately, fan interest just wasn't there.
All of these characters would go on to play roles in future Teen Titans stories, but Argent was the only one to continue to have a place on the team itself. When Devin Grayson wrote a new Titans series featuring the founding members as adults, each member sponsored a young hero to join them, and Argent was brought in, possibly simply to show all generations of Titans up until that point represented. This is where the incredible utility of her powers were really taken advantage of, essentially giving the Titans what amounted to a Green Lantern character in their ranks for the first time. The book had a large cast, and she was never really brought to the forefront, but was still a great utility character. After this book Argent would only ever appear again in group images of classic Titans, but she remains a stand-out character from this era of Titans history. |
Our Argent StoryIt would be so easy to just leave out the Dan Jurgens Teen Titans from our timeline; we're doing it with all the other members besides Argent. Toni, however, just fits so well into a specific era of the Titans history, that we're going out of our way to bring her into our timeline. The story when Starfire & Nightwing go into space gives us the perfect opportunity to use her alien-hybrid origin, and from there she can be a member of almost every team of Titans over the next several years; the Teen Titans West, Arsenal's government-funded team, and the group of founding members all benefit from her presence.
From there, however, we have a little trouble with her, because a new generation of Titans come into the forefront, and as much as we'd like her to be there, she just isn't part of that group. She's not a big enough character to join the Justice League, is not enough of a legacy character to join her longtime teammate Jesse Quick in the Justice Society, and while she might be a fit in the Outsiders, she has the exact same powers as Jade. For now, then, as she continues college and heals from her injury, she's just going to need to be a solo character. |
Argent's CostumeArgent's costume redesign happened in issue #17 of the Teen Titans series, also by Dan Jurgens. The book was clearly wrapping up, confronted with the lack of interest in the initial team by bringing in all the founding members and reshuffling the lineup. I don't actually know if the costume redesign happened in response to any backlash at the time, but it was clearly an attempt to scale back on her original costume's overt sexuality.
What you essentially got was a single skin-tight full-body costume, which actually was in keeping with a LOT of characters at the time. What made it stand out was that the color difference in the costume was achieved by cut-out areas, still using her white skin as part of her design and calling back to her original costume's deep-v. It was still pretty sexual, but in a more functional way that seemed like something a fashion-forward character might wear. It actually looked pretty good when Jurgens drew it, and while some other artists seemed to be a little challenged to reproduce the asymmetrical design successfully, it was a solid look that carried into her time in the next Titans team. This is the look we'd be using for our take on Argent as she engages in several small runs with different Titans teams. |
Argent's FutureToni is a solid, well-liked character with cool powers, a cool look, and a lot to contribute. We've used her a LOT in our story, making her a member of every single interim Titans team. For a long time, we wanted her to be a part of our current Teen Titans team along with Robin, Wondergirl and Superboy. She just seemed like someone who deserves a platform to have new stories told about her, and this seemed like the best place to do it. Unfortunately, there's just no way we could find that would have her be age appropriate to fit in with that group of characters.
But you know what... Maybe that's okay? Maybe not every character needs to be on a team to have their story told. Toni is a young woman that grew up a life of wealth and privilege, but after having turned in her father's criminal connections, she's having to make her own way. She has a history of being a newbie on several superhero teams, but now she's just a college student. Her pale skin means she can't hide her role as a meta-human... what will her life be like? All she needs is a gifted writer to tap into all that potential, and she can be an amazing hero all by herself. |