Creation Story
By 1980 the Teen Titans were a lapsed property. The team first appeared in The Brave and the Bold #54 in 1964 and got their own title, Teen Titans, in 1966, but that series was canceled in 1973. A short revival ran from 1976 to 1978 and ended with the cast having outgrown the “Teen” name. Marv Wolfman and George Pérez relaunched the team as The New Teen Titans in November 1980. Neither expected it to last. Both thought the book would fold after six issues, given how poorly DC’s line was selling at the time.
The relaunch mixed returning names with three brand-new characters, and Starfire was one of them. She is a princess of the planet Tamaran, and her real name, Koriand’r, is a pun on coriander. Pérez handled the design. The other two new creations in the same story were Cyborg and Raven, so one book introduced three new characters at once, and it also reintroduced Beast Boy under a new name, Changeling.
The relaunch got a running start. A month before the ongoing series, a full New Teen Titans story ran as a preview insert bound into an unrelated issue. That preview, not the first issue of the ongoing, is where Starfire, Cyborg, and Raven appear for the first time.
First Appearance: DC Comics Presents #26
Starfire’s first appearance is DC Comics Presents #26, cover-dated October 1980. The lead feature that month is a Superman team-up, which is what DC Comics Presents was: a Superman crossover anthology. The Titans material is separate, a 16-page preview insert titled “Where Nightmares Begin!”, written by Marv Wolfman with pencils by George Pérez, inks by Dick Giordano, and colors by Adrienne Roy.
The preview does the whole job of an introduction. It assembles the new lineup, Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Cyborg, Raven, Beast Boy, and Starfire, and sets the first threat in motion. Starfire arrives on Earth as a fugitive. She is a princess of Tamaran, and her sister Komand’r, later called Blackfire, sold her into slavery. She spent six years enslaved by the alien Citadel and experimented on by the Psions before she escaped and made a run for Earth, where the Titans take her in. That escape is the engine of her early stories, and it is set up here in her first pages.
What makes the book a key is the density. One issue holds the first appearance of Starfire, the first appearance of Cyborg, the first appearance of Raven, and the first team appearance of the new Teen Titans. That is three characters and a franchise reboot in a single preview, and it is why the issue is treated as a Bronze Age key instead of a routine crossover. The catch for a new collector is that the cover sells the Superman story, not the Titans, so the preview is easy to overlook if you are flipping through by cover alone.
One month later, The New Teen Titans #1 hit the stands with a November 1980 cover date and turned the preview into an ongoing series. This is the most common point of confusion around Starfire’s debut. The New Teen Titans #1 is the first issue of the run, not the first appearance of the character. The preview in DC Comics Presents #26 came first, and it is the book collectors chase.
In Adaptations
For many readers the cartoon comes first. The 2003 Teen Titans series on Cartoon Network cast Hynden Walch as the voice of Starfire, and Walch returned for the 2013 comedy spinoff Teen Titans Go!.
The live-action version arrived in 2018 with Titans, the DC Universe series that later moved to HBO Max, where Anna Diop plays Starfire under the human alias Kory Anders. That is a long gap for a character who debuted in 1980, and it landed decades after a preview insert most of the audience has never seen.
For readers working through DC’s Bronze Age keys, Starfire sits inside one of the era’s densest single issues, three debuts and a team launch in sixteen pages. The first-appearance database tracks the rest of that lineup as their pages come online.
