I agree with the comment that you didn't need to know who Darkseid was for the X-Men / Teen Titans to work. I'd never read the Teen Titans either and enjoyed the book loads.

In fact, after that came out, I went on a Teen Titans scavanger hunt for the back issues.

 It would be like reading about Batman
meeting Sherlock Holmes without knowing who Holmes is. You
wouldn't get why it's special.

I think Mike Barr and Alan Davis did this in their run on Detective Comics.

While Perez might be a bit awkward on dialogue, but he's an excellent plotter/co-plotter. His New Titans stuff was crammed with panels with very good character bits and interactions. And when he works with writers who play to that and give him room to do that, he works wonders.

The New Titans: Games GN for instance, the Wolfman script was ... par for the course, but what Perez did with it visually and narratively was breathtaking.

I was a bit disappointed with JLA/Avengers myself, and it was mainly that there was so much "over-plot" crammed and not as much of the standard Perez character-stuff that I remember.

I think, just guessing here, that it might have to do with writers starting to write "Perez pages" with 20 panels and then expecting the magic to happen. I would think that the best way to write for Perez would be to write a tight plot, with some dialogue, for a story with 6-panel pages and letting Perez work over that.

Just like a penciller might want to provide looser pencils for inkers like Tom Palmer, Klaus Janson or Kevin Nowlan in order to leave them room to do what they do so well, I imagine that with a penciller/storyteller like George Perez, a looser plot (with enough room for Perez to expand the story his way) would be better.

I don't know how Busiek and Perez worked on JLA/Avengers, but I wish it had a much tighter focus on the core team members and had shown some good character bits there.

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I think Mike Barr and Alan Davis did this in their run on Detective Comics.

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As I recall, there were legal reasons DC could not actually identify Holmes in that story.

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And yet the first one did precisely that! Remember the "We Now Pause for Hero Identification" pages? Today, I am sure, those would have caused much foaming at the mouth from anal fans who would claim to be insulted by any suggestion that they did not already know who Superman and Spider-Man were -- and that anyone who didn't should go read a few hundred back issues and CATCH UP!

In fact, when I did DARKSEID vs GALACTUS I included similar pages, to bring up to speed what I knew would be very narrowly focused Marvel and DC fans, and when he read the plot, Mark Gruenwald originally told me to take out those pages, as "Everybody knows who these guys are."

Everybody? DC and Marvel were smart enough to assume that not EVERYBODY would know who Superman and Spider-Man were, but Mark thought everybody would know Darkseid and Galactus?

Alas, that is the kind of myopic thinking that was beginning to show itself more and more in comics -- and of which JLA/AVENGERS is the worst example.

(Hm. Hold on that. KINGDOM COME might be the worst. I seem to recall page after page after page in which no one is called by name.)