The Young Justice Titles, EPIC FAILURE in the Nu52
By arnoldoaad 23 Comments
Today we got the solicits for March 2013 and I mainly checked them on Newsarama's site and I was already aware of the recent cancellation of titles like Blue Beetle and Legion Lost, but it wasnt until today when I open this page and I realized something
THERE ARE ONLY 3 TITLES LEFT
and the titles in question are Teen Titans, Ravagers and Legion of Superheroes
Now Teen Titans by Scott Lodbel have gotten a very mixed reaction, some ppl like it some ppl dont but at least everyone including Lodbell agrees that the Culling Sucks.
Ravagers is a very recent title and is very uneven to gentle about it, its going for its second writer but the team itself feels off, like it doesnt even have a purpose or a coherent cast
and finally LSH, Once upon a time and by that I mean over 30 years ago even before the Modern Era of Comics started giving its first steps LSH was the most popular and best selling book of all, now i guess is here for a sense of legacy but i just dont find very good
What Happen?
Legion Lost, Static Shock, Blue Beetle and Hawk and Dove all titles that were cancelled from the Young Justice family, and in exchange they have only got 1 title, which means that without Ravagers the Family would consist of only 2 titles, i think the evidence is pretty obvious when you look at it, DC launch both the Superman and GL families with 4 titles each and still have the same titles, but in just a year and a half YJ have lost 2/3s of the original line up and left with half the titles, an utter failure compared every other family.
Also its good to mention that titles like Supergirl and Superboy even though they have teen superheroes they arent part of the Young Justice Group
in short, Young Justice is about young superheroes trying to have their adventures in DC, I will put emphasis in the idea of young heroes but not kids and really not teens, mostly all of of the heroes in this line up border on 18 and go up with very few exceptions, so one might argue that for example the Legion books ended up in YJ for the sole reason that there was no other place to put them in.
so what happen?
It is obvious that there was no big picture on this family, that DC really had no plans to making it work.
First of all Hawk and Dove
Hawk and Dove have absolutely nothing to do with teen heroes who are young and having adventures, it deals with the fallout of the Brightest Day stories, now i was a big fan of Brightest Day and I loved the Dove/Deadman relationship, but a part of that i never cared 2 cents about was Hawk. Hawk is Lame, uninteresting and unappealing, a dove Dove ongoing would had been better, and this book had the misfortune to be drawn by Rob Liefeld.
Had this been a reboot of Hawk and Dove, with them as real young heroes and an interesting setting and mythology and a good artist it might have had a chance, but that just didnt happen
and honestly the girl Hawk was way way more interesting
Legion Lost
I tried every single #1 issue and Legion Lost was by far the Worst, it completely failed to present a good hook for the story and it doesnt even plant the plot until issue 3 and by issue 5 Nicieza leaves the book and when that happen the book just drift, it doesnt really have a solid direction nor anything to do with LSH or the Young Justice Line
BLUE BEETLE
if Blue Beetle had a problem it was poor pacing, it spend 4 issues retelling his origin in a way that was less appealing and interesting than the last time that it was told, the book itself wasnt bad, but it wasnt very good
and Finally STATIC SHOCK
I already about Static in another blog but as i said it before Its the worst comic in the new 52 and nothing more than that
YOUNG?
I want to talk about only 1 title and the is the only "successful" title in the entire line, and that is in terms of sales
TEEN TITANS
Its entertaining and Fun and its new, it has some problems with pacing and characters and like i stated the entire Culling sucked on its entirety but you need to consider that with every single problem that this title presents its still On top of the last 100 chps of Teen Titans that where cripple by constant bad writers one after the other one not having an stable team and a none stop amount of editorial mandates.
but watching what happen on the last volume of Teen Titans I can see certain paterns with what happen with the entire line up of titles
THERE IS NO STRATEGY
and the reason why there is no strategy is cause as it respects on DC, the entire concept of "TEEN HERO" Is Dead
and it has been dead since the cancellation of the original Young Justice title by Peter David
There is an attitude in that book that has yet to be replicated by any other book in DC or in any other Teen book, It was fun it was smart and it was funny and the best part of all, they were real teens, they had real teen problems and attitudes and once Teen Titans started it just went downhill for mostly all of the characters
This being a joke over the fact that The Ray(years ago), Superboy and Impulse ongoing comics were cancelled while Robin was still going
Young Justice was about Teens who had superpowers, Teen Titans was about Superheroes who are in their teens, the difference lies in the fact that for Young Justice being Young was a compliment and a main focus as for Teen Titans wasnt even important
as soon as YJ turn into TT the main characters also known as the YJ4, Robin, Wonder Girl Superboy and Impulse, all changed to a completely different dirrection
Wonder girl change from this girl who was growing into her own woman into basically "Superboy's girl" and it never move from that
Impulse who was one of the funniest characters in DC turn into just another superhero with speed
and Superboy just got more mature but mostly cause he discover that he was half Luthor half superman
My point is that none of this characters had the same personality and in some cases like Wondergirl move to have No personality at all and its only until very recently that we had the chance to see some improvement but not that much and not like before.
What can save the line up?
Of course Teen Titans remains strong in sales but you can argue that is mainly for Tim Drake, chp 0 saw his origin and the next few issues will be tied up onto DotF, but can the book stand on its own and on its characters is a completely different matter
however one thing is certain is that TT is the center for Young Justice, from that the logical step would be to divert from other TT titles
of course a Red Robin book would automatically be a Batman book so the next logical choices would be
KID FLASH and WONDER GIRL
but any amount of ongoings wont change the fact that this books NEED to be about their heroes, it need to be about the fact that they are young, thats the sole reason why this genre even exist, and it cannot be constantly tieing into Flash, Wonder Woman or TT, lets see an example
almost a year ago DC released a Wonder Girl One-shot, written by then TT writer JT Krul, the one-shot completely revamp the relationship of Wondergirl and her mother, they have a huge discussion at the beginning then they make up for it at the end, its just an entirely artificial plot constructed with nothing, but the main meat of the book was the first appearance of Solstice who was going to join in the TT.
so basically, the story that was suppose to be about Wondergirl had nothing to do with her.
The lesson to learn from this is that, Wonder girl is actually an interesting character, so if DC wants to make a book about her, it should be about her
and thats the core problem with Young Justice, its not about what is suppose to be about
End of Blog Post
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