For those who became self aware in the early 2000’s there was a plethora of animated DC media from which to learn about DC comics. Batman the Animated Series, New Batman Adventures, Superman the Animated Series, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, Teen Titans GO! - and Young Justice. These shows were so plentiful and so good that many DChuds (DC Comics fans) credit one or more of these shows as being their point of entry into capeshit, and not any particular comic. Many fans have seen parts of these series or a whole series and never actually read much of any comics, and I would argue that they probably have as good if not a better understanding of characters and in-universe dynamics than alot of comic book readers do because of the quality of these shows and the nature of their serialization.
The serialization of the comic book was originally absolutely key to the flow and function of information that was passed in its panels. We can reliably generate interest in a character or series of events happening in a comic if we are good at presenting information and events in a way that leaves the reader thinking that there is more to know and that what more there is to know is both interesting and necessary to know to understanding a character or story. This was possible in part due to the fact that for large portions of its lifetime comic book writers and artists have not been in demand as a profession, and so their work on a particular series was pretty important to establishing themselves as credible enough to continue being paid for their work.
Comics however have changed! Western comics, particularly at the “Big Two” (Marvel and DC) assign a writer and artist or teams of writers and artists to a particular character or ensemble of characters and when that writer or artist is done or has to move to other work that run just ends, whatever the state of the character or story is at that time is more or less where it ends, sometimes they do the due diligence of forcing an ending in a matter of a few issues. This is not the case in animation. Mostly. In animation, a cast of voice actors is selected, lead animators and writers are selected, and a season is produced often as far out as months in advance of the shows airing, with individual episodes being written and storyboarded weeks ahead of their animation being done. What this leads to is that in Comics, historically, there is no real impetus to keep a cogent story happening for any length of time. If we have 5 Batman books going a month, and one of those books writer has a prior commitment or has said something on twitter we dont like, we are just cancelling his book. If his book isn’t realizing sales targets, were ending his book. There is no consideration for Batman there, there isnt any thought about “Well we are putting the Reader in a bind here” because the open secret is that the reader is the only person in the equation who actually gives a shit about what happens to Batman. The Reader is the only person who likes Batman. In animation, because the project is done as a batch thing, you are getting the whole first season basically no matter what, there are very few cases where a show is cancelled mid season in the age of independent streaming platforms. Animated shows usually have rubber meet road after a season has concluded and a network and creatives have to look at it and say “Are people watching this, is it cheap enough to continue to produce”.
DC Comics in the early 2000’s was incredibly fortunate to have some really gifted creatives, namely Dwayne McDuffie and Bruce Timm, Rest in Peace Mr. McDuffie, in charge of these shows. Batman from BTAS all the way through Justice League Unlimited is the “Same Guy” in a way that Batman from Dennis O’Neill to Matt Fraction simply is not, that way is that there is consistent representation in visual cues, voice acting, modus operandi, and supporting cast. I cannot hate you for thinking “This is a complete Batman story, with a complete Batman that has complete adventures, I really like this and I don’t get this in the comics so this is My Batman.” because it is essentially true. The same goes for basically any character with more than 2 appearances throughout that era of DC animated shows. Consistent characterization and representation throughout.
BTAS or Batman the Animated Series, and I will group the New Batman Adventures into this as well, basically functions as a weekly or monthly comic actually should, which is to say that you are guaranteed a payoff by the end of the season if something is set up in episode 3, a guarantee you really do not have in comics because of the lack of confidence in these comics meeting sales targets or aligning with creative overhead or whatever extenuating factor is responsible for getting a series cancelled. BTAS, and really any animated show, has both the cross to bear and the benefit of a hundred years of comics to base its material off of, which you might think would result in nothing new really being done in the storytelling in these shows but that is not only not the case- its the reverse. In particular we can use Harley Quinn as an example: Harley Quinn was created for BTAS and was popular enough to reverse-infiltrate the comic space, and is now an inseparable and insufferable part of the “Bat-Family” (God forgive me for uttering those words) and the wider DC world. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is in a similar spot, a fantastic Batman story now possibly being adapted by Matt Reeves into live action Batman (Live action capeshit is an entirely different conversation we can have at another time). So not only is animation a space to convert the cherry picked very best stories from comics, its also a place apparently to innovate new stories that are as good as or better than the comics! If only it was relatively cheap to produce with established lines of production aligned with companies with reputations for their animation, accessible, and popular amongst the demographic that is already familiar and culturally entwined with these characters, stories, and properties…
And so we enter the modern era, The Year After Christ’s Death 2026. Anime is bigger than ever in the West, animated shows in general are viewed by ages 4-40 in every demographic and geographic locale. I have individual disagreements with the apparent policy of James Gunn as creative head for WB’s DCU, but something I think is entirely cogent is his having particular animated shows being greenlit to trail into the live action movies. I think that is the most consumer observant thing I have seen a major media company commit to in my lifetime besides making more than one Iron Man movie. But, I digress, I do mean to write about Young Justice here now that we understand the landscape we are working in.
Young Justice is based relatively loosely off of a comic of the same name, a less mature more Justice League aligned Teen Titans with some alternate characters and themes some more recognizable than the Teen Titans, some less. Young Justice (the show) takes this lifeline and executes a perfect pirouette backflip for its first act, decides to change the music in the second act, and then sets itself on fire and slams into a metal door by its fifth installment.
Original characters or characters so heavily changed as to be unrecognizable and changed retroactively in other mediums to fit their superior YJ profile:
-Kaldur’Ahm
-Artemis Crock
-Tigress (Paula Crock)
-Sportsmaster (Lawrence Crock)
-Cheshire (Jade Nguyen/Crock)
-Superboy (Conner Kent)
-Miss Martian (M’Gann M’Orzz/Megan Morse)
Every one of these characters rocks in Season One. Every character has an arc, has losses and wins and ultimately emerges more interesting and developed than you would suspect from their introductions. We’ll go character to character as I think they rate evaluation.
Kaldur’Ahm is the mature, soldierly leader of the team. He never seeks responsibility but it is thrust on him because he is the best man for the job of leading the team. Kaldur’Ahm is without a real romantic arc in the first season but this does not prevent him from collecting his just desserts on New Years. Kaldur is alot “like” Garth in that he is a sorcerer guy more than he is a super strong underwater guy, the same dynamic that Garth and Aquaman developed over the course of many publishings, this is not a bad thing.
Miss Martian is still the “niece” of Martian Manhunter, and possesses all of the normal array of DC Martian powers and weaknesses with the notable addition that she is a White Martian, considerably more physically freakish in their natural form, and suffers immense anxiety over her integration with human female-dom.
Artemis Crock is a near total reimagining of an existing character. Artemis in the show is the second child in the Crock family, founded on common criminality between her father (Sportsmaster) and mother (Tigress) until her mother suffers a crippling injury that leads to her father walking out on them after a lifetime of harsh physical and mental training. Artemis is trying to be a good guy, she doesn’t really have obvious killer instinct or any sort of hatred for the world but she is a snarky and obviously skilled combatant, good enough with a bow that she can slide into the role of Green Arrows protege with minimal skill related difficulty. Her arc is that she comes to terms with her family struggles, particularly with the role and presence of her sister Jade aka the assassin Cheshire in her life. Cheshire is pretty similar to lots of her comic appearances besides her relation to Artemis, Tigress, and Sportsmaster. Artemis is perfectly formatted for me in her interactions and eventual romance with Kid Flash. I will eventually longpost about what I think about the Flash, but the TLDR is that the Flash is your favorite Superhero’s favorite Superhero, and embodies everything about being a Superhero that is good and selfless, fun and noble. So Kid Flash, a character who for love of the game and idol worship recreated the nearly-deadly accident that gave his mentor his powers, and took up the mantle of happy go lucky good guy, is the perfect guy to bring in the psychologically walled-up, physically and socially hardened, emotionally distant female newcomer after a period of rocky co-socialization.
Sportsmaster bears some individual mention because it is perhaps the single greatest instance of any show lifting a character out of the gutter of obscurity to make them a menacing and interesting threat whenever they are on screen. Sportsmaster is originally a guy who uses Sports equipment to commit crimes. Exploding basketballs, that sort of shit, he is LITERALLY “Wearing Hockey Pads”. In the show, he is like Deathstroke-lite if Deathstroke had a semi-functional family and relationship with the League of Shadows/Assassins/Ras Al Ghul/Lex Luthor. He beats up street level heroes on the regular and CIA-handles Red Arrow. Masterclass, and may I say “Bravo!” to the showrunners.
Superboy is to me basically the main character of the show. He is a clone of Superman, an imperfect clone at that, half human and half Kryptonian, literally he is half Lex Luthor and half Kal-El. Superboy struggles with anger issues, lack of socialization, feeling alienated from his father figure, and being self aware of his status as a being designed both as a weapon and as a replacement for a guy who is not only still around, but is the most famous man in the world for being the best man in the world. What an insane burden for a biological 16 year old, and what an insane line for a kids TV show to take as a pitch to the modern male. And it is so good. We watch Superboy do things his way. When shit gets tough, the tough hit things. He gets a girlfriend that he ends up being more actually pro-social than somehow, he gets a motorcycle and proves himself as an individual and as a warrior. He gets a pet wild white wolf (eat your heart out GRRM). He is the representative of a race of weird telekinetic telepathic aliens that live underground in a government blacksite. He does super-drugs. He confronts both his father figures on their own terms and win. He (sort of) kisses Black Canary. This dude fucking rocks.
Superboy to me is the ultimate unfulfilled prophecy of the show. His connection with the Fourth World is the crux of what I believe should have constituted his arc of completely transcending the “Kryptonian-Human” dynamic struggle that he faces throughout the show. But instead, we got a 5 year time skip and season 2.
Season 2 represents to me the beginning of the end. More characters, more shit going on, everyone’s role changes, some people are Retired, we miss all of this. It happens in the interim. I am aware there are tie-in comics, but as I have illustrated, no one wants to fucking read that shit! The animated show is the perfect format for this medium- don’t make me go out of my way to find the answers to questions you should be addressing in a totally familiar established format! Nothing good comes of this. We lose track of any emotional contrivance between Wally and Artemis, we lose any opportunity to see Superman and Superboy getting along, we don’t see Red Arrow going down a dark path. We get Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle (who I independently detest as a Ted Kord supremacist) and the Reach. I will be totally frank, there are many DC shows and comics that steal things from Marvel and do quite well with them- doing the Skrull invasion with Blue Beetle just doesn’t fucking land for me. We have an established cast, why are we moving on from that why are we killing Kid Flash off, what the fuck is going on why am I seeing Bart Allen? We seriously don’t get to see Robin telling Batman to go fuck himself and becoming Nightwing? This is something they are explicitly building to with Robin the entire season, its his entire arc in the first season and our payoff is that he has Batman’s job in season 2 and is guilty of the exact same shit Batman is in season 1. So like nothing has actually happened. We have skipped 5 years, the most interesting 5 years in a young man’s life, 16-21, so that we can not immediately address:
-Roy Harper is out there somewhere, and Red Arrow now has to live with the knowledge he was his own worst enemy all along.
-The Light is still at large and presumably (as per Vandal Savages dialogue) operating within the limits of their overall original scheme despite the setbacks they have been handed by the team/league.
-The original 7 Justice Leaguers (this is a martian manhunter continuity per the show) were missing for 16 hours. What they did under the mental domination of Vandal Savage, they can only guess- or wait for the consequences to show themselves.
-The Light as an organism really still isnt wrapped up at all. No one associated with them is actually captured, Savage and Klarion get away in the chaos of peace being restored amongst the league and team.
-CADMUS has a fuck ton of genomes living in quasi-slavery and they are increasingly unhappy about it.
One of the cleverest things this show did was to format events as points in linear time, and to basically measure out a year in the lives of the members of the team. Abandoning this format was a sad mistake. How and why does the Justice League, which I believe at the end of season 1 has 4 “space” guys on it, and several implied associates in that realm, not discover anything about what they were doing in the missing 16 hours- not to mention I think it is both retarded that it’s revealed they were “terrorizing” alien populaces, and that the League is totally ambivalent to this actually having happened. No emotions from anyone on mass murder? Terrorism? Whatever?
I am not going to go into detail about the following seasons except to say that the apple falls far from the tree and rolls downhill into a landfill and contributes to poisoning the ground water in the area. Young Justice episode 17 constitutes the bedrock of my argument about the relationship between Superboy and New Genesis. Reading the wiki, it appears that Weisman and co have some very long term thing about Apokolips and New Genesis, and while I can appreciate trying to get into that mode of storytelling, literally everything after season 1 is horrible bullshit oriented at what I suspect was an increasingly millennial and female audience. Proof of this is that a major arc of later seasons is that Superboy and Miss Maritans wedding on mars is fraught with racial complications brought on by the active apartheid on mars being resisted by Martian Manhunters cousin who is a terrorist. Stop watching Fox/CNN on your phone. What the fuck are we talking about. What the fuck happened to either of them to A. Want to be married on Mars, B. BE ON MARS. The most regrettable shit about this is that Superboy would be a cool character to do a John Carter of Mars style story with, especially if you are going to drop Adam Strange in the show anyway. Let us not forget the “Beast Boy is addicted to sleeping pills”. (if you are going to retread “MY WARD IS A JUNKIE?!” ((twice btw)) then at least have the courage to write that one of the humans is doing meth or coke because he has an adrenaline addiction. Utterly juvenile milquetoast network shit instead. Cool.)
TLDR:
Nothing from Season 1 survives contact with the post-covid resurrection of the show, having already lost so much in a complete self-own 5 year time skip to season 2. The fact that they have purportedly designed an 8 season narrative is completely insane to me, there will be nothing good in there whatsoever and I can only hope season 5 is axed by James Gunn in place of something else, probably a batman show. I say this only because Season 1 of Young Justice is probably my favorite capeshit animation of all time, and has a special place in my development as a DChud.
Young Justice is one of my favorite alternate universes, and it is very likely I will revisit it to do something similar to @Gon did with ZZ Gundam, but this post is long enough as it is.