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Not So New 52: A Look Back at ‘Young Justice’ Titles From September 2011

By | December 26th, 2019
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

8, going on 9, years ago, DC did something radical. No, not in the slang 90s way but in the major, seismic shift sort of way. They took their entire line of comics, cancelled every single one of them, and rebooted their entire universe. Not only did they reboot it, they reset it, making a pseudo-Ultimate Universe where heroes were near the start of their careers, without decades of story baggage. The Wildstorm and Vertigo universes were folded back into the main DCU and an overarching threat was teased during the final pages of “Flashpoint,” the event that birthed the New 52. It was a promise of more interconnected titles, a greater coherence within the universe and 52(!) titles to start, with more on the way in subsequent waves.

Gone were the JSA. Gone were all but one of the Robins (not really). Teams that once had hundreds of members and rotating casts were reduced to their core membership. The Teen Titans existed, but didn’t. It was a weird time.

It was a bold move and while, in theory, it could have worked, the practicalities and execution fell flat on its face and gave us nearly a decade of material to shake our collective heads at and ask: what the hell happened?

Well, that’s not what we’re here for! To celebrate the end of the decade, we here at Multiversity thought it’d be a neat idea to go back to the start of the New 52 with fresh eyes to see if things were better, if things were worse, and how well these books have stood the test of time. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be covering every single title of Wave 1 of the New 52, divided up by the “imprints” they spearheaded, an idea I, Elias, genuinely wish they had kept.

These titles were meant to be an entry into a simplified universe — let’s see if these #1s accomplished that goal. So far, we covered the ‘Green Lantern’ quartet, ‘The Dark’ and the ‘Superman’ quartet. Today, we bring you the younger generation of heroes, fighting for justice or ‘Young Justice,’ if you will.

Cover by Tyler Kirkham, Sal Regla, and Nate Eyring

Blue Beetle #1
Written by Tony Bedard
Pencilled by Ig Guara
Inked by Ruy José
Colored by Pete Pantazis
Lettered by Rob Leigh
Reviewed by Elias Rosner

There are visual aspects of the New 52 that, in hindsight, mark and date the initiative. Lettering conventions, storytelling styles and this penchant for textured, dark art with both the coloring and the inking trying to shade the art, making for figures that straddle a line between real and unreal. This isn’t to knock Guara and José’s work on “Blue Beetle” #1, which for the most part I enjoy, but to point out that I took one look at the first page of this comic and knew instantly when the comic was made. It is also indicative of the tone of the issue, which is kinda all over the place.

It’s a dark first issue, opening with mass slaughter at the hands of a Blue Beetle, and for a new reader, this would probably be quite shocking. . .but not necessarily in a good way. It’s decisions like these that plague the book and make it a less than enjoyable read and makes you question: why do I want to read this? We’re given little to go on to endear us to the hero, his friends aren’t all that likeable or non-archetypal either, and the comic can’t seem to find the right balance between incorporating spanish into conversation to enhance the characters and the verisimilitude and using it as lazy shorthand for character.

Not all is bad with “Blue Beetle” #1. It sets up the mystery of the scarab and Brenda’s aunt quickly and effectively, and if the goal was to create a tension between Jaime and the scarab, creating a more violent relationship between the two for the sake of drama, then good job. But in the end, it’s missing something vital, making this debut issue feel like a poorer more violent but not more sophisticated rehash of Jaime’s origin that wastes page space on battles we really didn’t need to see, or bullying scenes that add nothing, instead of introducing the dang Blue Beetle proper.

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Final Verdict: 3.6 – Not the worst but I see why fans of the character really did not like this new origin.

Cover by Rob Liefeld and Hi-Fi

Hawk & Dove #1
Written by Sterling Gates
Illustrated by Rob Liefeld
Colored by Matt Yakey
Lettered by Dezi Sienty
Reviewed by Elias Rosner

You know how they say the 90s never really died? Well, this book proves the adage, suplexes it into the ground, and then yells in our faces before, in the time it takes to blink, suddenly being upside down, facing the wall across the room, and yelling as if it was facing that way the entire time. “Hawk and Dove” is a mess of a book that makes me never want to read a story about these characters ever again.

Like. . .wow. It’s easy to forget what a bad book looks like from DC nowadays, because while every now and again you get a real stinker (*cough* “HiC” *cough*,) most of the worst are simply aggressively standard and even the bad ones have some redeeming factor. This? I’m hard pressed to find a compliment. It’s not offensive, the story isn’t even aggregiously stupid or poorly written, and the action is big and bombastic. That should make for a fun, if not mindless, action title with these anti-heroes that work for a branch of the US military. You know, some kinda, Death Brigade. But instead there’s something about the whole package that screams run! Run while you still can!.

Thirteen pages in and I was bored, bored, bored. The paneling is somehow baffling despite there being, like, four panels per page. Everything is so tight on faces and upper bodies and the 180 rule is thrown out the window, blown up, and then sunk to the bottom of the ocean, making fight scenes baffling because one minute a punch is coming from the left, then the character is flying out a window, that was in the direction the punch came from, and Hawk is facing the wrong way with the punch coming upwards.

The story brings nothing to the table, Hawk and Dove do nothing to make me want to keep reading, and I dunno folks, this random military agent who has two expressions, dull surprise and gritted anger teeth, isn’t a very compelling addition either. It’s all a masterwork of OK that slips into bad. If titles like “Animal Man” are a good time capsule for the successes of the New 52, then this is a fantastic time capsule of its failings.

Final Verdict: 2.0 – The colors and letters are nice.

Cover by Karl Kerschl

Legion of Super-Heroes #1
Written by Paul Levitz
Illustrated by Francis Portela
Colored by Javier Mena
Lettered by Pat Brosseau
Reviewed by Reid Carter

Even as someone who loves the Legion, has read many iterations of them, and is read-up on the era directly preceding the New 52, this issue is borderline impenetrable. This was the only book I read for this revisit where I had to read it more than once–I read it three times–to try to make sense of the plot.

This is almost entirely due to the structure of the panels. Very often, important visual information was crunched into the corner of the page or omitted entirely. In one instance, an establishing shot of the Legion HQ is drawn small and at an extreme angle so that it was barely recognizable as a building at all. In another, the shape-changer Chameleon Boy changes faces and outfits mid-conversation and between panels, so that for a solid page I hadn’t realized he was the same character.

The critical flaw here, especially for a series that was ostensibly meant to be accessible to new readers with the rest of the reboot, is that far too much information is packed into one issue. The story is sprawling; we meet one five-member team of Legionnaires and barely have enough time to get to know them before we’re whisked off to another location to meet another team, and then to another location to meet another team.

The art takes some of the blame here–many of Francis Portela’s angle choices obscure information in favor of what he must have thought was a more dramatic view–but he’s handcuffed by the plotting that forces too many characters and too many locations into 19 pages. It’s a thankless task to attempt to introduce nearly 20 Legionnaires in the first issue, some of whom were brand new for this book. It would have been far preferable to slim down the number of focal characters, at least for this first issue; in the version we have, none of the faces we see have any room to breathe.

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None of that touches the very, very questionable decision to not do a full reboot of the Legion, instead more or less continuing the story of the Post-Infinite Crisis Legion (a fact which is handwaved away in a single line that references Flashpoint). As much as the issue doesn’t work well as a continuation of the previous iteration, it completely fails as a jumping on point, leaving a big unanswerable question of who this issue was meant to be for.

Final Verdict: 1.7 – This one is a rough one. I wouldn’t recommend it even for long time Legion fans.

Cover by Pete Woods and Brand Anderson

Legion Lost #1
Written by Fabian Nicieza
Illustrated by Pete Woods
Colored by Brad Anderson
Lettered by Travis Lanham
Reviewed by Brian Salvatore

What a mess.

The conceit of “Legion Lost” was that it was a Legion of Super-Heroes story, with a limited cast, in the ‘modern’ day. That’s a good idea for a book! It eliminates a lot of the so-called hurdles that people must jump through to fully get into a Legion story. Of course, that somewhat obscures what makes the Legion so compelling, but let’s leave that aside for now.

“Legion Lost” #1 does a poor job introducing its core cast, which every other New 52 book, for the most part, overdid. Most of the ‘New 52’ titles went to extreme effort to make sure that you knew exactly who every character on the page was, no matter what. Here, characters are thrown at your without the slightest attempt to catch you up on who is who. The story begins in media res, and the entire issue is spent trying to figure out what the hell is happening, and to who. The idea of the team being ‘lost’ isn’t introduced until the last page, and even then, without the title and the basic description, you wouldn’t necessarily figure out the hows and ways of this book just based on what is on the page.

One of the great shames of this issue is that Pete Woods is doing his usual fantastic work here. The pages are full of dynamism and expression, but when there is so little story to tell through your visuals, even the best pages read flat and dull. Two more appropriate words could not be chosen for this utterly confusing comic, which led off a new series and attempted to re-invigorate the 31st century of the DCU.

Final Verdict: 3.1 – Shit sandwich.

Cover by Scott McDaniel and Guy Major

Static Shock #1
Written by Scott McDaniel and John Rozum
Penciled by Jonathan Glapion and Le Beau Underwood
Colored by Dezi Sienty
Lettered by Guy Major
Reviewed by Reid Carter

When I first pulled up this comic, I read the first page and immediately flipped back to the cover, thinking I must have missed several pages. The issue opens on a splash page of Static, flying out into the city, about to do battle with Sunspot. The first two captions mention Static’s afterschool job at S.T.A.R. Labs, and that he had slipped away in the confusion of the evacuation, likely a dramatic event that happens completely off-panel.

It is a bizarre and disorienting choice to omit those scenes, dropping us directly into a fight scene with only a few lines of hasty context. That choice is emblematic of the many, many problems in “Static Shock” #1, an issue that misses the mark on just about every level.

Static’s personality feels flattened, which is a complete shame. Nearly all of the personality and specificity that makes the character feel so fresh and relevant is absent here, leaving a bland, generic teenage nerd as the anchor of the story. (I’m sure the fact that the script was written, as best as I can tell, by two white dudes has nothing to do with that). Beyond just his personality, his dialogue feels like it would sound unnatural coming out of anyone’s mouth, let alone someone with as distinct of a character as Static. Most of the quips he delivers feel like they were plucked straight out of a Silver Age Spider-Man comic.

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The visual style here, rendered by Scott McDaniel, is even more jarring than the script. The sharp angles combined with Guy Major’s flashy colors are a good match for Static’s powers, but a very poor match for telling a story. Multiple panels, including some that were clearly meant to be big moments, are so oddly rendered that it’s challenging to make out exactly what’s going on. The geography of its centerpiece fight scene is never clear. The costumes of all superpowered characters–Static included–feel like they were designed by a middle-schooler, and the reveal of the villains for the arc is undercut by the lack of specificity to their look.

It’s a tough issue that feels like such a missed opportunity for a great character. The New 52 era felt made for this kind of character, someone with great potential for the line who wasn’t able to shine in the backstory-laden post-Crisis landscape. Maybe the biggest tragedy here is the failure for DC to capitalize on the opportunity to give one of their best characters a real chance at stardom.

Final Verdict: 2.1 – Garish visuals aside, Static earns some points back for managing to tell a story from point A to point B without too much difficulty, something at least one other New 52 #1 that I reviewed could not manage.

Cover by Brett Booth, Norm Radmund, and Andrew Dalhouse

Teen Titans #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Penciled by Brett Booth
Inked by Norm Radmund
Colored by Andrew Dalhouse
Lettered by Carlos M. Mangual
Reviewed by Reid Carter

If there’s something I can say in this issue’s favor, it’s that I remembered it being much worse. Most of that ill will is likely leftover from where this era of the Teen Titans progressed to, and some of the elements that would define the series for years to come are on display right out of the gate in issue 1.

Chief among the problems here is that Teen Titans #1 goes out of its way to sever the connections of the majority of its legacy characters from the flagship heroes. Wonder Girl hates being called Wonder Girl and specifically mentions she has never met Wonder Woman. A news report quickly establishes that Kid Flash is unaffiliated with The Flash. Tim Drake says he thought he had left his life as Robin behind him (laughably implying that he’s retired despite the fact that we see in front of an enormous computer screen tracking the exploits of young metahumans).

The appeal of isolating these characters from their traditional mentors and keeping them firmly in their own section line makes some amount of sense from a publishing standpoint, especially in light of the compressed 5 year history of the New 52. How would any of the big heroes have had time to meet their wards and train them if they’re still relative novices themselves? From the perspective of a reader, or particularly a longtime fan, it’s baffling, and it forces the issue to get bogged down establishing the characters rather than moving forward into a bright new era.

The best served in this retooling is likely Kid Flash, mostly because his introduction takes place via action rather than exposition. His dialogue–like nearly all of the Scott Lobdell-penned dialogue in the issue–is clunky, but the scene is fun and starts the issue off on a good note. You can’t say the same for Wonder Girl and Red Robin, whose appearances feel lifeless. Red Robin in particular is burdened with so much exposition that not a single line he says reads as natural, which is a bit of a problem given that he is the most heavily featured character in the book.

This is a bad issue, but in comparison to many of the other books in the “Young Justice” arm of the New 52 it could almost be seen as successful. The art is clean, the events are easily enough to follow, and it tees up an interesting plot. If the remainder of the series hadn’t declined in quality, this could have been a mildly entertaining book.

Final Verdict: 4.8 – Well, it could’ve been worse.


//TAGS | Not So New 52

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