#Dark Crisis Young Justice | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

avayarising · 3 months ago

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I understand now why I didn’t enjoy this storyline very much. I could tell that the message was ‘you can’t go back to the past’ and it felt obvious to me that this message was not one that the characters particularly needed to hear so it all felt very much like an excuse for getting them out of the way. It didn’t occur to me that it might be a message for the readers.

I think I missed that because of the very achronological way I’m reading comics. Maybe it was more of an issue for the characters at that time.

But it makes me feel better about Cassie saying ‘I can’t believe you thought that was me!’ (which I felt was rather unfair because they very much didn’t – although if I recall rightly Tim in particular was thinking mind control rather than entire construct), if I consider it as something she’s actually saying to the audience rather than the other characters.

But I still feel they are hard done by. Even if it does tie in thematically, and even if it is an argument that needs to be made, it still very much feels like artificially getting them out of the way, either because they’d screw up the story the writers wanted to tell about the other characters or because they aren’t important and so just need to be given some filler plot. I would have felt better if getting Tim and Kon and Bart out of the way so they couldn’t interfere had actually been someone’s motivation in the story, because that would show that at least they were actually important enough to do something about.

Dark Crisis: Young Justice

I think my first, most top-level thought about this as a title is that the expectations you bring to this title have a large impact on the narrative you get out of it.

If you're picking it up for the words 'Young Justice' in the title, thinking you're going to get a fun romp of a story, you are necessarily going to be disappointed (and indeed that has happened to many people who've read this).

If however you look at it in context of the words 'Dark Crisis', as a tie-in mini to an event heavily involving themes of trapping people in dreamscape universes arising out of their subconscious, and the narrative of 'who grows up to step into the shoes of the Justice League'...? Then yeah. The story contains a lot of very relevant commentary on that.

I can see what the original pitch from Fitzmartin was for this story, and it's compelling. I think the pitch, premise and argument she is making are very interesting; I just don’t necessarily agree with all the conclusions and the exact characterisation used to achieve those conclusions.

Because. In the context of an event that has Jon Kent building a new Justice League out of a collection of heroes in his generation who largely are the relatives of the classic Justice League, despite having very little personal experience or time as heroes, and of the Original Titans generation realising that they need to step up and take on leadership of the broader community again, as they go through losing their mentors once more... a title about the inbetween generation, who have been ignored, asking 'well what about us? Why are we overlooked here? Once upon a time, we would have been seen as the future' makes sense.

Mickey offering Kon, Tim and Bart what he sees as the lure of being the hero - of growing up into the role originally seen as their destiny - is a potent one in a broader narrative that has Jon Kent openly stating multiple times that he has to be Superman because his father is not there and to live up to what his father would be doing; where Damian is once again being haunted and positioned as 'the true Son of the Bat, Heir to Batman, Has No Other Future Destiny', and where even Wally is being positioned as feeling junior to and not fully able of filling Barry's shoes. (Wally's inferiority complex is entirely unnecessary, but he is right that Barry is seen as the more 'multiverse proficient of the two of them)

Because. Why is the generation below Young Justice the ones who think they need to try and fill the shoes of the Justice League? Why has the Young Justice generation been replaced but not given the space to grow into new roles, and is the demand they step aside for the younger heroes a fair one? These are discussions to be had about the characters and they're had constantly by the fandom, and I think choosing to tackle it as a topic head on in an event focusing on the issues of legacy and what people desire secretly in their hearts is probably the place to bring it up.

And in that context, some of the choices of story that various characters were given, particularly Kon, make a lot more sense.

Bart gets to be the character who understands what is going on, who twigs to the situation first and how to fix it, because Bart is the character most often underestimated and treated as the afterthought and the comic relief of the three boys in fandom. They're in Bart's area of expertise, and he gets to showcase that as part of his growth and difference.

Tim is conflicted, because Tim has been conflicted ever since Damian was introduced and set up as a rival. But also Tim and Damian have largely made peace with each other, to the point where they're just fondly bickering brothers. And what convinces Tim that the present is better than the past is Bernard, and by analogy being bisexual and being openly allowed to be bisexual; it's an argument that it's better and easier for Tim to accept who he is in this present where he's written in the 2020s and can interrogate his identity, than to be in the 1990s and written by Chuck Dixon.

And Kon...Kon's entire story has always been about how he was created to become Superman, his destiny was to grow up to fill that role - and how it will never happen, for him. He spent years struggling with how that affected his identity and perception of himself, and whether he does have the ability to choose his path. Kon asking ‘isn’t it better here’ (in the past, when he was young and had a clear future trajectory) in an event where Clark is in a dreamworld where he gets to raise Jon (and none of the rest of the family are evident) and Jon’s running around announcing he’s Superman, he needs to live up to what his father would be doing…yeah. That IS potent commentary. Because Jon, a character who probably still is younger than Kon, is Superman. And Kon, who believed he was Superman from the moment of his decanting, is stuck as Superboy. He's been replaced and people don't even remember him.

So Kon being the fall guy who needs to be talked around the hardest in the story makes sense narratively, even if some of his lines don't wholly fit his characterisation, because when this story came out Kon was the character most in a situation where he didn't have connections to the present and a forward trajectory.

(And right now of course Tim and Kon are in the healthier positions, storywise, while Bart is the one careening around without proper characterisation. Swings and roundabouts)

And then we get to Cassie and Cissie.

And while the three boys have got to be their present selves, but pasted back into the setting of nostalgia...Cassie explicitly gets replaced and all of her characterisation wound back in the dreamworld version of her.

Notably, Fantasy Cassie is present for stories she did not appear in, in the very early days of Young Justice. Indeed, Young Justice #3, an issue that contains Mr Mxyzptlk, is officially titled "The Issue Before the One Where the Girls Show Up!". But the Cassie that Mickey chooses to use...is a costume never seen at Happy Harbour. It's a version of her mid-Young Justice costume, from about #20-#49. It's the one from before she's chosen as leader. He doesn't want her 'ugly' early costume, where Cassie's still hiding herself. He doesn't want the leader, the adult that Cassie is in her real aspect, or even the girl who joined the Teen Titans. He wants the idealised 'best' Cassie that everyone carries on about, just one section of her story.

And Cassie herself, in her conversations with Cissie, is having what are largely meta commentary discussions about the way the fandom and the 90s treated female characters, particularly in positioning Cassie as the afterthought of the Core Four.

Like, no doubt, Cissie gets stuck being nominated to be the character getting somewhat villainised to drive the plot forward. But again, part of why Cissie ends up in that role is that she's simply a less important character. Cissie's main trait that even the fans want to argue for her to show is "I don't want to be a hero, I don't want to be here". (See for instance everyone yelling for Cissie to get out of costume and go home in Green Arrow). And that's the thing. Even in her civilian aspect, she has rarely appeared on page, and even in storylines after YJ98 which mentioned her she occasionally never showed up. If Cissie and Cassie are really supposed to be best friends, where has Cissie been? It's worth poking at.

Cassie is arguing for her growth, and her complex history, and her leadership. She's also arguing to be allowed to have the narrative space to have her friends, both male and female, depicted as important to her.

All that said: I don't think the story manages to fully deliver and land the story it's trying to tell. Aspects that let this down as a title and cause drama:

I think part of the issue is the choice to use Mickey Mxyzptlk as the villain, rather than Bedlam. I think the choice of Mickey was taken explicitly for the 5th dimension 'comic story followers' aspect, and also to reflect in Mickey elements of Superboy-Prime and that aspect of Infinite Crisis, given the large effect IC has on this story, without actually making the villain Superboy-Prime and pulling the focus of the story over to what he explicitly had done to Young Justice characters. They clearly wanted to evoke the 'overentitled comic book fan' narrative encapsulated both in the concepts of the Prime universe and the 5th dimension as the villain of the piece to struggle against. The problem is that a lot of fans do not enjoy having that mirror turned so fully upon them, highlighting a view of insider frustrations with their fandom.

If it had been instead Bedlam, who is a world-shaper with a massive immaturity complex, the fundamental shape of the story could have still happened, but would have had the additional veneer of not openly attacking the fandom's idealisation of and nostalgia for Young Justice 1998. More people would have enjoyed the story. However, to make that change the story would have had to drop openly wrestling with the topic of fans demanding versions of characters that eliminate their intervening growth. It would still have underlaid the plot and gone down smoother, but also would have largely been overlooked and ignored by the fans the message was trying to talk to.

Would a spoon full of sugar have been a better narrative choice than what amounted to a take that? I think there are arguments either way, and many of the fans the message was targeted at have responded to it in any case by rejecting and ignoring it.

In addition, both Megan Fitzmartin and Laura Braga are less across the exact details of the characters and Young Justice 1998 than they really needed to be, which leads to a handful of art and plot screw ups that I feel let people dismiss the story. "Look they depicted Empress as a villain! They don't know what they're talking about!" and so on. Fitzmartin tends to write in ways where I can tell she's read things, but equally it was a while since she last read them (it's part of why her characterisation work often feels a little skewed to the fan versions of characters that she remembers or has developed in her head rather than following on from a recent writer/appearance). Just general editorial cleaning up of mistakes like this would have helped because I see a lot of people arguing that these silly mistakes are reasons the story is bad and they don't like it, when clearly they're actually discomforted by the plot itself.

Overall however, I think that Fitzmartin manages to successfully make the points she clearly wanted to make. The problem is that the fandom very much did not want to hear some of those points, and so rejected the story. People don't like to hear ‘you have to let go of what you idealise, not all change is bad and we exist in a universe where things have changed and throwing a tantrum about it doesn’t achieve what you want’, especially if they came in hoping to see their favourite characters having an adventure, and instead received a deconstruction of their favourite title.

I don't so much think I enjoyed it as a story, as it was quite heavy handed in places, but I do respect the analysis and commentary of the run, particularly in how it presented a coherent reason for why the Young Justice generation were so completely overlooked and excluded from discussions of who is a legacy and who steps forward happening in the main storyline of Dark Crisis.

I don't agree with all the conclusions, but I was interested in watching the argument.

#dc comics #dark crisis #young justice #dark crisis young justice

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