#Dark Crisis Young Justice

[batcavescolony]

I feel like comic writers and some fans have forgotten that Young Justice is mostly about the girls. The main storylines were about Secret/Greta, Cissie, and Anita. The boys were there but they had their own runs. Take Young Justice Dark Crisis, yeah it's all about the boys IF you only read the first 5 ish comics. After that it's either big comic events or about the girls. Really the girls are the main characters of Young Justice, the boys are there to draw people in.

[hotpinkstaples]

only good thing about dark crisis is that bart looked like a total babe:

while kon lost his scruff and his dignity to become one of those wistful gay twinks that start crying after their first tequila shot:

[ectonurites]

the artist formerly known as Arrowette and her Wonder Girl-friend

[ehliena]

When your 5th dimension imp isn't imp shaped but speaks the truth.

Bart was replaced. I like Ace, but DC making Wally West black and then retconning it to make is seem like Ace was meant to be a new character altogether?

Tim was replaced, but he's still there. New alias and all. Hell even Jason called him the boring one in Task Force Z.

Conner (poor sweet boy) was replaced and forgotten.

[dailytims]

Dark Crisis: Young Justice #3

[two-sibyls-tall]

Cassie was a little unhinged in this story methinks. Honorable mention for Cissie on the last one there.

[jewishcissiekj]

Alright, so Cissie is back.

(Green Arrow (2023) #1 cover art by Sean Izaakse)

I feel like I’m calm enough after the unbelievable burst of excitement and happiness this cover gave me when I first saw it, so let’s talk about this.

First off, I have to say that until I saw this cover last week, I didn’t think Cissie should be Arrowette again, and this cover gave me different ideas and hope for Cissie’s future, so my judgment might seem clouded. 

So first, to any Meghan Fizmartins and co out there listening who have no idea why Cissie quit being Arrowette, here’s a “brief” summary:

After her Counselor and mother figure, Dr. Marcey Money, gets killed by her ex-boyfriend, Cissie (rightfully) throws a fit and blames the lack of gun control in the U.S. as the reason for the murder. After that, she puts on a darker version of her Arowette costume (the same one Sean Izaaksa used for the GA cover), and goes to hunt down Marcey’s killer and his friend that was with him. During the chase, Cissie questions herself how much of a “Good Guy” is she, chasing down these men like that. At the end of the fight, she fires a killing shot from her bow, intending to kill Dr. Money’s murderer, when Superboy comes out of nowhere and catches the arrow. Then, she runs away and cries, confused and distraught. In the next issue she’s in a catatonic state following her actions, and after she gets out of it she breaks her bow and declares it’s not hers anymore. In the next issue she quits Young Justice. She makes it clear she never wants to be Arrowette again in the rest of the series, saying she can’t lose control again and talking about how her mom forced her into the hero life. 

For a much more extended and detailed version I recommend reading Young Justice #15-17, it’s a great story and a great read.

Now, she has donned the Arrowette suit a couple of times after quitting, most, if not all, were pretty weird and out of character. 

Starting off, we have that creepy thing in Spyboy/Young Justice, which I’m not 100% sure is canon at all, but it’s still worth talking about for a bit. In this miniseries, Cissie doesn’t actively choose to be Arrowette again any way, with Kon & Bart stealing her clothes while she’s in the bath and replacing them with the Arrowette costume, basically forcing her to put it on. They did give her a choice as to which costume to wear, the darker version from before or the usual one, and she chose the usual one, but I don’t feel like we should really give them credit for that. After that, she walks around in the costume, but doesn’t shoot a single arrow (she almost does, but she gives up on it) or fight, and is really just Cissie in a costume and less Arrowette. She also talks about how her friends are uncomfortable with the ‘Cissie’ part of her and they don’t know how to react to her with one of the spyboy characters. Overall I don’t hate it, except for the way they actually got her in costume.

Next we have the most confusing one yet. In Wonder Girl (2007) Cissie tells Cassie she could always go back to Arrowette for her (and later on in the miniseries she actually does), Completely disregarding her quitting storyline. That might (probably) be the writer’s mistake, but I’d like to think Cissie was at a point in her life here where she made peace with the whole “Arrowette” thing and with her mother and is just willing tp help an old friend with her slightly unusual skillset. She also previously hadn’t completely associated her archery with Arrowette (she competed in the Australia Summer Games an won a gold medal during ‘98 YJ), so maybe she’s just come to peace with that part of it all now. But since that is never specifically said in the series, I’m only assuming stuff.

Since then, she wasn’t seen as Arrowette or in general for more than 10 years, only showing up again in Young Justice (2019):

There’s no real explanation for her coming back this time other than, again, like last time, she’s made her peace with Arrowette and is only helping an old friend (Conner, this time) dressed in the most generic Archer-superhero outfit that came out of nowhere. She was barely in the series, but her return was handled badly anyway. Unless, of course, you’ll consider my theory from the previous time she came back canon, it’s pretty annoying that Brian Michael-Bendis brought her back, instead of Anita for example (which would’ve made much more sense), even after stating she was retired.

Now we have my least favorite handling of Cissie post-quitting.

Oh, Dark Crisis: Young Justice, the definition of shattered hopes. 

This is complete and utter bullshit. Not only Cissie kept being an archer after quitting and had several storylines in Young Justice (1998) related to her archery outside of Arrowette, Cassie not only knows that, she was literally there for half of it. Cissie is an archer, and that’s a part of her that she pretty much completely separated from her Arrowette persona, and she made that clear in more than a few instances during the original Young Justice run. I hope Joshua Williamson isn’t taking Cissie character lessons from this run, which not only handles Cissie quitting weirdly, but is outright spreading misinformation about Cissie.

Has Meghan Firzmartin even read the original YJ run? I don’t think she did, at least not fully. Cissie quit because of very specific reasons I've previously stated, not this. She also has a good relationship with the rest of Young Justice, and definitely doesn’t see them this way. 

Even though Cissie isn’t Arrowette at any point in this run, it feels much worse than any of my prior examples. Also, she is basically running around as Arrowette there, just without the costume. I hope the new Green Arrow series will ignore DC: YJ, because it’s just bad.

So to sum it up? I’m not completely disappointed Cissie is Arrowette again. I do hope Williamson will actually handle her past and not make her a whole new character for his run. I think a Cissie as Arrowette story can be interesting, if it’s at least implied she felt with her trauma from her quitting incident and made peace with everything the name and the costume mean. However, with all my high hopes, I'm still being realistic and I'm gonna say I don’t think I'll get everything I want in the new series. The series is currently a mini-series of six issues, unfortunately (but preorders might change that and give us more issues! Preorder the first issue!), and it tackles a seemingly large cast of characters with a lot of mysteries and questions around them and their appearance in the book. And with the actual plot being them trying to find/retrieve Ollie from where he was last stuck in in Dark Crisis, I do think there'll be space for good character interactions but not for a lot of individual character exploring. Overall, I think the series will handle Cissie’s return basically how YJ (2019) did, with a mostly unexplained return, but I guess a girl can dream about more.

[elioherondale]

Y'know, it does genuinely suck that you can't criticize the Skyrocket pitch because ppl will accuse you of being transphobic. There are people who have said, on record, that if this change had gone ahead that it would've been the first comic book they would have ever read and that's honestly kind off insulting to Connor's entire history. Like, it got to the point where people were rebutting the genuine criticisms by campaigning people to apologize to Meghan Fitzmartin for writing Dark Crisis: Young Justice.

[roseworth]

ok so WHY does cassie have heat vision here. literally who did this and why

[wonderbutch]

dark crisis young justice is over and cissiecassie still isnt canon. but tim being previously in love with kon IS. a win is a win.

[batcavescolony]

I think I'd respect YJ Dark Crisis more if it got anything right about YJ 98 canon

Happy Harbor was destroyed Young Justice issue #18. In Young Justice #19 they got a new base in an abandoned hotel in the catskills, the base that they were in for the rest of their time in YJ (BEFORE they joined the Teen Titans),

And the kicker?

This base that CISSIE BEEN TO MULTIPLE TIMES!!!!

Cus it didn't matter that she wasnt on the team she was still their friend! So she still hung out with them at their base and helped out sometimes when needed (she helped during the war and got roped into playing baseball and stuff)

[hotpinkstaples]

tbh as much as i wanted bart to beat kon’s ass for his disrespectful behavior in dark crisis, i know in my heart that any REAL fighting between bart and kon woulda put kon on suicide watch afterwards and put bart into a state of nonverbal rage that might’ve actually made him shoot someone forreal forreal by the end of the book. opposite sides of post-fight mental breakdown. kon’s crying in his bathtub with the shower running, and bart’s silently seething and crying and overthinking his place in life while running laps on the equator.

[lafoget]

listen DCYJ was horribly written with tons of factual errors and VERY BAD META (i refuse to take seriously the author who written-out Anita from the main characters and put under the label "villain" and stripped Cissie of her personal story and fully completed arc just to show how David's run was focused only on boys), but at least we got a one sided timkon and maybe an old Cassie's origin, so... a small victory i guess...

[ehliena]

I take it back. This 5th dimension imp ships TimKon.

Or at least that's how I choose to interpret his spiel about them being replaced and shoeing Bernard.

[thebartallenblog]

Today finally ended that massive nonsensical mini series called Dark Crisis Young Justice, don't get me wrong, I'm sure they wanted it to resonate with the story told in the main series, and this mini focused on the characters of Young Justice. However, I just can't understand many of the creative writing decisions from the writer behind this mini-series.

In my opinion, and I repeat only in my personal opinion, it seems that the writer barely read the original material, at least only a small part, that and apart from possibly little research, it is as if she had read it but only understood what she wanted to understand , a fanciful version of the story.

Or even worse, and what I think most possibly happened, the writer, despite knowing at least how all the events happened, simply decided to ignore it and write her own version of the story and the characters, just to fit the metatextual message that she tried to transmit.

Be that as it may, I can't say that I liked this mini at all or that I personally consider it good over everything she tried to transmit, (besides, it hardly seems to be related to Dark Crisis, apart from the simple fact that it take place simultaneously). You can't simply write a story, metamessage or not, if you can't even get the previously established facts.

Despite all the negatives, I have to say that I really enjoyed what was related to Bart/Impulse during the mini, a writing deepening into the character, there has been nothing like this for years with Bart, so his character definitely carried the full weight of this series in his back as the best writed character of this parody.

Still, with the story making no sense to some extent (not in universe at least), Bart still falls short as the other characters (although not so much as the others) and questionable interactions (also I really liked the reference to speedsters powers, and how they knew all the mechanics from parallel universes for example), more precisely with Cassie, as it Bart somehow disrespected Cassie in the past, apart from some questionable moment from Teen Titans 2003, with a different writer than Young Justice, this never happened. Similar to this and the most affected character in my opinion was Cissie, who in resume she could be perfectly a different character, both in personality and backstory.

All this aside, I really can't understand how Fitzmartin can have a really good understanding and writing of Bart overall, and actually get the character to some point during this miniseries, but everything else falls apart and is a garbage bucket on fire in the meantime.

Whatever, at least here's my boy Impulse, who's inconsistently drawn and recycled art throughout all the issues as are all the characters, but at least he's good looking in this artstyle, here are my favorite panels of Bart from the final issue:

[dangerdeficit]

i understand and agree with the point megfitz is trying to make with bart but like... constantly restating it does not help. where is the nuance and subtlety in the writing because it's not here