Yeah, this story scared me to black blazes when I was a kid, does nothing to me now!
Strange as it sounds, this is probably a highlight for Cynthia's characterization. Feeling like an outcast herself, even in a "team of misfits," she's bonded with Junior, the only being of its kind on Earth. Like a child with a teddy bear. And that bond is so deep that even when her teammates start to reach the obvious conclusion about Vixen's condition, she'll run away from home to protect her new friend. It's immature as heck, but that's who she is-- she ran away from home to join the League, it makes total sense that she'd start treating this as her go-to move.
It's maybe the one thing her powers make her good at doing. And that does kinda call into question the whole idea behind this League, which is "Sure, they're not the NAME-BRAND superheroes you grew up with, but these young upstarts can still prove they DESERVE to be called 'Justice Leaguers,' goshdarnit!"
Of the four newbies that make up the core team here, that description only really applied to Vixen, mostly. She did have a more low-key version of Wolverine's "how can I be a team player when I'm just a WILD ANIMAL ARRRRR" going on. But she showed herself to be at least as competent as Zatanna and probably more so than Ralph.
Vibe and Steel, though, were two hotheads so desperate to prove themselves worthy that they often verged on proving the opposite. They maybe could've grown into respectable heroes in time, but they were being thrown into this high-profile gig way too early. And Cyn was a freakin' kid and pathological liar whose powers mostly consisted of hiding and running away, like a version of the Invisible Woman who really leaned into that pre-force-field helplessness. The ability to project illusions for a few seconds didn't balance those scales.
From a Doylist perspective, she was probably a League member in hopes of injecting the team with some "Kitty Pryde energy." Kitty was another character who acted like a teenager, which is to say sometimes mature and sometimes like a dumb kid, placed in a group of adults. And the X-Men were, uh, kind of popular.
The differences, from a Watsonian perspective, are that the X-Men had a boarding school and that anti-mutant hysteria was so rampant that Kitty might've actually been safer fighting the White Queen next to Storm than living with her parents and hoping the Sentinels didn't show up. Cyn was under no such existential threat, and this JLA had no resources to protect or educate a teen. They had a building in Detroit, and then, in a slight step up, they had a cave with a B-movie monster in it.
One of the responsible adults on the team should've escorted her off the premises the moment it became clear she was mentally closer to eight years old than twenty, and it's one of life's little ironies that she ended up surviving this period when Vibe and Steel didn't.
(Batman starts leading the team next issue. That was a year or two before Jason Todd died. If it'd come after, he'd probably have placed a call to Social Services the afternoon he signed on. Or, if we caught him on one of his mellow days, he'd've had a long talk with her about the prospect of going back to her parents--who, when we do finally meet them at the series' end, don't really seem that bad. You'd think she'd have some unspeakably tragic family backstory driving her into the super-powered lyffe, but no, she was just a dumb kid being kind of dumb about things. Which, in its way, is kind of great.)
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Strange as it sounds, this is probably a highlight for Cynthia's characterization. Feeling like an outcast herself, even in a "team of misfits," she's bonded with Junior, the only being of its kind on Earth. Like a child with a teddy bear. And that bond is so deep that even when her teammates start to reach the obvious conclusion about Vixen's condition, she'll run away from home to protect her new friend. It's immature as heck, but that's who she is-- she ran away from home to join the League, it makes total sense that she'd start treating this as her go-to move.
It's maybe the one thing her powers make her good at doing. And that does kinda call into question the whole idea behind this League, which is "Sure, they're not the NAME-BRAND superheroes you grew up with, but these young upstarts can still prove they DESERVE to be called 'Justice Leaguers,' goshdarnit!"
Of the four newbies that make up the core team here, that description only really applied to Vixen, mostly. She did have a more low-key version of Wolverine's "how can I be a team player when I'm just a WILD ANIMAL ARRRRR" going on. But she showed herself to be at least as competent as Zatanna and probably more so than Ralph.
Vibe and Steel, though, were two hotheads so desperate to prove themselves worthy that they often verged on proving the opposite. They maybe could've grown into respectable heroes in time, but they were being thrown into this high-profile gig way too early. And Cyn was a freakin' kid and pathological liar whose powers mostly consisted of hiding and running away, like a version of the Invisible Woman who really leaned into that pre-force-field helplessness. The ability to project illusions for a few seconds didn't balance those scales.
From a Doylist perspective, she was probably a League member in hopes of injecting the team with some "Kitty Pryde energy." Kitty was another character who acted like a teenager, which is to say sometimes mature and sometimes like a dumb kid, placed in a group of adults. And the X-Men were, uh, kind of popular.
The differences, from a Watsonian perspective, are that the X-Men had a boarding school and that anti-mutant hysteria was so rampant that Kitty might've actually been safer fighting the White Queen next to Storm than living with her parents and hoping the Sentinels didn't show up. Cyn was under no such existential threat, and this JLA had no resources to protect or educate a teen. They had a building in Detroit, and then, in a slight step up, they had a cave with a B-movie monster in it.
One of the responsible adults on the team should've escorted her off the premises the moment it became clear she was mentally closer to eight years old than twenty, and it's one of life's little ironies that she ended up surviving this period when Vibe and Steel didn't.
(Batman starts leading the team next issue. That was a year or two before Jason Todd died. If it'd come after, he'd probably have placed a call to Social Services the afternoon he signed on. Or, if we caught him on one of his mellow days, he'd've had a long talk with her about the prospect of going back to her parents--who, when we do finally meet them at the series' end, don't really seem that bad. You'd think she'd have some unspeakably tragic family backstory driving her into the super-powered lyffe, but no, she was just a dumb kid being kind of dumb about things. Which, in its way, is kind of great.)