Young Justice: Why the Justice League Left Happy Harbour

[espanolbot]

With the Young Justice/Teen Titans crossover on the horizon, Link Text, I thought that we could have a brief look at the tie-in book, which really didn't get enough props when it was being published, frankly.

The story starts just after the third episode, with M'Gann and Superboy (he hadn't adopted the Conner name at this point) are exploring Mount Justice having just moved into the former JLA HQ built within.



Left alone for the first time since his rescue from CADMUS Labs, Superboy thinks that he can her laughter and someone running around the facility. He follows the noise, finding a panicking teenager within. The distinctly 90s looking kid tells Superboy that he's not supposed to be there, right before vanishing as soon as Superboy turns his head to look for the source of the laughter.






Hey, it's Brent Spiner's Joker! Who due to the show's shortened run only appeared in the cartoon all of once (though his impact is felt offscreen in YJ: Invasion, but I'll get to that later...).

Next issue, Superboy is drifting in and out of consciousness as he and the kid, Snapper Carr, are bound in duct tape as the Joker readies a trap for the League. The League, oddly enough, aren't at all suspicious of the sudden giant present in the middle of their base...


Unfortunately Batman isn't able to stop Barry, and soon everyone is knee-deep in green Joker monkeys.


Barry grabs the canisters strapped to the monkeys and tries to get them outside, only to quickly get knocked out by the gas leaking from them. After making sure that the Flash is fine, J'onn tries to read the Joker's mind to try and find what he's going to do... which turns out to be a mistake, as what he sees manages to stun him. The Joker then just shoots him and Hawkman with a laser weapon he happened to have stashed somewhere.

Annoyed even more than he usually was at the beginning of season one, Superboy tries to jump the Joker, only for this to happen.



The monkeys start exploding, with the force of one of the blasts throwing Superboy across the room into one of the zeta-beam teleporters. He then realises something, as soon as he got close to it, it identified him, yet when the rest of the Leaguers appeared nothing happened.

Working on a hunch, Superboy ducks out into the melee, grabs Aquaman (apologising while he does so) and bungs him at the machine... which remains silent. Realising that nothing he's seen or felt is real (hence why the Joker was able to subdue him), Superboy punches the ground, disrupting the illusion.


The creature is a G-Gnome, a telepathic create that CADMUS created to mindcontrol folk, including Superboy. His presence here isn't particularly welcomed, especially considering it was making Superboy imagine he was being beaten up.


Later, Red Tornado returns to take the G-Gnome back to CADMUS, explaining that it must have escaped during the reconstruction efforts following the events of the opening episodes. Having been with Superboy for the entirety of his life, the creature had felt a connection with him and sought him out because it was lonely. Said connection was so strong that it made the illusions Superboy was feeling seem real, because that was what the G-Gnome was DESIGNED to do.

With the acknowledgement that people actually might like his company, Superboy uses this as a reason to start being more social towards his housemate M'gann, as previously he'd just walk off while she was in the middle of a sentence. Yay!

--

Context within the show: The attack on Mount Justice was what lead to the JLA moving to the Hall of Justice in Washington DC, in addition to the construction of the much more secure Justice League Satellite. Snapper Carr continued to have a close relationship with the team, as in the years that followed he ended up a teacher in the school that Conner and M'Gann would later attend, in addition to tutoring Beast Boy once he entered the frame (his appearance and powers made regular schooling an issue). His being tricked by the Joker into revealing the JLA's hideout was actually taken from the comics themselves though.


I said previously that the Joker in this show had an impact beyond his appearance in the episode Revelation, where he was a member of the Injustice League, a group formed on the sly by the Big Bads the Light as means of drawing attention away from itself (the Team knew that there was an organised group of supervillains out there, the Light intended that they would think that the IL was that group). The impact?

Well, in the five year gap that happened in between Young Justice and Young Justice: Invasion, the Joker managed to do something that only one other animated version of the Joker had done: Kill Jason Todd.


Interestingly, the YJ version of the Joker is probably the most openly murderous out of the television incarnations thus far, what with him attempting to stab the Martian Manhunter to death in his guest issue and his outright gassing people to death in the show itself. In his DCAU appearances, people often quote the fact that the creators there couldn't actually have the Joker openly murder people, though this is sometimes misconstrued as Hamill!Joker not killing anyone at all, when really he was just as murderous as some modern versions in the comics.


Nostalgia goggles, I guess. Oh, and as for my opinon of Teen Titans Go... Although there are occasional funny moments, original flavour Raven sums up my opinion pretty well.

Comments

[icon_uk]

Hamill's Joker wasn't allowed to kill people in BTAS, but as TNBSA was on a different network, it was allowed, and the screenshot is from a TNBSA episode (Mad Love?)

Brent Spiner's Joker is under-rated IMHO, and it actually plays to the show's strength that whilst he's shown to be a vicious psychopath, he's not quite a "top tier" villain on the global stage.

He's not one of the Light, who ARE a global criminal elite and are all about control and power. To them he's a distraction they can use, a credible threat to be sure, but a flashy high profile sacrifice they can and WILL throw under the bus if it's convenient to them.

(DC sort of tried to do the same with the Villains United thing before Infinite Crisis, the Joker was pissed that no one had invited him to join, especially when he found out that they hadn't because no one wanted him to be in the gang, he was too wild and unpredictable)

[lucean]

I don't agree with this actually, as the show did use him as a top tier villain in his one appearance and reading that he was not due to not being in the Light is casting aside a lot of villains in DCU.

Besides, the Joker wouldn't have fitted in at all with the Light, as they were ultimately driven by a motivation that would have probably seen hilarious to Joker.

[espanolbot]

According to Greg Weisman, the Joker didn't know that he was being used as a pawn by the Light and that if he did he would have actively opposed them. What with him being more of an id-driven "because I feel like it" kind of villain than a social Darwinist fascist like the Light were.

[lucean]

I didn't mean to implicate that he wasn't used as a pawn by the Light, he was, just that it didn't reduce his status as one of the villains in that world.

Actually those statements are interesting in the sense that if there had not been a ban on using the Bat-villains, I wonder what kind of a role Joker would have played further in the storyline as they did show an interest in continuing to use the big villains in the story. A little bit too much at times for my taste, as using them as fodder for the Young Justice felt a bit beneath them at times.

Especially the usage of Bane was just horrific.

[icon_uk]

I wasn't aware of any a ban on using Batman villains udring YJ. Apart from the Joker, we have Hugo Strange and The Riddler as recurring characters, and ivy in this story.

[espanolbot]

Mr Freeze is a reoccuring character too, and Ra's al Ghul was a main villain as one of the core Light members. There was an embargo back in JLU, hence why the Joker and the like didn't appear after they expanded the League's members to include people outside of the original seven. Though that was because the Batman cartoon was on at the time, and they didn't want to confuse kids or something.

[lego_joker]

Ah, good times, good times.

In recent years, I've actually began to embrace the Bat-Embargo as something with virtually no downsides. Fans of obscure DC villains got to see their favorites get time in the spotlight, while we avoided the obvious logical issues with the Legion of Doom hiring the delightful, but unreliable and not particularly powerful Batman villains (after all, why go with the Scarecrow when you can get Doctor Destiny?).

[lucean]

It seems my memory failed me, because I for some reason remembered the embargo was still on during YJ, although now thinking about it it probably wasn't.

Still, I would argue that the reason they didn't use the Joker in the Light was more due to the fact that he simply would not have fitted there at all rather than them viewing him as a lesser villain.

[lego_joker]

Now *that* would've been awesome. The Joker as a third party, fighting The Light independently or in collaboration with the JLA (whether they want him to or not)? I'd buy that for a dollar.

[icon_uk]

I'd say there's a difference between "top tier" and "high profile".

The Joker is definitely the latter (and the Light make FULL use of that to keep everyone too buy to notice the apparently tiny little theft of the Starro sample), but he dudn't strike me as being top tier in the story, and I think I prefer it that way.

Batman offers supreme focus and brilliant forensic analysis to the League, I don't think the Joker has an equivlaent skill set which would make him THAT desirable to the bad guys side....

[lego_joker]

I also disagree; I think that Spiner's performance on YJ was terrible and the writing was a half-assed attempt to cash in on Heath Ledger, but that apart...

I *did* appreciate how he's part of The Light's decoy team, but even *that* was a little too top tier to make any sense. Why would people like Count Vertigo or Poison Ivy (who famously hates him for how he treats Harley) be any more inclined to team up with him than Luthor or Ra's?

For that matter, why would any of them *need* him? Everything he can do, Ivy can do better. Note that during the big fight scene at the end, everyone else is pulling out one superpower after another while all he has... are these itty-bitty knives, which would threaten Robin and no-one else. None of Dick's teammates could spare *two seconds* to take the guy out with a little love-tap?

[lucean]

They actually did establish that in the story, they needed someone who could control multiple plants and events at the same time, with Joker filling that role.

As for what threat he posed, he is the top Batman villain and thus he poses a threat to everyone. Popularity is power after all.

[lego_joker]

they needed someone who could control multiple plants and events at the same time

Isn't this something that literally *every other incarnation* of Poison Ivy can do by herself? Jeez, Pam really got burned if YJ had to cut her abilities in half so Joker could be marginally useful.

Popularity is power after all.

Don't remind me. -_-

[espanolbot]

Eh, when it comes to the Joker being super high profile, I like to say that he has to be THAT GOOD in order to keep Batman on the backfoot constantly. Like, Batman is a dude who has dedicated his life to stopping criminals, having him just steamroll them all through shear physical force would be both too easy and not very good storytelling.

He needs someone to challenge him in order for the story to be interesting. Hence why Riddler and Joker stories are often more interesting than the ones where he deals with regular gangsters or folks like the Penguin.

[lucean]

Oh, I agree completely. My point was rather that if we rank Batman among the greatest heroes within DCU, then it leads to certain implicit assumptions concerning his greatest villains.

And I do not consider Joker a primarily physical villain, on that note I always hate what they do with Bane in larger crossovers by having him suddenly lose all the mentality that makes him a worthy foe. But Joker is a brilliant foe and if Lex Luthor belongs among the greatest foes of Earth, then so should the Joker.

[lego_joker]

I disagree, actually. In the real world, experienced cops are stymied all the time by rookie criminals with fewer abilities/resources, even repeat offenders. Mere circumstance and unreliable witnesses can take the simplest crime and turn it into a tangled web that even Sherlock Holmes couldn't solve.

Besides, I've always figured that it was the Joker's sheer *cruelty* and pettiness that cemented him in Batman's mind, not precisely his competence (which in any case is probably outstripped by Ra's and Bane).

[lonewolf23k]

Thing is, if you're accepting ahead of time that the Joker is unpredictable and uncontrollable, before even beginning to recruit him, then you can plan around that. Since it was just a decoy team, Joker's uncontrollable nature only worked in the Light's favor, since they could just unleash him and let the League worry about stopping him while they were busy elsewhere.

And ultimately, that's what the Joker is good for: his unpredictable nature. You can't recruit the Joker and expect him to just follow orders and do what you want. It's not what he does. What he does, is be the Wild Card. He does what nobody expects. And if YOU don't know what he's going to do next, that just means the Justice League won't see it coming either.

Worst case scenario, you end up having to kill the Joker yourself.

[icon_uk]

Vertigo and Ivy might well have been either A) Paid by the Light to deal with him or B) Wanted the high profile work and took dealing with the Joker as the price to be paid (Also, the Joker's rather fragmented mind is perhaps better suited to dealing with the tech required to control multiple targets in multiple locations than Ivy)

Your comment about Ivy and the Joker pre-supposes that the Joker/Harley/Ivy dynamic is anything like the BTAS one, when we have no clue about that at all because we never see Harley Quinn in YJ at all. (We see a partygoer wearing a classic Harley outfit in the Halloween episode, but as Harley's costume is ususally a Halloween coatume she steals, that's sort of a circular reference rather than proof there IS a Harley (yet)).

I liked that Spiner's Joker was less ubermurdergod than a killer, a maleovlent bastard but a mortal one, an insane gangster with some nifty gadgets and a mean streak a mile wild. He'd use the little knives because it would be very personal when he hurts people with them.

I'd also add that the other kids can't take a time out to help Dick because they are busy fighting for their lives against the superpowered Vertigo, Wotan and Ivy, etc...

[lego_joker]

I liked that Spiner's Joker was less ubermurdergod than a killer, a maleovlent bastard but a mortal one, an insane gangster with some nifty gadgets and a mean streak a mile wild.

I like that too, at least in theory. The writers tried to meet us halfway, I'll give them that. Now if they'll only meet us the other half and stop making the Joker team up with other supervillains...

Still, at least it's not the DCAU where he randomly tracks down kryptonite before Lex friggin' Luthor can or somehow commandeers a team of superpowered sociopaths without *any* of them plastering him against the wall...

(Also, you'd think that "dancing circles around crazy people with knives" would be something that Bruce would cover in Robin's training sessions in the FIRST week. Hell, normal police get courses on that.)

Y'know what, screw it - my headcanon is now that Joker stumbled onto The Light's headquarters/plan by accident, parked himself there, and refused to leave until they at least gave him an honorary position.

[espanolbot]

The thing is, former gangster the DCAU might have been, he was also super smart (he was able to reverse engineer stolen CADMUS tech and redesign it for his own purposes) and capable of keeping pace with Batman, who is effectively THE milestone when it came to borderline human individuals. He had to be more than just a thug with a smile and a gun for him to last as long as he did.

And as for him commandeering Lex's team that one time... well the Joker's always been bizarrely charismatic. That's why he as an international street gang dedicated to his memory forty some years in the future and Batman has one kid who stumbled upon the role seemingly by accident.

[lego_joker]

I wasn't even thinking of Lex's team - I was talking about the Royal Flush Gang. Sure, Ace might've been broken enough to go with him without much persuasion, but the other four seem perfectly well-adjusted (if sociopathic) and I see no reason *they'd* jump at his orders.

I don't think the Jokerz are much proof of anything besides how *notorious* the Joker is, not how charismatic. They only popped up after he was *dead*, and the only gang that actually took orders from him hated it.

Even Jack the Ripper has fanclubs in real life, and I don't think anyone would call him charismatic.

[minervasolo]

In the original YJ, didn't the league leave the cave because it was haunted? Or psychic? Though I don't think that was a YJ issue so much as a silver age Justice League issue, possibly. It's a shame about the PAD ban, because it would be fun to compare with YJ with the original.

[long_silence]

Fun or infuriating? Members of PAD's YJ got shafted while characters like Dick Grayson and Wally West ate up screen time in the first season in yet another animated series. Members of PAD's version of the team who actually got significant screen time like Kon and Bart were almost unrecognizable from their comic counterparts (the majority of Bart's arc revolving around his friendship with Blue Beetle, Kon being broody and angsty)

Young Justice was a good series for what it was, standalone from the comic it was named after. But I will ALWAYS be bitter that this was Tim and Cassie and Cissie and Anita and Secret's chance to star in a cartoon series about my favorite team and era for them and they got jipped and had to play 3rd fiddle to a bunch of Teen Titans

[minervasolo]

At the end of the day, it had been years (a decade?) since the YJ comic ended, and there was no way it was going to be resurrected for an animated show when half the characters were in limbo and the other half had been significantly rebooted within the comics. Especially with DC gearing up for another reboot - can you imagine a YJ cartoon introducing the DCnU versions of the characters?

I had low expectations for the show, knowing it was basically a Teen Titans reboot (where they couldn't use the TT name) and being worried about the characterisation, but the massively positive response meant that when it popped up on Netflix I was interested enough to check it out. The complex, series-length plotting was well thought out, the new takes on old characters (like the Red Arrow / Arsenal thing) were fun and the new characters were great additions I wish had made it over to the comics. Jumping forward in s2 to introduce the actual YJ characters was a nice nod to the fans of the original comic without overloading the canon they were building for the show.

In terms of the characterisation of the original YJ team, half the problems came from the contemporary comics versions, especially Kon's broodiness and the Tim/Cassie 'ship (though the show made it work better than the TT comics did). At least Bart's characterisation was much closer to Impulse than he was as Kid Flash, where he basically had no personality beyond occasional comic relief (the simplification of the Bart/Tim/Kon friendship to Tim/Kon massively frustrated me because it was all about Superman/Batman and nothing about the previous characterisation of the actual characters involved).

For me, the YJ show had more in common with the YJ comic than Teen Titans had had for years, and I really appreciated it for that. The plotting was better than the TT comics, the relationships more thoroughly explored, the characterisation deeper. And then it got cancelled because girls liked it. Damn my gender! ::shakes fist at sky::

[bradygirl_12]

J'onn tries to read the Joker's mind to try and find what he's going to do... which turns out to be a mistake, as what he sees manages to stun him.

I hope poor J'onn was able to recover after seeing what was in the Joker's mind!

[lbd_nytetrayn]

First ten images aren't loading for me. =(