Author: Mark Waid
Publisher: DC
My take: For an origin story, it moves along fairly quickly and doesn’t get to bogged down in description.
Spoiler-free synopsis: The Flash – Wally West – is sought by a time-travelling relative asking him to save the life of Barry Allen (Another Flash)’s grandson.
Title: JLA: World without Grownups
Author: Todd Dezago
Publisher: DC
My take: Entertaining, but occasionally more ludicrous than my suspension of disbelief
Spoiler-free synopsis: What if all the adults woke up to find their kids gone? What if the kids woke to a world without adults? Superboy, Robin and Impulse have to figure out how to stop whoever’s banished those 17 and older.
Title: Young Justice: A League of Their Own
Author: Peter David and D. Curtis Johnson
Publisher: DC
My take: Has some great character moments, but suffers from the problem many team books do, in turning the characters into exaggerations of themselves.
Spoiler-free synopsis: The foundation of the Young Justice team.
Impulse
The book actually opens with some issues of Flash. We get a brief introduction to Wally west, the Flash in this timespan, and his girlfriend Linda. She’s dealing with death threats, he’s busy being a hero (and I always find the couples where the non-superpowered member knows about the super powers. ‘Course, he doesn’t seem to be too secret about it in general
(Also? I love Linda. A lot.)
But the tranquility of dealing with a death threat is broken when an ancestor from the… future… I hate time travel things… anyhow, Iris, wife of Flash Barry Allen, appears. There’s a lot of time travely stuff, but the gist is, she was in the current time looking for her grandson Bart, who’d spent his whole life in a VR simulation, whose metabolism never slows down and who is currently speeding around the Earth at incredible speed inadvertently running his body into an early grave.
They need Wally to help. And of course he does. Because otherwise Bart’d just overage and die, and there would be nothing more. So, he connects with the kid, saves him, and then… doesn’t know what to do with him. Wally seems sort of at a loss as to how to deal with a kid, especially one as hyperactive as Bart. You think you know hyperactive or are hyperactive? Nothing compared to this.
Really, once of the strengths of most Impulse stuff so far is people not forgetting how like thought Bart puts into things, how quick he acts on any little thing that happens. Wally actually calls it the “single-synapse theory” – from thought to deed in the firing of a single synapse.
So, Wally hands Bart off to Max Mercury for training both in his powers and in acting like a normal human. And the interactions between Max and Bart are… interesting.
Max always does make a point to point out when Bart at least *tries* to think. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day…
So, there’s a few stories of Bart learning to use his powers and fight crime at the same time. It’s a great little character book, with very little actual action. It tries to get a bit serious with a child abuse storyline, which was pretty well telegraphed, so I don’t feel that bad about putting the climax here. Not because of anything outstandingly awesome here, but because…
…I cannot stop wondering what happened to this woman’s butt.
The book’s fairly entertaining if you’re interested in Flash or Impulse in general. There’s a lot of great moments – moments between characters, moments where Impulse’s actions or thoughts are shown in unusual ways, and some really interesting small-scale ideas. Not a stellar book, but a great addition to Impulse lore.
JLA
I bought this book because I like both Superboy and Impulse and have no real negative thoughts about Robin, so this figured to be really interesting. However, as usual with well-planned group books, it was less about any of the characters and more about their interactions.
The first of the stories involves the three of them meeting up more or less by accident at the scene of an... accident. At first the authorities are hostile, but eventually they let the young superheroes go do what they can. A gaseous creature has escaped from them, and they need to get it back.
Eventually, through the powers of
After that story ends, it goes into the meat of the book. A kid’s apparently-mostly-absent father shows up late to his birthday party with a strange present – a weirdly glowing purple vial thing. (What his son was meant to DO with this, I’m not sure). So, the vial breaks and a powerful entity (not the same one as in the last story) is released. It gives the kid unimaginable power, and he uses it to – you guessed it – get rid of all the adults.
So, the adults wake up and, after initially being annoyed and thinking the kids are hiding or some such in many cases, figure out that something’s seriously wrong. The Justice League gathers but are at a loss as to what to do. Meanwhile, on the other side, kids are finding their parents are gone and, after a few moments to get over the shock, they start to do the most dangerous possible things they can think of. Driving cars. Playing with fire. Letting the animals out of the zoo. FLYING A FREAKING JET!
Robin, Superboy and Impulse meet up and decide to try to get to the bottom of things. Mostly they get along, thought there are times things get a hair tense.
While in the Batcave, they catch a TV transmission from Billy Batson, AKA Captain Marvel. They go to see him and Robin wants to know why he won’t say the magic word and become his alter ego. I have to admit, I feel really bad for Billy. Robin pretty much dismisses his concerns, but I think they’re legitimate ones:
So after being unable to get Billy to possibly commit suicide, the three leave. Having been shamed thus, Billy says the magic word… only to not turn into Captain Marvel and to wind up in outer space where he can see two Earths. He eventually gets to the Earth with adults and explains what he saw and how the other world is.
Meanwhile, our three heroes think they’ve found the source of the disturbance. As they try to enter, they each find themselves trapped by a vision of their worst fears. Impulse is facing Grodd, Superboy’s facing down a Metallo made entirely of Kryptonite and Robin’s in prison with the Joker, playing on his insecurities. All looks lost until Robin figures out the basic ploy used by every superhero group in a situation like this.
Switch partners!
So, Robin takes down Metallo, Superboy punches out Grodd, and then they both rush back to help Impulse, stuck opposite the Joker, but it turns out:
But as thoughtless as he seems there, Impulse does have a moment where he finally gets it impressed on him what carrying the legacy of the Flash really means, when the group retreats to the old JLA headquarters to regroup.
So, the heroes make another assault on the bad guys. And this time, instead of pulling scenarios from their own heads to trap them in, the kid and his evil demon counterpart peek into each one’s head to see how he’d take out the others. – Robin would use a kryptonite robot on Superboy (yay imagination O.o) Superboy would prevent Impulse from moving at all and Impulse would send… ninjas? Ninjas. Ninjas against Robin.
But this actually turns out to be a great move. It’s never addressed if that’s intentional by Impulse or just a happy accident, but the ninjas cloud Robin’s thoughts as they beat on him. Robin’s able to clear his mind and get Superboy to do the same. Unfortunately, getting Impulse’s mind to stop is about as unlikely as getting him to stop with anything else. So the constructs of his mind commence pummeling his friends until he hits upon a possible solution, honed on years of video games – “Reset!”
Ahahaha, it worked, it actually worked! So, they find the cause of the two worlds, and they come together, and in the end the idea of those three perhaps starting off on their own is given… if not approval, at least a partial nod by their guardians, paving the way for Young Justice.
There wasn’t a lot *to* this book, but it was entertaining enough for what it was. I sort of think the JLU episode where the main characters become kids might have been based on this storyline in some manner.
Young Justice
This book starts out with nightmares. Superboy imagines getting glowing wings because of his “holier than thou” attitude. Impulse having everything changing so fast he loses his sense o self and Robin… well, Robin….
This involved him having a hand replaced with a baterang and having Batman ask if he’s going to grow a beard. Commentary on other authors’ treatment much?
The boys go to the site of an archaeological dig, where something unusual has been found. The boys try to talk to the people in charge at the site. Well, two of them do. Impulse… he runs down and sticks his head inside what they found. What comes out is… is…
Well, if the world has to have overly-well-endowed women running around, I want mor of them to be introduced like this:
Sorry. I know it’s terrible of me but I just can’t help it.
So, she gets captured, and this clears the way for them to find a really cool, really smart bike. After going on a wild ride, they end up facing down the pike’s original owner, culminating in Robin and the guy both calling out to the bike like it’s some sort of pet, trying to get it to come to them (Guess who it chooses)
The second brief story centers around MXYZPTLK crashing a Halloween party. As a story, it’s sort of cute but not that engaging. It’s mostly good for character moments – serious ones for Red Tornado, and for others…
That’s really all I have to say about that.
It then goes into an arc called “Harms Way,” which starts with a really intense scene of Arrowette, bleeding from an arrow in her shoulder and trying to fight off a smug, superior-sounding bad guy. She’s rescued by the bike. With no one driving it. And in the aftermath of the attack, the group also adds Wonder Girl and Secret (the gaseous creature from the JLA book), mostly because a lot of them are being attacked by Harm. And with Harm attacking people, what do they do?
They go attack the research facility Secret escaped from to free others like her. This mostly goes well, though there is a little bit where the group is attacked by what looks like members of the JLA. I absolutely love the silhouette in the third frame here.
So they accomplish what they went there for, and back to the Harm problem. Superboy, for instance, is working very hard on learning to catch arrows, something Harm did in his first fight with Arrowette. It doesn’t work out so well. For him, at least.
So, they go fight Harm at a cathedral. It’s a pretty straightforward fight scene, good but nothing terribly groundbreaking. The really good part is the end – both in how they win (or feel they don’t win) and in what happens afterward.
Yikes. Yeah, that’s his dad. Guess no recurring status for him.
So the last chapter, I don’t have any scans from because I sort of got tired of trying to find really stand-out parts, but if you like Young Justice, it’s the chapter where they’re essentially earning their license from the JLA to operate as an independent entity, and includes a cat fight and some faces ending up in cake. Spectacular.
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