Young Justice Time

Last month the Nerdy Show podcast interviewed the creators of the Young Justice TV show, Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti, on the release of a videogame tied to the show.

That game is set between the TV show’s two seasons, which take place five years apart—one of the striking ways this cartoon used narrative time. In addition, each episode and each sequence have precise stamps of time and place (which Weisman and Vietti said proved to be a real headache), and the companion comic book had to fit into the same timeline.

In the interview Weisman explained how showing the passage of time was integral to the show’s main themes and narrative:

We felt that we were doing a show about growing up, gaining responsibility, gaining powers, gaining experience. . . . The first season takes place over six cohesive months, from July 4 to January 1, and our second season, and this was always the plan, takes places from Jan 1 to July 4, so it’s six months cohesive as well. . . . So in one sense we were always doing “a year in the life,” it’s just that half the year took place five years ago.

In order to tell a story about growing up…and the life of a teenager in particular, you just can't show that in six months or even in one year. And so if you’re going to show how Robin has evolved, or rather what I should say is Dick Grayson has evolved, then we want to see him as Robin in season one and Nightwing in season two. [We want to see him] advance from being an incredibly competent but still relatively immature thirteen-year-old kid to being a leader. You’re not to going to see that over the period of six months. . . . You needed to see him become Nightwing, you needed to see him become a true sort of heir to Batman, whether he wanted to or not, and that meant jumping. So it made the time jump somewhat inevitable. And I don’t just mean Dick Grayson, it was true of Wally West and Artemis and everyone who was a lead in season one—we really wanted to see…how they grew.

And so the time jump, I’m not saying it was planned from moment one, but it was something that we talked about from really early on in the development of the show, and certainly by the time we were in…preproduction of season one we knew we were going to do the time jump for season two—assuming we got a season two.

The show never got a season three, so we don’t know what Weisman and Vietti might have had planned for that season’s timeframe.

Both Weisman and Vietti are working on new projects. For Weisman, one is a new series of novels about a teen-aged girl in the Caribbean, starting with Rain of the Ghosts.

Networks Toying With Us?

In the latest “Fat Man on Batman” podcast, writer Paul Dini spoke candidly about recent trends in superhero cartoons on television (as transcribed by Vi):

There’s been…a sudden trend in animation, with super-heroes. Like, “It’s too old. It’s too old for our audience, and it has to be younger. It has to be funnier.” And that’s when I watch the first couple of episodes of Teen Titans Go!, it’s like those are the wacky moments in the Teen Titans cartoon, without any of the more serious moments. “Let’s just do them all fighting over pizza, or running around crazy and everything, ’cause our audience—the audience we wanna go after, is not the Young Justice audience any more. We wanna go after little kids, who are into—boys who are into goofy humor, goofy random humor, like on Adventure Time or Regular Show. We wanna do that goofy, that sense of humor, that’s where we’re going for.” . . .

They’re all for boys. “We do not want the girls.” I mean, I’ve heard executives say this…, saying like, “We do not want girls watching this show.” . . . They. Do. Not. Buy. Toys. The girls buy different toys. . . .

I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, like, “We need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys”—this is the network talking—“one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as the boys, but right there.” And then we began writing stories that got into the two girls’ back stories, and they were really interesting. And suddenly we had families and girls watching, and girls really became a big part of our audience, in sort of like they picked up that Harry Potter type of serialized way. . . . But, the Cartoon Network was saying, “Fuck, no, we want the boys.” Action, it’s boys’ action, this goofy boy humor we’ve gotta get that in there. . . . And I’d say, but look at the numbers, we’ve got parents watching, with the families, and then when you break it down—“Yeah,…we’ve got too many girls. We need more boys.” . . .

And then that’s why they cancelled us, and they put on a show called Level Up, which is, you know, goofy nerds fighting CG monsters. It’s like, “We don’t want the girls because the girls won’t buy toys. . . . Boys, boys, boys. Boys buy the little spinny tops, they buy the action figures, girls buy princesses, we’re not selling princesses.”

In fact, we already knew this.

Back in 2010, as Young Justice was launching on the Cartoon Network, co-creator Greg Weisman said:

I think, from an economic standpoint, we have to hit boys 6 – 14 for Cartoon Network to sell their ad space or whatever, so if you think of it as a bull’s eye with concentric circles, that’s the bull’s eye we have to hit.

I quoted that back here. Weisman and his fellow creators wanted to do more than that, and they created a fine show that appealed to a wider set of viewers. In fact, it did all the things that Dini just said the Cartoon Network didn’t appreciate. The mood was generally serious instead of goofy. There were lots of female characters and relationships. The story was serialized. And in the second season, the story became even more complex, with more adult themes.

When Young Justice wasn’t renewed after two seasons, Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool declared amid comma splices that the decision was “down to lower toy sales than expected.” As Weisman told the Denver Comic-Con, merchandise sales can make up a large part of the revenue for a show for the Warner Bros. A surplus of Green Lantern merchandise was a factor in the simultaneous cancellation of the Green Lantern animated show.

But in fact the Young Justice toy line was cancelled in April 2012, weeks before the second season launched. Production on that season continued through October, and the show itself ran until March 2013. Though the lack of toy revenue would have affected the larger corporation’s calculations about the show (both Warner Bros. and the Cartoon Network are part of what’s still for the moment called Time Warner), the show still had the chance to pull in an audience.

But that had to be the right sort of audience. As viewers of commercial television, we always have to remember that networks don’t make their money by providing us with entertainment. Their business is to supply their advertisers with our attention. And if those advertisers want the delivery of males aged six to fourteen, because that’s who will ask for their products, a larger audience of other eyeballs isn’t going to offer them much more value. In this era of “narrow-casting,” basic cable channels and Saturday-morning cartoons all have niche audiences to deliver.

Dick Grayson’s Uncle in the Young Justice Universe

The fictional universe of the Young Justice TV cartoon isn’t exactly like any other version of the DC Comics continuity. And in presenting the origin of Robin in issue #6 of the comic book, the creators of that universe added a significant new detail.

In every version of the DC Universe that I recall, going back to 1940, the Flying Graysons are a three-person act: John, Mary, and young Richard. But in the Young Justice cartoon universe, as shown in issue #6 of the comic, there are six relatives up on the trapeze platform together.

In September 2011 a fan asked Greg Weisman, one of the TV series’s creators, about that uncle. His reply revealed additional information:

Dick's father's name was John. His mother was Mary. And, yes, Cousin John was named after Dick's father. Dick's uncle is named Richard - Rick for short. (Dick was named for his own uncle, obviously - the two elder Grayson brothers were very close.) Dick's aunt was named Karla.

Some of that information never appeared in the cartoon or comic books, but coming from Weisman made it “canonical.”

The larger population of Graysons makes it harder for the creators of the magazine—Art Baltazar and Franco on the script, Christopher Jones on pencils—to explain how everybody but Dick fell to the arena floor when Tony Zucco’s men sabotaged their equipment. The answer, as shown at right, was an elaborate trick involving five Graysons at once.

At the bottom of this panel is the net, lying loose on the ground. In real life, big-top circus flyers always perform with a net. Sometimes they even incorporate that net into their acrobatics. Highwire acts often work without nets, which is why so many members of the Great Wallendas died or got badly hurt in falls. (Which makes it a bit gruesome that they eventually changed the name of their act to the Flying Wallendas.)

(Another notable detail about this panel is the missing “of” in the first caption box. This Young Justice run shows signs of being assembled and published in a hurry.)

After the accident, Dick as narrator describes his new family situation: “My mother and father dead, my aunt and cousin dead, my uncle alive but paralyzed for the rest of his life.” A living uncle!

In September 2011 and again in November, fans asked Weisman for more information on this Uncle Rick. “Is he comatose, mostly paralyzed, something else?” “Will we be seeing more of Dick Grayson's uncle Rick in the YJ series?” Both times, Weisman refused to comment, his way of preserving possible future plot twists from disclosure.

As I’ve written before, Weisman and his colleagues were playing the long game with Young Justice. They set up details that wouldn’t be explained until months later. They skipped five years between seasons and let viewers figure out what had happened in the meantime. And it appears that they included Uncle Rick as a potential complication for the future.

In this universe, Uncle Rick might show up at any time and want custody of Dick, or money from Bruce Wayne. He might recognize the masked hero Robin as moving like a Flying Grayson, just as circus owner Jack Haly does. Uncle Rick might thus be much more formidable than Dick’s Aunt Harriet, who appeared out of nowhere in the 1960s, moved into Wayne Manor, and moved out years later, still clueless.

But the cancellation of the Young Justice TV show and comic means we’ll probably never see that story and know what the continuity’s creators had in mind. Fanfiction writers are offering their own versions, which seem to lean toward the sentimental rather than the dangerous.