Young Justice #3 Review

Continuity Be Damned!

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Patrick Gleason, Viktor Bogdanovic, Jonathan Glapion, Alejandro Sanchez, Chris Sotomayor, Hi-Fi, Carlos M. Mangual, Josh Reed

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: March 6, 2019

It's time we learned some answers about Impulse and Superboy, right?  Well, we'll have to see about that because those two characters make no sense within the continuity right now, especially the way they were presented in the first issue and because of that I'm just chomping at the bit for Brian Michael Bendis to explain himself about what he's doing here and to make it worse......... Those characters weren't even in the previous issue.  That all changes here though as we head on back to Gemworld to see how our Young Justice team are faring in Dark Opal's world.  Let's check it out.

Well, I'm frustrated.  Right from the get go we see Impulse and Superboy talking and instead of showing us how any of this makes sense for what we've been reading for the past eight years, we instead get the sing-song dialog that really leads to nothing and while having a flashback about Superboy in this issue and how he got to Gemworld was something that I thought was going to shed some light on what's going on here...... Instead we get the idea that Brian Michael Bendis once heard about the character Superboy, the Pre-Flashpoint variety and decided to show us really nothing about the character except for the bare minimum that he once might have heard about.  

Seriously, we have Superboy fight a monster, go to high school, decide that high school isn't doing it for him and then head off back to where he fought the monster to talk to the organization that was trying to cover it up........ that's all we get about the background of Superboy....... Besides for the cover saying right at the beginning that this is the clone of Lex Luther and Superman.  Yeah, that might be the old version that people like, but it wasn't the one during the New 52 and I'm just sitting here trying to find a way for any of this to work since Brian Michael Bendis keeps saying that this is in continuity and that these are the characters that we've been reading about for years now.  I don't get it.

Really though, besides for a bit of nothing in Superboy's past and Bart getting taken away by Gemworld soldiers...... there's nothing to this issue and it's hard to think about how that could happen except for the all the useless and unnatural dialog that we got throughout this story that kept the page count going.  

All in all, the artwork was enjoyable, but the story itself was pretty cringe worthy for how basic Brian Michael Bendis wrote Superboy and besides for a shocking reveal at one moment about our Boy of Steel, there wasn't nothing to this issue and since I don't even recognize this character it doesn't mean much to me.  It does seem like the writer has a problem with whatever Superboy he's writing though.  While I was originally optimistic about getting the answers that Brian Michael Bendis promised that we were going to get, after reading this issue I fail to see how anything could make sense for what he's doing......... That is.... unless... he's playing some kind of long game here and somehow this ties into Pre-Flashpoint Conner and Bart, but I don't have faith in BMB doing something like that.

Bits and Pieces:

The art is the real draw to this story because you really won't get anything out of the characters......... at least anything that makes sense to the continuity.  Yeah, the answers about Superboy don't make a lick of sense and I'm not even positive that Brian Michael Bendis knows which version of the character he's supposed to be writing.  Even without that though, there really isn't anything to this issue.

5/10