Young Justice #9 Review

Garbage Picking

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Andre Lima Araujo, John Timms, Gabe Eltaeb, Wes Abbott

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: October 2, 2019

The Young Justice team is stuck in Earth-3 and stuck fighting their evil counterparts....... This may have worked if it seemed like Brian Michael Bendis knew anything about Earth-3 or seemed to put any thought into what an evil Young Justice would be like.... or why there would be an evil Young Justice.  That's what we got though on our continued jaunt throughout the Multiverse as our heroes try to find their way home and with this issue we see the background of Teen Lantern and what made her who she is today.  Let's jump into this issue and check it out.

Maybe it's just me, but from what we got of Teen Lantern since this series started it seemed like she was a smart girl from Bolivia, who was able to create a way to tap into the Green Lantern power battery in order to use the energy of willpower, which felt pretty cool, even if it was kind of weird.  Well, we'll continue with the weird here, but instead, we find out Keli Quintela just came across the gauntlet and backpack from an alien that may or may not have been a Green Lantern.......... and that's it.  Yeah, from what we get between Keli's interaction and this strange dying alien it seems like things may take an interesting turn in the future about this power gauntlet and what it was used for, but as for this issue it just seems like we went out of our way to make Keli a little less interesting.  Yeah, she's more of a regular person, but I personally liked the idea of a smart young girl who was able to tap into something she wasn't able to.  Now if something goes wrong, she's just done being Teen Lantern because she'll have no idea how to fix her glove or backpack.

As for the Earth-3 part of this book, Brian Michael Bendis continues to show he has no idea what this world is about, beyond having Stephanie Brown being "Batwoman"..... which is ridiculous, we're told about how Ultraman fed Dr. Fate to Gorilla Grodd.......  To help anyone out who doesn't know what I'm getting at...... a villain fed another villain to a hero.... Which at this point we're just using names of characters from our own world and it just feels lazy and really serves no purpose beyond explaining how someone got a map of the Multiverse........ which will somehow help our team get back home.

All in all, I'm still really down on this book and wonder why it even exists when there's so much story after these heroes were Young Justice in both the New 52 and Pre-Flashpoint and just wonder if it's to create synergy between this and the cartoon because after nine issues it's clear that Bendis knows nothing about what he's trying to write about and even his original characters are becoming less interesting as the series progresses.  Thankfully, the art in this issue is still really good because nothing here really made me happy about reading this title..... which is just a shame for how many characters I love on the team.

Bits and Pieces:

Teen Lantern's background is explored this issue and while there are seeds thrown in here that may become interesting in the future in dealing with her backpack and power gauntlet.... Keli Quintela kind of came off a little less interesting than she previously seemed.  Beyond that though, Bendis continues to know nothing about Earth-3, but at least we have some decent art this issue to try and mask that aspect.  

5/10