Young Justice #16 Review

What About Bart?

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis, David Walker

Art By: Scott Godlewski, Gabe Eltaeb, Wes Abbott

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: July 7, 2020

The last issue should have been the big issue of this series, where we found out what's up with Superboy, Connor Kent.  Like where he's been, why doesn't anyone remember him and in the most basic aspect..... we did.  The continuity shifted while he was in Gemworld and that's that.  It was a bit lackluster overall in my mind, but here we're going to get the lowdown on what Bart Allen has been up to before this series and hopefully find out if people remember him, if this ties into Flashpoint and what his return has to do with the Speed Force Barrier breaking way back in The Flash #50.  Let's jump into this issue and find out if the answers make any sense or not.  Let's check it out.

In my mind, the obvious place to take this story is to put it directly into the Flashpoint tie-in "Kid-Flash: Lost, where Bart became one with the Speed Force after becoming a White Flash and giving Barry Allen the speed to stop himself from creating the Flashpoint, thus creating the New 52 timeline in the process....... and erasing Kid-Flash as we knew him in the process.  Instead though, we don't do anything with that part of the continuity and still insist that Bart Allen was just Impulse and that's it and was thrown into a place between dimensions by Mirror Master at some point until running to the future, where all the Young Justice members are dead, but also where it seems like we still don't have the Batman Beyond timeline. 

So while we have all this continuity and stories to play with to make this explanation to what's up with Bart Allen make sense, we instead do a weird Mirror Master explanation, going to the future and then running back and forth until he found the rest of our young heroes in our present time and beyond the rest of the things I've already talked about, I'm wondering how any of this has anything to do with the Speed Force Barrier being broken like when we saw Bart Allen return originally.  Like the Superboy reveal we had the last issue, it seems like we're simply talking around what has happened instead of actually talking about it any kind of way that makes sense and that's most likely the problem here, there is no plan for any of this to make sense and the writers have just decided to go with not having a real explanation, which means we'll continue to talk around this for a bunch more issues because instead of actually doing things in this series, we just pad out arcs and do the bare minimum for each story.

All in all, I enjoyed the art in this issue a lot, but nothing really happened here and the explanation we did get didn't really make sense in my mind or satisfy my curiosity about what DC Comics was going to do to reassure me they know what they're doing with their own continuity, but that obviously isn't the case and I'm left just really disappointed in every aspect of what this book gives us issue after issue.  These are some of the best young heroes that DC Comics has to offer and the creative team has no idea what to do with them and nobody in editorial seems to understand that these characters became the Teen Titans after Young Justice.  

Bits and Pieces:

While I did enjoy the art in this issue a lot, that's about all I did enjoy because the explanation about where Impulse has been or even why he still calls himself Impulse is either just generic and makes no sense to what has come before or it's just simply not there.  Just more padding to fill out these issues and I naively thought that we might actually get something of substance here that tied into where we last saw this Bart Allen back in Flashpoint.  

5/10