Young Justice #20 Review

John Stewart Is A Mook

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis, David Walker

Art By: Scott Godlewski, Gabe Eltaeb, Wes Abbott

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: November 3, 2020

It's the final issue of Young Justice and I can't say that I really liked any of this series, which is crazy to me because I loved the original Young Justice back in the late '90s and love all of the characters that originally made up that team that are present in this series. The problem is, Brian Michael Bendis never really cared about the details of the characters that he was using and spent forever to explain why they were even here in the first place since they were erased from the timeline after Flashpoint or they were replaced by other versions of themselves that were then erased for other reasons... it's all kind of a mess and this series never made sense of it or really explored the new characters that were introduced for this iteration of the team. It's the final issue though and what better time to give us something with the Teen Lantern? Let's jump into this issue and see what we end up with.

While I was upset that it seemed like Brian Michael Bendis never knew that these characters graduated from being Young Justice into the Teen Titans back in the early 2000s, it seems from this issue that he never even read beyond the first arc of the original Young Justice series because here we just see our heroes going back to the Sanctuary in Happy Harbor where their original base was so that they can reclaim it, even though they left that base to move to an abandoned hotel later in the series, not to mention that the Happy Harbor Secret Sanctuary was destroyed by the Queen of Fables in Steve Orlando's Justice League of America run a few years ago, where they then built the Justice Foundation in its place. Continuity is nothing here, but that doesn't matter because this book is just a fight with Red Tornado, who is simply a robot sentry in this and nothing more.

The fight with Red Tornado though, which just seriously does the character a disservice is only here to show you how tough the Teen Lantern is and lead to a confrontation with her and John Stewart about why she has technology that hacks into the Green Lantern Corps....... but since they've already met during a fight in Action Comics, which they bring up here, this conversation that they flashback to and then have again in this issue goes nowhere and we never learn any more about Keli Quintana's powers and John Stewart seems like an absent-minded Lantern because he just doesn't seem to care about this tech after twice telling Keli at two different times that she needs to turn it over. John leaves, Bart yells "Secret Team Meeting" and then the book and series is over. What a nothing of an issue.

All in all, I did love the art in this issue and everyone looked as good as you'd want, but there was nothing to this story, the continuity was wrong, nothing was resolved and nothing about this felt like a finale to a series. I don't know why Brian Michael Bendis wanted to bring Young Justice back when it doesn't seem like he even cares or knows about the characters he's using and he did little to nothing to give us background on the characters he's introduced and these brief sporadic spotlights of them really don't do anything to further their story or give us any new information about them. Thankfully this book was fun to look at though because you won't get anything out of the so-called story.

Bits and Pieces:

Here we are at the finale of this series where little to nothing was explained about this group and when it was attempted, it didn't make much sense, but in this issue, Brian Michael Bendis and David Walker give us a spotlight on Teen Lantern, which would have been nice awhile ago, but ultimately you don't learn anything new here and the continuity is all screwed up with the decisions that were made for our finale setting. This finale, while it looks great is just like the rest of the series where nothing happens and nothing makes sense.  

4/10