9. Young Justice's Worst Nightmare Is Being Other DC Characters
DC ComicsSadly long out of print, Peter David and Todd Nauck's Young Justice series was a dazzling antidote to the grim and gritty house style that most other DC Comics had adopted in the nineties. Inspired by comics like Watchmen, as a matter of fact. Spinning out of the Justice League miniseries World Without Grown-Ups - which does what it says on the tin - it was like a pared down, comical spin on the Teen Titans as Robin, Superboy and Impulse (basically Kid Flash) teamed up to...well, mainly have sleepovers and talk about girls, until Red Tornado started sending them on superhero missions and introduced Wonder Girl, Secret and Arrowette into the fold. Young Justice's main draw was how different it was to the majority of the big DC titles of the time. This was the era of The Death of Superman, of Gotham City being decimated by earthquakes in No Man's Land, and writers trying to introduce "mature" elements in a ham-fisted fashion that spoilt the big, colourful, escapist fun of cape comics. In that landscape, Young Justice was loudly and defiantly anti-darkness, instead embracing teen culture - with plenty of pop culture references that are probably way past their sell by date now, if they weren't then - and telling stories that were as big, bright and enjoyable as life tends to be when you're powered mainly by hormones and zit cream. David and Nauck made their intentions with the series clear in the first issue of the Young Justice ongoing, in a series of full-page splashes illustrating the worst nightmares of Robin, Superboy and Impulse. First Batman's sidekick has the scenario above where his left hand is eaten by cockroaches and it's replaced with a Batarang, then Superboy grows fiery angel wings, whilst Impulse finds himself shedding personalities and costumes as fast as he can run (ie very fast). Then they all wake up, sat in a circle in their sleeping bags in the Bat Cave. Typical anxieties you'd expect from teen superheroes, right? Except all those are commentaries on things happening in comics at that very moment: Aquaman had just been rebooted as a dark, conflicted character who lost his hand and replaced it with a hook, Supergirl became an angsty "Earth-Bound Angel" with fiery wings, and Marvel even got a look in as Impulse spoofed the publisher's inability to come up with a consistent characterisation for the Hulk (made explicit by one of Impulse's imagined other selves: big, burly, and threatening to...well, Flash, rather than smash). The characters quickly dismiss these worries and carry on having a whimsical, comic book-y time.