Animation Wednesday: Justice League: The New Frontier
This post is part of the Animation Wednesday series, a weekly column which looks at animated TV series and movies of the past, present and future.
On some level, all stories are a product of their times. Authors are influenced and inspired by the events and cultures they experience, and their works react to them. This is kind of a problem for long running serial fiction, in which the characters must stay perennially young and fresh. Superman spun out of the Great Depression, partially as Siegel and Shuster’s voice of the common man. James Bond was created as an idealized version of Ian Fleming’s experiences and ideas about the Cold War. John McClane draws from the grit and guts of the early 90s. But without these contexts, without the KGB for Bond to fight or the Nazis for Captain America, the characters often float aimlessly, robbed of their reason to exist.
That’s why stories like Justice League: The New Frontier are so fantastic. New Frontier, adapted from Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier graphic novel, tells the story of the formation of the Justice League in the context of the 1950s, when many of the characters were created. Although it’s narrower in scope than the graphic novel, it still manages to feature an impressive cast of characters, including Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter and more. The plot follows the rise of a second generation of superheroes, after the Justice Society of America was forced to disband by the McCarthy hearings. It intertwines the origins of the Martian Manhunter (Miguel Ferrer) and Green Lantern Hal Jordan (David Boreanaz) with the larger threat of the mysterious Centre (Keith David).
Animation Wednesday: Young Justice
This post is part of the Animation Wednesday series, a weekly column which looks at animated TV series and movies of the past, present and future.
DC has a strong track record in animation. Batman: The Animated Series revolutionized superhero cartoons with its clean designs, quality writing and powerful atmospherics. Justice League and Justice League Unlimited told long-form story arcs in an engaging, approachable way and featured a laundry list of obscure characters and homages. Teen Titans adapted an older comics series as an wild, anime-influenced action-comedy. It’s reaching the point where it’s hard to imagine what new takes WB Animation Studios can come up with that haven’t been done before.
They can come up with Young Justice, that’s what. Young Justice is unrelated to the late 90s comic series of the same name, or mainstream comics continuity at all, for that matter. It follows the adventures of a covert-ops team of sidekicks in a world where superheroic exploits are a relatively new thing. The team consists of a mix of classic characters like the original Robin and Kid Flash and more recent additions like Superboy, Miss Martian, and a new Aqualad and Artemis. They operate out of an old Justice League headquarters and take various secret missions assigned to them by Batman and Red Tornado, the team’s house-parent. It’s an interesting premise which recalls several comic series while still remaining new and surprising.
