YOUNG JUSTICE #40
"The Night Before Doomsday"
Neutral (3/10)
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DC Comics
Writer: Peter David
Pencils: Todd Nauck
Inks: Lary Stucker
Colors: Jason Wright & Digital Chameleon
Letters: Ken Lopez
Editor: Eddie Berganza
Price: $2.50 US/$4.25 CAN |
Cute Christmas tale alert! Peter David and Todd Nauck offer up a super-hero version of T'was the Night Before Christmas featuring the young heroes, with plenty of forced poetry gags and pin-up art. It's diverting, but ultimately, it's an empty read. This might have worked as a short eight-page story, but not as a full issue.
We turn back the page to the Young Justice of two years ago, when the team is alerted to a cosmic threat on Christmas Eve. A sentient meteor from the Khund Empire is sent to obliterate the world, and only the YJ kids can stop it... or so they think. A certain jolly bearded fellow on a flying sleigh appears, leading to surprising, and disastrous, consequences.
As usual, Nauck captures the youth of the characters and the goofy tone of the story, but I felt short-changed by the pin-up quality of the visuals. Backgrounds are lacking. By the issue's end, there's so little space for the art, the characters' themselves lament it, as the script literally encroaches on them. There's a lot of wasted space in this issue, thanks to the large bits of text.
This isn't the first time that a writer has spoofed the classic T'was the Night... poem, and it won't be the last either, as just about everyone is familiar with it. David has obviously put a fair bit of work into this script. The rhyming is strong, but what really impresses is that the meter is pretty much on the whole way through as well.
In the end, though, this issue becomes an arduous read. At first, the gags are cute and fun, but that wears off after a few pages. The reader is left to trudge through to the ending, in which little is resolved. I also found I was scratching my head as to the reason for this to be set two years in the past. I'm assuming this is a project that the creators had already completed or at least had underway some time ago, and it didn't fit in with the title's current continuity and membership (as represented on the cover).
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