The team behind Young Justice revealed some of their plans for the third season, titled Young Justice: Outsiders, at San Diego Comic Con last weekend. After their panel, co-creators Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti also sat down in the press room to field questions. The Beat‘s Kyle Pinion shared some of their answers, and it looks like Outsiders will build on the meta-gene plots from the first two seasons while expanding on the Kirby influences.
“In season one and two,” said co-creator Greg Weisman, “We had quite a bit of Kirby influence in there. Everything from Sphere to the Forever People to G. Gordon Godfrey, and we revealed Darkseid at the end of season two. The ante is upped on the Fourth World stuff in season three; I don’t think that’s a surprise to anybody. I’m not going to go into any details but, if you like the Kirby DC stuff, then you’ll like season three.”
“It may not be what you’re expecting, though,” Weisman cautioned. “But the Kirby influence is definitely in there, just as there’s Bill Finger, Siegel and Shuster, and Bob Kane…we are not shy about taking characters from any era and trying to get to the core of those characters and make them more within the Earth-16 context. I go very, very deep when I look for characters, so that any named character, with a few exceptions like the Terror Twins…comes from somewhere in the DC Universe.”
When pressed about the plot, co-creator Brandon Vietti revealed that this season will build on the revelations of the previous two. “When we got back together and started to figure out what we’re going to do for our third season, first we had to look back at what we had done in our first two. And from day one, we’d been dealing with the creation of Superboy. We’d been dealing with genetic experimentation, creating super powered people that could be used for weapons, [while] our second season had aliens coming to Earth for the exact same reason as humans: ‘They have something called a meta-gene. What can we do with that? How can we harvest that? And use that for ourselves?’ It’s been a common theme. This meta-gene is just out of the bottle. Nobody knew about it in the first season. We’ve progressed through our stories where [in the first season] it was mad science; it was secret government organizations that were exclusively dealing with this. Second season, it breaks up and now we’ve got aliens coming. This is national news now. There’s nobody on the planet, probably, that doesn’t know what a meta-gene is at this point.”
“That’s our starting point,” he continued, “It’s a very scary world that we’re starting off with in our third season where anybody could be kidnapped, experimented upon, and trafficked into some usage where people are being used as weapons for their superpowers.”
Given the previous suggestions about including LGBTQIA characters (which they had best fulfill), Young Justice: Outsiders might be the series’ best yet: full-on Kirby cosmos, queer representation, and an intriguing look at the moral and social implications of a publicly known source of superpowers.
The 26-episode season will air at some point next year on the DC Comics as-yet-unnamed digital streaming platform.
(Via The Beat; image via Warner Brothers/DC Comics)
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