Artemis

Well, what do you think?

Green Arrow

That we’re going to discuss using arrows that don’t up by dry-cleaning bill.

Sept 6th – Green Arrow is mentoring Artemis during a stake out at Star City’s World History Museum when they notice that the security system has been bypassed. They discover a gang of masked gunmen ransacking the weapons display. Arrow teaches Artemis to keep her enemies distracted, although her own oil arrow seems to work quite well. The bag guys escape with a snake-headed twin-bladed dagger, but Artemis’s oil arrow contained micro-tracers that continue to functioning even after the thieves find Arrow’s full-sized tracer.

Sept 7th – Kid Flash is helping the Flash round-up an escaped cheetah when he discovers that the entire captive population of Central City Zoo is loose. The speedsters remove the bystanders and corral the larger animals with a trench dug at super speed. The monkeys have to be man handled out of the reptile house one-by-one, but the Flash spots that a vial of concentrated cobra venom has been stolen. Kid Flash also spots footprints covered by a type of pollen not native to Central City,

Sept 11th – Dr Jason Burr is working alone in Gotham City Observatory when he is surprised by a masked gang (the same as from Star City) who knock him out. The gang is leaving through the Observatory’s solar system exhibit when their way is blocked by Batman and Robin. They dynamic quo subdue the majority of the gang, but the massive thug carrying Burr turns out to have super strength and he knocks them aside. By the time Batman and Robin have recovered, the large thug has escaped with Burr and most of the others have taken poison. Robin is able to save one thug who Batman then interrogates.

Sept 12th – Artemis’s GPS tracer, Kid Flash’s pollen evidence, and Batman intimidation all point to Minneapolis and to an abandoned New Age monastery. Inside they find the international terrorist and cult leader Kobra (alias Jeffrey Burr) who is about to sacrifice his fraternal twin brother, the kidnapped Jason Burr, with the dagger stolen from Star City.

• The Green Arrow/Artemis sequence takes place on September 6th which places them concurrent with the end of Aqualad, Miss Martian, and Superboy’s visit to Atlantis in Young Justice (vol. 2) #15 (June 2012). The Flash/Kid Flash sequence take place on September 7th concurrent with events of “Targets”. The rest of the events happen on September 11-12th between “Targets” and “Terrors”.
• Kobra’s real name is Jeffrey Burr, he has a fraternal twin brother called Jason Burr (an astronomer in Gotham City).

Sales

My Thoughts

Surverying the Internets

Doug Zawisza (CBR):

“Young Justice” #16 is the type of “all ages” comic book that I grew up reading. The story itself is a nice throwback to the Silver Age adventures of the Justice League of America, with the larger team divided into smaller groups to work towards a common goal.

I Reads You:

The first thing about this issue of Young Justice that stands out to me is the art. Christopher Jones is a highly-skilled artist, showing flexibility when dealing with figure drawing and dexterity in the layout of his pages. His compositions are lively, and the backgrounds are simple, clean, and evocative.

The Verdicts

Page 6. Artemis’s use of tracers will become a pivotal plot point in “Insecurity”.

Page 9. I find the way that the Flashs handle this strange. They corral all the escaped zoo animals into a single enclosure seemingly without realising that those animals will probably start fighting each other immediately.

Page 11. Take a closer look at the sign on the Monkey Den in the third panel. It reads “This enclosure contains monkeys and other primates captured by the Flash and Kid Flash.” Now was that there before or after they emptied the primates out of the Reptile House? (credit to Yojimbo on the DC Animation Forum for spotting this one)

The Flash says he’s been a CSI before anybody knew what CSI stood for. Back in the 1950s his occupation was always given as Police Scientist, the job that was later popularised by the TV series CSI: Crimes Scene Investigation. In the cartoon the Flash is voiced by George Eads who is better known as Nick Stokes from CSI.

Page 12. The stolen venom is labelled “Family: Elapidae” and “Genus: Naja”. The Elapidae family is a family of venomous snakes that include coral snakes, copperheads, mambas, cobras, and tropical sea snakes. The Genus Naja is the group of snake usually called cobras.

Page 13-18. This sequence contains no speech. Five pages of it appeared in a 2012 Free Comic Book Day sampler called the DC Nation Flipbook.

Page 17. The name badge identifies the astronomer as Jason Burr. He first appeared in Kobra #1 (March 1976). The premise of the comic was that an international terrorist called Kobra has an identical twin brother (Jason) with whom he shared a psychic connection. If Jason was harmed Kobra also felt the pain. This made him the perfect recruit to fight his brother’s evil schemes and he became an international adventurer fighting Kobra’s worldwide schemes. The DC Universe version of Jason was killed and became a ghost haunting his evil brother. That was before Kobra was also killed and Jason was resurrected as Kobra’s successor. The version of Jason Burr shown here appears to be a normal civilian.

The Hilton DoubleTree Hotel in Bloomington, Minneapolis

Page 19. On his blog artist Christopher Jones teased that “As an added bonus there’s an Easter Egg for attendees of CONvergence!” The CONvergence convention is held in the The DoubleTree Hilton Hotel, a building that bears a very close similarity with the “Wayne Industries-owned hotel” shown in the first panel of Page 19.

Page 20. The Earth-16 version of the Kobra Cult first appeared in “Drop-Zone” where they were shown producing a variant of the venom super-steroid for the Light. Its first test subject was Mammoth. He’s probably the one who kidnapped Jason Burr. His sister is Shimmer.