Final Crisis: Dance!

Super Young Team was a weird bunch of characters introduced by Morrison and I didn't have much experience with Casey work so I wasn't sure what to expect from this one. Let's find out.

I'm going to start with the unfortunate - asides of rare cases I'm really not a fan of multiple artists doing one story. I was kinda okay with Escape having two artists, but this has 3 and a number of inkers, it is just too much. It doesn't help that I have read some of the recent Chriscross' work and it looks much better than here. Everyone has a bit different taste and all that, but I'd say that this one has the weakest art from the four aftermath minis.

With that out of the way lets talk a bit about Super Young Team. So the idea here was to create a Fifth World version of Forever People. Morrison has been pushing this Fifth World idea for a long time so it is not surprising that such team would be introduced at some point. But here is the problem, DC is never going to fully move into Fifth World so characters like Super Young Team don't really have a place in current DC Universe.

Second problem is that well, they are not really likeable? Generally speaking I don't like flower generation and I have less problems with a mix of Japan's pop culture, consumerism and self-absorption. But at the same time flower generation has certain charm and aspirational qualities, while these characters don't.

Morrison later wrote Just one-shot for Multiveristy, which does have some similarities to this team and Casey's mini. And well, I enjoyed it. But it was better written and drawn, was much shorter and part of a larger narrative. In other words, these concepts for me work as a light side-dish. But as a main feature? No, not really.

What about the story itself? It is hard to describe, many things are going on, but none of them really matter or have any weight. For example, thru the entire series there is this plot point about Japan's government (or ruling elite?) using Super Young Team to distract the world from Japan's problems that it is facing after Final Crisis. What are these problems? Who knows, in last issue few caption boxes are dedicated to explaining that Japan took some unspecified hits, but everything is going to be fine. Ok, but if that is the resolution then maybe there shouldn't have been multiple panels/pages dedicated to this plot point in every issue.

Oh, and Superbat also buys Japan. Yes, the entire country. Because he is super rich and he is going to help Japan get better. When this was originally published I didn't pay much attention to this, but now after seeing so many weird "Bruce should buy Gotham and fix it instead of being Batman" takes it reads a bit differently. It is weird how modern comic book writers aim for realism yet end up writing complete nonsenses, but this is more relevant for another topic since I doubt that Casey was really trying to do realistic story here.

Super Young Team is one of few cases where Morrison's idea wasn't very good and Casey certainly didn't manage to elevate it either.

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