C2E2 Report: Inside the Creator’s Studio with Mark Waid and Buddy Scalera

Not to get ahead of myself, one of the big lessons of C2E2 for me was how much I love it when creators speak honestly. It’s fun to hear announcements, but they’ll be on Bleeding Cool soon enough anyway. No, while all the traditional elements of the con experience you imagine are great, there’s something special about conventions that dismantles the strange, often artificial barriers between creators and fans. I’ll probably talk about this again before my coverage of C2E2 is over, but rarely was this fact more apparent than in Buddy Scalera’s Inside the Creator’s Studio with Mark Waid.

Things took a few minutes to get off the ground. First Mark Waid was late and then Scalera needed a moment to get things in order. Before Waid arrived, Scalera talked to us about illegal torrenting and the serious threat that he felt it posed to the industry. In the latter interim, Waid showed us all a magic trick. It was the purest silliness but it set a familiar vibe for the panel.

Scalera’s first questions were about Waid’s childhood and how it influenced his writing. Waid said that his family’s frequent moves were a fairly significant part of his experience. Scalera then brought up the theme of family in Waid’s writing. Mark said that while his relationship with his family was not a bad one it was not particularly strong and that he left home in his mid-teens. He also mentioned that growing up in small southern towns influenced him significantly. Growing up in the 60s Waid really saw a significant cultural evolution in the more ‘traditional’ areas of the country. He pointed to the realization that some of his racist relatives were still fundamentally good people limited by the culture they grew up in as a significant one, one that taught him about the complexity of good and evil.

Young Justice S02E20 – Review

By: Kevin Hopps (story)

The Story: As if Earth’s atmosphere didn’t have enough problems already.

The Review: There’s a reason why sitcoms usually go for an hour when they do their series finale.  While half an hour may be enough to deliver a neatly wrapped story for that one episode, a finale has more than just one story to resolve.  Over the course of a show’s lifetime, you have a lot of individual plot threads that need revisiting, loose ends to tie up, and of course, plenty of goodbyes, not just among the characters themselves, but between you and the show, too.

Although I have no evidence of this, I imagine the producers of Young Justice probably fought for an hour finale only to be, as so many of us have been, cruelly disappointed by Cartoon Network.  As a result, they were forced to deliver an epic conclusion to their Invasion storyline and hit a ton of other beats besides, all within a twenty-one minute episode.  Unsurprisingly, the finale ends up speeding through nearly every scene, leaving you winded when it’s all over.

Young Justice S02E10 – Review

By: Kevin Hopps (story)

The Story: This will teach Miss Martian to look before she leaps—into someone’s brain.

The Review: As I understand it, there’s some weirdness going on with the release of these episodes.  The official schedule set this episode to come out in January, but apparently, you can the jump on the television viewers if you have iTunes—or various “other sources,” as I do.  I won’t say more, just in case Cartoon Network’s intelligence community catches wind and breaks down my door, demanding turnover of my Young Justice episode.

They would have to pry it from my struggling fingers, too, because this was a highly enjoyable episode.  It puts on display every virtue this show has boasted from the beginning, and all the others it’s gained since its second season.  It also starts the show on the path towards the culmination of every major plotline it’s introduced in the last nine episodes.

Young Justice S02E09 – Review

By: Jon Weisman (story)

The Story: The team’s HQ may not be a Mt. St. Helen, but it sure blows up like one.

The Review: During the show’s first season, I complained frequently about how the characters didn’t seem like “real” teens, whatever that means in a world of superheroes.  As much as I appreciated that they never rushed into anything without looking first, I sometimes longed for a little more spontaneity and humor from them.  After all, what teenager doesn’t like doing something completely random and laughing a bit stupidly about it afterward?

So among the many improvements this season’s brought, I like most how much more often you laugh during an episode now.  The addition of purely comedy-driven characters, like Beast Boy, Blue Beetle, and especially Impulse has something to do with that, I imagine.  Kid Flash kind of served this function in season one, but his counterpart from the future really relishes his role as team jester.  Bart’s happy-go-lucky attitude is infection, and has the potential to draw the others into fun outings they’d never have taken with the first-gen YJers.

Young Justice S02E08 – Review

By: Greg Weisman (story)

The Story: The original Roy Harper proves he can take on Lex Luthor with only one hand.

The Review: I will never understand this show’s habit of going on hiatus mid-season.  Of course, this is the same show which aired its pilot months before the rest of the first season episodes, then took a summer-long break in between.  I’m sure there are some very good practical reasons why all this must be so, but it’s annoying anyway.  You would never put up with this on a lesser show.

However, Young Justice has the good fortune of being a very good show, so it can afford its logistical oddities from time to time.  We left off last time with some fairly gnarly plot twists, and this episode shows that the creators have given plenty of thought over the summer as to how to proceed.  More than any other cartoon I’ve heard seen on American television, this series does not mess around when it comes to exploring its stories from every possible angle.

Young Justice S02E06 – Review

By: Peter David (story)

The Story: It’s like Back to the Future, except without the awkward mom-and-son sexual tension.

The Review: Every time David comes on board as a guest writer, he ends up incorporating some aspect of his Young Justice run into the series—which is fine by me, as that can only boost its credibility in my eyes.  Besides introducing Harm and Secret, he put in probably the biggest effort to develop Artemis’ character (which I suspect is his way of writing an Arrowette story without actually having Arrowette in existence) and Red Tornado’s, both staples of his run.

In this episode, David gets the chance to use yet another staple of his Young Justice run, the incorrigible Bart Allen, better known as Impulse (and the current comics-version of Kid Flash).  Although he matured a great deal in DC’s previous continuity of things, at one point becoming a literal adult, from the moment he appears in the YJers lives here, he’s every bit the hyperactive, enthusiastic, and happy-go-lucky lad his character was originally conceived to be—which means you’re just as inclined to be as exasperated by him as you are fond of him.