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Phantoms: 402 – Needful Original Airdate – October 16, 2021 While attempting to solve a growing list of mysteries, Miss Martian, Superboy, and Beast Boy consult with royalty.

Phantoms: 403 – Volatile Original Airdate – October 21, 2021 Miss Martian and Superboy grapple with family traditions while Beast Boy grapples with something darker.

Phantoms: 404 – Involuntary Original Airdate – October 28, 2021 Answers come to light as Beast Boy, Miss Martian and Superboy uncover the awful truth.

Phantoms: 405 – Tale of Two Sisters Original Airdate – November 4, 2021 Artemis Crock’s life is interrupted by devastating news – just as multiple Shadows fall across her path.

Phantoms: 406 – Artemis Through the Looking-Glass Original Airdate – November 11, 2021 Tigress catches up with her sister, Cheshire, as a Shadowed history catches up with them both.

Phantoms: 407 – The Lady, or the Tigress? Original Airdate – November 18, 2021 Oracle’s memories challenge Tigress’ decision to trust her new allies.

Phantoms: 408 – I Know Why the Caged Cat Sings Original Airdate – November 25, 2021 For Tigress, saving everyone may not be an option, unless help is offered from an unexpected source.

Phantoms: 409 – Odnu! Original Airdate – December 2, 2021 Zatanna and her protegees find themselves on the cusp of war.

Phantoms: 410 – Nomed Esir! Original Airdate – December 9, 2021 Zatanna and her protégées encounter new allies — and an ancient foe.

Phantoms: 411 – Teg Ydaer! Original Airdate – December 16, 2021 Thirteen and her friends face their greatest challenge yet.

Phantoms: 412 – Og Htrof Dna Reuqnoc! Original Airdate – December 23, 2021 Zatanna rallies the Sentinels of Magic before Chaos consumes the Earth.

Phantoms: 413 – Kaerb Ym Traeh! Original Airdate – December 30, 2021 Zatanna and the Sentinels of Magic gain unlikely allies, but the new alliance may not be enough.

Phantoms: 414 – Nautical Twilight Original Airdate – March 31, 2022 Kaldur’ahm chews algae, while Violet Harper cuts vegetables.

Phantoms: 415 – Ebb Tide Original Airdate – March 31, 2022 Clark Kent gets all the news that’s fit to print, and Kaldur’ahm hears old family stories from his parents.

Phantoms: 416 – Emergency Dive Original Airdate – March 31, 2022 Kaldur’ahm, Wyynde and La’gann go for a swim. King Orin goes fishing.

Phantoms: 417 – Leviathan Wakes Original Airdate – April 7, 2022 Kaldur’ahm searches. Atlantis finds.

Phantoms: 418 – Beyond the Grip of the Gods! Original Airdate – April 14, 2022 Rocket gets a reality check, and reality’s ready to collect.

Phantoms: 419 – Encounter Upon the Razor’s Edge! Original Airdate – April 21, 2022 Rocket misses one conference, while another goes poorly.

Phantoms: 420 – Forbidden Secrets of Civilizations Past! Original Airdate – April 28, 2022 Rocket learns that nothing stays buried forever.

Phantoms: 421 – Odyssey of Death! Original Airdate – May 5, 2022 For Rocket, one portal opens and another closes forever.

Phantoms: 422 – Rescue and Search Original Airdate – May 12, 2022 Bart Allen went shopping. Zatanna Zatara stops by to talk baseball. Daring Dan Danger returns.

Phantoms: 423 – Ego and Superego Original Airdate – May 19, 2022 Nightwing and the gang refurbish a bus and hit the road.

Phantoms: 424 – Zenith and Abyss! Original Airdate – May 26, 2022 Trauma on Trombus.

Phantoms: 425 – Over and Out Original Airdate – June 2, 2022 You can go home again… but beware of hitchhikers.

Outsiders: 302 – Royal We Original Airdate – January 4, 2019 Dick Grayson, Artemis Crock, Conner Kent and Jefferson Pierce go undercover in Markovia to stop the Bedlam Syndicate’s meta-human trafficking cartel – before it claims another victim.

Outsiders: 303 – Eminent Threat Original Airdate – January 4, 2019 Conner Kent and Prince Biron Markov are in the clutches of Count Vertigo, leaving Dick Grayson, Artemis Crock and an emotionally damaged Jefferson Pierce to save them and put an end to the Bedlam Syndicate.

Outsiders: 304- Private Security Original Airdate – January 11, 2019 While Jefferson, Conner and Artemis find homes for their Markovian strays, Dick assembles a new squad and hits the road – but may not survive the trip.

Outsiders: 305 – Away Mission Original Airdate – January 11, 2019 A distant conflict sends the team on an away mission, while the Happy Harbor gang decides what to do with Brion Markov and Halo (Zehra Fazal).

Outsiders: 306 – Rescue Op Original Airdate – January 11, 2019 Brion Markov is determined to rescue his missing sister – even if it means throwing down against the entire League of Shadows.

Outsiders: 307- Evolution Original Airdate – January 18, 2019 Aliens once again threaten the Earth, but with the Justice League split and scattered, only Earth’s first and greatest hero can save us!

Outsiders: 308 – Triptych Original Airdate – January 18, 2019 As Meta-Human trafficking spreads across the United States, three very different teams of heroes seek to put a stop to it!

Outsiders: 309 – Home Fires Original Airdate – January 18, 2019 The Light has hired an intergalactic assassin, but who is the intended target?!

Outsiders: 310 – Exceptional Human Beings Original Airdate – January 25, 2019 The search for Tara Markov continues – but who’s doing the searching and where?!

Outsiders: 311- Another Freak Original Airdate – January 25, 2019 It’s the first day of school for Violet Harper and Forager. And the last day for a different freak…

Outsiders: 312 – Nightmare Monkeys Original Airdate – January 25, 2019 Garfield Logan tests out a pair of Goode VR goggles. Then the goggles test him!

Outsiders: 313 – True Heroes Original Airdate – January 25, 2019 Grayson’s operatives attempt to stop an auction of enslaved meta-teens.

Outsiders: 314 – Influence Original Airdate – July 2, 2019 The team reassembles while the Justice League faces a new threat in space.

Outsiders: 315 – Leverage Original Airdate – July 2, 2019 A new Gamma Squad sets out on its first mission.

Outsiders: 316 – Illusions of Control Original Airdate – July 2, 2019 The team gives thanks for what they have…and might lose!

Outsiders: 317 – First Impression Original Airdate – July 9, 2019 The Reach is back…unless the Outsiders can stop them!

Outsiders: 318 – Early Warning Original Airdate – July 16, 2019 Project Rutabaga threatens to create an international crisis.

Outsiders: 319 – Elder Wisdom Original Airdate – July 23, 2019 The Outsiders face Lex Luthor’s machinations.

Outsiders: 320 – Quiet Conversations Original Airdate – July 30, 2019 Victor Stone reaches a crisis point, and he’s not alone.

Outsiders: 321 – Unknown Factors Original Airdate – August 6, 2019 Dick Grayson and Jefferson go after Gretchen Goode – only to encounter the ominous Overlord.

Outsiders: 322 – Antisocial Pathologies Original Airdate – August 13, 2019 The betrayals come fast and furious, and with them, a reckoning…

Outsiders: 323 – Terminus Original Airdate – August 20, 2019 The hunt for Halo is on. Pray the team doesn’t find her.

Outsiders: 324 – Into the Breach Original Airdate – August 27, 2019 The Outsiders make one last attempt to save Halo…and the galaxy!

Outsiders: 325 – Overwhelmed Original Airdate – August 27, 2019 Artemis and Conner journey back to their pasts.

Invasion: 202 – Earthlings Original Airdate – May 5th, 2012 Miss Martian, Superboy, Beast Boy and Adam Strange arrive on the distant planet Rann to stop the alien infiltration of Earth at its source.

Invasion: 203 – Alienated Original Airdate – May 12th, 2012 The Team and the Justice League continue to hunt the Kroloteans that have invaded Earth – but the aliens have help from an extremely unexpected source.

Invasion: 204 – Salvage Original Airdate – May 19th, 2012 While Superboy and Blue Beetle battle Intergang, Nightwing and company try to salvage the soul of a former comrade fallen from grace.

Invasion: 205 – Beneath Original Airdate – May 26th, 2012 Jaime Reyes searches for a missing friend, while Miss Martian, Batgirl, Bumblebee and Wonder Girl return to Bialya to discover what lies beneath.

Invasion: 206 – Bloodlines Original Airdate – June 2nd, 2012 An intruder mysteriously appears inside Mount Justice, claiming to be a tourist from the future. But who is he really? And what is his true agenda?

Invasion: 207 – Depths Original Airdate – June 9th, 2012 Artemis rejoins the team to defend a critical satellite launch. But will her first mission back also be her last?!

Invasion: 208 – Satisfaction Original Airdate – September 29th, 2012 Roy Harper seeks vengeance against the man who ruined his life!

Invasion: 209 – Darkest Original Airdate – October 6th, 2012 Black Manta has a new mission for his son: a mission that should prove once and for all exactly whose side Aqualad is on!

Invasion: 210 – Before The Dawn Original Airdate – January 5th, 2013 On a covert mission to rescue some of its own, The Team, Blue Beetle and Miss Martian uncover shocking secrets…and devastating truths!

Invasion: 211 – Cornered Original Airdate – January 12th, 2013 The Team is trapped inside the Hall of Justice for a cage match against a brutal alien gladiator!

Invasion: 212 – True Colors Original Airdate – January 19th, 2013 When the REACH forms a devil’s alliance with Lexcorp, Robin leads a squad undercover to investigate.

Invasion: 213 – The Fix Original Airdate – January 26th, 2013 Black Manta seeks vengeance against Miss Martian.

Invasion: 214 – Runaways Original Airdate – February 2nd, 2013 Nightwing tasks Blue Beetle with chasing down a group of potentially dangerous super-powered teenage runaways. But Blue’s not the only one hunting them.

Invasion: 215 – War Original Airdate – February 9th, 2013 A conqueror from another world becomes a wild card in an intergalactic game of supremacy – placing planet Earth square in the jackpot.

Invasion: 216 – Complications Original Airdate – February 16th, 2013 Black Manta gives Miss Martian twenty-four hours to live, but that may be more time than Aqualad has with Sportsmaster and Cheshire on the hunt for his head!

Invasion: 217 – The Hunt Original Airdate – February 23rd, 2013 A band of misfits is put to the test when Lex Luthor sends them behind enemy lines… to rescue the team!

Invasion: 218 – Intervention Original Airdate – March 2nd, 2013 The team embarks on a desperate endeavor to free Blue Beetle.

Invasion: 219 – Summit Original Airdate – March 9th, 2013 The Light calls a Summit to decide the final fate of Aqualad, the team…and the entire planet Earth!

103 – Welcome to Happy Harbor Original Airdate – January 21st, 2011 After Speedy declines to join the new team, Robin, Aqualad and Kid Flash fear Young Justice is just a big joke…while new member Miss Martian fears there’s no room for her to be part of it. So when the four heroes and Superboy come up against Mister Twister, it looks like all their fears have just been realized…

104 – Drop Zone Original Airdate – January 28th, 2011 On their first official assignment – a covert recon mission to the Venom-producing island of Santa Prisca – the team finds itself caught in a struggle between the deadly Bane and cult leader Kobra for possession of something far worse than they suspected.

105 – Schooled Original Airdate – February 4th, 2011 Superboy’s anger over his non-relationship with Superman is getting out of control. He refuses to train with Black Canary, and when the team faces an opponent that even the Justice League had trouble defeating, the Boy of Steel goes rogue.

106 – Infiltrator Original Airdate – February 11th, 2011 Artemis faces an uphill battle trying to win over her new teammates as she tries to fill Red Arrow’s boots on a mission he initiated: saving a brilliant young scientist from the League of Shadows.

107 – Denial Original Airdate – February 18th, 2011 When the team investigates the disappearance of Kent Nelson (formerly Doctor Fate), the scientific-minded Wally West is forced to confront his disbelief in magic while battling Abra Kadabra and Klarion the Witch Boy for the ultra-powerful helmet of fate.

108 – Downtime Original Airdate – March 4th, 2011 After a disastrous mission with the team, Aqualad returns to Atlantis to choose between a life on the surface world…or one beneath the waves with the Aquagirl of his dreams. But other forces are at play, which may make Aqualad’s decision for him.

109 – Bereft Original Airdate – March 11th, 2011 The Team finds itself wandering the desert of Bialya with no memory of the last six months – or of each other. Only Miss Martian can restore their minds and figure out what happened.

110 – Targets Original Airdate – September 16th, 2011 Red Arrow’s battle to prevent the League of Shadows from inciting a war, pits him against the world’s most dangerous assassins – and allies him with someone more dangerous still. Too bad Aqualad couldn’t convince him to ask the team for help…

111 – Terrors Original Airdate – September 23rd, 2011 Batman assigns Superboy and Miss Martian to go undercover inside Belle Reve Penitentiary, a federal prison designed to house the world’s worst super-villains…

112 – Homefront Original Airdate – September 30th, 2011 When The Cave itself is attacked, can Artemis and Robin – the two teens without super-powers – save the Team (or even themselves) from the unknown invaders?

113 – Alpha Male Original Airdate – October 7th, 2011 Already exhausted and rattled after a home turf invasion of The Cave, The Team learns that Aqualad – their friend and leader – withheld vital information that put them all at risk. When Batman sends the Team and new “den-mother” Captain Marvel to India to investigate bizarre reports of armed animals attacking human beings, can Aqualad pull his fractured Team together?

114 – Revelation Original Airdate – October 14th, 2011 When Plant Creatures attack major cities around the world, The Team is eager to join the fight alongside the Justice League. Instead, Batman assigns them a still more dangerous task – taking out the plants’ masters: a secret society of super-villains: the Injustice League!

115 – Humanity Original Airdate – October 21st, 2011 The Team is on the hunt for Red Tornado, determined to find out once and for all whether the robot was the mole – even if it means kidnapping new friend Zatanna and dragging her along on their quest!

116 – Failsafe Original Airdate – November 4th, 2011 During an alien invasion, the team faces the ultimate challenge when they are forced to replace the fallen Justice League!

117 – Disordered Original Airdate – November 11th, 2011 Conner Kent’s pet Sphere has undergone a startling transformation, bringing it to the attention of the forever people of New Genesis. Turns out Sphere originally belonged to them…and they want it back!

118 – Secrets Original Airdate – November 18th, 2011 On Halloween, Artemis and Zatanna go to Manhattan for a night on the town, only to be hunted by Harm, a psycho-in-training, hiding a deadly secret…

119 – Misplaced Original Airdate – March 3rd, 2012 When every adult on the planet disappears, only the team, Zatanna and Billy Batson are left to defeat the five most powerful sorcerers on Earth…

120 – Coldhearted Original Airdate – March 10th, 2012 Wally West comes oh-so-close to fulfilling his birthday wish to finally fight alongside the Justice League. Instead, a massively disappointed Kid Flash is taken off the mission and tasked with a simple delivery job. But a few deadly surprises await the birthday boy along the way…

121 – Image Original Airdate – March 17th, 2012 A covert operation against Queen Bee in Qurac forces Miss Martian to finally face her greatest fears and her biggest secrets. But will she reveal those secrets to her friends – or allow what she’s hiding to take down the entire team?

122 – Agendas Original Airdate – March 24th, 2012 Superboy returns to Project Cadmus, where he learns the top-secret genetics lab may have created another Super-clone…

123 – Insecurity Original Airdate – March 31st 2012 Red Arrow’s return undercuts Artemis’ confidence, while the team’s mission to track down Sportsmaster threatens to expose her darkest secrets.

124 – Performance Original Airdate -April 7th, 2012 The Team goes undercover at the Haly International Traveling Circus to locate a thief stealing weapons technology across Europe. But a thief isn’t all they find…

125 – Usual Suspects Original Airdate – April 14th, 2012 The Team gets a new member and a new mission – a mission that may finally expose all the Team’s secrets…and all their lies!

NYJt3: My question is why did you choose the starting roster heroes as the team’s starting roster? Did those starters influence what other heroes to bring in the teams next rosters?

Greg Weisman: We began with a list of over fifty DC teen superheroes and quickly started to narrow it down to a dozen or fewer. We wanted a mix of characters. Some with powers. Some with only mad skills. We wanted to respect tradition with some of the original “sidekicks/proteges,” but we wanted to shake up expectations, as well. And we wanted to prioritize diversity and inclusion. Beyond that, one of the main themes of our series was “Secrets and Lies,” so, obviously, we wanted some of our leads to be keeping secrets and/or telling lies.

Thus, when it came to adding more characters in subsequent seasons, certain parameters were already set. Dick Grayson was a young Robin in season one, so the other Bat-proteges would have to follow him. On the other hand, Kaldur’ahm was our Aqualad, so that meant that Garth began his heroic career as Tempest. The passage of time, created by our between-season time-skips, also dictated who could and couldn’t now be with the Team (or the League or the Outsiders, etc.).

Brandon Vietti: We set out to make a show that was grounded in as much realism as possible in an animated superhero show. So, another factor that was important for us in choosing our Team was finding characters with powers or skills that weren’t so fantastical that they would undermine realism at every turn. We were growing the DC Universe around our Team and through their eyes. With each season, we wanted to progressively introduce our grounded characters to reality-shattering characters and concepts in small increments and make great stories about their reactions to those things.

david.rey0902.23620: Do you think this will be your biggest season finale yet?

GW: I guess it depends on how you define “big.”

BV: I think it’s fair to say that our season four finale was the most challenging to produce of them all. Our crew dug deep, at the end of a long season, to bring their best to the screen, and the end result is a landmark spectacle for our series. The scale, the action, the breathless pace of twists and turns…the horror!

Elop0923.96576: I’m really interested to learn how the show in itself is produced and how the process is done. Can you guys give me sort of an inside view of how?

GW: We start with story. Brandon and I break the entire season on index cards. Then I write up outlines for each episode. Those are handed off to our writers in a writers meeting, where everyone gives and receives feedback. Then the writers go off and write their individual scripts. I edit them. Brandon and the episode’s director give notes. I take the script final. At every single step, we share our work with various experts and sensitivity readers to make sure we’re doing justice to the issues and communities that are raised in each story.

The next major step is the voice recording. Jamie Thomason directs our amazing cast of actors, and those vocal tracks are handed off to our directors (Christopher Berkeley, Vinton Heuck and Christina Sotta) and their storyboard teams. Meanwhile, our design staff—led by Art Director Brian Jones and Model Supervisor Dou Hong—are designing characters, backgrounds, props, effects, etc., first in black-and-white and then again in color. Brandon and I give notes on everything at pretty much every stage.

Ultimately, all that work comes together in a design packet and in an animatic, which editor Cris Mertens edits alongside Brandon, myself and the episode’s director. All that stuff gets shipped to Studio Mir to be animated. When each episode comes back for post-production, Cris gets back to work, editing with Brandon and me. We call retakes; we get the retakes back. We call more retakes; we get those retakes back. Once we have a locked cut, the team at Audio Circus begins work on sound effects, while Dynamic Music Partners start scoring, and our Visual Effects team starts enhancing the look of the show, all after hand-off meetings with Brandon and myself. (Brandon usually takes on a few shots personally, as well.) Next comes the sound mix and the online. I review the closed captions. And the episode is in the can.

BV: And I’ll just add that all of it, every step, is planned with consideration of a budget and schedule. Greg and I factor these things into every single creative choice. And to help us with those considerations, we have an amazing production crew that helps us traffic huge volumes of art between team members, convey notes and deadlines and just keep everything running smooth. Honestly, it would all fall apart if we didn’t have our production crew holding it all together for us while we focus on the creative work.

GW: Here, here!

Spidey54: Out of curiosity, do you guys ever sit back and think about how much of an impact Young Justice has had on so many people? I imagine it makes you proud to be the showrunners behind such a major cultural phenomenon!

GW: It is very gratifying to know we’ve made an impact on people’s lives. But, honestly, we try not to let stuff like that go to our heads. Job One is still to make an entertaining series, a series we would like to watch. Something we feel passionate about. (After all, if we aren’t passionate about it, how could we expect our audience to be?) We’re not sure we really are “a major cultural phenomenon,” but we’re always happy when we reach people, make them think, make them feel.

BV: What Greg said. And thanks for the compliment!

CWDCTVFAN: Can’t wait for the 2nd half of the season! I am curious about the motivation behind the character-based arcs this season, as well was what went into deciding the order of said arcs.

GW: We felt it was time—after two seasons where the plot drove most of our choices—to get back to the core characters of our series and see where each one was in their lives, a decade after we first met them. In terms of the order of the arcs, the decision there was a combination of the overarching plot of the season and a desire to mix things up so that no two arcs in a row felt too similar.

BV: We’ve also tried to make each season feel unique by changing the overall story structures each time. Trying to break the mold a bit for each season keeps us on our toes creatively and hopefully defies audience expectations to some degree.

Sandiovala21.69453: One of the more amusing stories this season was the journey of the Metropolis School District bus commandeered by Klarion and how it manifested as far back as season one. What exactly inspired this particular subplot? Thank you!

GW: Um…the school bus itself and the folks inside it (i.e. the bus driver and the students). We decided LONG ago what the deal was there. It just took us a while to let you guys in on the secret.

BV: You may have noticed that we thread MANY story threads throughout the series. Some threads tie into the story where they first appear. Some threads are clues for a larger arc. And some threads are there because Greg and I are just wondering how long we can thread a thread.

Capo-Mage: What’s the significance with the usage of the #16 in pretty much every episode the last two seasons? I know it can’t be an accident...

GW: We think you mean, “What’s the significance with the usage of the #16 in pretty much every episode in every season?” It’s been there from the pilot on. So, turning the question back on you, why are you only noticing now?

BV: Young Justice takes place on Earth-16 in the DC Multiverse.

Row.Harper: Young Justice has had such a huge main and supporting cast during its current four seasons, but are there any characters that you have wanted to include that you weren’t allowed to or weren’t able to find a place for? And with all the time that has passed between seasons, have any opportunities for those characters opened up that wouldn’t have otherwise?

GW: Way back at the beginning of season one, we were told there were four characters who were off-limits to us: Darkseid, Wonder Girl/Donna Troy, Wonder Girl/Cassie Sandsmark and Blue Beetle/Ted Kord. We have no idea why those particular characters were off-limits, and obviously those restrictions were eventually lifted, as all four have since appeared in the series. Since then, there have been no other characters that were declared off-limits.

There are so many wonderful DC characters that there are always going to be a few that we don’t quite have room for…yet. But given enough episodes—or comic book issues, etc.—eventually we’ll get to everyone. And then more will be created, and we’ll try to get to those, too… It’s a never-ending cycle, you see.

BV: Someday…the Wonder Twins!

Nicksname: While I’m sure you’re proud of all of them, out of the first three arcs, do either of you have a personal favorite? Thanks so much for your time and dedication to this show!

GW: Honestly, we don’t. (And thank you for watching!)

BV: What Greg said. It’s impossible to choose.

SpoilerAlert88: How do you decide how much of a time jump you want between seasons? And is it hard to decide which events in your timeline happen onscreen versus events that the audience learns happened offscreen between seasons?

GW: We wanted a big time jump between the first two seasons to truly illustrate what our series was about, i.e. GROWING UP. After that, honestly, it’s more about what feels right. There are always things we want to skip, so that they become reveals. We have a timeline, which is currently 716 pages long (and growing), that dictates when certain things must have happened logically, stemming from events that have already taken place. And each new event that we add cascades into other decisions that also help to fill out the timeline. When things are really humming, the characters pretty much tell us what happens next, and we have surprisingly few “decisions” to make.

BV: Time jumps obviously create a mystery at the beginning of each season. We know our audience will want to know what happened between seasons and we can tease out the highlights over the course of a new season, which gives us good material to write around.

TaimurDar: Did you always know the title for season four would be “Phantoms” from the very beginning or did you come up with it afterwards or in the midst of working on the season?

GW: We didn’t know it a decade ago. But when we first pitched season four (immediately after season three) to our boss, Sam Register, we already knew it was PHANTOMS, before we’d written a single outline or script.

Thank you so much for speaking with The Nerds of Color today!

Brandon: Thanks for making time for us!

Of course! So I love Young Justice so much. It’s one of my favorite all-time series. How would you say you strike such a great balance in the show between the humor, the drama, and the thrilling action in your writing? It’s always consistent.

Brandon: Haha thank you! That’s the challenge, right? I mean, that’s what goes on in the writers’ room when you know when Greg and I are breaking stories when we bring our writers in to help us expand on the story. That is the challenge of you know crafting that balance, and sometimes there are episodes where you lean into a little more of one thing than the other things but But certainly, that’s our goal is to find just the right balance from episode to episode and throughout every season. So we’ve done that for you? Thank you. I’m glad we did our jobs right. What’s it been like working now with the Korea-based Studio Mir and how’s the show’s animation game stepped up with their involvement?

Weisman: Well, I mean, Studio Mir did a couple of episodes for us last season and they really stood out in terms of quality and they’ve been great partners this season taking on the entire season. Now. I’m sure it’s nerve-racking for them and we and everyone but they’ve just really stepped up and I mean, Brandon, you work more closely with them. 

Vietti: I mean, yeah, they’re, they’re great partners. They get the material they have a passion for the material. And I mean, let’s not forget they went through this pandemic, just like everybody else, and they overcame a lot of obstacles in working on the show, throughout this nightmare that’s going on in the world around us. And they delivered amazing work. I mean, it’s amazing and I have to say that for our crews here in LA as well. Everybody had to work through extraordinary circumstances, just like the rest of the world. We were very lucky to kind of keep the business running. We were able to keep doing the show. We honestly didn’t skip a beat. I mean, there was a little time I think as people were adjusting and getting the equipment home getting set up. But ultimately, once the dust kind of settled and we got into a rhythm, I think everybody’s passion for the material, passion for the show, really came through in the work and so so yeah, I’m really happy with what our artists that mir did for us as well as our many artists here in LA.

That’s absolutely evident while I’m watching. So on this season, the title for this season is “Phantoms” and fans have taken that to mean a number of things, from the Phantom Zone to literal ghosts appearing. So I know you can’t say any spoilers or anything like that. But can you say anything about what the thematic meaning is with the season title?

Weisman: Thematically, it’s about nothing’s ever gone. Things that took place back in season one are echoing forward into this season. Things that take place here will echo forward into seasons to come. If we’re just talking thematically, then it’s about that it’s about the idea that nothing ever goes away completely. Whether it’s the memory of a character or percussions of an event that took place sometime in the past, it’s all interconnected. And life is never as simple as just what’s in front of my face right now. I don’t want anybody else to tell me what’s here, right? Now. Life is never that simple. Phantoms of things always show up. 

Love that, thank you. So getting a little more specific, in a recent interview with DC, you had mentioned that for Halos character this season, you actually worked with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) And you learned that I’m quoting Brandon here, “We needed MPAC to help us with the nuances of authenticity that we could never find on our own as we plotted Halo’s next chapter.” So again, you can’t spoil any of the details, but how do you hope that Muslim viewers may resonate more with her this season in a way they may not have before?

Weisman: I mean, I think for starters, the thing to keep in mind is that Halo, Violet Harper, wasn’t a Muslim. This caught some fans off guard and that caught us a bit off guard to be perfectly honest, because we thought that was clear, I guess clear is maybe the wrong word. But in other words, Halo is inhabiting the entity that is Halo, which is a combination of two other entities, Gabrielle Daou and Mother Box, but neither, but is both, but is a whole new person. She’s now going to be exploring, what if anything, Islam means to her. And I’m using the word “her” on purpose because she hasn’t yet chosen her pronouns. And this is was important to us that this would be a journey and not an instantaneous thing. And one of the things she spoke to in the first episode this season is that Islam meant so much to Gabrielle that for example, Violet hasn’t been able to bring herself to stop wearing that hijab. But now she realizes that that’s got to mean something to her. And so she’s going to explore what that means. Again, as you mentioned, we don’t want to spoil anything that’s coming. But, I don’t think is a spoiler is that is the idea that it’s a journey. And so we’re hoping that Muslim viewers are willing to go with her on that journey. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed, and again, Brandon noted in that other interview, working with MPAC has been terrific. They’ve been great partners for us and a tremendous help, and incredibly supportive of what we wanted to do with Halo and with other characters on the show as well. And so I think folks are going to see that pay off throughout the season. But again, we never wanted it to be like flipping a switch. You know, we wanted it to be a path that she’s on. 

I love that, thank you. So the entire team has been through the wringer many times and from these last few episodes they’re still going through it with the in the most recent episode(SPOILER) the apparent loss of Superboy, so why must you in the writers be so cruel to our favorite heroes? I’m kidding of course, but still, why?

Vietti: [Laughs] I mean, in general, I guess I don’t really give us as being cruel. 

Weisman: I do! I think I’m truly evil. 

Vietti [Laughs] I’ve said before I relate to villains often because as we’re writing the show, we’re often plotting the demise, downfall, or manipulation of heroes. I mean, that’s our job as the writers, you know, I think to tell interesting stories, but I think even more so, we’ve been always, always trying to make the world of Young Justice feel real and grounded in some reality. And I think in the high-stakes world of the superhero business, there have to be serious consequences. And we have shown that in so many ways throughout the show, we’ve tried so hard to sell a show in which problems aren’t solved in 30 minutes and forgotten by the next step is that there are always consequences and there are always big risks to take. And there’s always fallout. And so I think, you know, with all of what we’ve done, in what is aired so far in Season Four, and what’s to come, I think is a further exploration of that, and you know, we don’t do anything lightly. We don’t make big decisions about who’s gonna live who’s gonna die, what’s going to happen to any given character lightly. None of that is ever taken lightly. There’s always a reason. And you know, you have to know if you’ve been on board with us from the beginning, that we will continue to explore major repercussions for a very long time. So it certainly wasn’t a cheap shot to our audience. There’s much to come that I hope people will find entertaining and rewarding.

Well, I can guarantee you it never feels cheap. It feels absolutely earned. So again on this most recent episode, I loved how Artemis’ response to Conner’s apparent death was to reach out to her sister Jade, AKA Cheshire. I have my own thoughts on this but what can you say on why she did that and how it ties to themes of family and found-family on the show?

Weisman: Well, I mean I think she spoke to it on the episode which is that she was not without a doubt and not trying to hide it. The death of Connor is a tragedy in and of itself because she loved him. Not romantically but she loved him. But it also is a huge, traumatic flashback to the death of Wally and her feelings about Conners’s death, and her sympathy for M’gann is bound to reverberate with her own backstory. And she’s in pain and aware that her pain right now, relative to Miss Martian’s, is probably insignificant and yet her pain is still her pain. And so she’s learned to be proactive about that. She’s learned the hard way that she needs to try and find a way to reach out to other people to help them and that any act of doing that helps her. We’ve been working this season with Dr. Janina Scarlet, on the psychological and therapeutic aspects of the show, in particular with Beast Boy, but also with all the characters. And so we wanted to make sure this was our gut reaction about how Artemis would go, you know, we wanted to run that by Janina and make sure that that felt accurate and real and not just some clever creation from two guys in Burbank, right? And so, if you look at her life, and you look at this big empty hole, well, she’s got a bunch of those, but the one that she could actually try to address is her sister. And that doesn’t make it easy. It certainly doesn’t make it automatic. But it’s at least something that she can go for. And so you see her doing that, here.

Absolutely. So, one more question. In this most recent episode, we see Talia al Ghul. And a toddler Damian Wayne. This is the second time we’ve seen that since the end of last season. Can you say anything about how they’re going to play into Batman and the Bat-Family’s storylines?

Weisman: No. [Laughs]

Vietti: No spoilers. We just put things on the table! But yeah, we’re not going to speak to how they play out. We just want you to enjoy the ride.

I appreciate that as a Damian Wayne fan and as a Young Justice fan. I love the show so much. Greg Weisman, Brandon Vietti, Thank you both so so much for joining The Nerds of Color today and you have a fantastic rest of your day!

Weisman: You too! Thank you. 

Geek: All I’ve seen is the Season Two trailer so far, but it really seems to have an even darker tone than Season One.

Greg Weisman: The trailer may kind of show that, but the show itself is not darker. Ultimately we are dealing with a team of teenagers, and teenagers are in generally a very fun group. We’ve got a lot of lightness and fun carrying over just out of the interaction of our characters, and that sort of lightness will carry over from Season One over to Season Two. But I would not say that it’s a darker show. I would say that the stakes are larger in the second season with the Invasion that is happening.

Geek: The first season felt like very much about The Team coming out the shadow of The League. What would you say is the main driving force of Season Two?

BV: By the end of our first season, we felt that we really thoroughly explored the relationships between the team and their mentors. One of the big elements for the second season is just exploring the relationships between the senior members from the team, and the new recruits. We’ve got new characters who join the team, and we’ve got new characters that sort of guest-star. We’ve come up with a lot of new characters that bring something new to the table for our team to deal with, it created for us a lot of great new relationships to explore throughout the second season.

BV: By the end of our first season, we felt that we really thoroughly explored the relationships between the team and their mentors. One of the big elements for the second season is just exploring the relationships between the senior members from the team, and the new recruits. We’ve got new characters who join the team, and we’ve got new characters that sort of guest-star. We’ve come up with a lot of new characters that bring something new to the table for our team to deal with, it created for us a lot of great new relationships to explore throughout the second season.

Geek: Let’s talk about the Freshmen for a little bit. There’s a whole bunch of new characters coming up like Blue Beetle, Batgirl, and Beast Boy… Was there somebody you are super excited to use that you finally got to use on the show in this Freshmen draft pick?

GW: It’s not like there were any characters we were forced to hold back… Any character we bring in helps jazz up the lot. We’ve got a lot of new characters this season, but we also have a lot of returning characters, and we’re “parentally fond” of all of them. It’s not like there’s one that leaps out to me like “finally!” We had a plan for Season Two back when we were making Season One, so we pretty much knew who we were bringing in.

I guess Wonder Girl, in a sense, was one of the very small handful of characters that we were told was off-limits at the very beginning of developing the series, and later when Geoff Johns came aboard, he was great and said “no, you can use her.” So we included her in Season Two. But when we got that news was so long ago that it was like old news to us… It didn’t feel like she was held back.

BV: I’ve been enjoying Blue Beetle, as a character…I as lucky enough to direct his appearance in Batman: The Brave And The Bold, and he was a very fun character in that series; I think it might have been his first time in animation. He got lots of new fans through that appearance, and it has been great to explore his character further in Young Justice.

Geek: I just wanted to take a step back and ask about the Freshmen/Team dynamic… Are we going to be seeing The Team stepping into more of a training role?

GW: To some degree.

BV: The Team is going to be a lot more self-governed in Season Two, rather than in Season One, when you saw a lot more influence from characters like Batman, Red Tornado, and Black Canary. In Season Two they really have to step up and take control of their own actions, their own destinies. And that includes training and everything else.

GW: It’s been interesting, because we’ve focused on our small team last season, and watched them make mistakes… And now they’ve got these new kids who make the same mistakes they’ve made in the first season, and how they deal with that has been fun and interesting to play out.

Geek: In the first episode you have Lobo. He’s obviously a pretty violent character. You guys haven’t really shied away from slightly more violent content for the show in the past, but how much will you be able to push the envelope with Lobo?

BV: I don’t think violence per se is our goal ever, we try to be true to the characters, and we try to be true to the story. I think he does some bad-ass stuff.

GW: He does… But it’s not like some of his comics, where it’s all gunplay and violence and blood and guts. I loved some of the older comics he was in… They were some of my favorite comics when I was younger. I think above all, my favorite thing about Lobo is that he’s chaos incarnate. Whether he’s with a gun shooting people, or he’s in a room without a gun, he’s chaos. As long as we’re playing him as chaos incarnate, we’re being true to the character. And that’s really what he brings to this series. His entrance in the first episode of the second season opens up a can of worms that will carry over through the rest of the second season. It’s hard for me to talk about because I really don’t want to spoil what he’s about in the first episode, but I think that by the end of the first episode, you’ll know what I mean.

Geek: We’ve gotten a couple of quick glimpses of how the aliens from the Invasion look like… But is this an alien race that DC readers might have encountered before?

BV: For starters, there’s not just one alien race in the invasion… I think at one point we counted nine different named alien races from the DC Universe. They’re all DC Universe races… I don’t think there are any we made up… Though we put our own unique spin on them.

Geek: Just the name “invasion” brings up the DC Comics event of the same title with the Dominators and everything… Is that something we might see here?

GW: We’re not going into what specific alien races we chose.

BV: We can neither confirm or deny any of that… We want our audience to discover these surprises for themselves. Just like we don’t announce every new character who is going to appear in the series, we are the same way with the alien races as well. Hopefully everybody will be really pleasantly surprised by our choices.

Geek: Okay, thirteen year old boy question: at the end of the last episode we saw a lot of smooching…. Will we see a lot of smooching in this new season?

GW: Some relationships will work out and some won’t… They’re teenagers, and you’re going to see a mix of successful and aborted relationships. There will be some more kissing, but it will be more like “romance in wartime,” as opposed to Season One where it was much more like teenagers in a clubhouse, boys and girls thrown together. Here, we’re on the front lines, so the tone of it shifts.

Geek: “Young Justice” is now part of the DC Nation block… Has that changed at all how you approach the show?

BV: it really hasn’t changed our content at all. With one exception, that our opening title got truncated to make room for the DC shorts. But in terms of the content of the show, we were so far along so it didn’t effect that. We think it’s really cool… “Young Justice” is, and was conceived as, a DC Universe show. We have over 200 characters from the DC Universe spanning over our two seasons. So being part of DC Nation feels really right.

One thing that we noticed was that in “Green Lantern”, one guy from Earth flies out to fight all these dangerous aliens, and in our show all these dangerous aliens come out to fight Earth; so we think it’s a really nice symmetry to how to the two shows play together I’ve been watching DC Nation every week since it came out, and I think “Green Lantern” is really great, and the shorts are fun. To me, it’s really a kick that there’s a place to go to see DC cartoon stuff.

Geek: Anything else you want to tease, anything coming up that you can’t wait for people to see in the upcoming season?

GW: Well, we’ve got a lot of great voice actors entering the stage in this new season, more than I want to reveal… But I’ll at least give you a trio: we have Mae Whitman as Wonder Girl, and we’ve got Michael Trucco from Battlestar Galactica as Adam Strange. And those two are great, but the one for me that was really fun was Tim Curry as G. Gordon Godfrey, he just really went to town in that role! And it was so much fun to write that character, and so much fun to go into the booth and hear Tim chew up the scenery.

Young Justice is of course now part of the network’s DC Nation programming block, which groups it with the Green Lantern animated series as well as various superhero short films each week. Interestingly, the creators feel that the often frustrating hiatuses that plagued Young Justice’s Season 1 airing schedule ultimately proved to be a boon in that they allowed the show to join the DC Nation block early.

“That is, the end of our first season became a part of DC Nation, and it also allowed us to go straight from Season 1 directly to Season 2, which of course we never anticipated,” explains Weisman. “It’s really cool that there’s only a one-week gap between Season 1 and Season 2. It’s pretty neat. And the neat thing about DC Nation is we’re partnered with Green Lantern, which is a show about a human being going out into outer space and facing dangerous aliens out there. And our show [in Season 2] is really about a bunch of dangerous aliens coming to Earth and our heroes being on the front lines and facing them here. I think that makes those two shows really nice companions.”

The producers told me that Season 2 picks up “a minute” after Season 1 ended, and while they were hesitant to reveal any plot details, they did say that they’ve changed up the dynamic of the show — and its characters.

“We changed things up a little bit,” Vietti told me. “In the first season, the team’s all very new. They’re all young teenagers trying to come into their own in the world and be more grown-up heroes. So we explored a lot of relationships between teenage students and adult mentors. That was a big dynamic we explored throughout the course of the first season. In our second season, the team has really proven themselves since the first season. They’re a full-fledged team. They’re sort of the side unit of the Justice League, and they’ve been very successful. They’ve even come up with their own missions and stuff, to the point where they haven’t needed to be assigned tasks to do. I think in the second season, you’re going to see a lot less of that dynamic where somebody has to come give them an assignment. We wanted them to feel like they’ve grown. They’re their own unit, they’re finding their own missions and going out to solve problems on their own.”

One of those problems includes The Light, the villainous cadre of characters who were pulling the strings from behind the scenes in Season 1. Their storyline, it would seem, did not end with the finale that aired last week.

“I think it’s just begun,” hints Weisman. “It’s basically stage one of The Light’s plan in Season 1. At the end of Season 1, Vandal Savage actually says, ‘Let’s begin phase two.’ That launches us off into our second season where we explore more of his plans. You will see The Light [again].”

In the Season 1 finale, Savage memorably calls the Justice League “champions of stagnation … dedicated to maintaining society’s calcified status quo.” The producers explained that Savage and his fellow villains don’t really see themselves as being bad guys at all.

“They see themselves as the heroes of the story,” says Weisman. “I don’t think they see the Justice League as evil; I think they see them as hugely misguided. So I think maybe one of the contrasts for our series, as opposed to other shows, is that our bad guys aren’t particularly interested in killing our good guys. That’s not to say that they won’t kill them if they get in the way or they’re problematic at a specific moment, but there’s no desire to, you know — ‘I’ve got to get that superhero!’ It’s not really about that. Oftentimes, our bad guys see our heroes as useful pawns, and sometimes our heroes are useful pawns. That’s not going to change. The Light has really, really long-term plans, and all that happens in Season 1 feeds into Season 2. And all that happens in Season 2 is part of those plans.”

Another part — or result, perhaps — of those plans is the introduction of even more characters on the show. Exactly which characters, Weisman and Vietti aren’t saying… yet.

“We will have new members come in that join the team,” says Weisman. “Some don’t join the team. Some join the team but don’t make the cut. It’s going to be an ongoing issue throughout the season. And a lot of the dynamics are shifting, as Brandon said, from this sort of mentor/protege, student/teacher dynamic — even a child dynamic — in Season 1 to more of a senior/freshman dynamic in Season 2, where our original characters who’ve been in it from more or less day one are now the seniors of the class. We’ve got some freshmen coming in, and we want to see how that gels. Now the younger kids learn from the older kids.”

A topic that has often come up in the IGN comments section is the construction of the show’s version of Robin, and how he seems to walk the line between the Dick Grayson and Tim Drake Boy Wonders at times. When asked about this, Vietti pretty strenuously disagreed with the notion — and wouldn’t say one way or another if we’ll be seeing any other Robins enter the picture this season.

“I think our Dick Grayson is very Dick Grayson, and … I guess there are two small aspects [that are different],” he said. “His costume has some Tim Drake influence, but frankly, the little elf shorts weren’t going to fly in the 21st century, so anything we did to give him long pants was going to feel sort of Tim Drakey. Then the other thing is that we gave him hacking skills, which we think would just suit the Dick Grayson of the 21st century as well. But personality-wise, I think our Dick Grayson is clearly Dick Grayson. His background is the circus. He’s the acrobat first, martial artist second. … How this evolves going forward throughout this season or potential future seasons, I don’t really want to get into. But I really do feel that aside from a couple of pretty superficial elements, our Robin is and always has been very Dick Grayson and has never been very Tim Drake.”

Having said that, it appears that the Young Justice writers are free to use just about any DC character that they like — so stay hopeful, Damian Wayne and Stephanie Brown fans! That wasn’t always the case, however. When the show first started, there were a “handful” of characters that were forbidden for use by the Time Warner corporate decision makers above.

“You could count them on one hand,” recalls Vietti. “But once [DC Chief Creative Officer] Geoff Johns came aboard to his new position, he said, ‘No, use who you want.’ He’s been great. So going into Season 2, by the time we were fully developing Season 2, we didn’t have anyone we couldn’t use.”

Weisman adds that the series was always conceived as a “DC Universe show.”

“We’ve had tremendous support from our friends at DC,” he says. “And bringing all these characters to life, we counted them up, and I think we have like 240-something characters over the course of two seasons, which is huge. And it’s all good for the characters. We’ve been fortunate enough to cast some lesser known characters from the comics and put the spotlight on them in our show and start introducing these characters to old fans and new fans alike. I think that’s been great fun for us because we just love all these characters, and we want everybody else in the world to love these characters too. So it’s been awesome to have this opportunity and this series to explore so much of the DC Universe.”

As any comic-book fan will tell you, a very important aspect of any adaptation is how the costumes of their beloved characters turn out. As fans themselves, this was also a matter of great importance to Weisman and Vietti — and one they did not take lightly.

“We always start with the traditional costumes from the comic books,” says Weisman. “We don’t purposefully go in and change the comic-book designs just because we want to. I think we basically take the traditional comic-book outfit as a starting point, and then we try to make sure that it works in our world. I think we didn’t want to make everybody look like they were wearing spandex. We set out to create a more realistic world for our characters to be in. There’s a lot of focus on the tailoring of outfits to make them look like real-world outfits. Robin in particular, we wanted him to look like his outfit maybe had Kevlar on it, like it could stop a bullet. Spandex doesn’t give you that. We had to add seams to his costume and stuff to make it look like he’s padded and ready to street-fight alongside Batman. And that’s just one example. We went through the thought process for every character. Their costume designs were based on their abilities and their needs in the field when they’re in battle, things like that. So some of the costumes needed a little more of a tailor adjustment than others. But we always tried to stay true to the source material, because we really respect where these characters come from and the tradition that they’re a part of.”

As for a Season 3 for Young Justice, so far there’s no word. So far…

But the tone of the series hasn’t changed, according to co-creator Greg Weisman. Young Justice will still focus on pushing to make the superhero genre to be as realistic as it can be. Just with more cosmic stuff.

“Basically, the galaxy’s coming to Earth,” Weisman says, “and our guys are the front line.”

Bringing in new characters from the DC Universe was always in the creators’ plans — Weisman counted and they have 241 characters total appearing in the first 26-episode season of Young Justice and the second season of 20 episodes combined. They wanted to see the cast grow as former sidekicks and youngsters Robin, Miss Martian, Zatanna and their ilk came into their own under the tutelage of Batman, Superman and the rest of the grownup superheroes.

The team will be growing quickly. Wonder Girl (voiced by Parenthood star Mae Whitman) shows up in Saturday’s episode, as does Adam Strange (Michael Trucco of Battlestar Galactica). Blue Beetle, Beast Boy, Lagoon Boy, Bumblebee, Batgirl and more will debut as the season progresses.

There were student-teacher relationships explored in the first season of Young Justice, Vietti says, but with so many newcomers in the second season, “we have more of a freshman vs. senior relationship dynamic going on.”

And not everyone will make the cut, Weisman says. “Some are going to do really well with the team, others won’t do quite so well.”

Where there are heroes, there are villains and ne’er-do-well sorts. G. Gordon Godfrey, who in comics is a minion of the evil Darkseid, appears in Saturday’s episode and is voiced by movie and animation veteran Tim Curry. (Asked if this means Darkseid and other folks from Apokolips will be coming later in the season, Weisman says, “I’m not going to confirm or deny.”)

Lobo, voiced by David Sobolov (Teen Titans), also makes his debut, and the intergalactic mercenary is one of Vietti’s favorite characters.

“He’s just the embodiment of chaos,” he says of Lobo. “His appearance is the top of the sci-fi iceberg for our team, the first encounter of many we’ll be exploring for the rest of the season.”

KSITETV: Season 2 of Young Justice is subtitled Invasion. Who is it that is doing the invading?

Greg Weisman: It’s not just one alien race. We’ve got something like eight or nine alien races at one point or another hitting the Earth throughout the season. Earth has had the spotlight shone on it, and the galaxy’s taking notice. I’m not going to get to specifics about it, but we definitely have a cascading alien danger.

In the finale, Vandal Savage referred to a “Phase Two.” Does this have anything to do with the coming Invasion?

GW: It does. Everything ties in, going frankly all the way back to Episode 1 of Season 1, but definitely Episode 26, our finale of Season 1, which aired this past weekend.

When we designed the show, we didn’t know that Episode 1 of Season 2 would air literally one week after, but it’s pretty cool, because it really lets our momentum go right into the new season. The episode literally starts where the previous episode left off, and things get pretty intense very quickly.

What kind of journey is Red Arrow going to be going on, now that he knows he’s not really Roy?

GW: It’s a downward spiral at first, frankly. And that very way you phrased that, that he’s not really Roy, is going to be a big issue for him. He’s not the original Roy, but is he really Roy or not? That’s one of the questions that he’s going to be dealing with throughout the season. He’s got this overall goal to find the original Speedy, the original Roy Harper. Obviously I’m not going to say whether he succeeds or not. A lot of characters on the show are convinced that The Light didn’t keep the original Roy Harper alive.

Brandon Vietti: It’s one of the great personal journeys that we’ve got in our second season. So much of our second season is focused on the invasion. Roy Harper’s story was actually the great little side story for us to explore and tell throughout the second season.

On the subject of clones, have we seen the last of the patches that gave Superboy full Kryptonian powers?

GW: Yeah.

There was some kissing going on at New Year’s. Will any of those relationships be continuing on into Season Two?

GW: You know, a couple of them are definitely a big issue for Season Two, and a couple of them, not so much. No spoilers.

How quickly do we go into the missing 16 hours of the Justice Leaguers?

GW: That’s an issue from Moment One. Literally, minute one of episode one of Season 2, and it’s something that they begin to address right off the bat. Frankly, it’s an ongoing subplot for the entire season, all the way through Episode 20. It’s not something that we let sleep for a while. It is something that we deal with right off the bat, and continue to do.

Will we be seeing any more female heroes on the show in Season 2?

BV: Yes. [laughs]

Beyond the one that was in the trailer [Wonder Girl], are you allowed to talk about any of them?

BV: We’ve announced a few. At this point I’ve forgotten exactly…

GW: Batgirl, Bumblebee, Wonder Girl, and that’s just the start.

Will Rocket be sticking around with the team? She’s pretty cool.

GW: Rocket is very cool, and she’s sticking around. I’m not going to go into specifics of her situation…

BV: But you will see her in Season Two.

GW: In fact, you’ll see her in the first episode.

Will any costumes be changing for Season Two?

BV: Yeah. A little bit. There’s no huge, dramatic leaps in costume, I don’t think. You’re not going to see anything wildly new or different from what you’d expect from comic book heroes that you know and love, but yeah. There’s some little tailoring adjustments here and there.

How many episodes are planned for Season Two?

BV: 20.

Will the schedule be more consistent for the second season than it was for the first?

BV: We’d love to be able to tell you, but it’s our friends at Cartoon Network that determine the scheduling. That’s a whole other building in a whole other state. We leave that up to them.

When we talked at Wondercon, you talked about how much of the series was conceived at the beginning. As you got through the first season, did any of the characters surprise you?

GW: In some ways, they all surprised me. Everything’s been pretty well planned out, but you learn stuff as you go. As you write characters… certainly as you record them. The actors always bring something into the characters, which in turn influences the writing. Then we have these great artists on the show, and often times, we’ll write and even record characters before we’ve got a design completed, and then we see the character looks like and we’re like ‘Wow. This guy or this gal’s really cool.’ Every time we get an episode back from Korea, even, where we see the animation for the first time, there’s something in each and every one where we’re sort of like ‘that really works!’ And it informs everything that follows.

Are there any more big guest voice actors coming up that we can look forward to hearing?

GW: We don’t want to spoil all of them, but we’ve got a few coming up. A triumverate of big names, even in this first episode that we’re introducing. We’ve got Mae Whitman from Parenthood and Arrested Development. She plays Wonder Girl. And we have Michael Trucco from Battlestar Galactica as Adam Strange. For me, the one that’s just a ton of fun is we’ve got Tim Curry playing G. Gordon Godfrey. That was just a really fun character to write, and then every time we’d come in to the booth, Tim would take what we wrote, and just run with it. We were always cracking up, and that freed us up the next time we wrote for the character, when we went even further and then HE’D go even further. Tim’s character runs through all 20 episodes, and Godfrey just was a huge kick to write.

Peter David wrote an episode with a very familiar sounding web-swinger. Who was responsible for bringing that in?

GW: I guess that was me. I just thought it would be a fun little inside joke for fans of Spectacular Spider-Man, to cast Josh Keaton as the Black Spider. Josh came in, and he’s like ‘How do you want to do this?’ And I’m like ‘Well, think of Peter Parker at age 25 instead of 15, and evil.’ So we were sort of hitting that one on the head. It was just a throaway teaser kind of thing. I think it was a fun inside joke. I don’t want to take it too seriously. We had fun with it.

That was one of the many things that the show has done to appeal to older fans as well as the younger audience. How do you balance that, and is it a concerted effort to appeal to everybody?

GW: Absolutely. We definitely don’t want to be too adult, but we don’t want to be too kiddie. we love to know that adult fans of DC Comics can tune in, maybe with their kids, and watch this together, and they’ll each have a good time with it, and get something out of it. We try to hit the broadest possible audience with the material that we put together.

There are many teen heroes in the DC Universe that actually come from the future. Might we be seeing any of them in Season 2?

GW: No comment.

Beyond Season 2, would you have a planned arc if the Cartoon Network says they want a third year?

GW: Absolutely. I’ve got an entire bulletin board I’m staring at right now, just full of story ideas for Season Three. So if they want it… frankly, we could go through Season 5, 6, 7 without a hell of a lot of problems.

BV: The brain storming during the first two seasons, we came up with so many stories that just would not fit into 26 episodes or 20 episodes. So, yeah. There’s a lot of leftover story ideas we would love to explore. Even new stories…. new arcs that we’d love to plan. Any time you come to the end of a season and you’ve watched how your characters evolved through the course of that season, you can’t help but to think ‘man, you know what would be great to happen next?’ Just a whole bunch of new ideas come up. So, yeah. We’re loaded with ideas and ready to go for a third season if we can get one.

GW: We also have the companion comic book Young Justice, so some of those stories that Brandon just talked about will be actually appearing in Young Justice the comic book. They’re all in-continuity; they have time stamps just like our episodes have time stamps, so if you’re a big time fan and you’re following along and you want to know ‘well, where exactly does this story fit into the continuity?’ It’s easy to figure out. You know exactly what day, what hour, what minute events are taking place, and all of those are part of this ridiculous 191 page timeline that I’ve got for the series.

BV: Very recently, it was announced that there’s a video game [coming] for Young Justice. We worked very closely with the guys making that game to put together a story that’s in line, in continuity with our series. So that’s something else for fans to look forward to.

Can you tease Saturday’s season premiere?

GW: We’ve got a lot of big events taking place. We’re introducing new characters, as we’ve mentioned. The Main Man is coming in. We’ve got Lobo. So, I think that’s enough said.

CBR News: Gentlemen, “Young Justice” is a bit of a departure from some of the previous DC animated series, and a big part of what people are sensing as different about it is how connected it is to what DC Comics is doing. How has this process been different from previous DC shows Warner Bros. has done?

Greg Weisman: Well, I can’t speak for the previous DC animated shows. I wrote for some of them, but I was just a freelancer on the outside of the process. But there’s no doubt that on this show, we’ve been really tight with DC. Ivan Cohen, who just left, and especially Geoff Johns and now Mike Carlin — it’s been a very close process, and they’ve been involved since day one. They’re very cooperative and great partners on the project.

“Young Justice” is a series that takes its name from a DC book, but it isn’t exactly what you’d call a straight adaptation. Were you guys looking to do a teen team show in general and found a comic series to help flesh out the background?

Brand Vietti: Going back to the start of it, Sam Register who’s our boss here at Warner Animation put Greg and I together. I think one of the first things he wanted us to think about was a “Justice League” show. And Greg and I said, “Love the idea, but…”

Weisman: It terrified us.

Vietti: [Laughs] Yeah! Bruce Timm had just done an awesome “Justice League” show not that long ago, and we really didn’t want to try and do it again. It just felt like to new of a thing. At some point, the idea of a younger hero show came up, and then “Young Justice” came up and that started the conversation rolling together. That got all of our interest — another teen show but not too close to something like “Teen Titans.” It was maybe a little closer to “Justice League,” but it could stand on its own compared to both of those shows, which were great shows. From that point, Greg and I started really thinking about it.

We were both interested in trying to do a new take on a teenage superhero show. We’d both, in the pasts of our careers done teenage superhero shows, and there’s a lot of “-isms” that are sort of common to those shows. We wanted to put all that behind us and try to find a new way to do a teenager superhero show. We’ve really focused on trying to ground the series and make it feel more realistic than anything we’ve done before. We thought that would make a great stamp of originality on “Young Justice” as a series. From the bottom up, we think of it a little bit like a teenager reality show. We’re just dealing with teenagers who happen to be superheroes.

With a cast this size on a show designed for general audiences, some of the characters like Robin are pretty easy to identify while Superboy or Miss Martian might require a bit more explanation. Is there a character you view as the star of the show?

Weisman: I think we’ve got six leads plus a boatload of supporting characters of secondary or tertiary characters. And amongst our six leads, we try to share the wealth. I think obviously if you take the pilot and cut it in half — because it really is two episodes — you get one episode that focuses equally on Aqualad, Kid Flash and Robin and one episode that obviously focuses on Superboy. As the series progresses, particularly the six that follow the pilot, we try to give each one of those six a shot to lead. Plus, we don’t ignore the other five during any of those. Episode three focuses on Miss Martian, but we’re not losing focus of the other four. And Artemis hasn’t even joined the show yet. So we really try to spread the wealth.

Having said that, obviously our conception of Superboy is a little bit different from what people see in the comics. I think it’s true to the origins of the character, but it’s definitely a new interpretation. In the same way, our new interpretation of Aqualad is a whole new guy wearing the red and blue. We wanted to make sure we were conceptually introducing him, but Aqualad compared to Aquaman isn’t that hard to get across as a concept. You’ve got to see how he operates and what his personality is like. But Superboy you’ve got to understand the concept of Superman in order to get this kid at all. Then you’ve got to understand that cloning…we just didn’t want to make it seem like cloning happens all the time here. We wanted to make a big deal of it.

We’re dealing with the superhero genre, and I say this with a lot of affection, that’s a real bastard genre. It mixes fantasy and science fiction and detective genres and any other you could think of. It’s always been that way, but we’re trying to ground the genre in as much reality as possible. One of the things that means is not taking these science fiction and fantasy concepts for grants. It’s not, “Oh yeah, this stuff happens all the time.” We want you to know there are superheroes in this world, but it is not an everyday thing for people. Every time you introduce a concept, you introduce it for the very first time. Something like Superboy and cloning too that time to put together, and we needed an inciting incident to put the team together in the first place. Kicking it off with Cadmus and Superboy was a great way to start.

And Superboy’s relationship to Superman here is this kind of angsty denial of a relationship. Did you guys try to tell a story about how the kids relate to their mentors?

Vietti: Yeah, we put a lot of thought into the relationships between the sidekicks and their mentors. It was another thing that helped us ground the series in reality. We showed very simply how teenagers relate to their parents. It’s a situation that feels like a real teenage experience. And we wanted to explore parents the sidekicks had with the adults. It was fun to go character-by-character. Some worked themselves out for us. Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne, Batman and Robin. There’s so much of that relationship there in the comics to pull from. But then of course, we’ve got the new Aqualad which we were able to nuance ourselves. And Superman and Superboy we also got to create from scratch with a lot of invention and new ideas for them. That push and pull between good relationships and bad relationships creates a nice contrast between all of the kids and makes a more dramatic show.

The high concept of the series is that you’ve cast the Young Justice squad as a black ops team who are doing missions for Batman. How did that idea affect the show’s development as a whole? What does it add to the larger arc of the characters?

Vietti: The covert ops thing, again, I think brings a stamp of originality in terms of animation. I know that’s been explored a bit in the comics, but at Warner Bros. animation we’ve not done a lot of stuff like that. So it helps us define the theme that would make our show unique in comparison to all the other superhero shows we’ve done here. Once we went in that direction, it really helped guide a lot of the stories we came up with and the situations we put our teams in. It also helped affect the teenagers lives outside of the costume. The show is all about secrets and lies. That’s exactly what you want and what you need when you’re going to do stories about covert ops. But it was also a really good guide in creating the dramatic situations we’d put our teenagers in when they’re out of costume as well. We’ve been trying to find real life situations that anybody can relate to where you’re lying to your parents or even lying to you — when you can’t admit certain truths to yourself. These are secrets and lies that anybody deals with on a day-to-day basis, and we’re able to incorporate that into the series two-fold.

Brandon, the last show you worked on was “Batman: The Brave & The Bold” before taking some time to direct the “Under The Red Hood” DVD. This show feels quite different from both those projects, but very different in terms of animation style from “Brave & The Bold.” What influences impacted how the look of “Young Justice” came about and the choice to “age up” the tone a bit?

Vietti: Once we decide to go with the more realistic feel and tone for the stories, the artwork had to follow. Otherwise the stories wouldn’t have the weight that we wanted them to. So we needed a very realistic look. That all started when we brought on board our lead character designer Phil Bourassa, who came to us from designs for the “Crisis on Two Earths” DVD. We got him to start designing for our show right away, and we were pushing him to design in a way that was more realistic than even he was used to. One of the things that I wanted for our characters was the idea that none of them shop at the same store. Every character had to have a costume that was tailored to their specific needs as a hero. I like to point to Robin having more seams and padding and a sense of body armor about him because he’s a guy who fights in the streets versus a guy like Kid Flash. At first, we see Kid Flash with a very streamlined costume to match his mentor in the Flash, but later on in the show you see him with a more padded costume. He starts to use his speed in his own way. Rather than just following Flash’s example, he starts to develop his own style, using his speed to be like a human cannonball.

So we looked a lot at what the characters needed specifically and tried to tailor their costumes to that idea. Phil was great at coming up with ways to convey these different textures from costume to costume in a very subtle, yet animation-friendly way. All of these costumes cross in the animation, and it creates that overall sense of realism that our stories need. The background designs and paintings also look as realistic as we can do for television. There’s a strong sense of lighting from episode to episode. We put a focus on that because lighting is the texture that builds reality. Across the board, reality guides us. We do everything we can to make the show feel as real as popular.

Greg, one thing everyone knows about your animation work from “Gargoyles” on through “Spectacular Spider-Man” is that you layer in complex plots and build big season arc stories through each episode. We’ve seen some teases in the show so far about a shadowy group watching our team from the backgrounds. What can you say about how you’re building that larger arc, and what kind of marching orders did you have in terms of making this show one big story?

Weisman: Well, I don’t know about marching orders, but I think that when someone hires me they know what they’re getting, for better or for worse. [Laughter] Though I think even Sam was caught off guard when he saw our big board. We have a gigantic bulletin board that breaks down all 26 episodes, and it was myself, Brandon and staff writer Kevin Hopps who did all those breakdowns. The three of us did that before we started writing a single script. And that’s just how I roll, I guess. But I will say Kevin and especially Brandon upped my game on this series. For me, I’m big on “Let’s prep this stuff in advance so I have to do less work later.” I like to lay pipe for things in advance. I like to be prepared for what’s coming up and to capitalize on things we’ve already done rather than going “Oh yeah, we did that. How do I get the repercussions of that in?”

And I like telling great episodic stories too. You can tune in to any episode of “Young Justice” — and I think that’s true of any show I’ve done — and go, “Wow! This is a great yarn! This is a great story I enjoyed!” You don’t have to have seen everything that came before or watch everything that comes after. But if you watch these things sequentially and keep up, you not only get the great story but the larger tapestry of what’s going on. It’s a lot more rewarding for the audience, and that’s how I like to work on frankly any series. I want it to work on the individual level and the grander scale.

Kevin and Brandon just dove in with me, and that’s been the one of the most fun aspects about the season. Breaking down everything makes it so, when we get down to writing outlines and scripts and storyboards, we’ve got some foresight. We can say, “We’re introducing this character in episode three, but let’s keep in mind what that character is going to do in episode ten so we’re not designing something that’ll give us trouble later.” It allows for synchronicity in production. And we try to keep open to serendipity too. If an idea occurs to us in the process, that’s great, we’ll go with it. But we have the ability to do that in part because we’ve laid the groundwork in advance.

Looking ahead to the rest of the season, we’ve already met most of the team and a few villains like Bane and Kobra. Who else are you excited to get on the screen that you’ve not been able to play with in animation before? 

Vietti: I’m really anxious to get to Artemis. There’s a lot of mystery about her online and guessing as to who she really is, and that will all be revealed in time. She’s been a great character to work with. Her back story and origins are as rich as any other character we’ve chosen for the show. She’s going to be great to get to, but that’s about all I can say because we’re trying to keep things under wraps for now. We will have other guest stars — heroes and villains. Again, with a show that’s all about secrets and lies and misdirection, we’re playing our cards close. We don’t want to reveal too much about the characters coming up because the storylines depend on keeping the secrets of certain identities. We want to keep the surprises held back so the punch hits the audience hard when they’re revealed.

Weisman: That’s a long version of my answer, which is [sings] “We’re not telling you!” [Laughter]

You mean you can’t even say if we’ll be seeing more of the Conan O’Brien’s Flaming C?

Weisman: The Flaming C seems to be a monster that has sort of taken over our lives! [Laughter] And I wouldn’t say it’s taken over our lives if you’d seen the end of it, let’s put it that way.

The clips starts as Batman and Robin (Dick Grayson) face off against Mr. Freeze. Robin seems particularly excited that “today’s the day.” Next, Green Arrow and Speedy (Roy Harper) stop Icicle Jr. from causing havok in Star City. On a freighter ship, Aquaman and Aqualad stop Killer Frost. And finally, Flash and Kid Flash (Wally West) put a stop to Captain Cold. Each sidekick excited that “today’s the day.”

The “day” is the first day of training for Young Justice, it seems.  Batman and  Aquaman stand beside their sidekicks, Robin and Aqualad, in front of the Hall of Justice. Just then, Flash and Kid Flash race to the scene, and Kid Flash remarks, “I knew we’d be the last ones here!”

The producers talked a bit about the show. Some of this was covered back on the San Diego panel, and some of it was new information. The series takes place on “Earth-16”, so it’s in-continuity with the DC Comics Universe as its own earth. The comic book series will tie closely to the animated series, as Producers Greg Weisman and Staff Writer Kevin Hopps will write a zero issue of the new YOUNG JUSTICE comic book series. Following that, TINY TITANS team Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani will write the series, but Weisman will return to write another issue down the line. The comic will tie in with the animated series, as some issues take place between episodes, or even during episodes to show events from a different perspective.

On this earth, Wesiman explains, things are a little more “grounded” and “realistic.” The Justice League hasn’t been active long, and in their universe, they’ve become fast celebrities. Because they’re in the spotlight so much, they need to develop a covert ops team. Which is why “Young Justice” is formed. Superman has been active for about 10 years, and Robin (the first sidekick) has been active for 4 years.

Weisman described it as a “New Age of Heroes,” as the League itself is even a fairly new entity in this world. In response to these organized heroes, the villains are also becoming more organized. As such, they will not be a bumbling bunch – they’ll be deadly and decisive in their actions.

Tonally, the producers said it falls somewhere between Bruce Timm’s JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED and TEEN TITANS. We will see a lot of  the teens in their downtime, and some of their missions will even be done in plainclothes. Weisman mentioned he’s a big fan of Joss Whedon, and emulated a little bit of that style for the show. A little comedy to offset the drama, a lot of romance, some angst, but a lot of humor as well.

The Leaguers (pictured above) will be featured regularly, with Bruce Greenwood as Batman, Alan Tudyk as Green Arrow, Phil Lemarr as Aquaman and Rob Lowe as Captain Marvel. Other Leaguers include Flash, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Martian Manhunter, Red Tornado, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Zatara, Captain Atom, Black Canary and Green Lantern (John Stewart).

Batman will often be doling out missions. Black Canary is the designated combat trainer. And Red Tornado will be a “sort of live-in den mother,” according to Wesiman. This is similar to Red Tornado’s role in the YOUNG JUSTICE comic book series. The rest of the Leaguers will be around as-needed.

Captain Marvel will start hanging around with the Young Justice team, because he’s secretly a 10-year old kid in an older body. One fan asked why they used Zatara rather than Zatanna, and the producers noted “the answer will become obvious halfway through the season.” (I’m guessing we’ll see a teenaged Zatanna perhaps?) Weisman also mentioned that he would like to use Captain Atom (Wesiman was the  former writer of his comic book series), but there hasn’t been a place for him yet.

When opened up to Q&A, fans began to ask questions like, “Will we see (XX) character in the series?” The producers wanted to keep those kinds of  surprises under wraps, so viewers can experience it while watching. Weisman said, “We’re not going to come up here and spoil a ton about a show that’ll premiere in a month and a half. My short answer is we have over 150 existing DC Universe characters in the first 18 episodes alone.” “A metric ton” of DC characters, was the exact phrase.

Fans still found playful ways to ask about certain comic book characters like the Legion of Doom and the Wonder Twins. Weisman didn’t answer directly, and said he always mixes up those villainy-groups like Secret Society, Legion of Doom and Injustice League because they are all fairly similar. His response to the Wonder Twins was “150 characters,” and added, “We’re including the Superfriends as part of the DC Universe,” which seemed like a pretty good indication we may see a certain brother-sister team from Exxor.

One fan asked about the previous “Bat Embargo” placed on JUSTICE LEAGUE, where the series was unable to use certain Batman-related characters due to licensing issues (the same thing happened with Wonder Girl during the TEEN TITANS animated series). Weisman said that there was a few characters they didn’t have access to in the beginning, but now there were no restrictions on any of the characters. “We no longer have an embargo on any chracaters as far as I know,” noted Weisman. He mentioned they would have used one character in the beginning if they could, so we may see that character in season two if there is an order for a season two (I’m guessing he’s referring to Wonder Girl). “If we don’t see them in season one, we’ll see them later,” the producers assured.

The producers mentioned that the theme of “Secrets and Lies” permeates the first 26 episodes. The villains are keeping secrets. The League is keeping secrets from the sidekicks. Young Justice is keeping secrets from each other, and even themselves.

The cast itself is a mash-up of the original Teen Titans and Young Justice members from various eras. The producers said they “wanted to start over,” so they used Dick Grayson and Wally West versions of the characters. Weisman mentioned that if you are using Robin, starting with Tim Drake made less sense than starting with Dick Grayson, the original sidekick.

The team said they referenced and reread a lot of old comics, including YOUNG JUSTICE, TEEN TITANS from the 60s and 70s and the NEW TEEN TITANS from the 80s. “We’re adpating from all over,” noted Weisman, “We’re basically adapting the entire DC Universe.”

Robin: Voiced by Jesse McCarthy. In this series, he’s a 13 year old Dick Grayson, but he’s been Robin for 4 years time, so he’s been Robin since he was 9 years old. He’s the most experienced of the team. Robin also keeps his identity secret, even from his teammates, and wears sunglasses when he’s hanging around with them in downtime.  Robin has revealed his secret identity to best friend Wally West (Kid Flash), and if Batman knew, he wouldn’t be happy about that.

Kid Flash: Voiced by Jason Spizak. He’s Wally West and he’s 15 years old. Not quite as fast as the Flash, so he has to accelerate and decelerate to use his powers. He’ll also use his powers a little differently than traditional speedsters, using momentum to launch himself as a human cannonball of sorts. His goggles also have some high-tech tricks, like seeing different light spectrums.

Aqualad: Voiced by Khary Payton (who also provided the voice for Cyborg). His name is Kaldur’ahm (which differs from the BRIGHTEST DAY version, whose name is Jackson). His friends sometimes shorten that to Kaldur. His father is Black Manta, which is something he isn’t even aware of. Kaldur’ahm’s powers are a mix of Atlantean sorcery and science, which are channeled through the mystic eel tattoos on his arms. In the series, Kaldur’ahm is best friends with Garth (no word on whether Garth would be Aqualad or Tempest, if either), and there would be stories revolving around both of them.

One fan asked why the comic book version in BRIGHTEST DAY differed from the YOUNG JUSTICE animated version, and the producers said that Geoff Johns came by and fell in love with the character, so he ended up using him. But the producers clarified the Aqualad in BRIGHTEST DAY is “Earth-0” while their universe is “Earth-16” anyway.

Superboy: Voiced by Nolan North (who also provides the voice of Superman). He’s a 16-week old clone who appears to be 16, and he’ll eventually assume the Conner Kent secret identity. Weisman noted that this is “a new interpretation of Superboy,” but he thinks Superboy will be the breakout star of the show.

Miss Martian: Voiced by Danica McKellar. Martian Manhunter’s 16-year old niece. The producers mentioned she’s actually 48 years old, but it works out to be 15-16 by earth standards. She’s very new to the hero game, and especially new to combat. A naive girl, Miss Martian has a somewhat warped view of the world because she’s gleaned most of her knowledge by watching earth tv shows to study its culture.

Artemis: Voiced by Stephanie Lemelin. This 16-year old heroine is neither Arrowette, nor Wonder Girl nor Speedy, not an Amazon and she’s not from Apokolips. But she is an existing character in the DCU! The panel refused to reveal who, however. Weisman thought her identity should be “fairly obvious,” though.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: How long has this been in development?

BRANDON: About a year.

GREG: Longer than that – I think it was March – not this March but the previous March.

BRANDON: Time blurs together when you’re working on something so intensely.

GREG: It took us months to finally get the green light, because Warner Brother and Cartoon Network and DC are all part of the same Time-Warner family, so getting them to communicate with each other takes a long time. So it took us a while to get the green light, but then I think last October, we finally got the green light and we’ve been on an express train ever since.

BRANDON: But it came together really quickly, because I think Greg and I both came into this kind of wanting to do the same kind of show together. I think we had different ideas on how to do it, but when these characters came up, I think Sam Register was a big part of helping come up with the idea for what direction to take for us, putting the show together.

GREG: And it intimidated both of us. Sam sort of said, “Here’s the kind of show we want to do, something with Justice League, or the young characters or something like that,” and he threw out the Young Justice title, just the title, and I think we were both terrified, because Bruce’s [Bruce Timm] Justice League Unlimited is so iconic, and so great, and Teen Titans is a very different show, but it’s also a great show in the other direction, and so for us to forge something that was new, and wasn’t treading on the turf of those two shows was sort of scary.

And then we sort of found our placement with this covert ops team, and I put together a list of – I’m not kidding – 50 teenage characters for us to choose from. We went through and made the decision fairly early on that this was going to be a young DC universe, that Superman will have only shown up ten years ago, put on the cape ten years ago, Batman would have only put on the cape nine years ago, that the heroes haven’t been around that long, and once you’ve made that decision, then the idea of starting with Dick Grayson and Wally West, the original side kicks, they’re still young…

BRANDON: I think that also helped us get out from under the shadow of these other shows, like Teen Titans and Justice League – to sort of reset the DC youth, in a way, and that allowed us the freedom to find our own identity.

GREG: Which was really important to us – and we think we’ve done it… we hope we’ve done it –

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Where does it fall in terms of the age of the audience that you’re shooting for?

BRANDON: We’re hoping to catch everybody. Our stories are all about teenagers of course, and I think those stories are going to appeal to the younger audiences, but there’s a sophistication to the way we’re telling the stories, there’s a complexity to the stories that we’ve got that will definitely appeal to the older fans.

GREG: I think, from an economic standpoint, we have to hit boys 6 – 14 for Cartoon Network to sell their ad space or whatever, so if you think of it as a bull’s eye with concentric circles, that’s the bull’s eye we have to hit – but I’m not satisfied with that and I don’t think Brandon is either. A, we want boys and girls, so there’s a lot of great relationship stuff in this, there’s humor in this show – I mean, it’s a serious show, but there’s a lot of humor in it, there’s a lot of eye candy for little kids.

I think little kids could enjoy this show, and some stuff will go over their heads, but they won’t know it’s going over their heads. There are a lot of explosions and guys in costumes, big villains and big events that are eye candy for the youngest audience, but there’s a lot of sophisticated stories for a teen audience, a college age audience, an old fart audience like me – and I certainly think any fan of DC comics in general is going to find a lot of great stuff from the 75 year history of DC comics to enjoy in the show.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: You’re going to hear a lot of farts and burps in Teen Titans, not so much in Young Justice?

BRANDON: Not so much – maybe occasionally, we’ve got teenagers and we’re true to that fact. They’re not dry teenagers, they’re fun teenagers, and they may not be fun in the middle of an mission – we treat our missions and our action very seriously, but when they’re training together or hanging out together, there will be moments of levity, because they’re teenagers, and I think they have genuine teenage reactions.

GREG: And we’re also trying to show a complete picture of their lives, so we don’t just see them training or on missions, we also see their home lives, we see their school lives, we’re trying to get a complete picture. We wanted to ground this series in reality as much as possible; we’re dealing with science fiction and fantasy and super heroes and all the genre stuff, but at the same time, we want to try and put it in the context of as much reality as possible, and really ground it – we want to see these characters’ lives, their homes, their schools… all this stuff is part of our show, it’s a big canvas we’re painting on.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Superboy is Connor Kent – you’re using him as Superboy – when you say his home life, is he part of the Kents –

BRANDON: I don’t want to give away too much right now, but saying no to that is enough for now – he’s newly cloned, he’s 16 weeks old – he looks like he’s 16, but he’s 16 weeks, and this is a new interpretation of the character, but we feel it really stays true to the origins of the character and is a very honest portrayal of him, but I think he’s going to be different from what people expect.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Is his DNA that of Superman and Lex Luthor?

GREG: We cannot confirm or deny.

BRANDON: We’ve got to keep some secrets.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Will that be explored on the show?

BRANDON: Absolutely.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: So was there a reason you chose these specific characters? The mix seems similar to the Young Justice comic.

BRANDON: Well, you know it’s a mix – we’re influenced by the Young Justice comic that Peter David did, we’re influenced by the original Titans from, you know, the late 60s, and a lot of more recent stuff, and everything in between –

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: And then you’ve got Robin – which Robin are we talking about?

GREG: Dick Grayson. There was a lot of speculation about that, and we kept it under wraps for a while, but it is Dick Grayson, and that’s part of our DC reset – we’re going back to the early days, so it just begs that we use Dick Grayson.

BRANDON: We’ve got a cast of six core characters, and a lot of others around them so it’s a mix – you’re going to see all sorts of combinations –

GREG: Kid Flash –

BRANDON: That’s Wally West —

GREG: We never said Impulse – it’s Wally West – we can run down them here – Aqualad –

BRANDON: That’s the new Aqualad that Geoff Johns introduced in Brightest Day, recently – and Garth is in the show – he’s not Garth – it’s not like we suddenly changed and Garth is black – but Garth is in the show, and this our Aqualad. He’s the leader of our team —

GREG: We’ve got an interesting way into that – and then of course our big revelation that is from Geoff Johns, he wanted us to reveal there’s a secret in Aqualad’s past, that even Aqualad doesn’t know about, and that’s that Aqualad’s father is Black Manta.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: So that’s that from the comic –

BRANDON: It will be in the comic, but it’s not out yet. Geoff’s like, “Tell them,” and I’m like, “Really?”

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Where are the girls?

GREG: The girls… there’s Miss Martian. She’s Geoff Johns’ creation, too.

BRANDON: She’s the Martian Manhunter’s daughter.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: So this is really a young Justice League?

BRANDON: That was one of the deciding factors on how we chose the characters: we wanted to have adults that the kids viewed as mentors or as parental figures I guess, and some relationships are better than others.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Do we have a Wonder somebody?

BRANDON: Wonder Woman is in the show, she’s member of the Justice League, but we don’t have a Wonder Girl –

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: And then there’s Arrowette, right?

GREG & BRANDON: That’s Artemis.

BRANDON: It was a mistake online – someone assumed she was Arrowette, but I announced that she’s not Arrowette, she’s not Speedy, she’s not Wonder Girl, she’s not an Amazon, but she is an existing DC Universe character. We did not make her up. So those are the six leads. And we’re set on Earth 16, so we’re actually a part of the DC Universe – you know they have 52 earths now and we’re Earth 16, so we’re part of the multiverse, and the comic book that’s based on the show is going to be in continuity.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: What kind of role does the Justice League play?

GREG: Some play more than others – Batman and Red Tornado have really big roles in the show, on an ongoing basis. Some characters like Superman, Martian Manhunter, Black Canary, Green Arrow, Aquaman, and Flash have large roles in the show, others have lesser roles. Captain Marvel has a big role – Captain Marvel’s being played by Rob Lowe.

BRANDON: He’s really great – Green Arrow was Alan Tudyk from Firefly and Dollhouse, and Batman is Bruce Greenwood, who played Batman in the Red Hood movie.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Who’s voicing Superman?

GREG: Nolan North, who’s also doing Superboy.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Oh that’s interesting, to have the same voice…

GREG: But he makes a good separation.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: Earlier you said covert missions – is there a set up to this show?

GREG: It’s a little bit like Mission Impossible actually.

BRANDON: Batman is kind of their Jim Phelps, if Jim Phelps didn’t go on the missions with them. So he chooses the team, and he sends them out on these covert missions.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: So it’s a generational thing –

BRANDON: There’s an element of that, but there’s also an element of the sidekicks saying we’re ready for the next level. There’s an element of the teens saying to the adults, “Get on board or get out of the way.”

GREG: Again, a show about teenagers, and I think to be true to that, to be true to what a teenager is, there’s a little rebellion there, there’s a little but of kids wanting to get out on their own, and they want to take the next steps to being an adult, and in this show, we explore that thoroughly. These are their first steps into adulthood. They want their own team, they get their own team, and then when they actually go out on missions, it isn’t always exactly what they want it to be, so there’s a lot of discovery that the kids have among themselves and on the mission at the same time.

SUPERHERO TOONIVERSE: So it sounds like a very different take on this type of show.