The third season of the Young Justice animated series won’t be out until 2018, but the crowd at the Young Justice: Outsiders San Diego Comic-Con panel were treated to an early glimpse of how new and returning characters will look when the series returns.
Returning characters received the largest cheers from the audience in San Diego and have led to many questions about what the characters have been up to since the show’s cancellation. One character, in particular, has drawn a lot of attention because of his inclusion on the Young Justice team in Season 3: that’s Static, who has received an update to his look.
“This show is so big that I don’t have a lot of time to marinate on one character, but I’ve worked on Static in various ways. That’s where I got my start in animation, on the Static Shock series,” Phil Bourassa, art director for Young Justice, said at an SDCC press roundtable. “So I love the character, and in Season 2 he’s wearing street clothes, because he’s a runaway, he’s in that group so it’s just his civies. In Season 3, where he’s at I felt he didn’t need to go full-on superhero outfit. He’s still in his civies, his streetwear, but he’s proudly wearing his static symbol, he’s training under Black Lightning. The characters evolve, so we may introduce a whole new outfit.”
Bourassa has worked on the Young Justice series from its inception in 2010 to the spring of 2012 before its untimely cancellation. He then spent several years working on the DC Animated movies before being told the show would be brought back.
“I didn’t think about, ‘if i went back to YJ, this is what I’d do differently’ at that time,” Bourassa said. “But when we got back to doing it, I’ve had some years under my belt and added some things to my repertoire that I feel that would build a better mousetrap, not necessarily changing the design theories.”
Some character designs for the new team are different from Season 2 (there is a timeskip to take into account) but in those differences in character design there are a lot of similarities, whether that’s taking from the show’s past or from the comic book iterations that spawned them.
Beast Boy, one of Bourassa’s favorite characters to design, along with Tim Drake, was a prime example of staying consistent to the character’s fundamental characteristics in every medium.
“Beast Boy is always going to be a fun, buoyant, comical character in any iteration. That’s fundamental to the character, so that stuff is consistent,” Bourassa said. “Look at it as a multiverse, just like we have it at DC. That basic core of who a character is is always the same but the context of the story drives the approach of design. Stylistically, there’s a ton of crossover. I had a lot of fun designing Beast Boy, we’re going to have some fun with him this season.”
As for staying true to the the series’ relatively short history and the long history of these comic book characters in the print medium, Bart Allen, in his new yellow suit, epitomizes what it takes to bring these heroes and villains to life.
“Bart is paying homage to Wally [West]. With every character you don’t want to depart so far away from tradition that they’re not recognizable. You want to be faithful to the guys and girls that created these characters,” Bourassa said. “We wouldn’t be able to carry on doing this stuff if not for these brilliant creators that came before us. I always liken it to tending someone else’s garden, I'm just the groundskeeper and there are other people after us and so we want to leave it nice because it was given to us nice. Maybe add your little flourish and maybe that will become a part of the character’s legacy, maybe not, you’re just carrying the torch for awhile. I’m always trying to make it where it feels like that is the character, fundamentally, but it’s slightly remixed.”
