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Let’s dive into the latest causality in Young Justice: Phantoms, which goes on to revives a key hero’s worst nightmare, as they can’t cope with death.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the first five episodes of Young Justice: Phantoms, streaming now on HBO Max.
One thing Young Justice hasn’t been afraid to do, unlike many teen cartoons, is embrace the macabre shroud of death. It stunned fans, especially with such a major character like Wally West, who died when Lex Luthor tried to manipulate an intergalactic war with the Reach. Now, this issue’s popping up again with the passing of Superboy on Mars, which goes on to revive a key hero’s worst nightmare.
This is none other than Artemis, the team’s resident archer who’s now a senior. She’s a parent as well to Cheshire’s kid, so she has grown leaps and bounds. However, when she lost Wally, it truly broke her, as she was looking at a future and family, hoping their love would take them away from the superhero game and into a life of peace at last.
She’s now experiencing these memories again when Nightwing and Aqualad show up to reveal Conner died too. After that, everything starts crushing her mentally, as she feels like another original — someone she considered a brother — has been taken too soon.
It shows most when she looks at pictures of the team being put up, remembering how they were robbed of Wally at such a young age, and now, Superboy, with only Miss Martian and Gar there in his final moments. It’s quite heartbreaking because Artemis becomes sloppy in the field, botches her teaching job over the upcoming days and isn’t functioning socially. It’s very relatable to grief in the real world, touching on how we struggle to cope with the loss of loved ones.
The thing is, no one can help her process it because she wants to do it on her own. Dick and Aqualad visit Conner’s shrine in the Watchtower by themselves, while Artemis does the same. As she reads “A Tale of Two Cities” in the post-credits as well, it’s clear she’s trying to use her mom’s coping method — literature.
After all, Artemis has always been independent, that is, until Wally made her vulnerable, so all this adds emotional resonance and proves while she has gotten stronger, no one’s invincible from fighting this monster known as angst. Some good does come from all this, as Artemis wants to reunite with Cheshire.
Right now, they’ve got to suss out a spy game with the League of Shadows, but she wants to eventually iron out their sisterhood, rivalry and how Sportsmaster weaponized them, all to try to make their family whole again. Time waits for no one, and Artemis, amid all her despair, wants to ensure she has happy moments with her sibling because only this can help ease what happened to her ‘brother’ and beloved.
To see Artemis’ grief return, the first five episodes of Young Justice: Phantoms are streaming on HBO Max.
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