Young Justice #3
Young Justice #3 is the penultimate all-male chapter of Peter David and Todd Nauck's debut arc — its cover even cheekily announces itself as 'The Issue Before the One Where the Girls Show Up!' — making it the last moment the founding trio of Robin, Superboy, and Impulse hold the stage alone before the team doubles in size with issue #4's additions of Wonder Girl, Secret, and Arrowette. Beyond that structural role, its Halloween-night plot turns on a young Mr. Mxyzptlk whose earnest decision to avoid his mischievous destiny nearly unravels the DC timeline, an early signal of how David's run would cheerfully weaponize DC continuity for comedy while still landing genuine consequences. The parallel Red Tornado/Traya subplot seeds the android's long-running custody arc, which becomes one of the series' most emotionally grounded threads. That the issue belongs to a run that went on to win the 1999 Eisner Award for Best New Series underscores how quickly this title announced itself as something different from the grimdark mainstream of 1990s superhero comics.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The Young Justice ongoing launched in September 1998 under writer Peter David and artist Todd Nauck, filling the teen-team vacuum left when DC's established Teen Titans aged into the adult Titans. The conceptual and creative hand-off is notable: Todd DeZago co-created the team with Nauck in the 1998 GirlFrenzy one-shot Young Justice: The Secret and wrote the two-issue JLA: World Without Grown-Ups prequel, but David took the writer's chair from issue #1 of the ongoing and held it for the series' entire run — a creative transition whose behind-the-scenes reasoning has never been publicly documented. Issue #3, cover-dated December 1998, was the third installment under David and Nauck and part of the first arc that would be collected in the 2000 trade paperback Young Justice: A League of Their Own (issues #1–7 plus Secret Files material).
Trivia · 8 facts
- Written by Peter David with art by Todd Nauck and inks by Lary Stucker — the core creative team for the entire ongoing series.
- Cover-dated December 1998; Comic Vine titles it 'The Issue Before the One Where the Girls Show Up!' — a self-aware nod to the imminent expansion of the roster in issue #4.
- Central plot: a coven of amateur techno-wizards accidentally summons a young, studious Mr. Mxyzptlk from the 5th Dimension on Halloween night; when he vows to never become the prankster who torments Superman, the timeline collapses into an apocalyptic wasteland, and Young Justice must talk him back into accepting his mischievous destiny.
- Parallel subplot follows Red Tornado secretly watching over his adopted daughter Traya during Halloween in Chicago — an early installment of the custody/family arc that becomes a major dramatic engine through issues #11–13.
- The three founding members — Robin (Tim Drake), Superboy (Kon-El), and Impulse (Bart Allen) — are the sole Young Justice members active in the issue; Wonder Girl (Cassie Sandsmark), Arrowette (Cissie King-Jones), and Secret do not yet join until issue #4.
- Arrowette (Cissie King-Jones), though indexed as a character associated with this issue, was originally created by Tom Peyer, Craig Rousseau, and Sal Buscema, first appearing in Impulse #28 before joining Young Justice.
- The issue was later collected in the Young Justice: A League of Their Own trade paperback (DC, 2000), which reprinted issues #1–7 alongside Young Justice: Secret Files #1.
- The series that contains this issue won the 1999 Eisner Award for Best New Series, and the Halloween cover — depicting the trio trick-or-treating in the costumes of their respective mentors — is a comedic sight-gag deliberately unrelated to the interior story.