SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Bryan Hitch and Fernando Pasarin’s Justice League #28, on sale now.


The mystery of the Justice League’s children from the future has been heating up in the pages of Bryan Hitch and Fernando Pasarin’s Justice League series and the most recent issue really dove into who each of the kids are and what their relationship was like with their superhero parents.

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However, as much as the kids love and respect the people who are destined to one day sire them, they care just as much — if not more — about the state of their home in the future. This, and the surprising revelation about the villain responsible for their apocalyptic reality, may lead to the two teams clashing in as the story heads towards its climax.

Family Values

The majority of the issue focuses on the alone time each of the kids spends with their parents and features a number of touching vignettes as the Justice League grapples with the concept of one day having kids who are superheroes themselves. Superman already has a superhero son in Superboy, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his own questions for Hunter Prince, Wonder Woman’s son whom she abandoned and left to be raised by the Kents at some point in the future.

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Hunter is welcomed into the Kents home, where he tells them as much as he can about the coming future, and bonds with Jon Kent, who is technically his older brother. When it comes time to say goodnight, however, Clark presses Hunter for the facts as to what happened to Jon and Lois in his home timeline, and Hunter reveals that they died against the growing darkness which ruined his world. Superman, ever the optimist, promises Hunter that they will find a way to defeat The Darkness and save the future, a promise that Clark Kent may later regret making.

Hunter-Prince-Jon-Kent

Elsewhere, Eldora Curry struggles with the existential idea that she is not yet the daughter of Aquaman and Mera and that she may in fact never be, if they successfully save the future. Her one-day mother Mera comforts her and assures her that whatever is to come in the future, today they are mother and daughter and that’s all the matters for right now. Meanwhile, Cyborg has taken his son George AKA Cube to STAR Labs to run some tests with his own father, but encourages to distant scientist to spend some time getting to know his own grandson, and though Silas Stone is more concerned with the technology that keeps Box running, Cyborg embraces the chance to bond with his son.

The Flash and Green Lantern have perhaps the strangest situation of all as Barry and Jessica have learned that not only do they also have children from the future, but they have children from the future together. As Jason and Jenny sleep, glowing with the blue light of hope for the first time that anyone can remember, Barry bonds with his speedster daughter Cruise, who falls asleep on his chest. While the pair are not presented as a couple outside of Hitch's Justice League, here we see Flash and Green Lantern seem almost content at the idea of starting a family together, opening up numerous possibilities for other writers to explore in the future.

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Teenage Wasteland

Unfortunately, not everything is clear skies and bright futures as the Justice League still have a number of threats to deal with. Interestingly, this issue doesn’t feature the future Aquaman who travelled back in time with the kids and attacked Batman at the cliffhanger of last issue. The Cyborg-integrated Curry is even on the cover with the tagline “Aquaman is back from the future… and he’s taking no prisoners,” which is technically true as he is back from the future and is absence from this issue means no prisoners were taken, but it’s on odd and misleading cover choice for the contents of the comic.

In the actual comic, Simon Baz — the only member of the Justice League other than Batman to not have children travel to the present — is overseeing the fallout in Midway City following the incident with The Kindred. Working alongside Steve Trevor and ARGUS, Simon deduces that the quarantined area is still highly contagious and although he and Steve are in the clear, something is growing under the green bubble where Midway used to be and it has some connection to The Darkness which ravaged the future.

Simon-Baz-Steve-Trevor

Aboard the Justice League Watchtower, Wonder Woman slowly puts together the bigger picture that links The Kindred to the Justice League’s children and her role in it all. Remembering how the Fear Creature of the Kindred drove her to thoughts of war and how readily she accepted those thoughts, Diana realises that there’s a connection with The Darkness in Midway City and what the children said about how she has a part to play in the downfall of the future. Realizing how much she can be manipulated into acts of war and that the threat in Midway isn’t over, Diana comes to the conclusion that the war that destroyed the world and created the future the children are from was likely with herself.

As she realizes this, Cube is hooked into the Justice League’s communication systems and intercepts Diana’s realization, relaying it to his leader Hunter. After discovering his own mother may be responsible for the future they are so desperately trying to save, Hunter Prince comes to one conclusion. The children of the Justice League must kill Wonder Woman to save their world.

Hunter-Prince-Justice-League

The revelation that Diana was the antagonist that kickstarted the downfall of Earth makes a lot of sense in hindsight, not just with her previous role as God of War in Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang and Matt Wilson’s run on Wonder Woman. Diana herself was puzzled at the idea that she would abandon her child so readily, but if Diana wasn’t in full control of her most important personality traits — her empathy and her compassion — it’s easy to see how a Wonder Woman driven only by war would do such a thing. Now, that child is an adult and has travelled back to the present to kill his mother before she can ever abandon him but in attempting to do so he may alienate the only family who ever loved him and send the future onto a dangerously unknowable path.