A new piece of key art for the upcoming animated series Young Justice: Outsiders shows off more characters coming (or returning) the series when it helps launch DC Universe, Warner Bros.' upcoming streaming service. Outsiders takes place years after the events of the last season, Invasion, and will see the covert ops superhero team take on metahuman trafficking and a "genetic arms race" with an intergalactic reach.

While the new art features a number of familiar faces and costumes, it also introduces a few newcomers the Young Justice Universe, while hinting at what's happened in the past few years to the likes of Nightwing and Huntress.

At the end of Invasion, Nightwing decided he needed to take a leave of absence from being Team leader after Kid Flash straight-up vanished from reality. Years have passed since that incident, and Dick is now back and part of a black ops group that undertakes considerably dicier missions than the regular, teen-oriented team. Joining him are Superboy and Artemis Crock, apparently operating in the Tigress persona she adopted while under deep cover back in Season 2. While she's technically Tigress here, however, previous character art has shown her still rocking a bow and arrow, indicating that she hasn't fully left her archer life behind.

Joining Nightwing, Artemis and Superboy in this black ops group is Black Lightning. Previously, he'd had brief cameos in Invasion, most notably in the finale when he offered to become a tutor for Virgil Hawkins. No surprise, the young teen took him up on his offer and has since gone by the codename Static. He was one of the more newer members of the Justice League back in Season 2, and if he's with this new team, it's unclear whether he's pulling double duty or has left the League in favor of working with Nightwing's group. 

RELATED: Young Justice: Outsiders Art Confirms Katana, Lightning, & Metamorpho

The most interesting thing about the key art is, obviously, the people that we haven't seen in the Young Justice Universe before. Two of them will be instantly obvious to DC Comics fans; on the far left is Katana, sporting her trademark sword and a look fairly similar to her current outfit in the comics, and on the far right, next to Nightwing, is Metamorpho, the man with the ability to turn his body into various elemental compounds. Like Katana, his look is fairly similar to how he appears in the comics, with the main difference being that his body appears to be only two colors rather his typical four color scheme.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Young%20Justice%3A%20Who%20Are%20The%20Final%20Three%20Outsiders%3F']



Things get more complicated with the middle three characters, requiring some digging into the comic book history of the Outsiders team to narrow down just who they are. Instantly, the most obvious candidate for the young woman in black and yellow directly below Black Lightning would be his daughter Jennifer Pierce, aka Lightning. Lightning's powers include flight and her costume design here is more or less similar to how it was to the comics, with the hood being a new addition. If it's not Lightning, the other two obvious candidates would be her older sister Anissa, aka Thunder, or Kiran Singh, aka Solstice, a more recently introduced DC character who is typically aligned with the Teen Titans.

On Katana's right is a redheaded man in a green suit with a headband, who we're going to assume is Geo-Force, one of the earliest members of the Outsiders. In the comics, he is a man named Brion Markov who is the prince of the country of Markovia, and also happens to be the older brother of Teen Titans' most infamous traitor, Terra. Producer Greg Weisman has previously stated that the arrival of the Reach on Earth in Season 2 spurred various nations, corporations and even aliens on other worlds to try their hands at accessing the Meta-Gene within humans for their own various ends, and Geo-Force's traditional origin involves acquiring powers to stop an invasion on his home, further bolstering our theory. There's also a slim chance this man is Wally West, having returned from wherever he went to in Season 2 and sporting a new costume. However, the only logic behind that theory is that he's a redheaded man, and considering comments from the YJ creative team affirming Wally is indeed dead, his inclusion is more wishful thinking than anything.

Finally, there's the four-armed bug-person with red skin and a black carapace. Given the prominence of red, it would be easy to suggest that he's an original character named Red Beetle that was once part of the Reach -- after all, Invasion gave us not just Blue Beetle, but Green and Black Beetle as well. An even more wild possibility is that this is Forager, one of the various New Gods. In the comics, Forager's people evolved from the "micro-life" spread on New Genesis and are essentially humanoid bugs that thrive underneath the planet's surface. It's a wild theory, but New Genesis and Apokolips were both featured in the previous two seasons, with the series' previous finale coming with the introduction of Darkseid, so it's not one completely without merit.

Each season of Young Justice has introduced new parts of the DC Universe to the series' world, and Outsiders looks to be no exception. While the season will clearly be focused on the titular DC Comics team, there's no doubt that other races and organizations will be brought into the show's mythology, and we can't wait to see them all.