Unlike you I don't know Grodd at all, so if they mangle his character I don't really notice, and since I'm actually trying to like this series, I've also decided to not think about the inane premise of the new team (and you were right in your post, it doesn't make sense) and I'm slowly, slowly getting over my annoyance that obviously the Joker's appearances won't make sense in the wider DCU continuity -- though another good thing in this Outsiders issue was that at least Nightwing seemed to have noticed that too. ;)

I don't know, I'll just assume that maybe the Joker made evil clones of himself or something and one is still safely at the Slab being monitored by Oracle and the other Joker clones worked out a division of labor thing so that they can pop up all over the DCU in all series at the same time and coordinate their schedules with the omnipresent Lex Luthor clones or something. Okay, so I'm not quite over it, but working on it. Honestly.

But at this point I would have really liked some classic introduction plot with some focus on each team member in turn accomplishing a task. So that wouldn't have been the most original opening plot, and it would have been a formula structure, but it's a formula that actually works when you try to familiarize the readers with knew characters. I think comic writers can count themselves lucky that comic series don't get canceled quite as fast as tv series.