Batman Beyond (2015)

The Batman Beyond property has always possessed great potential, even if it borrows heavily in look and feel from Matt Wagner’s Grendel.  Essentially, it has removed the character of Batman from the realm of Bruce Wayne and permitted other individuals to don the suit with their own insecurities and weaknesses.  The showrunner on which the comic is based told of how an elderly Bruce Wayne knighted Terry McGinnis as the new Batman, allowing him to use the technologically advanced Batman suit that Wayne had developed but could never use himself.  As the new Batman, McGinnis created a new mythos of his own, although with hints of Batman’s old allies and enemies.  Barbara Gordon, too aged to be Batgirl, became the new Commissioner Gordon.  There were the Jokerz, a gang of thugs who adopted the anarchic premise of the original Joker, striving in a futile way to incorporate the embodiment of chaos of its namesake.  And then there were new villains, just as interesting and complex as Wayne’s own library of villains.

But DC released its crossover event, Future’s End, which, personally, I loved, but, rewrote part of its history, as DC is wont to do, a tradition starting with the mother of all crossover events, Crisis on Multiple Earths.  Like all crossover events, it was the publisher’s raison d’etre for shuffling the continuity cards, erasing some characters and changing others.  Batman Beyond was no different.  At the end of Future’s End, Terry McGinnis had sacrificed himself with Tim Drake, the former Red Robin, being shuttle into the future and made the new Batman Beyond. 

Batman Beyond #1 (2015) begins where Future’s End left off.  Tim Drake is the new Batman.  There are Jokerz.  Even Barbara Gordon, Bruce Wayne, and Terry’s younger brother, Matt McGinnis are present.  However, the world is a different place than when Terry was there.  As Tim notes, “Butterfly wings, ripples in the pond, and all that stuff.”  Dan Jurgens goes to great length to tell us how different, reminding us constantly that we are not in Terry McGinnis’s world anymore.  Such repetition narratively makes the story less compelling than the Batman Beyond of old, where television viewers and comic book readers would have to navigate a world a little uncertain and in the dark about the lay of the land.  Such uncertainty was used so well that it served as a plot device in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.

To a certain extent, the art by Bernard Chang too tries to capitalize on the success of other material, in this case, the artwork of Andrea Sorrentino.  There are panels in the first act of the book which reflect the dual tone to reflect dramatic events in the book’s progress.  Yet, these attempts are weak.  The moments lack drama.  There are mere reflections of confusing fight sequences that are inconsequential and meaningless.  They are wasted panels, and such waste does a disservice to the book as a whole. 

What the book does, it does well.  It establishes a plot, and cleanly so.  It is divided cleanly into three acts, the first, the casual interruption of the theft of veil technology keeping Gotham safe from Brother Eye.  The second scene develops the secondary plots which obviously will arise later in the book.  The third act places Tim Drake in the mix of the larger problem of the arc of the book, the problem of Brother Eye, with a clear cliffhanger at the end with the appearance of Barbara Gordon.  But, in a way, its too clean, too predictable. 

Admittedly, I did not collect anymore of this book.  Having read the first issue, I am glad I didn’t continue.