Batman Beyond #2 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Dan Jurgens
Art By: Bernard Chang, Marcelo Maiolo
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: July 1, 2015

Your Mind's EYE

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Welcome Back To The Future!  That's right folks, we're Thirty Five years into the future, where Brother Eye has still conquered the world, even though Tim stopped events in the past that led to this current holocaust.  Fate's a bitch apparently and now that Tim Drake is all Batman Beyond-ed up, it's up to him to save the future from Brother Eye and try to find his way home.  In the previous issue, we saw our hero go looking for Terry McGinnis's friends at a Brother Eye prison, known as The Lodge, but things might get a little more complicated than he hoped because after fighting a Superman borg monster, Tim depleted the Bat suit's energy cells and has to go in powerless.  At least he'll have some familiar faces around because as that issue closed we saw that Barbara Gordon was one of the residents of The Lodge.  Let's check this issue out and see what's in store for our out of time former Red Robin as he tries to fix the future.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins and continues with a lot of running......it's kind of like that movie....... you know the one with the man running........ where it's kind of like a game?...... Oh that's right, Flowers In The Attic.  Okay, it's nothing like that and that was a long way to get to a lousy joke.  Anyway, there's a lot of running as Max Gibson and Barbara Gordon try and get Tim Drake to safety, so he doesn't have to go through processing and so they can find out what a barely aged Red Robin is doing in The Lodge.  Too bad that Max gets captured along the way because Tim is the priority here.  You know, if they had just stopped and possibly saved Max, our two heroes might have actually gotten out of this unscathed.  You see, once Max is captured and put through processing, the person behind The Lodge realizes that there's a woman in the place of the man that came through the gates and that leads to Max getting interrogated and Brother Eye getting inside her mind.  This part is a little weird though because we find out that Inque, one of Terry McGinnis's greatest enemies is the person in charge of The Lodge and while she initially doesn't care if the drugs used to open Max's mind......Kuato style, will kill her, but once Brother Eye begins increasing the drugs, Inque is all concerned out of nowhere.  Anyway, Max gives up the goods and Brother Eye sees who she was with, outing Barbara Gordon and Tim Drake......... and man does Brother Eye seem happy to see Tim Drake!

So we continue running as Tim Drake drops some knowledge on Barbara about what he's been through and how he's now Batman, but without the power to activate the suit, him being Batman doesn't really do much to help their situation............Personally, I'd call him a phony unless he could prove his Batman-ness........ that's just me though.  I've fallen for people telling me they were Batman a number of times and I promised myself I wouldn't do it again.  Since Max gave up the dirt on Tim to Brother Eye, our sentient satellite sent out Inque and one of his borgs to capture Tim and Barbara and we get to see how our new Batman Beyond measures up against the old one as he takes on the liquid loony.  Even though Tim somehow tapped into the borg's power source and got his suit going..........which would make me think that Brother Eye could infect the suit's A.I. Alfred, due to the direct connection, it seems that Terry is still the BMOC when it comes to future Batmans because Inque wipes the floor with Tim.

In the end, Barbara and Tim are taken away to processing after Batman is finished off by a now Stepford Wifed Max Gibson and as we pan out to the moon that's been converted into the new Brother Eye satellite, we see that there's some kind of body to go with Brother Eye in this future.  Well, we don't really see, but we do get an ominous outline that would certainly suggest that our Brother from another...........server, has taken up residence in some sort of form.

That's it for this issue of Batman Beyond and while the art remains strong and enticing, there just wasn't much going on in this issue besides for us finding out about "processing" and that enigmatic cliffhanger.  Yeah, it was cool to see Barbara Gordon again and I was really looking forward to what she would add to this issue, but really she didn't add anything except for being a running companion for Tim, as they spent the majority of the book talking about how bad the future sucks and that if Tim's Batman, that makes him important.  Even finding out that Inque is working for Brother Eye should have been pretty interesting, but she's little more than a familiar face here to simply tease the reader into thinking that this would be a more important issue than it was.  Hopefully the next issue picks up a bit because with a whole new world to discover and explore, this issue felt confined and irrelevant.

Bits and Pieces:

As excited as I was for this book this week, I find myself being really disappointed.  Familiar faces are thrown at us here for what seems like a cheap thrill, while the story did little more than to try and catch readers up who didn't read the Futures End event.  Luckily though, the art remains strong and I continue to look forward to what comes next, but hope that the next issue will get back to exploring this strange new future instead of running around in circles as it did here.

5/10