Batman Beyond #10 Review and *SPOILERS*

Things........ and Stuff

Written By: Dan Jurgens
Art By: Bernard Chang, Marcelo Maiolo, Dave Sharpe
Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: March 2, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Time to get back to the future because something has to be done about YOUR kids...... that's right, all of this is happening because your kids screwed up somewhere down the line and now all of us, Tim Drake and all the residents of forty years from now have to deal with it....... at least I think that's the plot of Batman Beyond.  Anyway, in the last issue of Batman Beyond, we saw Tim Drake go to Metropolis to find young Matt McGinnis before he went and did something stupid like get himself killed, but from the way it looked at the end of that issue, it might just be Tim who's on the chopping block........... or at least the Splicer block.  That's right, our hero came across the big bad splicing doc himself, Dr. Cuvier and he's got his eyes set on transforming Batman into something a little more animalistic.  We've got all that and Matt McGinnis stumbling upon the stasis tubed bodies of the Justice League Beyond and shocking the shit out of us because they're all still alive.  Let's jump into this issue and see if the Justice League can be the turning point for this dark world of the future or if Batman will have a whole new set of problems on his hands.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

We start this issue off with me scratching my head because when we last saw our future Batman, he was all types of knocked out and being brought to Dr. Cuvier for what could only be some sort of terribly painful splicing procedure, but here we see that for some reason the fight in the previous issue never stopped and is still going on here......... with Dr. Cuvier and some hooded animal men just chilling in the distance watching.  Did they just decide to revive Batman and put him in a Thunderdome type situation instead of splicing him?  On top of this weird fight scene, which only appears to be here to catch everyone up on what's been going down in this series and to get the idea across that being a Splicer isn't as bad as it looks, we have Dr. Cuvier looking like he's adding to the Splicers and Batman's conversation from a cliff in the distance, but I don't get the idea anywhere in this book that he can hear them or that they can hear him so I'm left totally confused about what's going on............. To add to that confusion, we see Tuftan is one of the hooded animal men with Cuvier and my initial aggravation about the Splicers being animal men from Kamandi returns because while I was originally wrong about them being in this comic, here they are and it doesn't make any sense to me.  I'm sure they'll be explained in upcoming issues that the Splicers somehow led to the animal men in the future instead of Cortexin, but I have no idea how Tuftan is a Time Master out of nowhere.  Besides for Tuftan though, this is just a big fight scene that doesn't make any sense from where we left off in the previous issue.

Let's check on Matt McGinnis, who is following a Green Lantern ring like we saw him do in the previous issue and after it breaks through the glass on Kai-Ro's stasis tube, the Green Lantern uses his power to revive the rest of the Justice League........... except we don't have a Superman for some reason even though we saw him in the previous issue and on the cover to this one.  Before we can get any kind of inside scoop about how or why the Justice League are still alive after Micron told all of us that he saw them die, they're ambushed by a big ass talking elephant man, who also seems to have the power to mind control you when you stare into his bindi.  Back in Neo Gotham shit is getting real, when the refugees become rioters after one man's daughter dies after being refused medicine and the gates of the city are rammed down as people come running in claiming that your shit is now their shit........ or everybody's shit, but whatever.  

In the end, we head back to Metropolis to see how Batman is doing and as you could probably imagine from what we saw in every other fight he's been in in this series, it isn't going too well.  Out of nowhere though the antagonists become the Justice League and the Splicers just kind of disappear as we see that the elephant man with the stylin' bindi has made the League believe that Batman is in fact a Brother Eye cyborg.  So now I guess we just have to wait for someone to intervene because there's no way that Batman is taking on the Justice League after having his ass handed to him from a bunch of Splicers.  As our issue closes, we see Matt McGinnis watching from some high point, yelling out C-3 as Barda uses her mega rod to disintegrate Batman......... Maybe Matt should have yelled "No, stop" instead of "C-3".  

That's it for this issue of Batman Beyond and I have to tell you that I was so confused going into this issue that I had to go back and check out the previous one because I was totally lost in where we were in the story............ and after doing that I was still lost because the beginning of this doesn't seem to jive with where we left off last month.  While we finally get the Justice League in this series, it doesn't do much because they are essentially puppets like they were when we thought Brother Eye converted them and we're barely a step closer in finding out what actually happened to them and like most things in this series, any development has to first punch Batman in the face before we can move on.  Like I realized in the previous issue it seems that we're really just reading this series for the cliffhangers because there's never a real payoff in the next issue, just more teases and without a decent payoff I'm left feeling used month after month because all we get are fight scenes where Batman gets his ass kicked.  The best part of this issue, just like the last issue are the developments going on in Neo Gotham and I hate saying that because it's so well written that I find myself feeling uncomfortable reading it because of how real and plausible it seems.  It just reminds me of how terrible and unpredictable people can be.  The art in this book was enjoyable as always, but due to us spending half the issue dealing with Batman fighting the Splicers again out of nowhere, it ended up feeling like the director's cut to the last issue instead of something new.

Bits and Pieces:

Batman Beyond #10 comes off as a bit of a disappointment because we find ourselves more in the middle of last issue than where we left off in the cliffhanger and we don't get any of the answers that we were hoping for going into this........... only that some people dig being Splicers.  Pretty much just another issue where Batman gets his ass kicked and that's about it.  Luckily, there's some excellent art as always so you can really see how hard Batman's getting hit in the face.

5.5/10