Batman Beyond #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Clownin' Around

Written By: Dan Jurgens
Art By: Bernard Chang, Marcelo Maiolo, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: October 26, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Batman Beyond is back in action with Terry McGinnis finally behind the cowl again and if that wasn't enough to get you excited for this series.......... Well, it looks like the Jokerz are going out of their damn minds by resurrecting their namesake, the Joker.  In our previous issue we caught back up with our futuristic hero and found out about how he was under Spellbinder's control for the last few months, but like I said, he's back now and on the hunt for Dana Tan, who's been kidnapped by the Joker known as Terminal.  Let's jump into this issue and see if Terry McGinnis can find his once lady love and if he'll be able to put a hurt on the Joker who's currently kicking his ass.......... Which is fucked up because he's all hopped up on venom.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with us getting caught up in case for some reason we didn't read the Rebirth issue of this series.......... So yeah, it's a lot of catch up, which is odd because we just had a lot of catch up in the previous issue so we could all get on the trolley from the previous Batman Beyond series.  With that we find out that Terminal is trying to resurrect the Joker and Terry is currently getting his ass kicked.  The only bit of new information we get right away is that Matt McGinnis isn't one for keeping secrets since he lets Max Gibson into the Batcave so that the two can monitor Terry's vitals and even talk to him while he's out in the field.......... you know, normal Bruce Wayne type stuff.  

One of the things that really chapped my ass in the previous Batman Beyond series was the amount of times that Tim Drake got his ass kicked while he was in the role of Batman and I figured that once Terry got back in action things would be different........... Yeah, they're not so different.  For most of this issue Terry finds that he's terribly out of shape and that his reflexes aren't what they used to be and because of this, that venom-ed up Joker just completely wrecks our hero.  Luckily though, Terry's seen the Arkham games and every cartoon that Bane's ever been in and knows that all he has to do to stop this hulking terror is to cut the pumps feeding him his muscle juice.  The only problem with that though, this Joker wasn't alone.  Yeah, I didn't tell you in the recap at the beginning that a portion of Neo Gotham has been taken over by the Jokerz and they're calling that section Jokerz Town........ Yeah, they're not really that clever. 

In the end, after almost getting sliced and diced by the largest amount of Jokerz that I've ever seen, Terry flies off and calls this mission a wash because he wasn't prepared enough to take on the type of threats that Batman needs to because he hasn't been training, but as we all know from all the times that Bruce used to go undercover as Matches Malone, being in the cowl isn't the only resource that Batman has and we see Terry take off the costume so that he can cover himself in Joker paint so that he can take care of this problem from the inside out.

That's it for this issue of Batman Beyond and while I was really looking forward to this issue and this series, I have to say that there wasn't too much to this issue that wasn't in the Rebirth one.  We spent half the story getting all caught up all over again and when we finally did get to something new, it was all about Terry getting his ass kicked because of how out of shape he's become and while it's new to see Terry out of shape, I got enough of seeing Batman get his ass kicked in the previous series.  Yeah, the only thing that really felt new here was the fact that Matt and Max are now watching Terry's back from inside the Batcave and that Terry is going to go undercover as a Joker in order to get to Dana.  Not much to write home about and really, the only thing that felt right was the art because we have the last series art team back on this book, but that's about it because even the dialog came off to me like Terry was still a kid playing at being Batman instead of someone who's been rocking the cowl for awhile now.  Hopefully things pick up in the next issue because right now I'm really not impressed with what we got.

Bits and Pieces:

While we do have Terry Mcginnis back in the Bat-suit, what we don't have is enough of a story for this issue since it takes a lot of pages just to catch everyone up on what happened in the Rebirth issue, while continuing to show us Batman getting his ass kicked like we saw throughout the previous series.  The art and the cliffhanger were decent enough but nothing really felt fresh with this issue.

6/10