Batman Beyond #18 Review and *SPOILERS*

It's Payback Time

Written By: Dan Jurgens

Art By: Phil Hester, Ande Parks, Michael Spicer, Travis Lanham

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: March 28, 2018

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's time to jump into the future.......... or one of many possible futures now that we've been playing with the Tim Drake of Tomorrow in a bunch of books lately, and see how Terry McGinnis will fair now that our main villain has revealed himself to be Payback........ which probably means nothing to you if you didn't watch the 90's cartoon show regularly.  Anyway, when last we saw our hero, Payback had teleported away with Ten, but before leaving, he had thrown a grenade at the feet of Batman and Stalker.  Let's jump into this issue and see if the two survive and if Batman can get Ten back from Payback.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

This is a weird title in that it really relies on you knowing Batman's adventures in the Batman Beyond cartoon because here we have the character Payback and even though our characters keep telling us about how Kenny Stanton was Payback when Batman originally fought him and how he became this villain because his father ignored him, it really doesn't play off too well here in my mind if you hadn't seen that episode of the cartoon.  It just feels really disconnected, especially because of everything that's gone down in this world, what with the Brother Eye invasion and the fact that this is supposed to be the continuity of the comics and not of the animated universe.  Anyway, what we get here is more of the same from what we've been getting from this title, where Batman survives from the cliffhanger, we get a bunch of quick moving action, some reveals that don't mean much and Matt McGinnis continuing to look at the Robin costumes of old........... Wait, wait,...... that's actually something that finally happens in this issue, where Matt has to save his brother from certain doom and dawns Damian's old costume, so at least we have that going for us, but really, the rest is just kind of stale at this point in the series.

Getting to a proper "Explain It!:", our hero survives his fall because of Stalker's help, who figured he owed our hero for stopping Payback from killing him and with that, we just get Payback talking to himself about Ten's connection to Batman and whether or not that can be exploited, but either way it doesn't matter because eventually, Payback just teleports Batman to his hideout, where he has some deathtraps prepared for our hero, which prompts Matt to get his sidekicking on.  During the whole "torture" bit, Payback reveals to us that he's actually Kenny's father and is going after Batman because it's our hero's fault that Kenny was locked away, tormented and eventually committed suicide, but there's not any real emotion here because we're getting this from Payback and Bruce Wayne already informed us in this issue that Kenny's father had disowned him when he was arrested and never visited the boy in Juvenile Rehab.  So the guy's a schmuck and is out of nowhere blaming others for his mistakes.

That's it for this issue of Batman Beyond and while I would love to love this title, it just doesn't do it for me each and every month and the biggest problem with it is it doesn't know what it wants to be.  Is this the future that we were all told it was supposed to be or is it just a continuation of the animated series?  Dan Jurgens really relies on you knowing the animated series here, even with him saying things over and over again about the characters in that series, it just doesn't have the same resonance as it would if these characters were actually here and we had experienced these stories within this title.  The art was decent this issue, but overall, there isn't too much exciting going on over here, just cliched storytelling that feels really rushed at times.

Bits and Pieces:

Batman Beyond continues to disappoint, even with a reveal this issue, but really, who didn't see this twist coming?  The art is decent, but this title really needs to go away for awhile and figure out if it wants to be its own continuity or just a continuation of the animated series.  

5.1/10