Batman Beyond #19 Review

Payback's A Bi............

Written By: Dan Jurgens

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

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: April 25, 2018

Let's head back to the future to see if Terry McGinnis is able to take on Payback all by his lonesome........ What?...... what's that you say?  Oh, that's right, he's not going to be all on his own because Matt McGinnis has become Robin Beyond now....... even though his training only consists of watching Damian Wayne train and Matt mimicking what he saw.  Yeah, nothing can go wrong there.  Let's jump into this issue and see if Dan Jurgens can bring everything together that he's been setting up for a dog's age now or if he's just continuing to string us along.  Let's check it out.

Pretty much, if you've been reading Batman Beyond this long you already know exactly how this issue is going to play out.  Everything you needed to know was in the previous issue with Payback's own involvement in his son's death, which he just throws on Batman's shoulders as being the culprit.  

The biggest takeaway I had while reading this issue was.......... why the hell did Matt McGinnis have to break the glass to the Robin costume if all he was going to take was the mask?  The Robin Beyond aspects of this issue are what kills me because there's nothing really here besides for Matt coming in to save the day, which he accomplishes, but which also leads him to become a liability has well.  That being the catalyst for something that feels like it's going to play on way too damn long with Terry not trusting Bruce for putting his brother in such a situation without Terry's approval.  

The issue really ends pretty anticlimactically, with a lot of the issue being Dana Tan just throwing shade at Bruce's decision making skills and for all the drama that was set up here to have a real confrontation between Terry and Bruce, it's all cut short so that Terry can go and look like a hero elsewhere outside of the costume so that we can all know how good of a guy our hero actually is.......... even though having more story would have been more preferable.  While I haven't minded the art in past issues, here it seems that Phil Hester's style is just rubbing me the wrong way and while it isn't bad, it's just something that I'm not the biggest fan of now that we've had it for so long.  All in all, another predictable issue that really got us nowhere besides for the end of this arc in the least interesting way possible.

Bits and Pieces:

There's not much to this story and if you've been reading Batman Beyond for awhile now, it's pretty much par for the course.  This issue hits all the beats that we've gotten in previous issues, but at the end of this, we just get to see Terry being a good guy outside of the costume and it's not enough to win me over.

5.5/10