History Lesson
Written By: Dan Jurgens
Art By: Cully Hamner, Marco Santucci, Val Staples, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: October 24, 2018
It's the special over-sized anniversary issue of Batman Beyond...... or some such nonsense that DC likes to call these issues. That's not the important part though, we're getting the Joker back here and I'm sure that's getting everyone excited to jump back into this series...... and really, looking at the sales numbers, this book needs something to get the people to pick it back up again. Alright, no more dawdling, let's jump into this issue, where it looks like the only thing you need to know going in is that Matt McGinnis has become Robin Beyond....... and of course, the Joker is still alive. Let's check it out.
Many people talk about "good jumping on points" for books and for everything I've read lately, this might be the best jumping on point for new Batman Beyond fans because it seems that half the book is just a refresher on who Batman is, who Batman Beyond is and what led us to this point so far. The worst part about that? It's some of the most interesting parts of the book.
Don't get me wrong though, the Joker's back and you spend the whole issue anticipating what he's going to do to crash Bruce Wayne's big celebration that this issue is framed around, but besides for the recap of events leading up to this, you get Luke Fox and then Bruce Wayne giving speeches and I don't know if you're like me or not........ but I get bored to death being forced to listen to someone give a speech.
So yeah, you get little bits of things throughout, like a murder mystery, that's not so mysterious by a couple of pages in....... or at all if you have any kind of imagination and you get some guest stars showing up in this book that leave me intrigued to what they've been up to in this future of our continuity. It's not bad, but it's not great either and I wish I could say that I at least really enjoyed the art, but that too was along the same lines of not bad, but not great either. I still look forward to what this story can bring, especially after the decent cliffhanger, but this first part here just felt like a refresher course that I didn't need, while I continued to ask myself if anyone in this world still remembers Brother Eye taking over the world because I don't know about you, but that seemed like a big thing for people to talk about that just seems to be swept under the rug here.
Bits and Pieces:
Our "Final Joke" arc starts off a little boring as this over-sized issue takes a lot of its time catching people up to what's been going on in the world of Batman Beyond. Yeah, it's a good jumping on point for new readers, but pretty pointless for anyone familiar with this series. The art didn't grab me as much as I would have liked, but like most issues of Batman Beyond, the strength of this issue really comes from the cliffhanger.
6/10
i liked it.
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