Batman Beyond #29 Review

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Written By: Dan Jurgens

Art By: Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund, Andrew Dalhouse, Travis Lanham

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: February 27, 2019

While the Joker's official return as a big bad to Batman should be something that feels immense in this series..... it's something that has felt small since it began because for the most part, while we do have Dick Grayson and his daughter in this arc, nothing about this has felt fresh and we've even had the Joker talking about recreating his greatest hits and because of that....... it's a been there done that situation that doesn't get exciting just because it's thirty-five years in the future.  Previously, we saw our elderly Clown Prince of Crime take the new Robin, Matt McGinnis hostage.  Let's see if history repeats itself or if Terry McGinnis can get to his brother in time.  Let's check it out.

It's the finale to the "Final Joke" arc and while I'd like to say that this issue blows everything we've had previously out of the water and really shows us that this return of the Joker was needed......... it seems to have worked better in the animated series' movie about it because here it's just more of the same as we move through this issue where the Joker talks about killing Jason Todd and shooting Barbara Gordon.  

Something here that doesn't feel old though is the fact that the Joker doesn't know who Batman is here and while that doesn't feel old, it definitely feels odd because this is the future of our current continuity and while I'd like to say that this bit of unknown information is a clue to something not being right here........ it's not and everything here boils down to one final confrontation with Bruce and Joker, which may have been cool if it didn't seriously just feel like a callback to the way the Batman Beyond animated series started.  

All in all, Dick and his daughter Elainna felt unneeded for this story and I really hope that they play a bigger part going forward because like most of the characters involved in this arc...... they were pretty useless.  Besides that though, I continued to love the art in this issue and feel that it's probably the best looking book from this team so far, which is definitely saying something because I love this art team, but the story was just really lackluster and just seem to end just because it filled out the amount of issues it needed to.  I want to like this book and thought that once Matt McGinnis became Robin that I'd find a reason to enjoy it again, but because of the ramifications of this arc it seems like I won't even have that going forward and it's becoming harder and harder to think of reasons this book shouldn't be canceled.

Bits and Pieces:

Not much of a finale to a story that felt like it should have been bigger than it was.  Characters are pretty useless here and it seems that everything we've been dealing with was just to get to the end of the story so that we could have a pseudo callback to the first episode of Batman Beyond.  Very disappointing and the only thing that I can say is a positive here is the art team.  

5/10