Batman Beyond #32 Review

Make Like A Banana and........

Written By: Dan Jurgens

Art By: Rick Leonardi, Ande Parks, Chris Sotomayor, Travis Lanham

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: May 22, 2019

Thirty-Five years in the future, Terry McGinnis is Batman and he's keeping the streets of Neo Gotham safe for the good people of the city.  It seems that he might have met his match now in the form of the new villain, "The Splitt", who can split into two people and as far as Terry can tell, can teleport as well.  Things look bad for our hero and from what we saw in the previous issue, it doesn't look like he'll get much help from Bruce Wayne, who hasn't been acting like himself after making a visit to Arkham Asylum.  Let's jump into this issue and see if Batman can get the upper hand on The Splitt.  Let's check it out.

It's been a bit of running gag in my mind where Dan Jurgens usually has our hero fight the bad guy, get his ass kicked and then end it looking like our hero is going to be toast...... Well, that's what we got last issue and that's what we get this issue, while in the middle of the book, we have some decent scenes in setting up the new Batman Beyond family of people who are helping out Terry McGinnis with his war on crime.  Yeah, it seems that Dana Tan is on the outs for now, where Ten is filling in with not only love, but with side kicking as well.  It's funny too because Matt doesn't really seem to throw up much of a stink about being sidelined and I think that's because he's forced to step into the Bruce Wayne role, while Bruce......... Well, while Bruce isn't exactly acting like himself.  

As for the character of The Splitt though, who is the most interesting part of this book, besides for the mystery of what's up with Bruce Wayne, which does have a really cool reveal at the end, we see these brothers who are fused together to give them their powers, but it seems that they're up to something to either cure themselves or give them more power, it's up in the air at this point, but I like the idea of this villain, especially since one of the brothers seems to be more ruthless than the other.

All in all, the art in this issue is really fun and does its job in telling the story, the biggest problem though is that our main characters on the side of good......... you know, Terry, Matt and Ten are the least interesting parts of this book and all we get out of this is some cool villain moments, while our hero just continues to show how out of his league he is every story that we get.  Yeah, he always eventually wins, but boy does he take a beating to get there.  With that though, I like the reveal of Bruce at the end and I'm enjoying this new villain.  I just wish that Batman was more interesting overall.

Bits and Pieces:

With some interesting villains involved and some really fun art depicting the action, there's some joy to be had in this issue........ The biggest problem I see is that our heroes aren't really interesting and stuck in a formulaic style of storytelling, where Terry has to get his ass kicked every issue to end his parts of the issue and it's been a bit stale for awhile.  The villains though are really cool and I'm really interested in continuing their stories.

6/10