Batman Beyond #40 Review

Batwoman Revealed!

Written By: Dan Jurgens
Art By: Sean Chen, Sean Parsons, Chris Sotomayor, Wes Abbott
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: January 22, 2020


Thirty-Five years from now, Derek Powers or Blight as he likes to go by now has returned to Neo Gotham, where he keeps telling people that radiation doesn't die.... even though he needs a new body because he's dying, but beyond that we have a new Batwoman in town to go after the big ugly, it's just too bad that his new body he's hoping to get is an amnesia ridden Terry McGinnis, who's also on the run from the police for murder.  Yeah, it's crazy in the future and hopefully Batwoman and the rest of the Bat Family can get together to save the day because right now it seems like everyone is just running around and not exactly focused on what they should be focused on.  Let's jump into this issue and see if the mystery of the Batwoman is solved and if she can take down Blight. 



If you've been reading Batman Beyond lately, then you pretty much know what to expect at this point because besides for the return of Blight, Terry McGinnis' first real villain of the Batman Beyond animated show and the mystery of the new Batwoman Beyond, this series has just been spinning its wheels in trying to make its page count.  I mean, how many issues can you have Bruce Wayne (the world's greatest detective) and Matt McGinnis sit in the Batcave and just say that they think the new Batwoman is Barbara Gordon or Melanie Walker?  Well, I don't know either, but we can add to that count with this issue and another big portion of this book is Blight and his confidant, Dr. Constance Gustinov, who just conveniently was a homeless person who Terry befriended but who also hates Terry's father for ruining her career, going over the plot of what they intend to do.

For our action portion of the book though we have Batwoman going around and saving people from Blight's side mission in destroying Bruce Wayne and his properties by using these devices called "Devourers", which everyone seems to call, but were some secret project that Wayne-Powers were working on for alien threats, but this just leads us to finally getting Bruce and Matt to stop accusing Barbara and Melanie so that we can get the reveal of who this mysterious Batwoman is and for me it wasn't that much of a reveal because it was the only person besides for the accused who was setup in this book and by the end the reveal is the only real thing that happened of note here.

All in all, I did enjoy the art in this book and love what Sean Chen is bringing to the party, but the writing feels thrown together and doesn't come off clever at all, especially since most of our main cast have been sitting around and saying the same things for a bunch of issues, but at least it feels like that part of the story is over and hopefully moving forward we can get Terry to start remembering things again because his amnesia plot is really running thin as well.  This could have been a definitive arc for this book by bringing Blight back and having him confront Batman again, but even that just feel thrown at us and doesn't feel like anything was really thought out at all going into this story.

Bits and Pieces:

While we finally do get a reveal of who Batwoman is in this issue, it was at the cost of half our cast looking like dummies for issue after issue.  Besides that though and some big recap we do have our heroine get thrown into some action, but this feels uninspired and at the end of the day this series just feels tired.  Thankfully though, the art is really good in this issue so at least there's that.

5/10