Batman Beyond #45 Review

Cold As Ice

Written By: Dan Jurgens

Art By: Paul Pelletier, Norm Rapmund, Chris Sotomayor, Travis Lanham

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: July 21, 2020

Damian Wayne has been cast out of as the leader of the League of Assassins and a madman with an ice-age fetish named Zeh-Ro is taking his place, but to do so he needs to take out the former Demon's Head.  Thankfully though, the Bat-Family has come to Damian's aid and not only that, but in the background, Elainna Grayson has been given permission to continue her exploits as the new Batwoman, but first...... she's going to need a new costume.  Let's jump into this issue and see how all of this plays out in a dark future, thirty-five years from now.  Let's check it out.

In this issue of Batman Beyond we spend the first bit of this book in getting some necessary background on Zeh-Ro and his plan and it turns out that this assassin wanna-be Mr. Freeze plans on saving the world by setting forth a new ice-age while the League of Assassins will wait out the death of man-kind out in space with their assassin starships.  It's not a bad background and really hinges on him turning on Damian Wayne from Damian's time in this series way back in issue #11, which is a fun little callback, but it's when this issue decides that we need to have a little action thrown in that the book becomes a little....... meh.

I mean, who doesn't love some action?  It's just that the backgrounds and some of the fighting kind of gets lost here as The League of Assassins, now not able to find Damian Wayne plan on destroying all of Neo-Gotham.  Thankfully though, we have Batman, Damian Wayne and Goliath start out the fight against the League of Assassins City-Destroyer ship, but everything just kind of becomes a bit excessive when Dick Grayson and Batwoman show up for her new grand debut......... I say excessive because there's so many people with laser-blasting sky sleds and every time you see someone doing something during this battle, it's really close-up and loses all scope in my mind...... not to mention that the ice-age as started so all of this is also obscured by snow falling.

All in all, even with my complaints of the battle scene, this wasn't a bad issue and shows some really cool moments between the Bat-Family, not to mention the grand debut of the new Batwoman, with her new Nightwing inspired costume.  I even like the League of Assassins background that we got here, but the scope of what should be happening here doesn't really feel like it fits what we see.  The city being destroyed, the Bat-Family fighting for their lives to stop it and we don't really see anything from the city or the people in the know, who would be in the city reacting to this threat.  I liked the art and colors a lot in this issue and only found them to start lacking during the battle, but overall, I liked this enough.

Bits and Pieces:

While I did want more out of the big battle that this issue gave us, this was still a fun issue overall, that gave us some necessary background on the League of Assassins and what we're currently dealing with and showed us the debut of the new Batwoman costume.  I enjoyed the art for the most part here and look forward to seeing how our united Bat-Family plans on taking out their newest threat.

6.8/10