Review: Batman Beyond: The Animated Series Classics Compendium - 25th Anniversary Edition trade paperback (DC Comics)

[A week of Batman Beyond-related reviews kicks off with a guest review by Zach King. Zach writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

It might surprise readers to learn that I’m lukewarm to neutral on Batman Beyond. The animated series debuted in 1999, just about the same time that I was starting to outgrow Saturday morning cartoons. I held onto the comics a little while longer, which accounts for my complete run of Batman Beyond floppies, and while I’ve since picked up the Blu-Ray set, I’ve never gone through the whole thing in order, instead hop-skipping around to the same half-dozen episodes.

For me, the most remarkable thing about Batman Beyond has always been that it’s the best version of an idea that should be unworkable. After a network executive demanded a new cartoon starring a teenage Batman, Bruce Timm joined up with the ever-dependable Paul Dini and Alan Burnett to make the concept salable without betraying everything they’d spent the last decade creating with Batman: The Animated Series and the DC Animated Universe writ large. Instead of a young Wayne driving a Batmobile, we got Terry McGinnis, heir to the Bat-mantle under the watchful tutelage of an octogenarian Bruce. It’s a compelling archetypal frame, ripe with possibilities for new stories and fresh twists on familiar Gotham tropes.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

And it’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years already. So thoroughly has Terry McGinnis become the logical next step for the evolution of Batman that no less than Jeph Loeb, Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, and Sean Gordon Murphy have extrapolated their Batman runs to imagine a place for this Batman just beyond the sightline of continuity’s horizon. Batman and Robin will never die — we know this — but if one or both of them were to retire, lo there shall come a McGinnis. We even saw a tease for it in the final installments of Batman: The Adventures Continue, a welcome reminder that it’s all true, and it all counts.

I was overjoyed, then, that a recent renaissance in interest in the DCAU yielded Batman Beyond: The Animated Series Classics Compendium — a whopping 750 pages of fin de siècle cartoon goodness, helmed by Hilary J. Bader, Craig Rousseau, Rick Burchett, and others. Bader was herself an active participant in the Batman Beyond writers' room, with Burchett standing as the premier DCAU comics artist; Rousseau, meanwhile, drew 19 of 24 issues in Beyond’s second volume and became synonymous with the clean house style of the DCAU.¹ I haven’t revisited many of these comics since their initial publication, and I was curious to see how they’d aged.

Out of 31 issues, the bag is mostly mixed, but as our host likes to say, “even if it’s not good, at least there’s a lot of it.” With nearly all of the issues written by Bader, they rightly feel of a piece with the animated universe, with one of the better features in this volume being the two-part opener which adapts the pilot episode. Burchett’s pencils are dynamic as ever, lending drama and action with dynamic angles and the judicious use of silhouette. Burchett hangs on for a third issue, which finds Blight (Derek Powers) stealing radioactive chemicals — a mostly boilerplate story that augurs how much of the compendium will operate.

Ostensibly Batman Beyond’s archnemesis, Blight crops up a few times throughout the volume, but all the familiar villains are here, most appearing more than once. You’ve got Inque and Stalker with multiple appearances (including a fun Blight vs. Stalker tale); capers starring the likes of Spellbinder, Shriek, and Terminal; plus Curaré, Kobra, and even Ma Mayhem. It’s a literal rogues' gallery here, though many of these stories feel simply like unproduced episodes, sideways tangents that keep the toys in the box. When the comic presents characters like Ratboy, presumed dead at the end of his episode, it’s a sure bet that Ratboy will be presumed dead by the end of the issue so there’s no question of continuity. More disappointingly, though, none of these issues gives me a stronger insight into any of these characters; where The Batman Adventures often had pointed, poignant things to say about its villains, the Batman Beyond Compendium never quite says anything new.

The Royal Flush Gang ends up starring in two standout issues, with Melanie “Ten” Walker becoming a kind of hybrid between Catwoman and Spoiler for Terry’s Batman. I recall that pairing on the show possessing a little more crackle than Terry’s proper love interest, Dana Tan (who remains severely undercooked in this volume), and Melanie ends up being the character I wanted to see more often. Also starring in two issues is, surprisingly enough, Etrigan the Demon. It’s a neat way to continue the legacy begun in his episode of The New Batman Adventures, but it’s a shame we don’t get to see this Bruce reunited with the ageless Jason Blood. Another episode that gets revisited is the superlative “Over the Edge,” which gets a reprise here when Commissioner Barbara Gordon reveals she’s still grappling with the after-effects of a Scarecrow attack. And in a semi-sequel to one of Beyond’s best-loved two-parters, Batman reunites with the Justice League Unlimited against Kai-Ro’s nemesis, Blacklight. (Rick Burchett returns to the art duties too, another point in this story’s favor.)

At the end of the book, the editors have happily included Superman Adventures #64, a team-up between Superman and Batman Beyond. I mentioned in my recent Uncollected Editions review that this issue was a welcome treat, and it’s a fun coda for this compendium, too. Yet disappointingly, this attention to collective detail makes only more glaring a staggering omission; as I feared when the solicitations dropped, this volume does not include the comics adaptation of Return of the Joker (scripted by Darren Vincenzo and illustrated by Craig Rousseau). Both Mask of the Phantasm and Sub-Zero showed up in their respective omnibus collections, which leads me to fear there might be a more comprehensive Batman Beyond hardcover in the offing before long. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it might have been nice to end the volume with Bruce Wayne and Tim Drake finally making amends after that horrible final encounter with The Joker.²

The optimist and the completist in me, though, hopes Return of the Joker might be carried over into a second compendium volume, something to collect the Adam Beechen run (Hush Beyond, et al.) into the Batman Beyond Unlimited/Universe anthology era,³ which brought in the Justice Lords, Kobra, a new Batgirl, and ultimately the Phantasm herself. I always think of this era as the Dustin Nguyen era, mostly for his covers and his Justice League Beyond back-up feature, but there’s another cover artist in play; you’ve got Darwyn Cooke and Phil Hester, Rafael Albuquerque and Matteo Scalera (plus Norm Breyfogle on interiors!), yet the first issue of Batman Beyond Universe comes with a cover from the pen of Sean Gordon Murphy – and a compendium with that cover, I’d imagine, sells itself. Roll on, then, Batman Beyond Universe Compendium; we are, after all, “beyond the white knight…”

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1. Perhaps my favorite Rousseau contribution was his “No Man’s Land Adventures,” a Secret Files & Origins short that reimagined a post-Cataclysm Gotham as an animated cartoon. If only we’d had that on our TV screens!  ↩︎

2. If you’re wondering, the comics adaptation used the “censored” death of the Joker, accidentally electrocuted in the bowels of Arkham. I prefer (as I believe most Bat-fans do) the “uncensored” version, in which Joker is impaled on a Joker-ized Tim Drake’s “BANG!” flag pistol.  ↩︎

3. This era was also sometimes known as Batman Beyond 2.0, an equally compelling subtitle for a second compendium.  ↩︎