Batman Beyond #13 Review and *SPOILERS*

Frenemies

Written By: Bernard Chang

Art By: Bernard Chang, Marcelo Maiolo, Travis Lanham

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: October 25, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's time for a little one-shot that takes place just as the Brother Eye invasion began, but that's not about to stop Neo Gotham from having some fun with their Gotham Games competition featuring Tri-Ball.......... yeah, I don't know what that is, but all I can say is.......... Mayor Fox is an idiot.  Okay, not a lot of info to get you into this so let's just check it out and see what Batman Beyond was doing before Brother Eye took over the world and Terry believed himself to be Rewire.

Explain It!:

Oh my god, this book is a fucking mess.  Alright, so we have our prequel story, where we find Batman tasked with turning off three switches around Gotham to shutdown the cities air defense system, which seems to be in place so that Brother Eye can't get in, but at this point it seems to be keeping out the flying cars and or planes (future) that are trying to bring in medical supplies and rations to the city............ So yeah, this seems like the stupidest damn defense system ever created........ especially because now that Batman has to run his ass off around the city to find the switches, he keeps coming across bad guys who want to kick the shit out of him.  First, we have Shriek show up in the subway tunnels, but really, it seems like he's only there to protect the people who decided going underground was the safest plan.

Then when going for the second shutoff switch, Batman comes across Hacker, who also just wants to kick our heroes ass and while Batman does get away from him and finds the second shut off switch, he comes across Freon from the Terrific Trio, who believes that Batman killed her fiance........ and I don't know what continuity we're playing with her, but I don't remember Freon being an insane radiation woman.  While all of this is going on we have panels on the bottom of the page that show us what these three villains have been up to and if that wasn't enough, we also have a row of panels that is showing us Matt and Max playing Tri-Ball in the Gotham Games.............. just a mess.

In the end, Hacker and Shriek come to Terry's aid against Freon, where they finally put her down and Terry says farewell so that he can hopefully make the end of Matt's Tri-Ball game........... and I'm not certain that he ever shut down the third air defense switch.

That's it for this issue of Batman Beyond and I don't know if this issue will read better with a physical copy, but from the review copy I was given, it was a goddamn mess that was hard as hell to follow and just came off sloppy as hell.  Yeah, the Bernard Chang art that we all love was still there, but his style in writing is something that I'm not a fan of at all because by the end of the issue I have no idea if our hero actually completed his task or why the first two villains came to his aid.  All in all, this issue is not needed at all and doesn't do anything for the character or the current timeline of events.

Bits and Pieces:

Man, did I have problems following this story because of the panel layout and found most of it just pointless filler that didn't do anything to improve what was going on and where I could follow it, it didn't seem to make much sense.  The art is still fantastic though, but Bernard Chang's writing left a lot to be desired.

4/10