Batman: The Adventures Continue #2
Written by Alan Burnett and Paul Dini
Art by Ty Templeton and Monica Kubrina
Lettering by Joshua Reed
Published by DC
‘Rama Rating: 3 out of 10
With much of the country stuck at home for the last month, it makes sense that we’ve all been holding out for a hero – but thanks to its rushed pacing, Batman: The Adventures Continue #2 never quite lives up to the nostalgia of the hit 1990s animated series. While writers Alan Burnett and Paul Dini are ambitious with how much they stuff into their abbreviated page count, they also force artist Ty Templeton into an impossible corner, transforming comic book comfort food into something too lightweight to satisfy.
Given DC’s previous track record with digital-first offerings, you’d be forgiven if you expected Batman: The Adventures Continue to follow in the footsteps of Injustice or DC Comics Bombshells, where creators have used bite-sized, character-driven installments to lay down the groundwork for a much longer storyline. And reading Burnett and Dini’s first chapter of this series, you’d be forgiven if you thought the same thing might happen here, as Batman went up against Lex Luthor rather than any of his standard rogues. It felt like there was a bigger world for Bruce Wayne to explore — if only he had the page count to do so.
Which is what makes Burnett and Dini’s attempt to wrap this story up in just two chapters feel all the more bewildering. For two creators who have had such a historically strong grasp on Batman as a character, here they throw continuity against the wall seemingly without regard of whether any of it will stick – we’ve got scrapped Brainiac hardware, we’ve got Dark Knight Returns armor, we’ve got a trapped Superman suddenly appearing as a deus ex machina, not to mention spending pages they don’t have with a teaser about a new villain waiting in the wings. Given that it’s all told in the confines of 10 standard pages, none of it gets time to breathe – it honestly barely even has time to be properly introduced, let alone resolved.
Much of that burden instead is unfairly placed on artist Ty Templeton. While he captures the animated series aesthetic nicely, it’s hard to blame him for characters looking tiny or action sequences lacking impact – the fact that he has to try to draw panels of giant robot combat when his page space is postage-sized means he should be filing for hazard pay at this point. But there’s so much that isn’t properly introduced in the script, and Templeton unfortunately can’t make it happen, either – Batman freeing a trapped Superman, for example, comes out of nowhere, and looking at what’s been drawn on the page, I couldn’t really tell you what Batman did exactly to make Clark’s sudden escape actually happen.
There are obviously demands that publishers need in terms of series like Batman: The Adventures Continue – and if the directive is that every two digital chapters have to combine to form one 20-page comic, it’s understandable. But what doesn’t make any sense is for Burnett and Dini to start this new series with a story that’s this big and then give it zero time to breathe. If the goal was to tell done-in-one stories like Batman: The Animated Series, these creators have the history to do that with their eyes closed – but if that was the directive, this particular story should have been axed at the pitching stage. As it stands, this opening story doesn’t due credit to any of these creators’ prodigious track records, nor does it really live up to the critically acclaimed cartoon from which it is based.