My editor doesn't like it when we make predictions in our reviews. It rarely adds anything substantial to the commentary itself, and you open yourself up to looking foolish if you're wrong. I get that. That being said, I almost wish I had last review because this ending could be seen coming a mile away. Flooding the page with meaningless spectacle while also trying (and failing) to say something poignant with trite clichés has become this series' hallmark. As soon as last issue established a bunch of mindless incarnations of DC plant villains as "The Garden" and an evil John Constantine as the puppet master and Kyle Selina the Catboi's former mentor, the finale was just a matter of watching everything play out. Well we're finally here, with everything wrapping up the only way it could.
What's worse than three giant plant monsters? An entire city full of them! In a sequence pulled straight from the cut ending of Little Shop of Horrors, plants have taken over Neo-Gotham. You'd think it'd too much for one person to handle in less than a single issue, but luckily the story has something they could never have anticipated: the power of deus ex machina. Yes, it turns out that everyone in Gotham still has some of the Gotham nanotech from the last series in their bloodstreams, which apparently means that using vague hacking under the name "Gordon Initiative", everyone can turn into a Batman.
If there's one thing that this series loves, it's writing sequences that sound cool in a vacuum, but never coming up with the narrative support to make it worth caring about. Wouldn't it be "cool" if there were, like, dozens of Batmans fighting monsters? What results is a disjointed and ultimately unimportant series of panels. Even Max Dunbar's art, often a highlight of the series, doesn't do anything to make it more engaging. It's not bad art, it's just unremarkably depicting the information on the page, which due to the script is nameless good guys punching nameless, mindless bad guys. It's a struggle to not just gloss over all of it.
This is made especially true by the fact that even within the story itself, none of that matters at all. As has become increasingly clear over the course of this mini, this isn't Terry's story. It's Kyle Selina the Catboi's. His is the emotional core of this narrative, to the point of everything else being backdrop filler. It's his talking down of Constantine that causes all the plant monsters to die, not any actions taken topside. A comic titled Batman Beyond makes Batman himself into an observer to the story of the author's pet character (forgive the pun, but it's nothing compared to the cat puns that Kyle continues to make even in what's supposed to be the emotional climax).
So what of that story? Well, it has all the same problems as the rest of it. Just as with the Batmans vs monsters fight, the story never puts in the work to make the dramatic moments work. The "Constantine" that we see here bears no resemblance to the man from Hellblazer. His actions couldn't be more out of line with the ethos and beliefs of the character. So how does Batman Beyond: Neo-Gothic invest you in this version? It doesn't. He's just inexplicably evil in the most cliched "for the greater good" way, and what's worse is he changes his mind just as easily. All it takes is Kyle forgiving(?) him, and he gives up and dies. Never is their connection built up to make this moment hit the way it's meant to; it's just an anticlimax between an underdeveloped villain and an frustratingly intrusive pseudo-protagonist.
"What of Lumos?" I hear you asking. After all, he's been working in the background this entire time with the real estate subplot. He's completely pushed aside off page. You should know by now that none of this matters, so why expect anything to come of that plotline? While this definitely makes every scene with him a complete waste of time, I won't complain about minimizing the amount of time with him on the page.
After all of this, it's finally done. Barely anything mattered, and the parts that were given narrative focus were undercooked and annoying, but it's over.
Show Spoiler
Except it's not, as the final "Batman Beyond will return" feels more like a threat at this point than a promise.
Recommended If…
- The more Batmen the better
- You're really invested in the emotional weight of Kyle's journey and his relationship with Constantine
- You want to see this end
Overall
Batman Beyond: Neo-Gothic's finale ends as frustrating and pointless as the rest of the series. Batman's story is relegated to an irrelevant brawl between swaths of nameless action figures that accomplish nothing. The focus, instead, is given to the relationship between Kyle the Catboi and a John Constantine whose motivations are both hackneyed and unrecognizable to the character you know and love. The best part of this story is that it's over.
Score: 2.5/10
Disclaimer: DC Comics provided Batman-News with a copy of this comic for the purpose of this review.
