Some folks only know Batman Beyond as that beloved animated series. But since the mid-2010s especially (beginning with the third volume) the character’s entered the DC mainstream for some fun, futuristic adventures. (Just see Batman Beyond Unlimited from 2012 to 2013 and the Rebirth-era series from 2016 to 2021.)
Special attention, though, should be given to Batman Beyond: Neo-Year. The 2022 miniseries (from writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing and artist Max Dunbar) wasn’t the biggest or the loudest of Terry McGinnis’ cyberpunk-colored adventures. However, it did something novel: strip Bruce Wayne out of the equation, and let us see how McGinnis functioned as The Dark Knight all on his own. We’ll get to see that compelling and poignant process further evolve as the trio of Lanzing, Kelly, and Dunbar return for a new follow-up title.
Batman Beyond: Neo-Gothic picks up right where we left off: Batman has defeated the A.I. controlling Neo-Gotham, and is ready to start a new chapter. However, Batman quickly finds himself embroiled in a decidedly much smaller case, as he teams up with a “mysterious splicer named Kyle the Catboi” to crack the case of missing children in the ruins of Old Gotham. Dark and foreboding, it’s a tale of discovery — of how to be a hero, sure, but also how much the past can never truly stay buried. In short, a daring new chapter for Batman Beyond in general.
Issue #1 doesn’t hit shelves until July 25. In the meantime, though. we got the chance to catch up with both Kelly and Dunbar during a recent Zoom chat. There, the creators talked about Terry’s development as a person and a hero, the influence of the Batman Beyond animated series, McGinnis’ new friends and foes, and the book’s larger themes and motifs, among many other topics and tidbits.
If you haven’t already, check out our full and exclusive preview of issue #1.
Issue #1 main cover by Max Dunbar. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: Batman Beyond is a very specific corner of the Bat “universe.” What’s it like to play around here?
Collin Kelly: One of the things that we think is so fascinating about Terry [McGinnis] is kind of how we phrased it — from the very beginning — that this this is an apprentice, and this is a scion of Bruce [Wayne] without having him directly over his shoulder, right? This is the first of a new generation of Batman and what Batman can actually be once you divorce him from the literal shadow of Bruce Wayne.
Beyond that, Terry’s fun — he has some of the Jason Todd danger to him. He’s got a bit of the quirkiness of Dick Grayson and the intelligence (once he really accepts it about himself) of Tim Drake. It’s really an amazing opportunity to tell this story about an effectively troubled teen making good on the promise of someone who truly believes in him.
AIPT: That first series, Terry was really unsure of himself and tenuous. Is this a more “evolved” Terry?
CK: Our first story with him was really about moving past who he was as an effectively an apprentice, right? We looked at that story as effectively Batman Beyond: Year One. That was the story of him getting his feet under himself and accepting who he was always meant to be. With Neo-Gothic, we’re stepping in directly to the story of he’s confident of who he is. He understands what being Batman means for both himself and the city. But one thing we’re going to discover is how easy it is to lose yourself in that role, and how easy it is to divorce yourself from all of those things — the “man” part in Batman. It’s him literally becoming buried under the role of who he is and who he’s meant to be. Yeah.
AIPT: Max, from a visual standpoint, there’s a certain aesthetic tied Batman Beyond from the animated series. How do you add to or extend that?
Max Dunbar: There’s probably the biggest challenge, and the thing that I was most frightened of heading into this. DC properties that have had animated series generally have started in comics and therefore might have a fairly wide variety of visual styles associated with them. But Batman Beyond is really associated with the animated series. Even the look of the suit was something that the three of us — or the four of us, when David [Wielgosz, editor] was our editor — talked about how to really represent in comic form because it’s this essentially opaque silhouette; you don’t see a lot of detail through it.
It was a really interesting challenge figuring out how we were going to honor the style that everyone loves with the animated series but not draw an animated series adaptation in a comic book because that was just not something that any of us necessarily were setting out to do. And, obviously, I wanted to marry it with my own style somewhat, but pay homage and respect to the art style that defines it. We did some art styles to try and figure out the look.
Issue #1 variant cover by Christian Ward. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I loved that animated suit. The way it moves and behaves, it feels a little more organic. Plus, it seems more expressive.
DB: The suit is so iconic and so many people think, rightfully, that it’s one of the best designs in all of comics. So we really wanted to try and stay true to it. But again, with marrying it with my own style and trying to get away a little bit from the animated series. It just took some real back and forth to try and figure out the right level of detail and the right level of expressiveness to show in Terry.
CK: Anyone who read our first series knows that Terry got a suit upgrade at the end of the story.And considering the technology available to him, we kind of leaned into hard light holographics, right?
In our first story, we went up, and this time we’re going down — into the dark. And one of the things that we realized, completely unintentionally, was because of those hard light holographics, Terry is his own light source. And it’s not like there’s a bunch of lamps underground, so oftentimes he is the only light source in the room. So it not only thematically is Batman bringing the light down into the dark, but it creates this incredibly moody, incredible feeling of Terry walking and everything is either black or red in a lot of his most darkest moments. That, again, is just so thematic to what the suit was originally intended to be.
AIPT: Speaking of the story, that first arc/title felt like this grand conspiracy. But Neo-Gothic feels a little more intimate. Was there a conscious decision to bring it down like that?
CK: You always want to start big, right? You’ve got to grab people. They want to see the huge excitement, but Batman is, in our opinion, at his best when he is with his back against the wall, and when he does not have a massive support system. When he’s really being challenged. And that’s what we wanted to take Terry into with this story.
Very early in the adventure, he makes the conscious choice — in the first volume to send his family away. Being Batman, or Terry’s understanding, is that [family] is a vulnerability, and so he’s making sure the people he cares for most are gone. But that puts him in the situation that he doesn’t have an emotional support system besides being Sunbeam Boonma, his new girlfriend and partner in this adventure, who lets him be Batman without anyone kind of pulling him back. And in classic Batman stories, that’s when Batman gets closest to the dark. So, yes, 100% we wanted to make this a more personal story for him as he goes deeper — not only into the bowels of Gotham, but into the depths of his own mind.
Issue #1 variant cover by Dike Ruan. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I think that’s interesting to say given that I also think Terry is building his own Bat Family with Beam and also Gestalt. That speaks volumes about him, I think: he’s not going to train an orphan from the street but he’ll make something that’s real to him.
CK: I think you hit it on the head. Bruce is a dad; even when he was young, he was a dad. He wants to protect the youth. He wants to protect orphans. He brings people together who he sees as people who need his protection. In a sense, he sees them as vulnerable and then he’s helping them become better than they are.
Terry looks for equals.Terry walks into this knowing that he’s kind of a f***up. He made some real bad choices and he knows that about himself. So when he finds people who can match him, and who can make him a better person, he welcomes them into his family. He is definitely trying to be as dark and isolated as he knows Batman must be, but he’s still a really good person. So even if it’s unintentional, he’s surrounding himself with people who love him.
AIPT: I think people recognize Terry’s not Batman; he’s doing the best with what he has. He’s still heroic in his own right. You can be a f***up and still be a hero.
CK: Put that on my gravestone.
AIPT: Max, the new book involves Catbois. Is it super weird to have to draw like a very serious cat person? How do you make something like that sort of feel fun and silly, but also take it serious enough?
MD: That was something I was actually thinking about today cause I’m drawing a sequence.
There’s a lot of darkness in this book. There’s a lot of horror elements. But in the middle of it, you have a cat-man. The comic book style tends to lend itself to exaggeration of features, but then cats already have very exaggerated features, like big eyes and big ears and they’re very expressive. So, again, it’s a really fun challenge to make him have the right mixture of human qualities mixed with recognizable cat qualities. Luckily, the internet is full of cat pictures. So I made a big collage of cats making various different faces and tried to incorporate that into the artwork to make sure it seems relatively authentic to what a cat would look like…but with a human element. So it is a challenge putting that into the story and hopefully having it fit in.
I think working with Sebastian Cheng, who’s the colorist. He really can make the whole thing cohesive with these sort of haunting colors that he’s putting on everything. And that really helps, in my opinion, sell it as a serious character who otherwise might seem kind of goofy and cartoonish, but Sebastian’s really helping me ground it.
Issue #1 variant cover by Ejikure. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: Does working with Sebastian give you the opportunity to get a little weird with certain designs or to be a little more playful because you know you have that support system?
MD: We worked together on Batman Beyond: Neo-Year, and I’ve worked with him before on other comic books. I feel like we have a really great working relationship and we understand each other really well. And, yeah, it gives you a lot of confidence when you have a good idea of what the colorist is going be doing with the lines that you’ve put down. And it does give you that confidence to try some new things, and to not feel like you need to check in with them all the time to make sure they understand what you’re going for. He’s a phenomenal, phenomenal colorist. And I just know that when I hand in a page, he’s gonna elevate it and take it to the next level and add some stuff to it that I never even thought of and really help complete the visual storytelling of it.
AIPT: We talked already about Terry’s family being gone, and obviously Bruce is gone. How much does their presence inform what he’s doing now? Is he still grappling with these relationships?
CK: That is the core of this entire story. Yes, it is a Batman story first and foremost. This adventure is something that Jack and I have been brewing on for years. We think this is a really fascinating corner of Gotham to tell a story in — as in the underside of Gotham. But Terry is dealing with the ramifications of not having that support system from issue #1.
He wants nothing more than to lose himself in the Batman persona. It is so much easier, as every one of us knows, to just be one thing. Just one thing and do that one thing to the absolute limit. But none of us are just one thing. We all contain multitudes. And especially when you cut yourself off from the support system that makes you pull yourself back.
We can get so focused and we can get so determined to be the best version of ourselves. Sometimes it takes our family to say, ‘Hey, pump the brakes, my guy.’ Or, ‘Think about where you’re going and why you’re doing this,’ which is not something we often want to hear. And that’s something that Terry does not want to hear at the start of this story. So going through all of this, especially as he gets further and further away from where people that love him and he gets deeper and deeper into this story. He’s starting as being disconnected and he’s going to slowly be realizing how important that connection truly is.
AIPT: You mentioned it earlier, but in the spectrum of Batman characters, I’ve always put Terry between Bruce and Dick. I think that he wants to be that stoic figure that Bruce is, but he also wants that humanity that I think Dick readily accepts it.
CK: I’ve always felt that Terry and Dick probably have a really kind of complicated relationship. I think of the entire Bat Family, and how it relates in the Batman Beyond universe is fascinating to me. It’s not really something that we’re touching on in this particular story, but I do think that you are 100% correct. I also think that Terry doesn’t really try to be anyone but himself. And I think that’s something that we see even in the very first episode of the show — it kind of mirrors Kitty Pryde screaming, ‘Professor X is a jerk.’ He starts by saying, ‘Who are you old man? You don’t get to tell me what to do.’ Terry has always been very confident in who he is — in a way that a lot of the other Bat Boys have not really defined themselves.
Unlettered art from issue #1. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I want to talk about the main protagonist, Lumos. He had a huge presence in that first story. What can we expect from him this time around?
CK: He is, spoiler alert, he’s not going be our primary antagonist for this arc. He is, however, around. Jack and I live here in Los Angeles, and what we see outside our door everywhere is a housing crisis. This city is in the midst of a homeless pandemic. Many metropolitan cities are.
That’s something that we really wanted to look at with Lumos. How can we utilize that kind of tech bro mindset? How can the uber rich think they can solve this problem? And we know that whenever they do step in to try and solve these problems, it is inevitably towards their own self aggrandizement. Our politics are showing.
That being said, his plan, which is going to remain on the surface of the city, which Beam is going to be directly engaging with as well as Gestalt, does have dire ramifications for everything from the top to the bottom. He is not done with his bullshit. He is still on it, and he is still making terrible mistakes. However, he is a man, and he is capable of learning.
AIPT: Max, how do you tackle this big, bombastic villain who’s effectively made of light. What challenges or opportunities are afforded?
MD: Terry, who is not quite as dark and brooding as Bruce was, is still dark and brooding compared to Lumos. Lumos is very flamboyant. He wants to be seen by everyone. He wants to be the center of attention. So we talked a lot about Lumos and his design when we were creating him. And one thing about him, because he has this mastery of this holographic technology, is his appearance can change on a dime. We discussed the fact that he would change his appearance frequently, and that in certain situations, he would get really, really crazy looking. Very big and operatic and have these incredibly ridiculous costumes that, of course, make everyone focus on him.
It’s really fun to figure out what he’s going to look like in any particular situation. With this arc, I wanted to base him on a retro ’80s ultra-capitalist, like a Gordon Gekko type character. He’s got that current, slicked-back mullet type thing and the rolled up sleeves. He’s channeling his inner corporate raider type look. It’s really fun to be able to do that with a character, and to just change him as the situation dictates. You almost can’t go too over the top with him, which is just a really fun thing to be able to do.
AIPT: Everytime I see him I think, ‘Man, he’s so ridiculous’ but also ‘They can certainly get bigger and weirder with him.’
MD: The fact that he calls himself the ‘Illuminated Man’ really lends to a lot of themes you can touch on. He gives himself these nicknames and he’s probably thinking about it way too seriously or taking himself too seriously. Like, he’s got the pyramid thing with the point of illumination, which is an Illuminati reference probably. Whether or not he’s actually a part of any of that, he’s probably just wanting to be a part of that. So he’s referencing it all and just trying to be more impressive than he actually is.
Unlettered art from issue #1. Courtesy of DC Comics.
CK: I do just want to add, from the thematic side, writers like to pat themselves on the back. But once you find a clean idea that everyone can kind of get on board. So in this sense, Batman/Terry is very much a man of the night, right? He has one look — OK, he has two looks, it evolves — but effectively it’s as simple, it’s as clean as possible. So what better mirror for him than a man of light who is constantly changing. That was really kind of our one-to-one. We love mirrors, and we love symmetry. So bringing that to life was really awesome. And I will say, unfortunately, Max gives him such good clothes. When he has that first big reveal in Neo-Year, I thought, ‘Do I need to commission [something]?’ Because I’m a real clothes fiend.
AIPT: Feel free to be as spoiler-y or not as you want, but what can expect from the book? Are there any bits, visually or storytelling wise, that you think are pure gold?
MD: In that first arc, in Neo-Gotham, it’s ultimately this very clean, very stark design based heavily off of the visual aesthetic of the animated series. And we’re going into this claustrophobic, dark, and decrepit Old Gotham, it really allowed us to sort of flip 180 degrees from what I think people associate with Batman Beyond — the sort of cyberpunk, ultra futuristic, clean-lined look. We’re really delving into this rotten underbelly of Gotham and what lies below Gotham and that was, for me, the most exciting part of when Jackson and Colin were talking about this story arc. I thought that it was going to be really cool to see him in this environment that I feel like he doesn’t usually get to be in. And I think I’m just really excited for people to see all the weird and gross stuff that we’ve got planned for Terry and for him to fight against in the upcoming issues.
CK: I’ve got two things personally that I’m really excited for people to see. And the first we’ve touched on, Kyle the Catboi. Kyle is, in a lot of ways, the heart of this story. I think Splicer technology is one of those things that Batman Beyond dances around, but it’s actually this absolutely insane piece of technology. The ability to combine your DNA, to change who you are into who you are actually meant to be, is a fascinating kind of allegory that we can see outside our window.
Kyle has been through so much and so much pain, even though he is a very cute cat-boy. Also, Max did this to himself: he drew the Catbois in one panel of volume and we fell in love with them instantly.
It’s about unpacking and also understanding how that pack mentality can imbue the nature of being an outcast and how kind of toxic that perspective can become. I think people are really going to feel for Kyle. They’re going fall in love with him. And, hopefully, they’ll cry along with his tragedy.
Unlettered art from issue #1. Courtesy of DC Comics.
But the thing I will say in a broader sense is that this is a story about going down. This is a story about plunging into the dark. And in Gotham…this is a city that, in a very real sense, was made by Bruce Wayne.
Going down means excavating the secrets of Batman’s past. We are looking to Dante. We’re going to be delving deeper and deeper into these secrets that Gotham has long left buried. They’ve been crushed by all the weight of what has been built upon. And they’ve begun to become quite toxic. So exploring down, and discovering those secrets — unpacking, effectively, the crimes of Bruce Wayne 00 is going to be very much a journey for Terry as he unpacks this stuff and gets deeper and deeper into the dark.
So I’m excited for fans to see what we’ve uncovered. And while knowing that wherever it is going on, they do not expect it. Our goal here is to unpack this as a mystery box. And as soon as you think you know what’s going on, I guarantee you we’re going to change the game.
AIPT: The first issue is great — it sets up Terry in some new ways.
CK: If Neo-Year was our Year One, then Neo-Gothic is our Long Halloween. I hope people start to get on board and get excited by the mystery as Terry steps into the role of not just Batman, but the city’s greatest detective.
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