The cartoon - 1999 to 2001 - really hit the sweet spot for me as a 20-something nerd: great storytelling, a darker setting and circumstance and superb voice acting combined to produce the pinnacle of that wave of American animation most directly shaped by anime. I was one of the people who was simultaneously stunned that Warner Bros. would claim with straight faces that this was a show for kids, impressed by its production quality and talent - Teri Garr! Stockard Channing! Kevin Conroy! Seth Green! - and grateful that they were producing it at all. When the show was ended in favor of Justice League I was sorely disappointed.

Fast forward to now, and when I saw this on the shelf of my local shop I snatched up the first two issues without even a glance at the inside. For me, pretty much anything with the Batman Beyond logo on it is worth the price of admission. I settled in at home and read both issues in a row and I'm still impressed with the quality of the treatment this property gets and the maturity of its storytelling. Despite Adam Beechen having no role in the original TV series he clearly gets the relationship between Terry and Bruce Wayne, including its affections and its tremendous stresses. Wayne is nothing if not the DC universe's superlative control freak and Beechen plays to great effect on Bruce's passive-aggressive tendencies in his relationship with Terry: Wayne never thinks anything Terry does is good enough but he always pushes Terry to do more of it. The pseudo-parental relationship between them is one with which many of us can identify, queer or otherwise, and Beechen does not shy away from the claustrophobia it creates.

The art is also very good in this book, definitely up to the standards of the original cartoon's visually striking design. Looking at these two issues, they looked like Batman Beyond. Seeing a visually unique property recreated after a long period of dormancy - and seeing a visual style originally created for television converted into static images - is very impressive.

So what's my beef? That in issues #1 and #2, anyway, the story doesn't really seem to be about Terry. It seems to be much more about Bruce and his past than about McGinnis and his future. There's little if any appearance of Terry's school, his girlfriend, his mother, his little brother or any other aspect of his life outside of the suit and those were some of the things that most made the show as interesting as it was. Whereas Bruce Wayne's personal narrative is one of the phoenix-like rise of a hero from the total destruction and arguable abandonment of his personal life, Terry is the Batman who's trying to walk the line between hero and human; that is, ultimately, the heart of the tension between him and his mentor. Part of what was so thrilling about Batman Beyond was that Bruce Wayne was such a negative example to Terry, easily as much a warning as an inspiration. Terry is initially inspired by tragedy, yes, but his living family and support structure are the fuel that keep the engine of ambition running for him and without those elements - and given what the plot seems to be in the first two issues - the story in this Batman Beyond comic series feels like it's more about Bruce Wayne's abuse of Terry's body by proxy more than about Terry becoming the real Batman. Even Terry's scorecard in the suit seems absent, in that there's only the tiniest acknowledgement of his unique cast of villains and the various ways they act as foils.

Last year my biggest complaint about the em-dash nightmare Dark Reign - Young Avengers - The List was that it didn't seem to be about them so much as it served as an opportunity to remind us that they existed while telling a story about someone else. In some ways, Batman Beyond #1 and #2 feel the same way.

But will I keep reading it? Absolutely. For one thing, despite my complaints above this feels like Batman Beyond and I enjoy reading it. Even if it's stripped of some of what made the original property so compelling to me it's still very entertaining and it has not been hollowed out or abused. The hyperbolized emotional struggle between Terry's desire to be a kid and his desire to make a difference in the world are the coming-of-age metaphor that most made the show relevant to me, yes, but there are a lot of other dimensions to the characters and their relationships and this comic is unwaveringly true to those elements. An honest assessment includes that there were plenty of times when the TV show was as much about Bruce Wayne and his freight car of baggage as it was about Terry, so in that regard this comic series is simply taking a different angle of the show and blowing it up into a comic book. Again, that it isn't the element that most interested me doesn't mean it's invalid or badly done; to the contrary, Beechen is much more willing to "go there" in terms of how Wayne wobbles between mentor and abuser and I have zero doubt that plenty of people - young and old - need stories to help them work through such relationships.

So, overall, a mixed review: this is an exceedingly well-crafted work, yes, and I will absolutely finish out the series. It doesn't seem to be about what I hoped it would be about, thematically, but it's still very much Batman Beyond and any fan of the TV series would be well served by picking this up.