Welcome to the twenty-eighth edition of Adventure(s) Time, where we examine a beloved animated series and an issue of its tie-in comic with a similar theme. This week, we're looking back on a rather significant episode of Batman Beyond, and an issue of the tie-in comic that presented a sequel to the story.

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"Splicers" originally aired on September 18, 1999 as the second season premiere. Written by Evan Dorkin & Sarah Dyer, and directed by Curt Geda, "Splicers" is the first episode to air after the WB network examined the first season of the show and offered its notes to the producers. Network notes always make everything better, right? Feeling that the first season relied too heavily on corporate espionage (with Derek Powers, Bruce Wayne's one-time business partner as the lead villain), the WB asked the producers to take advantage of the school setting, and the life of this new Batman as a young teenager.

The producers apparently had no problem with the note, based on their comments on the DVD releases, creating a new template for Batman Beyond episodes. Batman's alter ego will now regularly be introduced to the criminal plot in the episode in some way through his high school teachers or classmates, with those teachers and classmates often turning into supervillains themselves.

It wouldn't have been a terrible setup for the occasional episode, but it's a well the series revisited far too many times. The majority of Bruce Wayne's foes didn't come from Gotham's high society, so why should Batman Beyond's rogues gallery be dominated by figures from Hamilton Hill High?

"Splicers" begins with popular girl Chelsea arriving at school with a pair of genetically altered cat eyes, a vehicle for introducing the fad of splicing animal and human DNA into the plot. Inspired by the late 1990s fad of tattoos and piercings, splicing is treated by the episode as a rather absurd extrapolation of the body modification trend. (Although "trend" probably isn't the most accurate term; it's not as if people stopped getting tattoos in the 2000s.)

Having the popular, pretty kids in school embrace the fad, essentially choosing to make themselves freaks, is a play on the concept of every subculture eventually going mainstream, a theory that's proven more true each day as cultural taboos continue to dissipate in America. The obsessiveness around the fad, and the cult that surrounds its creator, Dr. Abel Cuvier, is a little hard to swallow, however.

The story has Gotham's DA (and Police Commissioner Barbara Gordon's husband) Sam Young declaring plans to outlaw the practice, which leads to Cuvier and his devotees threatening Young's life. When Batman attempts to stand in their way, he finds himself injected with a blend of bat DNA, courtesy of Dr. Cuvier, who is convinced that splicing will "literally change the world!"

Why Cuvier cares so much about splicing isn't explained, nor is the source of his followers odd devotion to the practice. This is symptomatic of a major problem with the series -- the Batman Beyond villains are often lacking in depth or sympathetic motivations. They exist to fulfill certain plot functions, but few of them could ever be classified in the same league as characters like Two-Face or Mr. Freeze, following Paul Dini's reinvention of the character. Many Batman Beyond plots are exercises in moving the plot along or coming up with justifications to work in cool bits. This episode provides a classic example: Cuvier's nonsensical injection of the bat DNA turns Terry into a futuristic incarnation of the Man-Bat, all for a brief scene that looks very cool, but serves no real story function.

Another issue with Batman Beyond is its failure to execute ideas from its early episodes, such as a much older and cynical Barbara Gordon becoming Police Commissioner, and openly declaring that she isn't going to be tolerating another Batman. This leads absolutely nowhere, with Barbara never acting against Batman, and merely giving him the advice to hang up the costume this episode (even after he saved her husband.) There's also a bit about Bruce Wayne's dog Ace finally accepting Terry after the events of this story, which could've worked as a way to reaffirm Terry's role as the new Batman, but it feels tacked on.

As for the conclusion of the episode, it ends like a fairly standard Batman Beyond episode. Terry fights dirty (this time, injecting Cuvier, who's already turned himself into a "Chimera", with even more DNA), the villain becomes a monster, there are a few explosions, and the villain is left for dead. Nothing particularly memorable, aside from the hideous design of the super-mutated Dr. Cuvier. Kids' WB really did have a pretty lax standards and practices department, didn't it?

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Many fans might not know the tie-in comic later offered a sequel in the form of "Zoologically Speaking," the third issue of the regular Batman Beyond series. Written by Hilary J. Bader, who penned several episodes of the cartoon, and penciled by Craig Rousseau, the story picks up months after the apparent death of Dr. Cuvier. Splicing is now illegal, but the practice has only been pushed underground and mutated into something even more extreme.

Concerned about the more violent, animalistic Splicers that are appearing, Batman investigates the scene with one of Terry's friends (one of the new kids at the school who always seemed to appear when a plot required one.) He's taken to an underground Splicers' club, and in a rushed sequence meets the regulars, has a fight with some hyena Splicers, is offered a chance to join their gang, then pointed in the direction of a white tiger Splicer who can provide Terry with the "strong stuff."

This is a sequence that would take up much of the second act of an actual Batman Beyond episode, but there's no room in Bader's plots for such a leisurely pace. Some readers might enjoy this -- there's a decent amount of story in only 22 pages, and the issues read like plot summaries of ideas that really could've been episodes of the show. However, the final product just comes across as a rushed, unfulfilling comic in many instances. While Kelley Puckett became an expert at giving the reader just enough information in each scene during his Batman Adventures days, crafting comics that were fast but also satisfying reads, Beyond often feels like an episode set on fast-forward.

And speaking of fast-forward, over the course of only ten pages, we have a fight between Batman and the tiger-man, hints about his true origins, the discovery of Dr. Cuvier's new lab (with no explanation for how he survived the ending of "Splicers," or why he's a chimera again instead of the mutated monster Batman turned him into), the tiger-man turning on Cuvier, Batman knocking Cuvier several stories into the streets of Gotham (killing this guy for a second time), and the revelation that the tiger-man, like most of these new Splicers, was actually an animal grafted with human DNA, and not the other way around, followed by a touching reunion of the tiger with his mate at the Gotham Zoo. Whew!

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The Wrap-Up

Design-y

We've already covered the utterly sick design of Dr. Cuvier's monster form, but Batman's transformation into a variation of the Man-Bat is also a striking design. Going back into this series, I've also noticed just how richer these earlier, cel-painted episodes look when compared to the later digitally-colored episodes.

Continuity Notes

The concept of splicing returns in the Batman Beyond animated film, with the character of Woof. And Maxine "Max" Gibson, who goes on to become Batman's assistant and confidante, debuts in "Splicers." Conceived at the network's request for a "female entry point" (Bruce Timm swears those are the words they used), Max is portrayed as just another kid at school this episode.

Hey, I Know that Voice

Ice T makes a surprising appearance as Ramrod, one of Dr. Cuvier's violent followers. Ian Buchanan, who later goes on to voice the Ultra-Humanite on Justice League, provides the sophisticated voice for Dr. Abel Cuvier.

Battle of the Insanely Exaggerated Allegories for 1990s Fads

Sarah Dyer commented in an interview with the World's Finest site that Beyond was "a show that wasn’t firing on all cylinders" and that her script with Evan Dorkin underwent even more revisions than their previous Superman episodes. The producers have always been open about the rushed nature of the series' development, so it's not a total surprise the show didn't have a bible and at least a little second-guessing occurred during its early days.

Unfortunately, the chaotic early production of the show likely contributed to the formulaic nature of many episodes...after all, if you're busy world building and figuring out the main cast, it's easy to allow the plots to fall into a certain pattern. "Splicers" is one of the better episodes to start at the school and end with a giant explosion and Terry as a likely murderer, but it's a shame the series even has more than one of them.

Bader's sequel, meanwhile, feels more like a plot summary than an actual story, so it's hard to judge. Perhaps a well-produced episode of Batman Beyond could've sold Terry's friendship with the spliced tiger, or continued to explore the subculture of the Splicers, but who's to say? The comic that exists lacks any mood and has no time to truly establish the settings, so the reader is left to mentally fill in the gaps of what the story was meant to be. For completists, it's a look at what could've been a fourth season episode, but judged on its merits, the issue is intensely disappointing.

That’s all for now. If you have any suggestions for future pairings, just leave a comment or let me know on Twitter.