Batman: Wayne Family Adventures #29

Hangout

Inks Starbrite

Writing CRC Payne

Storyboards Maria Li

Backgrounds Lan Ma

Flats & Rendering C.M. Cameron

Lettering Kielamel Sibal

Production Susan Cheng and Wil Kennedy

Based on characters by DC Comics

Batman created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger

I’m back! Just when I had almost given up hope that I’d never have another Bart Allen story to review, he finally had an actual appearance on Young Justice: Phantoms. This prompted me to doublecheck that I hadn’t missed anything else from this year, and it turns out I did miss an entire episode of The Flash CW show — oops! — and this weird little web comic thing.

Batman: Wayne Family Adventures is an odd beast. For starters, it’s completely free. You can read this comic right here. It also doesn’t seem to be beholden to any particular continuity — just using whichever characters whenever it wants. The stories are humorous in nature — at least they try to be — and they seem to have been mass produced at a very quick pace. There are minimal backgrounds and no real layouts, as the comic presents every panel one at a time, stacked right on top of each other, forcing you to scroll down and down and down to read it. The whole production feels like nothing more than a fanfic, but it is apparently officially sanctioned by DC, so I decided to review it.

Our story opens with Tim Drake having hamburgers and fries in Gotham City with Conner Kent, Cassie Sandsmark and Bart Allen (labeled as Impulse: The Flash’s grandson from the future). Since they don’t have any villains to battle and none of them are ready to go home yet, Bart suggests they go to a movie. Unfortunately, Tim explains, the Riddler had recently taken over a bunch of movie theaters, so they’re all still closed. Conner says they should go to Wayne Manor, but Bruce is holding a dinner party that Tim was hoping to avoid. Conner confidently states that three of them have super speed and could zip in and out without anyone noticing. Bart begs Tim with the biggest puppy-dog eyes he can muster, and Tim finally relents. Sort of.

Tim brings his friends into the Batcave, bragging about how they own every movie. All Conner and Bart care about is the snacks, though. Tim tries to explain they’re not allowed to eat around the Batcomputer, but Bart doesn’t listen and ransacks Alfred’s pantry before anyone can stop him. So they all settle down, hoping that Batman doesn’t notice them.

But before they can even start the movie, Bruce angrily storms down into the cave. Demonstrating a complete lack of loyalty, Conner, Cassie and Bart all run away as fast as they can, leaving Tim to clean up the snacks and grumble that he should have met his friends in Smallville, since the Kents are nicer.

So … that was … kind of fun? I like having a quiet slice-of-life story, especially since most shows and comics these days never seem to make time for stuff like this. And I always do appreciate bringing back the old Big Four of the original Young Justice. It was interesting that our heroes seemed a bit older than usual — I’d probably put them between 17 and 20. I do, however, hate that Bart was drawn to look exactly like Wally West. So many artists make this mistake. Bart has yellow eyes and brown hair (the more of it the better)! He’s not even related to Wally by blood, so please, stop giving him red hair and freckles! Personality-wise, he was just fine. There really wasn’t much to the story. It wasn’t particularly funny, but it was a cute reminder that these characters do exist and some people still like them.

Next time, we’ll return to The Flash TV show to find out if it’s somehow managed to sink any lower, or if it has miraculously recovered somewhat.