Terry McGinnis has joined the Justice League. In the closing pages of Batman Beyond #50, fans got the news: the hero known to fans as “Batman Beyond” will join the other heroes of the DC Universe in the greatest super-team in the multiverse. After sixty-seven issues, writer Dan Jurgens wrapped his run on Batman Beyond, and did so in fine style, with Bruce Wayne clinging to life, Terry’s greatest enemy at large, and Wonder Woman appearing in the finale to help out. As the story wrapped up, the hero was invited into the League by Wonder Woman, to his own shock.
The issue saw Inque putting Bruce Wayne at risk, and Terry teaming with Diana to defeat her and bring him back from the brink. In the end, Bruce is still in a hospital bed, but he promises that he has a lot left to give.
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Throughout the issue, Wonder Woman had played a bit coy with naming the Justice League itself, referring to “her friends” repeatedly, and suggesting that those friends had been keeping an eye on Terry. It’s in the final moments that she finally said it, clarifying that she wanted to introduce him to some people.
“My friends want to meet you,” Diana tells Terry. After all, the justice League just isn’t complete…without a Batman.”
That’s the last we get (outside of a “schway” from Terry), so we don’t actually get to see him hanging out with the team, unlike in the short-lived digital-first series that preceded Jurgens’s run. During that time, creators Derek Fridolfs and Dustin Nguyen told stories of the Justice League Beyond in a way that was far less tied to Batman’s own history and legacy than what Jurgens did and more a riff on what fans got in the Batman Beyond animated series.
Jurgens has spent the last arc or so of his long run on Batman Beyond bringing the character face to face with some of the things that have defined Jurgens’s own career. Not just the Justice League, but allowing the character to time travel to the present day, where he teamed up with Booster Gold and the Bruce Wayne Batman in his prime for a bizarrely unlikely storyline involving using Terry to save his own father’s life.
The final issue of Batman Beyond is available in comic shops and online now. You can get most of Jurgens’s six-year run on DC Universe Infinite.
