Batman: His Greatest Adventures
Batman: His Greatest Adventures is a collection of standalone titles from Batman Adventures, which was the tie-in comic to the Batman: The Animated Series show. That’s where the style of artwork comes from, which you either love or hate. Personally, I love it. It’s highly stylized, with exaggerated but simplified forms. Batman’s face is represented as a flat plane like the side of an office building, and the Penguin (who in one story arc becomes mayor of Gotham) has the appearance of an Art Deco paperweight. Even Cat Woman, who looks more like a cartoon mouse with giant ears than a cat, is lots of fun.
The Joker and Riddler also show up, as well as Spellbinder in the final story, which is set in the Batman Beyond universe. Two villains you won’t see though are Two-Face and Poison Ivy, who are the two figures standing behind Batman on the cover. Talk about false advertising! How do comics get away with this?
Things start off great, with the first story being the best. It seems the Penguin has taken over Gotham Zoo with a flock of radio-controlled birds. I didn’t care as much for the other episodes. The Cat Woman story was good and the rest were only so-so. I thought the Batman Beyond episode had too much going on to fit into one comic, and the Scarecrow comic was just weak. All of the stories tend to wrap up quickly, but that’s the format.
Neither as dark as Batman too often gets, nor overly complicated in plot terms, this is just a bit of throwback comic fun. I haven’t read widely enough in the Batman Adventures to know if the stories collected here are the best in that series, but I had a real good time.
Alex Good 
Which one of them is Uncle Vanya?
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Two-Face, because he also plays Hedda Gabler.
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I think I remember one of the movies had the radio controlled penguins running around, not sure which one though.
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Uncle Vanya 2: March of the Penguins.
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I was relying on you to chip in with the answer, silly me. 🙄
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There were radio-controlled penguins in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, but these radio controlled birds are actual birds that fly. Not saying penguins aren’t actual birds, but you get the point.
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A LOT of people liked the art style of Batman the animated series. So it’s no surprise it made the leap over to the comic side. I don’t know if I’d like it in a comic though.
Speaking of overly complicated. As I’ve been reading The Shadow novels and realizing just how much Batman is based on that character, and seeing as how most batman comics today rely on multi-year SFF oriented story arcs to keep people buying, I’ve wondered if a Batman comic based on the stories of the Shadow would work. Return Batman to his roots as a detective facing a real world villain without the threat of Ultimate Extinction every other issue. I wonder if that would sell or if peoples’ tastes are so jaded now that it just wouldn’t help.
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I did like the art here, but maybe because it was so much of a change-up. Some of the recent Batmans have really played up the detective angle. It’s more the darkness/madness angle that I think gets overdone today. It’s like Arkham has overtaken Gotham on a metaphorical level. But then I guess the association was always there. Batman started out trying to scare people.
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Batman wanted to scare criminals. A fine distinction, but one that I think has gotten lost over the years. Those fine lines getting erased are part of the current problem I think.
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