[Guest reviewer Zach King writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

When I reviewed the fourth volume of The Batman Adventures, I closed by sharing a conversation I had with Kevin Conroy, in which he told me that he didn’t think the Dark Knight could ever be truly happy while still being Batman. I had his words (never mind his voice) ringing in my ears as I read Batman: The Adventures Continue — Season Three, in which Batman’s happiness becomes the turning point, along with the concomitant possibility of ending his vigilante career.

With Season Three, we come to the end of so many roads — the end of a whole continuity’s worth (and more than a year) of reviews, the end of a television show that’s been expanding (more or less) since 1992, and the end (so we’re told) of a publishing initiative that’s run just as long. “Alan Burnett and Paul Dini return one final time,” the back cover promises, and Season Three feels very much like a series finale. And like most finales, Season Three is not the last brilliant gasp but rather a slightly sedate winding-down that dithers in spots but nevertheless finds its readers asking, hoping, for one more round.¹

When Season Three begins, we’re right in the midst of recognizable territory, with district attorney Janet Van Dorn (Batman’s own defense attorney in the superlative episode “Trial”) inviting Oscar “The Muscle” Delgado to testify against crime boss Esther Valestra. We met the Muscle in the previous volume of The Adventures Continue, but Esther Valestra is the daughter of Sal Valestra (late, and we do mean late, of Mask of the Phantasm). We then cut to a dinner between Esther, Rupert Thorne, the Penguin, and Black Mask, and before long no less than Lock-Up gets involved in a plot that ultimately finds the Muscle recruited to join a certain Task Force X. It’s an issue that is bursting at the seams with recognizable characters and double-triple-crosses, cueing up a much larger story with Amanda Waller’s last page cameo.

Before we get too deep into the weeds, though, Dini and Burnett slow it down a step with “Old Flames,” a nutty one-off that finds Harley Quinn reuniting with her old college girlfriend Cassie Kendall — who also happens to be one of Bruce Wayne’s past paramours. This story is high on whimsy and a little insubstantial, though it feels exactly like the kind of Harley Quinn episode Dini would have written late in the original series.

The real standout feature in this tale is the presence of artist Kevin Altieri, famed for directing 20 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, including the pilot “On Leather Wings,” “Harlequinade,” and “Harley’s Holiday,” the latter two of which share a particular kinship with “Old Flames.” In a reunion jam session, it’s a treat to see Altieri pop up (and not just because of the time he submitted [a comment to my own blog).

After a bit of table-setting, then, we’re off into Season Three’s two big storylines, “Crack-Up” and “The Offer.” In the former, we learn the secret origin of Joker’s new henchman Straightman; placing him somewhere between Captain America and Bane, we learn that Straightman was once Carl Finley, an army captain brainwashed by Hugo Strange to be the perfect soldier, only for the Joker to tamper with Strange’s programming to create his own sidekick.

As plotting goes, it’s a bit thick and convoluted, especially with a bait-and-switch about a mysterious woman trying to cure Straightman, and the fuller involvement of Task Force X raises too many questions about continuity (namely, when was Harley a member, and how does this connect with the Justice League Unlimited episode which saw Deadshot join Waller’s team?).

It’s also just one ingredient too many in the soup, with a breakneck resolution that leaves much of the denouement to a Batcave debrief. Even artist Ty Templeton seems pushed beyond the boundaries of his own panels, with a few moments of characters disappearing into the choreography of each scene’s staging. Deadshot, for example, appears and reappears in one Task Force X scene, and at least once it seems the Muscle is standing where Deadshot should be.

Finally, “The Offer” brings us the ostensible finale to the story, and it feels like one of the strongest stories from The Adventures Continue. It’s exactly what it ought to be, tying together many threads from The Animated Series and the comics that followed, and it ends up offering a very nice thesis statement on this incarnation of Batman.

“The Offer” begins with crime nearly eradicated in Gotham, such that Tim Drake convinces Bruce Wayne to take a vacation. It’s on this tropical island that Ra’s al Ghul resurfaces, aging beyond the help of the Lazarus Pits, once again asking Bruce to take the reins of his empire. It’s a story we’ve seen a thousand times by now, but Dini and Burnett make it feel more plausible than usual, and Bruce’s conflict seems both genuine and earned, especially given that this might be the ending of the story.

All is not as it seems (is it ever?), and where “Crack-Up” felt overstuffed, “The Offer” feels suitably full with its inclusion of the Court of Owls, an animated equivalent of the Gotham City Sirens, a love triangle that finds Bruce caught between Selina Kyle and Talia al Ghul, and cameos from just about every Gotham rogue, up to and including Esther Valestra (in case you thought, as I did, that the book had forgotten about her). What’s more, the whole thing feels topped with a bow by an issue cover from Ty Templeton that homages his own 1992 cover for The Batman Adventures #1. It’s as though the whole creative team simultaneously agreed, with this last arc, to close up and turn the lights off.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, given that this was the first series published after the passing of Kevin Conroy. Indeed, Season Three ends with full page obituaries for Kevin Conroy and Arleen Sorkin.² Both pages, with moving testimonials from Dini and Burnett, describe these two titans not just as colleagues but as friends, and I felt an acute sadness reading these pages and then closing the book. I felt like something had ended. Like David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, I didn’t want to go. For those who, like me, have spent the last thirty years hearing these voices in our heads as well as on our television sets, the prospect of a Gotham without Conroy and Sorkin seems unfathomable. I spent maybe seven minutes with Kevin Conroy five years ago and felt his loss so acutely that I can’t fathom the grief of losing two 30-year friendships in the space of a year.

What’s more, Dini and Burnett appear to have taken that sadness and that loss and funneled it into something that heals this Batman. Most fans lament how jaded and cold Batman became in The New Batman Adventures, all gritted teeth and holding his loved ones at bay. In the final pages of Season Three, though, Tim Drake points out the fatal flaw in Ra’s al Ghul’s plan: “Ra’s was trying to win you over with the one thing he felt Bruce Wayne could never have.” But Batman smirks, itself a rare feat for the Dark Knight, as he reminds his young charge, “But Batman does. A family.”

It put me in mind of my other favorite interpretation of Batman, from the pen of Grant Morrison. At the tail end of Return of Bruce Wayne, just as the third act of Morrison’s seven-year opus was about to begin, Morrison taught me something new about Batman, an epiphany that saves Bruce Wayne’s life — “The first truth of Batman. The saving grace. I was never alone. I had help.” It’s telling that Dini and Burnett stage the final moment of their run in the Batmobile, with Robin right beside Batman, charging headlong into another red-sky night of crimefighting and in pursuit of Man-Bat. Lest we forget, the very first episode³ of Batman: The Animated Series found Batman hunting Man-Bat, albeit alone, one creature of the night giving chase to another. But he was never alone. He had help.

And all of us who have taken inspiration from this character, from this particular interpretation and its unusually long life, had the help of Paul Dini and Alan Burnett, of Kevin Conroy and Andrea Romano’s whole Mount Rushmore of voice talent, of Ty Templeton and Mike Parobeck and Bruce Timm. And we have each other, whole found families of people whose only thing in common is the four-color ink stains on our fingers. But a Bat-family all the same.