Changes: Batman (Terry McGinnis)

Revision as of 14:18, 22 July 2008

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This article is about Terry McGinnis, the future Batman. For his predecessor, Bruce Wayne, see Batman. For other uses of the word "Batman", see Batman (disambiguation).

"If Batman's not around--"
"I've got it covered. Always."
— Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis^[1]

Terry McGinnis adopted the identity of Batman in the future. Like his predecessor, McGinnis fought crime and injustice in Gotham City and elsewhere for many years.

History

Early Years

By his own admission, Terry was once a "bad kid." A member of a street gang run by youthful racketeer Charlie "Big Time" Bigelow, Terry had his fair share of run-ins with the GCPD in his early teens, even serving a three-month stint in juvenile hall.

As he entered high school, however, he shed some of his worst habits and acquired a girlfriend, Dana Tan. He still had trouble relating to his father, Warren McGinnis, who accused him of being irresponsible. On what proved to be the last night of Warren's life, Terry stormed out of the house after an argument.

While defending Dana from a street gang, the Jokerz, Terry found himself being chased by them to the outskirts of Gotham City. He fled onto the grounds of Wayne Manor, where an aged Bruce Wayne appeared and assisted him in defeating the Jokerz. The strain of the fight placed substantial stress on Wayne's heart and he collapsed. Terry helped Wayne into the mansion and in the process stumbled upon the entrance to the Batcave.

Wayne kicked McGinnis out, but Terry returned home to find it covered in Jokerz grafitti, and discovered his father had been murdered, apparently in retaliation for Terry's defiance of the gang. Grief-stricken, Terry looked through his father's belongings and found a disk that Warren had taken from his employer, Derek Powers, the new head of Wayne-Powers. Realizing there was more to his father's death than first appeared, Terry rushed back to Wayne Manor and demanded to be let in.

As Bruce examined the disk in the Batcave, Terry noticed the latest-generation Batsuit Wayne had used before retiring. The disk revealed that Powers was making a deadly nerve gas to sell to the government of Kaznia, but Wayne refused to get involved and ordered Terry to go to the police.

Terry refused to accept this and stole the suit. When Wayne discovered the theft, he admonished Terry through the suit’s communicator, but McGinnis was adamant on confronting Powers. Wayne retaliated by shutting the suit down, in the middle of a confrontation with Powers's security guards.

Terry pleaded with Wayne for a chance to prove himself and persuaded Wayne to reactivate the Suit and let him carry on as Batman for the time being. Wayne’s decision resulted in the sabotage of Powers’s operation; the stores of the chemical weapon were lost in the Gotham River, along with Mr. Fixx, Powers's henchman, whom Terry discovered had murdered Warren. Powers himself was inadvertently exposed to his own weapon, and the radiation therapy necessary to save his life mutated him into the villain Blight.

Convinced that there was still a need for a Batman, Wayne hired Terry as his personal assistant, a cover for secretly training him as Gotham's new Dark Knight.

Crimefighting Career

Terry quickly found himself walking in the footsteps of his mentor in many ways.

Like Bruce, Terry amassed his own Rogue's gallery of villains, including Derek Powers's mutated form, Blight, the assassin Curaré, the shape-changing Inque, sound engineer Shriek, former psychologist Spellbinder, and the Royal Flush Gang. At one time, he also found himself taking after his mentor in getting entangled without meaning to with a woman who was in reality a criminal — Melanie Walker.

He also gained a collection of allies. These included Barbara Gordon, the first Batgirl and now Commissioner of Police. His most valuable ally by far was school friend Maxine "Max" Gibson who stumbled on his secret identity when they were both threatened by a rogue student, and turned her considerable brains and energy to his aid. Max had first-class skills with research, data retrieval, and computer hacking. More than that, she helped him maintain his "normal" life as a high school student, and was always there with a sympathetic ear (Terry jokingly called her his "Alfred").

But Terry was different from Bruce in many ways. Unlike his mentor, he had had a childhood (of sorts), and also faced the demands of a normal youth his age: a school career, a girlfriend, and the responsibilities of an eldest son in a family which included his mother Mary and his kid brother Matt. It was often a greater strain than Bruce had ever faced to maintain his secret life with these other responsibilities, but it was also a source of solace that he wasn't alone.

Terry occasionally faced some of his mentor's old enemies, including Mr. Freeze, whose disembodied head survived for more than 50 years in cold storage before he was resurrected by Derek Powers. Undoubtedly Terry's greatest challenge came with the return of Batman's deadliest enemy, The Joker. Having cheated death by transferring his consciousness into a microchip implanted in Tim Drake, the Joker returned to menace Gotham in the 2050's, combining all his old cunning and dangerous unpredictability with a much-stronger genetically engineered body and a wealth of technical know-how.

At first, the young Dark Knight and the old Clown Prince of Crime both made the mistake of underestimating each other; Terry dismissed the "clown" as an ineffective prankster, while the Joker dismissed the "Bat-Fake" as a "rank amateur" dependent on advice from the elderly Wayne. Both were proven incorrect, and Terry won the day, putting a final end to the Joker. This earned him the heartfelt respect not only of Bruce, but also of Barbara and Tim, the "older generation" of Bat-Heroes.

Also like Bruce, Terry came to prefer operating alone. Like the original Batman, he was once offered membership in the Justice League by Superman. Though he may have been more tempted than Bruce was at the time, he eventually declined, put off by the other Leaguers' willingness to endanger his own life. In the process, however, he almost single-handedly saved Superman, and in turn the world, from an alien invasion, likewise earning the respect of the League (and possibly even greater admiration from Aquagirl).

True Lineage

Terry continued to don the cowl for the next ten years, after leaving high school. He managed to preserve his relationship with Dana, who was also let in on his secret.

When Terry reached his early thirties, he discovered a shocking truth. When Bruce, in failing health, required a tissue donor to clone a kidney transplant, Terry was checked for compatibility, and was told that he was Bruce's genetic son. Disillusioned, Terry believed that his whole life had been a lie, that Bruce had planned everything from the beginning and "trapped" him into becoming Batman. But then he confronted government agent Amanda Waller, who told him the truth:

Decades earlier, Waller came to admire Batman more than all the other members of the Justice League. Convinced that the world would always need a Batman, she drew on her old Project Cadmus connections to launch Project Batman Beyond, a genetics project based on her belief that Bruce Wayne was an irreplaceable individual, and which sought to "copy" him.

The first step was to retrieve DNA samples from Wayne (easy enough, she told Terry, on account of all the injuries he sustained fighting crime). The second was to give the "new" Batman a background very like the original's. Waller selected Warren and Mary McGinnis as being nearly identical psychological matches with Thomas and Martha Wayne, and secretly implanted the DNA into Warren during a routine inoculation, where it overwrote his with Bruce's. The result was Terry, genetically the son of Mary and Bruce, rather than Warren (as eventually was Matt).

But the final step of Waller's plan went awry: she hired Andrea Beaumont, an assassin for hire, to kill Warren and Mary when Terry was eight years old. But Andrea refused at the last minute, and Waller realized that she was right; to murder two innocent people in an attempt to create a new Batman would have betrayed everything Batman stood for. Instead, fate intervened and completed her plan for her: Warren was murdered, and by a coincidence, Terry found his way to Bruce.

Waller left Terry with some parting words of wisdom: his life was still his to choose, but he was worthy of being Batman — maybe not as smart as Bruce, but every bit as devoted to justice. She also advised him that Bruce's way wasn't always the best way, and Terry should take care to keep his friends and family close.

Armed with this advice, Terry reconciled with his father, prepared to propose to Dana, and returned to the role of Batman.

Abilities

Though he did not possess anything close to Bruce's years of training in martial arts and the science of detection, Terry was an able street fighter and an agile gymnast before taking up the Batman name.

Initially the Batsuit gave him several advantages in battle, including flight, enhanced strength, and protection from attack. However, he engaged in regular and rigorous training to ensure he did not become dependent on it, and soon developed an Olympic-level physique and lightning-quick reflexes. He was also somewhat less dependent on the formal fighting styles Bruce had employed, and quite willing to use dirty tricks when necessary (a fact mentioned by the Joker).

He recieved further training from Kairi Tanaga, who commented that one of his weaknesses was a tendency to lower his guard on the left side.

He also extensively studied Bruce's old files to develop his skills at medicine, mechanics, and detection. Though he was not formally trained as a detective, he had above-average intelligence and often made intuitive leaps that surprised his mentor. He was also very street-smart, which enabled him to go undercover in many situations and often talk his way out of a tight fix.

Probably his most important strength was the realization that he did not have to be just like the old Batman, but had talents the other didn't possess. The most shining example of this was shown during his confrontation with the Joker, when unsettled the villain through mind games instead of physical combat, taunting Joker with biting wit and even laughing derisively at him — something beyond the old Batman.

Equipment and Vehicles

Background Information

According to episode writer Dwayne McDuffie, Bruce, as the world's greatest detective, became aware that Terry and Matt were his genetic offspring at some point after Terry assumed the role of Batman. However, he chose not to tell Terry, as he wanted Terry to be his own man, and out of respect for Warren McGinnis, who had raised him from birth. [1]

Like Kevin Conroy, Will Friedle developed two distinct voices to use between Terry and Batman.