Gotham City has more or less settled down. All of the major villains are behind bars. There haven’t been any major breakouts in four months. One might suspect that Bruce Wayne could simply take a restful vacation in the Caribbean. It’s not going to happen, though. There’s too much to worry about in Batman: The Adventures Continue Season Three #6. Writers Alan Burnett and Paul Dini take Batman and Robin around a corner and into a direct conflict with one of the dynamic duo’s greatest villains in an issue brought to the page by artist Ty Templeton with colors by Monica Kubina.

It’s a vacation. Bruce Wayne is sitting by the pool. He’s thinking about work...watching footage of the last time he was out with Bargirl and Robin. They were bringing in the Man-Bat. He was the last one they’ve had to deal with for months. And yet, there he is by the pool, looking at the footage again. Everyone thinks he should relax. Maybe he's going to find an opportunity to do so in his own way. There’s someone on the resort who likes to engage in a little kendo. And maybe Bruce’s going to find something of interest on vacation after all.

Gotham City is such a place of madness. Any major city is going to have an ebb and flow in the crime rate. It's not something that's often explored in Batman comics. (Kind of like the fact that it always seems to be raining at night.) Burnett and Dini play with the idea of things suddenly settling down just in time for Ra’s al Ghul. It’s an interesting background for what might have otherwise been kind of a boring conflict between Batman and an old foe. The deeper concerns of the psyche of Ra’s al Ghul in the situation might be a little lost, but this IS an issue that is largely focused on Batman, so it’s of no great consequence. 

Bruce Wayne doesn't generally hang out in a sunny resort. The character of Batman is not exactly at home in a more placid area like the Caribbean. The background suits as a calm introduction to what ends up being a much deeper and more complicated journey than what often finds itself on the pages of your average issue of Batman. The action manages to keep things grounded in a very physically dynamic sort of nocturnal reality. The deeper nuances and complexities are left to the script while the art maintains a clean design aesthetic.

The DC Animated Universe continues to grow and develop. Burnett and Dini have been working in it forever. Their consistency in writing continues to serve the comic book incarnation of a Batman animated series that has been around for over three decades. It’s an impressive accomplishment that Burnett and Dini still manage to find new inspiration for fresh stories after all these years. Granted---it IS all variations on and echoes of what has come before, but it’s still a lot of fun.

Grade: B