"Batman: Off-World" is a 2024 six issue miniseries and a 2025 trade paperback telling the story of Batman's adventures in a distant galaxy. It was written by Jason Aaron, and illustrated by Doug Mahnke and Jaime Mendoza. It has a relatively standard story format, with each of the six issues telling a story that is part of a larger arc. If you have read comic books in the past 25 years, most of the format will be familiar.
Keep moving. Don't stop to think about how absurd this is.
The
Batman tells us, and it is a good thing to remember while reading this.
Batman fights muggers in
Gotham City, so why is he piloting a spaceship through the
Slag Galaxy. Well, one of the local
crime families has hired an alien as an enforcer, and after getting beaten by an alien, Batman decides his training is not really complete until he learns to fight every alien imaginable, so he takes an experimental spaceship 26 million lightyears away and ends up as a slave on a ship in a
grim cyberpunk future, in a galaxy dominated by an
omnicorp. Batman finds a
comedic robot sidekick, a hot alien bounty hunter who is both attracted to, and stymied by, his stoic nature, and also a pet wolf, and decides to liberate a galaxy. All of this is slightly ridiculous, but also gorgeously illustrated, both in a
grim and gritty cyberpunk way, but also in a fistfights in space way.
There is another point to make, which is that this series seems to appear in either a rebooted continuity, or is a standalone story (perhaps a hoax, perhaps a dream, perhaps an imaginary tale), which makes sense: in the mainstream DC Universe I know, Batman's best friend is an alien, and he has been into space dozens or hundreds of times. But here, apparently, he is still starting his business of being Batman. And this directly impacts the dramatic impact of the story. Instead of this being just another space adventure to bring some diversity into punching out goth-themed villains, this is shown as a unique and singular adventure (although certain pillars of the DC cosmos, such as Oa, Rann and Thanagar, are all mentioned). But the question is: will the audience believe it? Personally, it didn't quite work for me. For me, the book didn't quite navigate the sense of scale between Batman, the street-level noir hero, and the cosmic scope of this story. At one point, an entire planet is destroyed, with twelve billion lives lost. Which would belong in another story, but here, we see that next to pictures of Batman riding his pet wolf, and trading quips with his comedic android buddy. The story can't seem to decide between style and substance, and when it does try for substance, it seems stilted, as when Batman insists on fighting a space war with no fatalities.
So my opinion of "Batman: Off-World" is that it is well-executed, but that it might not make as much of an impression on a reader as was designed, just because it doesn't do anything to develop the character beyond what almost ninety years of Batman comics have already done.