- "Your Angel of Death awaits"
- ―The Phantasm[src]
The Phantasm was the secret identity of Andrea Beaumont, a revenge seeking vigilante who would later cross paths with the man she once loved: Bruce Wayne. She was the main and titular villain of the 1993 film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.
History[]
Andrea Beaumont was the daughter of the rich entrepreneur Carl Beaumont and his departed wife, Victoria. In her youth, she attends Gotham University where she first meets Bruce Wayne. When Andrea meets him again at Wayne Manor, she defeats him in a small sparring session. Her triumph over Bruce is short-lived when Bruce knocks Andrea to the floor and he pins her down. It was at this instant that she fell in love with Bruce. He is internally clashed by his longing to lead a normal life with Andrea as well as keeping the pledge he made to his slain parents to combat law-breaking.
Bruce finally chooses to abandon crime-fighting - as a substitute plighting part of his inheritance to the Gotham City Police Department - so he can wed Andrea. After Bruce proposes to her at his home, she gladly accepts. Moments later, a swarm of bats fly out of a nearby cavern that would later become the Batcave.
Meanwhile, Carl Beaumont set up mock businesses for some of the most powerful mob bosses in Gotham, including Chuckie Sol, Sal Valestra, and Buzz Bronski. When they discover that Beaumont has pilfered from them, they request instantaneous reimbursement. Andrea is forced to halt her engagement to Bruce and move to Europe after she learned her father had double-crossed the Mafia bosses. Incapable of swiftly retrieving the money he had embezzled and later invested; Carl fled with Andrea and eventually settled on the Mediterranean coast.
By then, he had parlayed the stolen money into a sizable fortune. However, when Beaumont's father refuses to make donations to Arthur Reeves, a politician formerly in his employ, the young legislator sells information on the Beaumonts' location to the mob. Though Carl has recompensed them, the unforgiving mobsters want "interest compounded in blood" and plot to use the info to have him murdered. They send their hit man Jack Napier (who would later become The Joker) to kill Carl. Andrea encounters Napier as he leaves her villa, and discovers her murdered father only seconds afterward.
Andrea Beaumont.
Inspired by her own hatred, Andrea patiently waits for a decade, planning the deaths of the men who shattered her life. When she returns to Gotham, she dons an outfit reminiscent of the fabled Grim Reaper, with a smoke-generating device and scythe-bladed gauntlet. Veiled as such, and incorrectly thought of by everybody as Batman, she kills both Sol and Bronski. After Bronski's demise, she learns that Batman is, in fact, Bruce Wayne. Batman quickly ascertains the connection between the gangsters and Carl Beaumont and queries Andrea, but she snubs him. She then attempted to kill Valestra, but nearly falls into a trap laid by The Joker, which she escapes. Batman tries to catch her as she escapes from Valestra's abode, though she effortlessly avoids him and the police.
When Andrea recognises that the police will arrest Bruce in her place, she hurriedly changes out of her attire and helps him evade the authorities. In a final endeavour to secrete her identity, Andrea tells Bruce that The Phantasm is, in fact, her father, and that she has returned to stay his homicidal rage. The two then spend the night together. Batman opens Andrea's locket while examining her apartment, and, after surviving a bomb sent by The Joker, he realizes that she has actually been The Phantasm all along.
Andrea manages to track The Joker to his hideaway at the dilapidated Gotham World Fairgrounds, but he too has gathered her identity, and is ready for her attack. The two fight head-on in the "Home of the Future" exhibit before he baits Andrea to a giant turbine. He endeavours to kill her by sucking her into it, but Batman intrudes, breaking the machine seconds before its blades would have crushed her. Andrea attempts to validate her actions. She asks him to let her finish her vendetta without intervention. For once, totally helpless, Batman pleads her to leave. Andrea agrees and vanishes in a cloud of smoke. After a battle between The Dark Knight and The Joker, Andrea resurfaces to claim the overwhelmed maniac. As the fairgrounds blow up, Andrea fades along with The Joker, with the latter still laughing maniacally.
Illustration by Bruce Timm
After fleeing the firestorm through a series of sewers, Batman assumed that both Andrea and The Joker had perished in the fire. However, she indeed survived and left a locket for Bruce in the Batcave as a keepsake. In the penultimate scene of the film, Andrea stands on the vesper tine deck of an ocean liner, alone and ostracised from Gotham once more.
Trivia[]
- The Phantasm is based somewhat on another DC Comics character The Reaper, who according to the revised comics continuity was a former Gotham vigilante who had been active in the city circa twenty years prior to Batman's first appearance.
- The Phantasm appears in DC's 2021 miniseries Batman/Catwoman.