While Batman Beyond.
Batman: Hush by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee details the return of one of Bruce Wayne’s oldest friends and the simultaneous rise of one of his greatest villains. The storyline begins with Bruce reuniting with his childhood best friend Thomas Elliot who returns to Gotham after making a name for himself as a brain surgeon. As soon as Elliot comes to town, however, a new villain comes into the picture as well, a criminal mastermind known as Hush who aligns himself with a number of Batman’s villains – most notably Riddler – to ruin Batman’s reputation. In the end, Hush is revealed to be Elliot who wanted to take his revenge on the Wayne family because Bruce’s father saved his mother’s life after Elliot plotted to kill his parents and claim his inheritance when he was just a child.
In Batman Beyond Vol. 3 by Adam Beechen and Ryan Benjamin, Hush has seemingly returned and is running around Neo-Gotham, killing all of the original Batman villains even though most were either retired or reformed. He then takes his plan a step further by plotting to destroy all of Neo-Gotham so that the corruption he believes has taken over the city can be washed away. While this version of the classic villain has basically the opposite motives as his original counterpart, his mission makes sense when it is revealed who Batman Beyond’s Hush really is: a clone of Dick Grayson. After Nightwing was almost killed by the Joker years ago and taken to the hospital, Amanda Waller took samples of his DNA and created a clone, one with intimate knowledge of Batman and the entire Bat-Family. Since it was Nightwing’s goal to eradicate crime, Hush became obsessed with doing just that, except he took things a bit too far and crossed the line into villainy.
The secret identity of Batman Beyond’s Hush is a better reveal than the first. In the original story, the reveal was akin to an episodic crime show where the guest star always turns out to be the killer. There's a reason DC's animated changed so much about the original. In Batman Beyond, however, no one would expect this incarnation of Hush to be a clone of Nightwing. Plus, the fact that it was basically Dick Grayson all along perfectly explains how he had intimate knowledge of Bruce Wayne and why he was on his dark mission of cruel and misguided justice. Not only was the clone of Nightwing a better Hush reveal than the original due to its unexpected nature, but that also made him a more formidable opponent in combat. When Terry McGinnis fought Hush for the first time, he was absolutely destroyed by him as he couldn’t compare to Nightwing skills. Beyond that, however, the fact that even a copy of Nightwing would turn on Batman like that and corrupt everything he ever taught him hits much closer to home than some mystery character that has supposedly been Bruce’s friend since childhood in Batman: Hush.
Dick was Batman’s first Robin, a surrogate son to him that could never be replaced, and in Batman Beyond, a version of that same person hated Bruce and everything he stood for in of the rehabilitation of criminals and the preservation of Gotham City. From the twist itself to how it impacted Batman on a personal level, Batman Beyond’s ‘Hush’ twist is way better than the original.
