Review: Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Emerald Knight trade paperback (DC Comics)

[A series on DC’s animated tie-in comics collections by guest reviewer Zach King. Zach writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

Three volumes into this series, and I’m starting to realize that reading Batman: The Brave and the Bold is a lot like opening a pack of trading cards. As I peel back the covers, I have a sense of what I’m expecting to find, along with clear hopes about what rare gems I might discover, yet there’s equal opportunity to be surprised. Some stories are clearly written for readers who are not me, while others feel like line drives right into my soul.

And as with most card collections, we’ve come to the point in this third volume — called Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Emerald Knight, for reasons that will become obvious — where we are unable to complete the set. Collecting the standard six issues, Emerald Knight glosses over four other issues in advance of the next volume. Like The Batman Adventures before it, The Brave and the Bold is poised for a new #1 and an all-new title, but that’s a story for the next review.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Emerald Knight, meanwhile, feels like the strongest volume yet, fully leaning into its animated-adjacent place in comics while keenly aware that it can bring “new” material into the cartoon milieu. Where The Batman Adventures was a little less likely to bring in characters that hadn’t appeared on television (Anarky and The Huntress spring to mind), The Brave and the Bold is paradoxically more inclined to feature characters who hadn’t been on the show — a true paradox, given how deep the cartoon bench ended up becoming. That the comics team still found characters who hadn’t been brought to animated life is surely a testament both to their creative passions and to the deep, deep lore that keeps the DC Universe thrumming after all these years.

From the book’s opening pages, featuring Angel O’Day and Sam Simeon (perhaps better known as Angel & the Ape), the book does things that the cartoon hadn’t yet done. And indeed, that issue’s feature story “Night of the Batmen” was later adapted into an episode of its own, with Sholly Fisch and Robert Pope credited on screen. Pope is surely having a blast with this issue, depicting each of the Justice Leaguers as very clearly themselves behind the cape and cowl; Plastic Man’s square jaw is unmistakable, while Pope needs only a swooping line to delineate Captain Marvel’s cleft chin. And in the moment where Plastic Man oversells the “dark” in “Dark Knight,” Pope channels Kelley Jones with his Bat-fangs and no fewer than sixteen serratus anterior muscles. (Incidentally, most humans have only half as many.)

Elsewhere in the book, we spend a little more time with Mister Camera (a rogue so forgotten, he might as well be teaming up with the Pencil) before an outrageous team-up with Wonder Woman in which Egghead conjures up Egg Fu as a Lovecraftian nightmare (Y’ggphu Soggoth). It is exactly the sort of ludic glee that can be evoked from a book with as freewheeling a purview as this one, and when Ma’alefa’ak shows up for a Martian Manhunter tale, this child of the '90s was right back to his “Secret Files & Origins” collection (even though Ostrander’s Ma’alefa’ak was never, as I recall, a White Martian).

In the book’s final two chapters, Batman teams up with Hal Jordan to fight the Cyborg Superman and later Robert, the living yellow asteroid from Qward. (Although the issue cover implies a connection to Poison Ivy, I think Robert must be an original creation for this comic, and I can’t fathom why or what joke I’m missing. Dear readers, help!) It’s the former tale that strikes the strongest chord, with the Cyborg Superman trying to steal a Green Lantern ring which, delightfully, ends up on Batman’s finger instead. In Darkest Knight, eat your heart out; this Bat-Lantern gets a splash page from Carlo Barberi that is suitable for framing.

And as the antics in the book verge cosmic, as guest stars beyond your wildest dreams begin to populate the panels, our ever-stoic Caped Crusader simply observes, “It happens,” before boldly and voluntarily diving head-first into a black hole. Make no mistake, these things do happen in a book that embraces its ironic whimsy and unrepentant affection for juxtaposing the wildest corners of the DC Universe. When one teaser prologue features Batman in a team up with the Lady Blackhawks against King Rex and the Dinosaur Gang, even Batman has to take a breath and opine, “Yeah. Sometimes my life is pretty cool.”

It’s that mindset that governs this volume of The Brave and the Bold, making it one of the stronger anthology collections in this run. Yet while I’ve been thinking of these as sequential volumes, the editors appear to be treating it as a shuffled deck, omitting four issues before a mid-series refresh. What’s more, these volumes are unnumbered, suggesting that the continuity wonks are among this series’s last intended audience, but even so it’s wild that the trade hops over #15, a team-up with the Flash to solve the Minute Mystery.

Meanwhile, #20 and #22 were never collected at all, leaving stories with Big Barda and Aquaman on the table. To this diehard Kirby fan, the former’s absence is especially egregious, but I’m cheered at least that #15 and #17 were eventually collected later in this run of trades. I’ll save my thoughts about #17 for that review, but I’ll concede that it works almost better as a series finale. Having said that, though, with all the love that DC’s animated properties have seen from the collected editions department of late, it’s not beyond the realm to imagine a compendium for The Brave and the Bold, restoring all the issues together in sequence.

Making the case even stronger, our next volume promises an “All-New” direction, replacing a rotating cast of creators with writer Sholly Fisch and no less than Rick Burchett, a legend among animated tie-ins (and a Bat-saint in his own right). Stay tuned, loyal readers!