[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.]

I’ve been thinking about animated tie-in comics for about two years now. (Well, longer, but you know what I mean.) And in that time, I’ve noticed a certain paradox; while animated shows like Batman: The Animated Series thrive as anthologies with a plethora of creative voices, the comics end up stronger when there’s a singular pair of creatives at the helm. I think of folks like Mike Parobeck or Mark Millar, who really leaned into their runs on Batman and Superman — and I think also of letter-writer PhantomZone, who opined of Superman Adventures, “This title is in dire need of a regular creative team.”

With the All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold Vol. 2: Help Wanted, Brave and the Bold continues the run of its regular creative team. Sholly Fisch and Rick Burchett carry on the hot streak from their previous volume, though the lows are a little lower this time around.

We open with a humCdinger of a story, which begins with one of my new favorite pages of all time as a pint-sized Batman declares, “The Time Trapper turned the Justice League into babies!” Indeed, infantilized Leaguers are throwing tantrums at Robin’s ankles, and the Teen Titans give the Time Trapper a good walloping on the two-page spread that follows. Nothing sets this book’s ideal tone quite so effectively as this mini-prologue: wacky fun, breathless momentum, and a deep bench of guest stars. In the story proper, Fisch and Burchett push the limits of the Brave and Bold style sheet with a flashback tale of what happened when a young Batman met Alan Scott’s Green Lantern, raising questions that any good Gotham scholar would ask.

The middle of the book is a little baggier, featuring underwhelming team-ups with Aquaman and Hawkman. These stories don’t do anything wrong, but they’re mostly generic and precisely what you’d expect from those two co-stars. One pleasant surprise is how consistently the visual designs adhere to the Silver Age, particularly with cameo turns from Captain Fear and Hawkgirl. The latter appears only briefly, with a terrific final page that reveals she’s been on her own adventure this whole time alongside Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and Big Barda. When I tell you I’d have rather been reading that issue, I was a little disappointed to see that Fisch never wrote the “girls' night out” side of the coin in a later installment.

After these stumbles, though, the book rebounds in heroic fashion. Right in the middle is the titular “Help Wanted,” the story of hapless henchman Joe, whose every caper is busted by Batman, even as he takes his wife and son from city to city, from gang to gang. It’s the kind of story The Batman Adventures and Batman: The Animated Series before it had done especially well, a slice of life that gives us a better insight into how Batman reshapes the world around him, and Joe’s escalating fear is palpable. The punchline to the story sticks a real emotional landing; we learn (spoilers) that Joe has been telling his story to Matches Malone before taking a security guard job at Wayne Enterprises, and what’s more, it turns out Batman told Joe’s wife about the job because, “No boy should have to grow up without a father.”

And speaking of The Animated Series, I was not expecting to find a thematic sequel to “Showdown,” the episode in which Jonah Hex tussles with the son of Ra’s al Ghul. Here, after Cave Carson discovers an earthquake lumbering toward Gotham, Batman travels back to the Old West (with the help of Silver Age scientist Carter Nichols) to join Jonah Hex in defeating Ra’s al Ghul before his earthquake machine can destabilize the Gotham fault line. Never mind the shout-out to Cataclysm; Fisch lines the story with so many neat supporting roles that it’s a slam dunk.

Likewise, the book’s finale is a home run in which Batman and Zatanna investigate who TP’d the House of Mystery. (One of my new favorite sentences, by the way!) The list of suspects is surprisingly long, and I wish I hadn’t thumbed ahead because the reveal is both right up my alley and solvable on the page if you know what to look for. But here again is another tale with just about everyone you can imagine from the mystical side of the DC Universe — Cain and Abel, yes, but also Etrigan, Blue Devil, Solomon Grundy, Dala. (Still no Constantine, though.) This vast reservoir of characters reminds me, once more, just how ornate and alive the DC multiverse can be, and maybe it’s all what James Gunn derides as “cameo porn,” but for me it’s exactly the chief delight of a project like Brave and the Bold.

Put another way, if you can find a way to get Mr. Mxyzptlk and Swamp Thing in the same issue, why wouldn’t you? And no, dear readers, that’s not the spoiler — Mxy would never! “You think I’d stoop to toilet paper? Where’s the style? Where’s the panache?” But when it comes to style and panache, Fisch and Burchett have it all over All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold Vol. 2: Help Wanted. I’m a little sorry they couldn’t make this magic until the end of time.

But no, all good things come to an end. And so the series concludes with Small Miracles, picking up a few stray uncollected issues and, in many ways, saving the best for last.