Broken Frontier

DC’s premier team-up book is back, nearly a quarter of a century on, as Batman and Green Lantern find themselves investigating a murder mystery from the stars.

The Brave and the Bold may have been the book that spawned the JLA but most fans today remember it fondly as the comic that from the late Sixties to the early Eighties was the home for Batman team-ups. Apart from two miniseries that briefly appropriated the title, it’s been a long time since this DC mainstay was in regular publication, with the vogue for team-up books having seemed long passed.

This first issue gives a nod to that past by using Batman as one of the principal players alongside Green Lantern Hal Jordan. When GL discovers a body with a gunshot wound floating in space, he enlists the aid of the Dark Knight to solve the mystery of the man’s death. But not only has Batman found seemingly the same corpse in the Batcave but another 62 deceased doppelgangers have appeared from Atlantis to Keystone City. With alien enforcers on their tails and the discovery of the involvement of JSA villainess Roulette, events quickly start to spiral out of control.

This isa decent enough set-up for the first arc but it’s more an intriguing opener than excitingly page-turning stuff. The promise of better to come once the story really gets going is evident throughout though and it’s worth remembering that this is just chapter one of a complex ongoing storyline.

The normal failing of a team-up story is the contrived reasoning for the heroes getting together. Waid succeeds in providing a logical reason for Batman and GL working together and, at the end of the issue, segues nicely into the next grouping of heroes in issue #2. Longer-term fans will enjoy the revelation as to the nature of the mystic artifact everyone is chasing this month as it appears to be something we thought we’d never see again outside of a Vertigo book.

It seems superfluous to even mention it but Perez and Wiacek are sublime on the art chores. From the cosmic scenes of Green Lantern in space to the brooding Batman in the Batcave through to the bright lights of Las Vegas, Perez’s busy, intricate panels are a joy to behold.

For reader identification it’s great to see the featured characters’ logos displayed so prominently on the cover as well, something that the last volume of Marvel Team-Up inexplicably failed to do. It’s eye-catching and markets the book to its greatest strengths.

My only complaint is the expressed intention that the second-string characters that appear in this book won’t necessarily be getting headliner status. Half the fun of The Brave and the Bold in its first incarnation was seeing those odder Batman co-stars emblazoned on the covers: Kamandi, the House of Mystery, the Unknown Soldier, Scalphunter, the Riddler, I…Vampire and so on. It’s an understandable decision but still a shame.

Team-up books have not had a great deal of success in recent years but The Brave and the Bold’s combination of fan-favorite creators and A-list characters should ensure this is one team-up book with a long and healthy future.