The Brave and the Bold: Help Wanted by Sholly Fisch, Rick Burchett, Dan Davis, et al.

The All New! Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Help Wanted

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2011
Read: February 2026

Writer: Sholly Fisch
Artists: Rick Burchett, Dan Davis, Dario Brizuela, Ethen Beavers

Colorists: Gabe Eltaeb, Guy Major 
Letterers: Dezi Sienty, Sal Cipriano

Back when my now-seven-year-old was getting into graphic novels, I got them this for Christmas with the intention of directing their interest toward DC Comics. It's based on the Brave and the Bold tv show than ran from 2008 to 2011, but my suspicion was that it would work just fine for someone who hadn't seen the show as a source of kid-friendly DC superhero adventures. And indeed, it worked out; my kid has become a big DC stan. This was Christmas 2024 and at a certain point it occurred to me there was a DC trade paperback in my house that I had never read! Certainly this could not be permitted.

The book features six stories: team-ups with the original Green Lantern (Alan Scott), Aquaman, Hawkman, Jonah Hex, and Zatanna, plus a more offbeat one I'll get to later. Writer Sholly Fisch, as any DC reader with discerning taste knows, is the king of fun superhero comics, and these stories are all solid adventures; in most, he's teamed with Rick Burchett and Dan Davis on art, two kings themselves. (Burchett is one of those artists who is impressively adaptable: he's done very adult stuff like the 1980s Blackhawk revival, classic superhero stuff like Justice Society and Justice League America in the 1990s, and kid-focused stuff like this; Dan Davis has done a lot of good work as well, most relevant is probably is run as inker on Stargirl.)

Of those five stories, my favorite was the first one, which is actually a flashback story to the early days of Batman's career: a retired Alan Scott takes an interest in this new superhero who's appeared in his home turf of Gotham. Fisch gets some good dynamics out of this team-up, with Batman seeking Green Lantern's approval, but Green Lantern disapproving of Batman's propensity for terror. An excellent done-in-one story of Batman's early days, and if you're willing to squint, I think it would fit just fine into the post-Crisis/pre-Flashpoint iteration of the DC universe. My other favorite was the Zatanna team-up, which makes good use of the classic House of Mystery characters Abel and Cain. The art is by Ethen Beavers; back in the day he illustrated a few installments of Dark Horse's Clone Wars Adventures, but my favorite stuff by him are his truly excellent illustrations for Little Golden Books' Star Trek tie-ins.

This bit made me laugh; my seven-year-old didn't get it.
from The All New! Batman: The Brave and the Bold #7 (art by Rick Burchett & Dan Davis)

The oddball story is the title story, "Help Wanted." This is told from the perspective of a perpetual henchman: he works for the Toyman, then the Clock King, then Ocean Master, and so on; each time, the supervillain he works for is defeated by a superhero teaming up with Batman. How can this guy get back on his feet? Does he deserve another chance? A really charming look at the flipside of superheroics, and my favorite story in the book. 

She is the world's most patient wife.
from Batman: The Brave and the Bold vol. 2 #10 (art by Rick Burchett & Dan Davis)

If you like DC not for its complicated continuity and endless events, but for its fun characters and interesting histories, this book is a perfect little slice of it. Highly recommended.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXVI: The Brave and the Bold: The Book of Destiny

Comic trade paperback, 156 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2007-08)
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2012

The Brave and the Bold: The Book of Destiny

Writer: Mark Waid

Pencillers: George Pérez, Jerry Ordway
Inkers: Bob Wiacek, Scott Koblish

Colorist: Tom Smith
Letterer: Rob Leigh

The connections to The Sandman are even more tenuous in the second volume of The Brave and the Bold than in the first, though this is a direct sequel to The Lords of Luck. The Challengers of the Unknown spend much of the book puzzling over the Book of Destiny, but Destiny of the Endless does not actually appear.

What we get are a number of superhero teamups, as usual: Power Girl and Wonder Woman, the Flash and the Doom Patrol, Superman and the Silent Knight, and so on. They're good, but there's a spark in The Lords of Luck that's not quite present here. Is it that the connections between the stories here feel a little more forced? The Lords of Luck managed to balance the needs of done-in-one stories with an overall arc, whereas The Book of Destiny feels like a series of one-shots jammed together with an arbitrary villain. The fact that although the Challengers are the focus, they never really pop as characters (all I could remember was that "Red" was the redhead and June was the woman), which undermines the story somewhat, especially the final issue.

Still, if you focus on the individual stories and the artwork (George Pérez is joined in this volume by the almost-as-good Jerry Ordway), you have here a fun set of superhero stories. I might not ever know why what's-his-face was travelling through time and space, but I got to watch the Boy Commandos team up with the Blackhawks, and that's good enough for me.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXIV: The Brave and the Bold: The Lords of Luck

Comic hardcover, 152 pages
Published 2007 (contents: 2007)
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2012

The Brave and the Bold: The Lords of Luck

Writer: Mark Waid

Penciller: George Pérez
Inkers: Bob Wiacek, Scott Koblish

Colorist: Tom Smith
Letterer: Rob Leigh

The first volume of the 2000s revival of The Brave and the Bold has some tenuous ties to Gaiman's Sandman: Destiny of the Endless appears here (though he was the one Endless who had been established before Gaiman came along). Destiny has subsequently appeared in his own spin-off, gotten a story of his own in Endless Nights, and even popped up in Lucifer.

Before I get to Destiny's role, though, I want to talk about The Lords of Luck as a whole. It's fun. It's amazingly fun. I wouldn't say that all superhero comics should be all fun all the time, but given their subject matter, there's often a surprising lack of the stuff. Well, not here: Mark Waid manages to give us a story that takes in the length and breadth of the DC universe, showing off just how awesome it is in almost all regards. The old Brave and the Bold comics was, I believe, one-and-done superhero team-ups; Waid hits the perfect middleground between that and the sprawling six-plus-part stories of the modern day by making The Lords of Luck a succession of team-ups that are all one story, meaning characters come and go from the story in rapidfire fashion. But Waid's a smart writer, and I was rarely confused, unlike with the deep levels of referencing going on in JSA: Mixed Signals.

We start with a team-up between Batman and Green Lantern, who discover that something powerful is after two weapons, and they split up to pursue each weapon. Green Lantern and Supergirl head to a casino planet following one. This is my first exposure to the 2000s Supergirl after Jeph Loeb's mediocre introduction of her, and (perhaps obviously) Waid writes her a heckuva a lot better; she's smart but seventeen, and wins you over even when she does stupid stuff. Then we get Batman teaming up with Blue Beetle, Supergirl teaming up with Lobo(!), and Batman teaming up with the Legion of Super-Heroes (!!).

Each of these is more awesome than the last. I always enjoy a bit of Lobo, and the banter between him and Supergirl never stops being entertaining. Even better, though, is watching Batman one-up the Legion of Super-Heroes; one should never give Batman a flight ring, apparently. I was laughing all the way through. It's a very real love letter to the DC universe and all the marvelous strangeness it contains. This is how you use continuity to your advantage. It helps that Waid treats his characters like people with personalities, not datapoints with histories.

It helps even more that Waid is paired with the legendary George Pérez on art.  Pérez's art is always great; he has storytelling skills that are rarely matched in modern comics. His pages are dense and eventful in the best way, and his splash pages have real impact. His characters are as fun-looking as the story, and he even manages to restrict himself to just one Supergirl panty-shot. (Sigh.)

Destiny himself is not exactly the imperturbable Endless we usually see; here, he's distracted and amnesiac, having given up control of the Book of Destiny that contains all history. He seems a little less inscrutable when he talks to Lobo and Supergirl as opposed to Dream and Lucifer, but watching Lobo drive his motorcycle through Destiny's garden is worth the price of admission.

The Brave and the Bold is kind of comic I'd wish I'd read when I was a kid, and that I hope my kids will read one day. I'm going to read the next volume because it too has some Sandman connections, but I'm looking forward even more to my eventual readthrough of the whole series. Cool stuff.