Book of Doom: The Brave and the Bold #1

It’s Saturday and that means it’s Book of Doom time. This week it was The Brave and the Bold #1 by Mark Waid and George Perez.

To be honest, I picked this book because nothing else looked worth picking. It was a week that did not lend itself to experimentation in my mind. I was not particularly excited because as I have pointed out too many times to be worth linking to, I am sick and tired of out of continuity superhero tales.

I wasn’t even looking forward to reading this. I flipped through it and let it sit on my stack until the very end. And then I let the stack sit for a couple days.

But man, I loved it. In spite of my whining about extra-continuity business running wild, I just thought “What a fun story.” There are no bigtime implications, there are no potentially earth-shattering conclusions – it’s just a cool superhero team-up story. I love how it seamlessly hands the baton off to next issue with a different team up. How cool, I thought to myself.

Not that I should expect anything less from the likes of Waid and Perez. And not that this is flaunting its existence outside of current DC space and time; this could be in-continuity just as much as it could be out. What’s nice about it is that it doesn’t matter. Just as you don’t have to fit it in with what’s going on now, you don’t have to suspend your current perception of the DC status quo to make it work.

The one thing that I was curious about – I thought Batman was pretty secretive about his Bruce Wayne identity, and that only a few heroes knew. Am I wrong about that? Or is Hal Jordan just one of the folks in the know? Not enough to bother me – it was just something that caught my attention for a second.

Let’s see what the rest of the Legion had to say…

Fin Fang Doom:
I can’t really think of anything to write about The Brave and The Bold. I really enejoyed the issue, and there’s really only three reasons why:

1) Mark Waid writing a DC series which is neither set one year in the past or 1000 years in the future.

2) George Perez back on a monthly title.

3) The title seems to be going the route of the latest incarnation of Marvel Team-Up–a continuing storyline with characters dropping in and out of the adventure as the storyline merits.

That’s a recipe for a great comic.

Jean-Claude Van Doom:
I don’t really have a lot to say here, just that Brave and the Bold reminds me of reading comics when I first started reading them in the late 80s. I like this direction, I like the art, I like the story.

My only concern, and this is a small one, is how the creators/editors will fit this book into what’s going on throughout the DCU. As Jim Doom wrote before about out-of-continuity stories, I’ll like Brave and the Bold a lot more if it’s relevant, instead of an Elseworlds/All-Star/Confidential/Year One/etc. story that’s just not labeled as such.