Up next, The Brave and the Bold #160, with Batman and Supergirl.

Written by Cary Burkett

Art by Jim Aparo

Supergirl appeared in one of the non-Batman team-up issues of TBATB, the previously mentioned #63 with Wonder Woman. (It’s nuts! Highly recommended for people who dig nutty DC Silver Age comics.)

Many years passed before she got a chance to team up with Batman, but she finally managed to pop up in TBATB #147 in 1978 in a story written by Cary Burkett and drawn by Jim Aparo. I’ve never read it. Apparently, Dr. Light is the villain.

Which brings us to Supergirl’s second and final team-up with Batman in late 1979 in TBATB #160. Linda Danvers shows up at Bruce Wayne’s office asking for help. Her adoptive father Fred Danvers has been kidnapped! He’s a chemist for S.T.A.R. Laboratories, see, and he’s working on a new rocket fuel that will revolutionize the industry!

I guess it makes sense that Linda and Bruce know each other on a first name basis. This is back in the World’s Finest days when the Superman Family and the Batman Family were pretty chummy and usually got together for Thanksgiving and Christmas and attended all the super-hero weddings together. It’s also pretty clear that they know each other’s secret identities.

And so, they start following the clues! Batman gives Supergirl a lot of hints on being a detective, which is great, but she’s been doing the super-hero thing for 20 years. You would think that she would have already picked up some of this stuff.

It turns out that a bad guy named Colonel Sulphur is behind the plot to get the formula for the rocket fuel. He has a whole army of generic Gotham City thugs helping him in his criminal endeavors. While Batman and Supergirl are rescuing Fred Danvers from a death trap, Colonel Sulphur uses an airplane as a decoy and escapes in a submarine.

Or at least, he TRIES to escape in a submarine. Batman figures out what’s going on and tells Supergirl to get the submarine. Which is super easy, barely an inconvenience. The sub is soon grounded, Fred is safe and the rocket fuel formula is recovered.

Not a bad story. Nice art. And a lot of nice little touches to remind you what the DC Universe used to be like.

I keep meaning to look up Colonel Sulphur. Batman acts like he knows him, so maybe he has an earlier appearance somewhere.

Green Arrow has quite a lengthy history with TBATB, and I decided to deal with that separately from reviewing TBATB #168, the next issue on the review list.

Green Arrow’s association with TBATB goes all the way back to the beginning of the team-ups in #50 in 1963. That’s right, the very first TBATB team-up! Green Arrow met up with the Martian Manhunter to fight the Capsule Master.

(I’m writing this from memory, and that can’t be right, so hang on while I check that! ... Yup. Right there in black and white. The title is “Wanted - The Capsule Master!”)

I don’t really get why this story has been reprinted so many times. It was reprinted in TBATB #114. And in the Brave and the Bold Annual #1 in 2001. And in the TBATB Archives. And it was included in the Green Arrow Showcase volume!

It’s been a while since I read it. Maybe it’s not as bad as I remember.

Green Arrow’s first TBATB team-up with Batman took place in #71. Green Arrow and Batman teach an Indian how to shoot a bow and arrow (and other athletic skills) so he can beat the Indian who is a ruthless businessman and become chief of the Kijowas tribe. Or something. I’m not a big fan of this one either.

The Brave and the Bold is a very important series for Bronze Age Green Arrow. He appeared with Batman ten times! That’s a record. (The Metal Men are second with seven Batman team-ups!) It almost looks like the editorial staff are using TBATB to keep Green Arrow in the public eye, to give him some exposure, to make sure he has a fanbase, no matter how small.

And in his next TBATB appearance, lacking his own series as a stage for major changes, the team-up series is used to debut Green Arrow’s big Bronze Age makeover. Say goodbye to George Papp, red gloves and a clean-shaven Oliver Queen. The Green Arrow now has a new costume, a goatee and he’s drawn by Neal Adams!

He’s still appearing in the Justice League, and for a while he co-stars with Green Lantern. But that ends and TBATB is a place for GA to get some exposure in the 1970s and 1980s.

You can see him in #100, #106, #129, #130, #136, #144, #168 and #185. I’ve read most of them. #100 and #106 are in a TBATB Showcase that I got from the library. I don’t remember the stories at all. That two-parter in #129 and #130 was a much-beloved story from the first year I was collecting comics. Not just Batman and Green Arrow but also Atom, Two-Face and the Joker!

I never read #136 and #144. #168 is the subject of the next review. And #185 is one of the TBATB issues I bought new in 1982 and 1983 when I had a renewed interest in the series when I was 17. The Penguin is the bad guy! You’re playing in the big leagues now, Oliver!

The Brave and the Bold every year or so was a good place for a DC super-hero to be in the Bronze Age. Oliver is kind of a jerk sometimes. I hope he appreciated it.

I’m reading the Zatanna team-up in TBATB #169. It is one of the great tragedies of the Bronze Age that this team-up ended up being scheduled when Zatanna was wearing one of the worst costumes of the era, the one where she looks like a vampire super-hero in a really bad Saturday morning cartoon.

I read TBATB #169 a few nights ago, and I didn’t like it very much. I didn’t write a review that night, and then I got kind of busy, and then when I sat down to write the review, I realized that I would probably have to read the story again to really get into why I didn’t like it. And I just didn’t want to read it again.

Oddly enough, Zatanna’s circa 1980 space vampire costume is the least of this comic book’s problems! Starting with the cover! Zatanna is totally helpless because some generic Gotham City gangsters are holding her mouth closed, and Batman is leaping dramatically over the wall to save her! But she’s a space vampire or something! Shouldn’t she be tossing them around like department-store mannequins?

So I read it again. And it did not get any better. It’s titled “Angel of Mercy, Angel of Death!” and it’s written by Mike W. Barr.

Great art by Jim Aparo! But it would have been so nice to see Aparo illustrating any other Zatanna costume!

The Marcy Temple on the outskirts of Gotham City was run by a couple of faith healers, Raymond Marcy and his daughter Angela. Raymond has just died, though, and the authorities (and Batman!) have a few questions about his death.

Batman is swinging by (as you do in a team-up comic) and there’s a shootout! The police are in gun battle with a couple of hoods who were coming out of the temple. Batman is able to fight off the hoodlums, with the help of Zatanna, who appears to be hanging out at the temple because the Marcys are old family friends.

The problems with this story start multiplying right out of the box! The reasons for the original shootout are lame at best. And then there’s this whole subplot where Zatanna is friends with the faith healers because they saved her father’s life when modern medicine couldn’t do anything for his illness, Vague Comic-Book Terminal Disease Syndrome. Which seems to be an epidemic in this issue. It seems like everybody has it!

And I guess Zatanna saying “Rehtaf, eb llew!” just didn’t work.

Zatanna defends the Marcys’ faith healing powers quite forcefully. And when Batman mentions that the death of Raymond is kind of suspicious, he implies Angela might be involved, and Zatanna gets kind of mad.

Well, I guess I can accept legitimate faith healers in the DC Universe. We are already accepting a lot of things when we read these things. This story gives Zatanna the power to do just about anything (except cure her father without a faith healer) just by talking backwards.

But there’s still a couple of problems with it. It just doesn’t really make for an interesting challenge for Batman and Zatanna. The thugs continually neutralize Zatanna by gagging her. Without this lazy contrivance, there wouldn’t be much of a story. This story needed a villain that could go toe-to-toe with Zatanna’s powers, which would be a lot more interesting than exploiting her weakness like a fireplace in a Martian Manhunter story. (At least, the cover was honest in this respect.)

The other problem with the faith-healing angle is that almost every specific incident of this healing power (except the miracle cure for Zatanna’s father) is shown to be either a failure or faked. It appears that the Marcys only believed that they had healing powers, or maybe their powers are rather limited (I’m a little unclear on this point) and the con was being perpetrated by the people around them. (There are a bunch of ways that this story makes no sense.)

So the fake healers tricked Zatanna, who looks like an utter fool. Not only is she totally helpless when gagged (and it’s child’s play to overpower her and gag her) but she also doesn’t know fake healers when she sees them. (Apparently, their powers only worked on Zatara; maybe he was the only one who’s faith was strong enough.)

Anyway, there’s several suspects in Raymond Marcy’s murder, including his daughter Angela and the temple’s business manager. But it turns out to be a generic Gotham City gangster named Steel Springer, who was mad when Raymond Marcy couldn’t cure his Vague Comic-Book Terminal Disease Syndrome.

At the end, Angela is upset to find out that she doesn’t actually have great healing powers and she says she’s going to close the temple. Zatanna convinces her that she can still do the Lord’s work. Batman suggests that she open a mission in the slums and help Gotham’s poor.

Batman has a busy schedule and rushes off to Detective #497. Zatanna goes back to being a space vampire. (Actually, she’s going to get a much better costume in just a few months.)

The Brave and the Bold #169 just doesn’t work. It ignores everything that’s interesting about Zatanna, ignores her past, sidelines her powers for a lot of the story and makes her an easy mark for some faith healers who think they have great power to heal.

It’s just very disappointing for a lot of reasons.

Yes! Roy Raymond! Or maybe Doctor Thirteen!

(OK. Now that I’ve said that, I really want to see a Zatanna/Doctor Thirteen team-up just to see how Doctor Thirteen rationalizes Zatanna’s powers.)

I read the first Nemesis and didn't see the character again (other than Who's Who) until Suicide Squad. He fit in well there and Ostrander used him very well. I didn't appreciate Spiegle's art when I was younger,except maybe on an issue or two of Scooby Doo, though I didn't know he was the artist. Seeing his work on Crossfire and the updated Secret Six made me appreciate him more and when I finally saw some of his other work, especially his Maverick. I saw one issue of the Blackhawk revival with his art, on Mark Evanier's story, until a couple of decades later, when I found all of the issues, on the cheap. He really did a wonderful job, there. Also great on a few Sky Wolf stories, in Airboy and his Jonny Quest issues.

By the time I was in my 30s, I really started to appreciate Toth, Spiegle, Pete Morisi and a few others of that generation and cleaner style.

The Brave and the Bold #171

Batman and Scalphunter

“A Cannon for Batman!”

Writer: Gerry Conway

Artist: Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez

Scalphunter is a DC western character who, from what I glean from the Internet, appeared in Weird Western Tales in the late 1970s and then moved to back-up status in the Jonah Hex comic. He was a white boy who was raised by Indians and as an adult, operated as Scalphunter.

Until I read this issue of TBATB, I had never read a Scalphunter story, but I’m vaguely aware of him, probably from the ads and promotional pages in DC comics.

I like this story a lot!

I wondered how they were going to get Batman back in time to meet Scalphunter. How delightful to see they went the Carter Nichols route! I suppose I should have thought of Carter Nichols as a possibility at least. But Professor Nichols was not used much in the 1970s. I didn’t think of Nichols because I thought he might be considered old-fashioned by 1989. A little online research reveals that this is his only appearance in The Brave and the Bold. He was apparently in Super Friends a lot!

Anyway, getting to the story ... Bruce wins a 19th-century cask at an auction, and it has a secret compartment containing a Civil War campaign patch with a bat symbol on it!

Wow! Somebody has read a few Carter Nichols stories! Batman and Robin (and sometimes Superman) were always going back in time to solve some bizarre anomaly, like an image resembling Batman woven into a medieval tapestry or something.

So Bruce pays a visit to Nichols and the good professor cheerfully uses his hypnosis method to send Bruce back in time to the 1870s. (But we know it’s not really hypnosis! Carter Nichols is a chronal vampire! It’s a mostly benign condition, but he does have to release some of the chronal energy from time to time. Carter and Bruce are helping each other out with these time-travel visits.)

So Bruce goes back in time and changes into Batman and runs into Scalphunter and Martha Jennings, the owner of the cask with the bat patch in the secret compartment! Miss Jennings is America’s Florence Nightingale, and transports medical supplies around on battlefields and she helps wounded soldiers.

And so they all go to the Second Battle of Bull Run. And Batman is captured by Confederate soldiers who tie him to a cannon! And Scalphunter helps him escape! And Batman and Scalphunter help Miss Jennings evade the Confederates and get the medical supplies to the Union field hospital.

So that’s how Miss Jennings had a campaign patch with a bat on it. Somehow. And so Batman finds out why. And Scalphunter ... well, we don’t learn much about Scalphunter or why he’s at the Second Battle of Bull Run or why he’s helping to get the medical supplies to the Union.

But, you know, it’s The Brave and the Bold. You have to figure some of it out yourself.

One thing I’ve noticed over the last few days is how much a Bob Haney moment helps any TBATB series. Haney had been gone for over a year at this point. But I noticed a couple of whacky moments that reminded me of all those great scenes from the Haneyverse. Like Batman being tied to a cannon on a Civil War battlefield! That’s a Bob Haney moment!

But don’t over-do it! A squad of gorilla infantrymen wearing kepis would have been a bit much!