...attempting to maintain my air of neutrality while laughing out loud, Prince Hal ...

The Metal Men teamed with Batman in issues 74, 103, 113, 121, 135, 136, 187. They also teamed with the Atom in 55 and Metamorpho in 66, for a total of nine pairings over the run. As mentioned previously, issue 136, the second of two parts, also featured Green Arrow.

So how was it that the Metal Men would be runners-up for the most guest-starring appearances in B&B? I can only speculate.

At first, it would seem unlikely that the Metal Men would boost issue sales. After all, they couldn’t sustain their own comic for long at any time in the B&B glory days of the 70’s. But it may be that that small contingent of Metal Men fans would buy B&B yet pass on other issues, helping to increase sales. DC’s former publisher, Dan DiDio, is a huge fan, having taken two opportunities to write them himself (in Wednesday Comics and in the currently running maxi-series). Metal Men fans clearly do exist, so...it’s possible.

Bob Haney must have liked writing the characters. But they weren’t his “babies”, they were Robert Kanigher’s creation, and I wouldn’t expect Haney to “adopt” characters so closely associated with a then-working writer, but there’s no question they fit well into the kinds of stories he liked to tell.

Returning to the previously-discussed issue of trademark protection, it could be that DC not only wanted to hang on to “Metal Men”, but saw potential in them for toys, cartoons, or a revival (which did in fact happen for a while in the 70’s). B&B would be a place to keep them alive and somewhat in the eyes of comics fandom.

In their first two B&B appearances, the Metal Men were teamed with the Atom (#55) and Metamorpho (#66). The Atom team-up was essentially a Metal Men story with an Atom cameo, served up by Bob Haney and the art team of Ramona Fradon and Charles Paris. Fradon was an inspired choice of penciller for the Metal Men, who’d been monopolized by Ross Andru throughout their own title. Mike Sekowsky (who would inherit the Metal Men title from Kanigher and Andru) handled the Metamorpho team-up. It’s a pretty obvious pairing, really: the Element Man with a set of robots based on specific elements, and Haney matches Kanigher’s whimsical approach while throwing in plenty of his own signature craziness, including curing Rex Mason (temporarily) and a mad scientist who’s created his own, inferior Metal Men while marooned away from news about Will Magnus’s team.

Original Metal Men artist Ross Andru came in to handle the robots’ first team-up with Batman in #74, which featured a “robot convention” with what appears to be hundreds of sentient robots. As Batman says in the conclusion: “Great! Robots need something like this! After all--they’re people, too!”

Issue #103 was just three issues after I jumped on the B&B bandwagon, and was my second exposure to the team, following a reprint in a Flash Super-Spectacular a couple of months prior. An all-reprint revival would follow in less than a year, so there must have been either good sales or an effort to keep them in the spotlight. I was disappointed by the absence of Jim Aparo, who had taken over as the regular artist as of #100, but I had missed the immediately previous issue, wherein Neal Adams stepped in to finish an issue Aparo had started but dropped due to illness. I guess Murray Boltinoff gave this one to Bob Brown to drawn when Aparo took ill.

This story of a computer AI that tries to take over the world borrows from the 1969 film “Colossus: The Forbin Project”, something I recognized even at age 12, without having seen the movie. The story does resolve the situation the robots were in when their own comic was cancelled: “The New, Hunted Metal Men” were passing for humans in disguise. Gold is still maintaining his fake human identity, but Mercury’s had enough, and is recruiting Gold to go public again with the “Robots Lib” movement! Three of the other robots are “out” now, working public but demeaning jobs: iron in a scrap yard, Lead handling radioactive isotopes, and Platinum as a go-go dancer. Tin is living in a secluded cottage with his still-nameless robot wife.

Haney echoes the previous Batman team-up, with a “Robots Lib” convention. Memories of Doc Magnus turn the Metal Men from the anti-human sentiment that the convention has stirred in them, and they agree to help Batman prevent the nuclear war that the convention’s featured robot speaker is helping to bring about. In so doing, Haney nicks from another cinematic classic about AI gone mad, with Gold yanking memory modules in an aisle of racks just like Dave Bowman did to HAL-9000.

(Of some possible interest: in the letters page, Bob Haney fills in the gaps between Metamorpho’s final issue and his revival in issue #101--some untold history for Rex Mason!)
In #113’s “The Fifty Story Killer”, a 100-page issue with the new story by Haney and Aparo, Jim Gordon has been forced out as Gotham’s police commissioner, and the new guy also insists Batman retire, to be replaced by the Metal Men. Batman folds (too easily), but by the story’s end, both he and Gordon have been “recommissioned”--Haney’s Batman, of course, is a rightfully deputized officer of the law.

On the letters page, Murray Boltinoff responds to a “Mike Gallagher” by presenting a bio of artist Jim Aparo, and encouraged readers interested in a Jim Aparo Fan Club to write him at 1364 Vicoscia, Memphis TN, 38127. I have it on good authority that letters were indeed sent there, including one nearly 20 years later that led finally to a year or two of the Jim Aparo Fan Club Newsletter, co-published with Houston TX letterhack Chris Khalaf.

Issue #121 celebrates America’s Bicentennial with the Metal Men assisting Batman in protecting a train touring the country to display the original documents of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Bats and the robots are along for the tour, promoted as part of the attraction. This time around, Haney shows even more atypical interest in established continuity, as the Metal Men are being teased into pursuing leads in the whereabouts of their creator, Will Magnus, who’s been traitorous and crazed since near the end of their own series.

Issues 135-136 formed a two-part continued story. Since last we saw our elemental sextet, they were reunited with a restored Doc Magnus, who participates in this story. More about this one in a later post!

In their final appearance in the original B&B run, Haney is gone, replace by a rotating roster of writers. This time, Charlie Boatner pens #187, and Jim Aparo illustrates “Whatever Happened To What’s ‘Er Name?”, revealing the sad and touching fate of Tin’s wife, last seen in #103. Batman remembers a 7th member, but the Metal Men do not. Even Doc Magnus denies the existence of “Beautiful”, Tin’s name for the female robot the rest of them called “Nameless”. In a tale that brings back multiple robotic villains from the Metal Men’s past, Nameless gets named, and officially married to Tin (ignoring the previously-stated married relationship in #103).

No question the Metal Men were hits in their day, but that day seemed to be past us in the 1970's. Still, that history of success must have fueled DC's confidence in the property, and retained some good feelings among the early fans who continued to buy comics.
Metal Men being behind only the Superman and Batman comics does surprise me, but it probably shouldn't: robots were all the rage in the 60's and early 70's, as I well remember, and robot heroes were hard to find on the comics stands (I can only drudge up the one-shot Microbots from Western and the pedestrian Automan from Jack Schiff's stable of DC mediocrity as alternatives, but I must be missing something, right?).

I failed to mention that the Metal Men made a return to B&B in The Silver Age: The Brave and the Bold #1 (and only) in 2000. Jim Aparo penciled the cover in his B&B capstone.

Perfect Ten:
Green Arrow was, as I’m sure most everyone reading this thread knew, the most frequently-appearing co-star in The Brave and the Bold. Green Arrow participated in ten team-ups with Batman, and he kicked off the team-up era of B&B in issue 50, for a total of 11 team-up appearances.

Why Green Arrow? The usual speculations probably all have some validity: the creative team liked him, DC wanted to preserve the trademark in an era when GA didn’t get his logo on many covers, his appearances sold well.
From a scripter’s perspective, in particular Bob Haney’s, GA was an easy character to pair up with Batman. At the time of his first Batman team-up, in 1969, he was little more than a Batman clone, which he had been for his entire publishing history: fought crime with his ward Speedy, drove around in an Arrowcar, had lots of gimmicks (in his case, confined to arrows instead of secreted in a “utility belt”) to use at the plot’s convenience. As a skilled but not super-powered hero, he didn’t outclass the Batman, as a fellow JLAer he was easy to call into any story, and he fit well into the kinds of stories with non-super-powered threats that Haney favored in the 70’s.

Of the most historic significance is Green Arrow’s appearance in issue 85, “The Senator’s Been Shot”. With no ongoing backup feature at the time, Green Arrow was approved for a visual renovation courtesy of Neal Adams, who whipped up one of the most modern and appealing wardrobe upgrades a DC character had ever seen. I’m pretty sure this was the first DC superhero with facial hair in the Silver Age (before that, I can only think of Air Wave, who, I believe, sported a mustache?). In a single appearance, the mundane Battling Bowman was transformed into an exciting figure that must have startled readers at the time, with upper arms bared to the shoulder, strapped arm guards on the lower arms, a mix of two shades of green rather than the clashing red and green he’d sported before, and that hip, blond Van Dyke on his face, implying a counter-culture affinity so contrary to the stick-in-the-mud conservative tone of DC’s main characters.

In this issue, Haney didn’t do too much to shift Oliver Queen’s personality in line with his timely makeover, leaving that instead to Denny O’Neill, who’d bring Ollie in as the permanent co-star with Green Lantern. But he did drop the dependence on trick arrows, which was a pretty daring change in GA’s M.O. And the new look was an instant hit: in the responding letter column, editor Murray Boltinoff claims they got an avalanche of mail on this one, and I believe it!

And now a quick review of his appearances:

50, October/November 1963 : The original Green Team, GA and J’onn J’onzz take on a gang of Martians in the first B&B team-up. J’onn uses Professor Erdel’s machine which brought him (and stranded him) on Earth to casually transport himself back to his own planet and chat with his pals there. I’ve read the entirety of J’onn’s solo run, and maybe I’ve forgotten some of the changes, but I don’t remember this being a thing he could do...If not, Haney got off to a B&B team-up start with his characteristic continuity-flaunting ways.

71, April/May 1967: Long-time GA artist George Papp handles Ollie’s first team-up with Batman in a pedestrian outing.

85, August/September 1969: Haney and Adams begin the redefinition of Green Arrow for the modern era.

100, February/March 1972: Robin joins in as GA brings along his co-stars Green Lantern and Black Canary from the GL/GA comic, to serve as Batman’s agents when he’s temporarily disabled. This was my first issue of B&B, so I’ve very partial to it.

106, March/April 1973: A quick return for Ollie, one year later for the then-bimonthly series. Jim Aparo gets his first chance to tackle the archer, and acquits himself very well as the pair of heroes confront a mystery villain. Haney mucks with ongoing continuity, taking it upon himself to restore Ollie’s fortune. Later, the letter column does some hand-waving about the stories in B&B and elsewhere in the DC line not occurring chronologically.

129, September 1976-130, October 1976: A two-parter with a three-hero team (Batman, GA, and the Atom) against Joker and Two-Face. Joker had made a splash in his first shocking B&B guest-starring role, and Two-Face was (spoiler alert!) the mystery villain in GA’s previous appearance. Green Arrow was in the line-up of both of the “4 Famous Co-Stars” cover-billed on #100 and #130.

136, September 1977: GA joins for part two of a continued story, jumping into an adventure with Batman and the Metal Men. GA takes his sweet time, not showing until page 8, seeking Doc Magnus to “test some new arrow designs!” Wait, scratch what I said before about it being easy to bring GA into these stories...that’s a pretty flimsy justification.

144, November 1978: This is a wild one, with magic arrows, the heroes traveling back in time to the time of the knights, and the return of the Gargoyle, a villain that no one but Haney remembered from a couple of his Teen Titans issues. Also appearing is Merlin, drawn by Aparo in an admirable DC Universe continuity to match Jack Kirby’s version from the Demon.

168, November 1980: Haney’s gone, and Cary Burkett continues the B&B beat with Jim Aparo in a good-looking yarn revolving around escape artists. Probably best not to have included Mr. Miracle in on this one, since he’d have made everyone look bad by comparison.

185, April 1982: GA’s final B&B appearance came in an era of fill-in talent, this time writer Don Kraar and artists Adrian Gonzales and Mike deCarlo. A poor close to Green Arrow’s co-starring streak, this is a chore to read and not very pleasant to look at. The Penguin was the villain in this one; a few years earlier, and I have no doubt that they would have listed his logo up top on the cover. As it is, he’s the only one of the top tier Batman villains who didn’t get prime billing, but he did appear at least a couple of times.

Looking over the timeline, GA appeared on at least an annual basis in ‘76-’78, but other than those years, he showed up every 2-3 years--not exactly overexposure, just a reliable standby. His stories demonstrated considerable variety, and most were high quality, appealingly drawn issues. Had DC ever decided to give Batman a break from B&B, it seems likely that Green Arrow would have been the odds-on favorite to slip into the lead position.

I have not seen any specific justification, Prince Hal . The "World's Finest" comparison is certainly apt. Green Arrow was intentionally written from the start to follow the Batman template, and the Manhunter had evolved into a Superman analog (with a similarly tragic origin plight, even if it was undercut in B&B #50), so they had a guideline on how to team up these characters with significantly unbalanced power sets. Unlike most of the other likely contenders for a B&B headlining gig at the time, GA and MM were appearing only in backups, with only a small blurb on the World's Finest and Detective Comics covers when they appeared, so this selection gave DC the chance to measure their cover appeal. I suspect this metric was more on their mind than the potential for a new World's Second-Finest buddy book. Trying out a team-up of potential headliners at once may have seemed less risky than a Showcase-like solo spotlight, but they didn't seem to do this enough for it to seem like the intentional guiding strategy of B&B: the next times that GA or MM would appear, they'd be alongside established top-tier characters (Batman and the Flash). The only other trial balloons that took the team-up approach were Starman, Black Canary (& Wildcat), and Robin, Kid Flash & Aqualad. Those, though, do seem to me to have been intended as ongoing partnerships, since none of those characters had ongoing backup features at the time.
I think DC quickly realized the appeal of the book was the novelty of the team-up, not the opportunity to showcase a potential lead character, and therefore relied mainly on established headline features to fuel them.

He was indeed all over the place, zaku, which suggests to me that he, of all of the DC stable, was always recognized by DC as being on the cusp of a breakthrough to a major solo feature. Which, obviously, was eventually borne out by long runs in comics and on tv. As a practical matter, DC fans of the times had to keep an eye on the in-house promotion pages (like "Direct Currents" and the "Daily Planet") to see whether Ollie was in Action Comics, or World's Finest, or Detective Comics. He must have been bringing some extra eyes to those titles--it's not very common for a back-up feature to supplant Batman on the cover, as on Detective Comics #521!

Week...I've lost count...And Farrar wants to see cars in motion!

I've memorized all the Hour Man covers, my final holdout, so when I saw this topic, I was ready to finish out the challenge with Adventure Comics #58, from January 1941:




Backup Reprint Feature Commentary:
Hour Man appeared in B&B #115 in a reprint from Showcase #55, a team-up with Dr. Fate. I think he'd have been a terrific co-star in the Haney/Aparo era, and since the B&B team already used Earth-2 characters like Spectre and Wildcat willy-nilly, why not throw in a one-hour adventure with Rex "Tick-Tock" Tyler, the Man of the Hour? We'll never know, because they never did. 

Sitting on Hour Man for as long as I have, I've worked up an interest in the character, and toyed with the idea of a review thread along the lines of chadwilliam's terrific Spectre thread. I've always found the character appealing, and I even once had a page of original Hour Man art (from his mid-60's backup adventure in The Spectre, drawn by Dick Dillin and Sid Greene). The concept suggests a unique sort of modest adventure story, since with an hour limit on a fairly modest power set, you can't really expect the guy to take on major-league threats that might require long-term super-heroics. This made him a bad fit for the JSA, where he was the first released from duty, and it didn't set him up to be a super-star, but he had something unique that could have been exploited to good effect. Maybe I'll do that thread, after all...