The Brave and the Bold #1

There are more people that speak Klingon than do most dialects of Cree. The largest flower on earth is the Corpse Flower, which proffers a cadaverous stench to the flies that pollinate it. And government regulations stipulate that 20% of all ink produced in the United States must be used to draw Batman. These are all pieces of trivia that are useless in your day to day life, as useless as The Brave and The Bold #1, but the last one does explain why DC feels the need to shoehorn Batman into so many guest appearances, specials, and regular series you start to expect an applause sign to flash every time he shows up.

The Brave and the Bold , a rebirth of DC's classic team-up series, isn't bad, but it's not particularly good, either, and feels incredibly unnecessary. In the first issue, writer Mark Waid has Batman team up with Green Lantern to discover why 62 identical corpses have turned up dead around the world, and beyond. Somehow, this leads them to a casino, where they take turns at pretending to be James Bond between alien attacks. Waid is an unpredictable writer, occasionally standing out with creativity and inventive dialogue, but just as often clearly just going through the motions. The Brave and The Bold seems to be a case of the latter, executed with competence, but forgettable and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. That's the problem with iconic, flagship characters like Batman: you can never change them. They have to remain constant, recognizable, and marketable, so that the DVDs and the toys and the merchandise retain their branding. And so, even the best Batman stories are either experimental alternate universe stories, or do their best to return Batman to the same state in which he was found by the end. The new  Brave and the Bold is shaping up to be an example of this, insignificant in the Batman canon, and inconsequential to anything other than DC's quarterly report.

So, it's a shame that both Mark Waid and artist George Perez are wasted on this title. Perez, though extremely popular, has never been particularly distinctive in my opinion. He draws well, and has a good sense of visual dynamics, but there's a workmanlike quality to his art that doesn't help separate The Brave and the Bold from the pack. And ultimately, that's what this comic needs: something to make it stand out. While Waid and Perez are too talented for the issue to be a bad read, there's nothing here to mark it as a particularly good one, making it, unfortunately, the very definition of trivial.

Rating: 5 on 10