Brave & Bold's Mission Omissions

During the Silver Age, Batman teamed with the majority of DC's solo heroes but not all. Here are some puzzling omissions:

5) Supergirl--despite one weird team-up with Wonder Woman, the Maid of Might never worked with the Caped Crusader as a teen. But then after WW (with Batgirl added) and later with a transplanted Black Canary, he never was paired with a female hero!

4) Rip Hunter-Time Master--perhaps the strongest of National's non-powered heroes, if you exclude the teams like the Challengers of the Unknown (another puzzling omission) and the Sea Devils. With Batman's time-traveling resume, this one seems so natural.

3) Blackhawk--Quality's Dark Knight meeting DC's. Combined with Batman's love of aircraft and an international flair, there are so many opportunities here.

2) Congorilla--with DC's love of gorillas, it's strange that it never happened.

1) The Martian Manhunter--the only JLAer Batman never teamed with in B&B in its entire run. Especially odd after MM got the lead in House of Mystery. A real puzzler.

Of couse I excluded the teams like The Challs, Doom Patrol and the Legion but if he could be paired with the Bat-Squad....

Next I'll add some non-Batman team-ups that could have been fun!

Who did YOU miss in B&B?

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  • Let me see what I can add to your list, by way of explanation where I can. I lived through Silver Age, so the timeline is more obvious to me.

     

    1936047154?profile=RESIZE_180x180Supergirl: Batman did team up with the Maid of Steel (love that pun) in at least one memorable issue of World's Finest  Comics (along with Batgirl and Superman). Outside of that, I can't think of a single appearance in the Silver Age by the Last Daughter of Krypton in any non-Weisinger book. Oh, wait, she did guest star in one Gardner Fox Justice League of America, against Queen Bee. But otherwise, Supergirl's Silver Age appearances were -- I think -- mostly limited to the Superman/Legion books.

     

    Rip Hunter: Rip is a supporting character in Booster Gold these days, but in the Silver Age I don't believe he ever appeared anywhere except his few try-out issues. And the Challengers and Sea Devils appeared once or twice in Doom Patrol, but outside of that, they were also pretty much outside the DCU.

     

    1936049150?profile=RESIZE_180x180Blackhawk: You may wonder that the Dark Knights didn't appear in Brave & Bold, but they also didn't appear where they'd be more natural: the war books. I don't have very large collections of G.I. Combat, Star-Spangled War Stories, Our Army at War, etc., but I expect I'd have heard about a Blackhawk team-up. They DID however, team up with Batman in World War II during the Bronze Age -- the Earth-2 Batman, that is, and it was in Brave & Bold.

     

    Congorilla: This is another character that stayed pretty much in his own world. As you say, he would be a natural due to Silver Age DC's love of apes, but not only did he never appear in Brave & Bold, he never appeared in any of the Gorilla City stories in The Flash, and never appeared with the headliner of his own magazine despite being a back-up in Superman's Action Comics.

     

    Martian Manhunter: This one's pretty obvious if you consider the timeline. Yes, Martian Manhunter headlined House of Mystery -- but lost that series in December 1965 due to poor sales. I doubt it's a coincidence that J'onn's last appearance in Brave & Bold was also in 1965 (with The Flash) -- and Batman didn't become the host of B&B until the next year. J'onn also disappeared from Justice League of America around 1968, and was written out of the series (and off the planet) in a one-issue appearance in 1969. He didn't resurface until 1972 (briefly, in World's Finest) and remained a pretty elusive character for years. Obviously, when Manhunter lost his HoM series, DC lost confidence in him, so it's no surprise he didn't appear in Brave & Bold -- especially when he was off-planet anyway.

     

    The picture that emerges of these characters' absence in Brave & Bold is that they weren't very big sellers, weren't available and/or never guest starred anywhere anyway. lt's hard to believe now, where comprehensive universes are the norm, but in the Silver Age DC wasn't one big tapestry. Many characters seemed to live in their own little universes, plus you almost never saw cross-genre crossovers -- superheroes were never acknowledged as existing in the suspense books, Cain & Abel never appeared in the war books, etc. And even within the "superhero universe," the characters were separated into different editorial offices, and the editors jealously guarded their characters and turf. So Julius Schwartz teamed his own characters with each other -- Flash with Green Lantern, Atom with Hawkman -- and Mort Weisinger had his stable of books where the Legion and the Superman characters interacted with each other, but not much with other offices. Most editors, the Schiffs, Boltinoffs, Kashdans and so forth, seemed to treat each of their books as occurring in a vacuum. So when Challengers of the Unknown and Doom Patrol crossed over, it was an eyebrow-raiser, and it was never repeated. Even Teen Titans didn't see appearances of the characters' mentors, except in cameo. It wasn't until the Bronze Age that DC began stitching its various books into a unified whole.

     

    This thread being in the Mr. Silver Age universe, I expect to be corrected by the man himself if I'm wrong. Craig, what'd I miss?

  • Personally, I would have preferred to see more of the GA/Martian Manhunter stories because by the time Decoy Missions of the Justice League was published, GA and MM are referred to as what seems to be an ongoing team. One thing I would have LOVED to have seen, especially as it worked for the other heroes, is having the Earth One and Earth Two Batmen working side by side. The closest they came was well after the SA in Brave and the Bold # 200 and then it was decades apart. Maybe that was not just only the similarities in MO but also the similarites in costumes at the time making it harder to distinguish between the two?
  • I would have liked to have seen more Manhunter from Mars and Green Arrow team-ups, the World's Second Finest Team.

     

    I recall a story where Jimmy Olsen got the magic ring from Congo Bill and marched around as Congorilla for a while.

     

    One of my favorite B&B Batman team-ups was with Eclipso. Their own books were so different that it was a lot of fun to see them together.

     

    Another favorite was Aquaman and Hawkman, water and air. Some spooky artwork in that one.

     

    The Captain's explanation aside, I think a Batman/Martian Manhunter team-up would have been great, especially since they shared Detective Comics for many years before MM went to House of Mystery.

     

    Maybe a Batman/Dial H for Hero story drawn by Jim Mooney would have been fun.

     

    Hoy

  • "Rip is a supporting character in Booster Gold these days, but in the Silver Age I don't believe he ever appeared anywhere except his few try-out issues."

     

    Cap, I'm surprised that you didn't know that Rip Hunter had his own series that ran 29 issues from 1961-1965.

  • ...This is about the Silver Age , isn't it ???

    Not the Bronze Age , which the " Batman And..." ( as I called it then ! :-) ) format lasted well into...

      Or isn't it ???

  • My answers to the good Captain,

    • Supergirl: First it was Batgirl who battled the Queen Bee with the JLA. Supergirl never appeared in the Gardner Fox era. In fact Jimmy and Lois only made cameo appearances. It would have been interesting to see a B&B with Batman during her "secret weapon" phase since the Caped Crusader knew about her. She could have been affected by the super-Macguffin, red kryptonite and lost her memory. Instead of doing something crazy (like marrying Jimmy Olsen! *Ye Gads*), she could have fell in with criminals, especially the Joker who could be charming if he wanted. How could Batman stop her AND safeguard her secret?
    • Rip Hunter: I read some of his stories in World's Finest and enjoyed them. I prefer his non uniformed period. Perhaps some crooks use and damage Professor Nichols' time machine and travel to the 1770s. Superman is unavailable (Darn those deep space missions!) so Batman turns to Rip. It could even be a two-parter with Tomahawk! Throw in Lord Shilling, a Penguin-like Tory and Mad Anthony Wayne and you got a story!
    • Blackhawk: I know about the Earth-Two adventure. I try to tie it in to Blackhawk's DC history here. But DC was continuing the title for a reason. And the Bat-Plane is too cool a visual to pass up on! Maybe they could have involved the Phantom General!
    • Congorilla: a longtime back-up character as Congo Bill. Batman went all over the world so why not an African safari for Bruce Wayne. The villain could be Cat-Man and Blockbuster, trying to steal mystic relics, possibly even the Gorilla-Ring!
    • Martian Manhunter: The Commander wrote a wonderful Deck Log entry about the Green Arrow/Martian Manhunter team that focuses on the merits and drawbacks of that pairing. But it is still a shame that J'onn never teamed with Batman despite their history. There were so many "lost" Bat-foes that they could have contended with or J'onn could have had to impersonate Bruce. The potential for great tales were always there!
  • "But it is still a shame that J'onn never teamed with Batman despite their history . . . ."

     

    The natural hook for teaming up the Batman and the Manhunter from Mars would have been Professor Arnold Hugo. 

     

    Hugo debuted as a Batman foe, in "The Wizard of 1,000 Menaces", from Detective Comics # 306 (Aug., 1962).  Then, in the tale "The Man Who Destroyed J'onn J'onzz", from Detective Comics # 322 (Dec., 1963), Hugo escapes from prison and flees to Middletown, where he comes up against the Manhunter.  From then on, he becomes J'onn J'onzz's arch-foe, butting heads with the martian four or five more times over the course of his series.

     

    But the link had been established.  In fact, at the conclusion of "The Man Who Destroyed J'onn "J'onzz", the Manhunter turns Hugo over to the Batman personally---marking the only time another DC hero appeared in the Manhunter from Mars series.

     

     

    1936047473?profile=original

     

     

    As Cap pointed out, though, the timing was off for a Batman-J'onn J'onzz team-up in The Brave and the Bold.  The Cowled Crusader became the permanent star of B&B with issue # 67 (Aug.-Sep., 1966), and by then, it was clear to any regular DC fan that the Manhunter was on his way out.

     

    True, in his series' jump from Detective Comics to House of Mystery, in '64, J'onn J'onzz was a headliner for awhile.  But for only eight issues before he relinquished the top spot to "Dial 'H' for Hero".  The fact that DC felt Robby Reed was a better draw than the Manhunter shows that JJ just wasn't making it as a significant character.

     

    Over at JJ's only other venue, Justice League of America, he was fading from sight rapidly.  The impetus was Julius Schwartz' insistence that Gardner Fox play up the most popular JLA members in the stories.  Batman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, and to a lesser extent, Hawkman, Wonder Woman, and the Atom.  By 1966, Aquaman, the Green Arrow, and the Manhunter seldom appeared in the splash page roll call of participating members.

     

    And of those three, J'onn J'onzz suffered the worst.  Fox had started to write him out of JLA adventures, without explanation, as far back as JLA # 28 (Jun., 1964).  Both Cap and I have, in the past, cogitated on the reasons for this, but certainly part of it had to be the steady decline in the popularity of the Manhunter series.  House of Mystery # 160 (Jul., 1966) marked yet another revamping of the Manhunter's format, giving him the new secret identity of Marco Xavier and setting him against the criminal combine Vulture.  Such jump-starts are always a sign that a series isn't succeeding.

     

    So, as Cap accurately states, DC was losing confidence in the Manhunter, and it wasn't likely to toss away an issue of B&B on a team-up of JJ and Batman.

  • It's not implausible for those characters to find a reason to team up with Batman, it just didn't happen for the reasons Cap says. They either had a bad sales record, so they brought nothing to the issue, or the editor in charge didn't want to lend him out or the B&B team didn't want to do him.

    Besides that one B&B appearance with WW, Supergirl didn't travel much. It was Batgirl in the Queen Bee JLA story, and she wasn't actually in the B&B story either.

    Teaming with the Blackhawks, or even Blackhawk, might have helped that book, which surely needed it. But they may have felt that trying to manipulate entire teams along with Batman would be complicated. 

    perhaps the strongest of National's non-powered heroes, if you exclude the teams like the Challengers of the Unknown (another puzzling omission) and the Sea Devils.

    I'm not sure what that means. If you take out the Challs and the Sea Devils, what other non-powered SA DC teams are there besides Rip and the Blackhawks? Rip has the same B&B problem as MM--his book only lasted until 1965, and Batman didn't take over B&B until after that. So they would essentially be teaming him with a guy that readers didn't like well enough in his own book to keep him around. (I presume that Cap meant that Rip didn't appear anywhere except his own book.)

    Congorilla would have the same problem. It might not have been a bad idea to give these characters another spot just to see if they could handle the spotlight again. But the B&B team couldn't expect much of a sales spike using characters that had proven there wasn't much interest out there.

  • Mr. Age said: "But the B&B team couldn't expect much of a sales spike using characters that had proven there wasn't much interest out there."

     

    That's a really good point. We're used to years of team-up comics being used to keep old characters (and trademarks) alive, but in the late 1960s DC was just trying to find something that would sell and still promote their still-published characters. Batman was an obvious solution because of the TV show, and co-stars had to be carefully selected to boost sales and spotlight their own series.

     

    Hoy

     

  • I just wanted to point out that although Mort Weisinger was reluctant to "loan out" Supergirl to other books, he had no problem using Batman in Supergirl stories from time to time. A quick GCD check finds Action #270, 309, & 313 to name just a few.

     

    Really Batman? A Batgirl costume?!?

     

    Action_Comics_270_Page_12_Supergirl.jpg17302917699.jpg

     

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