By 1965 The Brave and the Bold had spent fifteen issues as DC’s laboratory for pairings nobody had asked for. Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter. Starman and Black Canary. Wonder Woman and Supergirl. The premise was that two heroes who had no particular reason to meet would meet anyway, solve something, and part. It was a good idea executed at arm’s length, and it had not yet found the thing that would make it matter.
Then Batman walked in.
What happens in issue #59 is not, on its face, momentous. Bob Haney gives us John Starr, a stage performer working a Count of Monte Cristo routine, wrongly convicted and out for vindication, armed with an hourglass that lets him push men forward and backward through their own lifetimes. He knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. He asks for help. He is, of course, the Time Commander, appearing here for the first time, and the help he wants is not the help he gets.
The pleasure of the book is in the hands that made it. Ramona Fradon penciled these pages two issues after she and Haney had co-created Metamorpho in #57 — one of the few women drawing mainstream superhero comics in America at the time, and among the most distinctive draftsmen of either sex working in the DC house style. Charles Paris inked. Gil Kane took the cover and did something genuinely clever with it: Batman and Hal Jordan stretched across the frame in states of age and youth, the Time Commander between them holding the glass, the entire premise rendered legible in a single glance.
And then history did the rest. Less than a year after this issue shipped, the Adam West series went on the air, and the culture briefly lost its mind about Batman. The Brave and the Bold responded the way any commercial enterprise would: it stopped rotating. Within two years Batman was the permanent fixture, and the book settled into the identity it would keep for the next two decades and two hundred issues.
This is the issue where that begins — not announced, not marketed, just a Batman story in a book that had not been a Batman book the month before.
The copy offered here grades CGC 8.0, Very Fine, with off-white pages. In the upper margin of the front cover a distributor has stamped FEB 24 1965 — the date this comic was put out for sale, sixty-one years ago, by someone whose job was moving paper. CGC saw it and graded the book at 8.0 regardless. It is the kind of mark that tells you where a thing has been.
Ships in a Gemini graded-comic mailer with honeycomb kraft void fill, fully insured, within one business day of cleared payment.
By 1965 The Brave and the Bold had spent fifteen issues as DC’s laboratory for pairings nobody had asked for. Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter. Starman and Black Canary. Wonder Woman and Supergirl. The premise was that two heroes who had no particular reason to meet would meet anyway, solve something, and part. It was a good idea executed at arm’s length, and it had not yet found the thing that would make it matter.
Then Batman walked in.
What happens in issue #59 is not, on its face, momentous. Bob Haney gives us John Starr, a stage performer working a Count of Monte Cristo routine, wrongly convicted and out for vindication, armed with an hourglass that lets him push men forward and backward through their own lifetimes. He knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. He asks for help. He is, of course, the Time Commander, appearing here for the first time, and the help he wants is not the help he gets.
The pleasure of the book is in the hands that made it. Ramona Fradon penciled these pages two issues after she and Haney had co-created Metamorpho in #57 — one of the few women drawing mainstream superhero comics in America at the time, and among the most distinctive draftsmen of either sex working in the DC house style. Charles Paris inked. Gil Kane took the cover and did something genuinely clever with it: Batman and Hal Jordan stretched across the frame in states of age and youth, the Time Commander between them holding the glass, the entire premise rendered legible in a single glance.
And then history did the rest. Less than a year after this issue shipped, the Adam West series went on the air, and the culture briefly lost its mind about Batman. The Brave and the Bold responded the way any commercial enterprise would: it stopped rotating. Within two years Batman was the permanent fixture, and the book settled into the identity it would keep for the next two decades and two hundred issues.
This is the issue where that begins — not announced, not marketed, just a Batman story in a book that had not been a Batman book the month before.
The copy offered here grades CGC 8.0, Very Fine, with off-white pages. In the upper margin of the front cover a distributor has stamped FEB 24 1965 — the date this comic was put out for sale, sixty-one years ago, by someone whose job was moving paper. CGC saw it and graded the book at 8.0 regardless. It is the kind of mark that tells you where a thing has been.
Ships in a Gemini graded-comic mailer with honeycomb kraft void fill, fully insured, within one business day of cleared payment.
