![]() ![]() (Well, I say it was perfect, but as a kid there were aspects I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. And it’s the last issue of the Batman team-up book concluding with Batman teaming up with Batman! Mixed with a tinge of horror, a perfect entryway for a kid to both Batman and some of the bigger ideas underpinning DC as a whole. ![]() Mike Barr’s well known as a Batman writer who while keeping up with the times kept one foot in the characters’ swashbuckling, toyetic roots, while Dave Gibbons was a few years from, well, that thing Dave Gibbons did, making them uniquely suited to a story bridging generations of superhero storytelling. The gimmick’s an excellent one, a (nonexistent) classic Batman villain somehow hopping from his Golden Age Earth-2 form after a fight with his rival turned catastrophic in 1955 to possess his modern 1983 counterpart on Earth-1, pitting him against a just barely pre-Miller Caped Crusader. To say I ‘grew up with’ The Brave and the Bold #200 is a bit odd given it predates me more than a decade, but it’s true: it’s one of the earliest comics my dad supplied me with as a kid once I started taking an interest. Which makes it particularly striking and more than a little gratifying when you pick up said old Batman comic in that mindset and partway through realize that oh jeez, wait, maybe this actually IS super-important and no one noticed? To be able to pick up an old Batman comic you liked as a kid and enjoy it for what it is without having to tell yourself it was the most important comic of all time. Even as generations of creators and editors and belligerent fans have steered the Big Two superhero ship on the premise that what they grew up with WAS the best and most important work of all time and that those stories are the template everything after has to follow, hopefully as a maturing adult you grow to be able to appreciate nostalgia while still recognizing it for what it is and knowing its proper place. Ideally as you grow older you realize that a lot of what you have attached to those stories – without necessarily disparaging them – is largely about those comics being from long before you had any chance to be desensitized. If you’re introduced to them as a kid then the things you enjoyed most were the best stories in the entire world, sublime in construction and execution and evoking feelings nothing else could match, the pinnacle of the form. There’s a certain journey you want to make growing up reading comics.
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