Regular visitors to his blog will find it no surprise that the original Brave and the Bold was my all-time favorite comic book series. One of my personal favorite issues had to be #192, in which Batman teamed up with Superboy. At first glance, I didn't think it would be anything special since Batman regularly appeared alongside Superman in the pages of World's Finest and elsewhere. I needn't have worried though, writer Mike W. Barr and artist Jim Aparo turned in a story unlike any I had read before between the two characters, and I still remember it fondly to this day.
These two met once before, back in my MTIO days...
...and this story isn't over yet, make sure to check in tomorrow for Part 2!
I prefer the Silver Age issue of SUPERBOY that had the Teen of Steel teaming up with a teenage Bruce Wayne as...the Executioner!
ReplyDeleteThat looks like John Byrne art to me. Nice. Doom in the Phantom Zone? Uh oh... (Looking forward to part 2)
ReplyDeleteOne of the kinda cool things about Byrne's Generations series was teaming up Clark and Bruce in real time. They aged. The other thing was teaming up Superboy with Bruce as variations on Robin. I wish Byrne had been given the opportunity to continue the series and "bounce" around the Batman/Superman Family with different stories. His take on the Teen Titans was quite interesting!
ReplyDelete@AirDave: I suspect that you already knew this, but just in case -- the "Bruce-as-Robin" variation came from an in-continuity Silver Age story from Batman #226(although Superboy wasn't in it).
ReplyDeleteI'd love to see the "other" Superboy (post-"Death of Superman") a bit more in this project. Checking the name-tag, I see he's teamed up with Spider-Man (Ultimate Spider-Man II, that is) in STF #645, and as a member of Young Justice back in MTIO in 2011 (a couple of months after the one you cite in the text body. I think it might be interesting to see him, for example, dating Jubilee.
ReplyDeleteAnd Bruce did team up with Superboy as the Flying Fox in another Silver Age story (Adventure Comics #275).
ReplyDelete@Martin Maenza: I share your dread. With his Ovoid power of astral transmigration, he could usurp the phantom form of any one of the Kryptonians in the Zone. And, thereby, sneak that Kryptonian back on to the Earthly plane, where the latter's re-corporealized body would have super-powers enough to take on the FF, single-handedly!
ReplyDeleteSort of like Amalgam Comics "Dr. Doomsday." ;-)
Speaking of Doomsday, the pre-Crisis Supes could have simply Zoned Doomsday, had DD shown up in pre-Crisis continuity.
ReplyDeleteNice! Byrne art plus Byrne art makes this one seamless.
ReplyDeleteI wonder... could the Phantom Zone turn out to be another name for a Zone the FF is familiar with?
Matthew: I remember one of the Amalgam comics referred to the "Phantom Negative Zone".
ReplyDeleteMike W. Barr will always be my favorite writer for Batman. My first comics growing up in the 1980s were Barr's B&TB issues, and later Batman & the Outsiders. HIS Batman for me was the definitive one- Detective foremost, dry humor, arrogant, loner, leader, and unfazed whether going up against ghouls & vampires or superpowered aliens or brilliant yet insane thinkers.
ReplyDeleteKid Charlemagne said...
ReplyDelete"Matthew: I remember one of the Amalgam comics referred to the "Phantom Negative Zone"."
Yes, that was in 'Challengers of the Fantastic' (which was one of several Amalgam titles that I could happily have followed as an ongoing series...) the IIRC. However the two dimensions don't really have much in common, "really", do they?
But maybe the 'Negative Zone' might be a part of -- or, anyway, somehow connected to -- the 'Anti-Matter Universe' that is home to the Weaponeers of Qward and to the post-Crisis version of the Crime Syndicate?
Never seen that version of Superboy by Byrne before, but wow.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a pretty story behind the team-up most definitely.