Batman: Brave and the Bold

So we’ve been having fun watching the new Batman: The Brave and the Bold cartoon on Cartoon Network (official site). While I miss my beloved Batman: The Animated Series of memory, it’s a better (read: truer to the comic book world) rendition of Bats than the shortish-lived The Batman.

The Brave and the Bold was a comic that ran for some decades at DC (recently resurrected), and basically served as a team-up book, usually with Batman. That’s how this new series works — each episode has Batman teaming up with another DCU hero against some thread. In fact, it’s usually two heroes, one for the teaser in front (the end of an adventure), once for the main part of the show.

The animation style is similar to BTAS, if a bit more stylized. The whole show has a 60s jazz lilt to it, from the graphics to the music. While there are more contemporary sensibilities, the overall tone is lighter, much more Silver or Golden Age (Green Arrow, a semi-regular, is in his pre-Neil Adams getup, drives an Arrow-Car, flies an Arrow-Plane, etc.). Bats himself is — well, he’s still got that glowering I-am-the-Night sensibility, but he’s not above the occasional wry wisecrack or cracking a grin.

Much of the internal Bat-monologue (which we are now privy to, which seems odd) is commentary about other heroes — especially young ones. Indeed, for a show that so far has not mentioned Robin, we’ve had significant appearances from Speedy and (the new) Blue Beetle to fill in the youthful-projection role. Batman’s voiced by Dietrich Bader, who manages a credible gravelly Kevin Conroy imitation.  

Though clearly set in the DC Universe, it’s neither canonical to the comics (either now or from the period), nor does it parallel the BTAS or Justice League animated universes (the treatments of Wildcat and, even moreso, Aquaman, are quite different). That’s okay, if occasionally jarring. In some ways, it’s like the (endless) Legion of Super Heroes reboots — it’s fun to see old stories and old characters behaving just a bit differently.

If there’s one drawback to BatB, it’s what haunted the original comic, too (as well as whenever Batman is with the Justice League). Batman is essentially a normal, if highly trained, human, partnering with and fighting against metahuman opponents. The options seem to be (a) getting soundly thrashed on every outing, (b) turning into a tech monkey to pull a new equalizer out of the utility belt at each turn, (c) ignoring the different power levels as much as possible, so that Bats dukes it out with much more powerful opponents, (d) leveraging martials arts into a “power” to provide at least some equality, and/or (e) making Bats into a cunning mastermind who wins against more powerful opponents because he out-thinks them.

The writers here have generally gone for (b) and (c). Bats seems to be reguarly pulling out some new tech trick (Nth Metal brass knuckles, built-in jet-pack, etc.”) at every turn, and even when he’s not, he’s still a formidable brawler against folks who ought to pound him into paste. They’re the weakest options, but they’re also understandable for a kid’s cartoon.

Can’t criticize too much, because we’re enjoying this Cartoon Network outing. It’s good to see Bats up on the screen again, even if it’s not my “favorite” incarnation, both Katherine and I (and Margie) enjoy it, and I hope the show has a long run.

(As a side note, I can’t imagine that Cartoon Network gets so many downloads of ringtones that they actually make a substantial amount of money from it at $1.99/shot — as opposed to the publicity they’d get if their ringtones were, ah, free.)