Batman: The Brave and the Bold #3 // Review
The guy’s messing with people. He carries around a baseball bat covered with barbed wire. He’s a bald guy...head covered in stitches, kind of like a baseball. They call him Mr. Baseball. Not the most original name, but in a place like Gotham City...all the crazy criminals ultimately find their way to the same vigilante. Mr. Baseball’s got an appointment with the bat in Batman: The Brave and the Bold #3. Writer Dennis Culver and artist Otto Schmidt’s Mr. Baseball story is accompanied by three other stories, including a tale of a break-in at STAR Labs’ Halo building by writer Ed Brisson and artist Jeff Spokes, the continuation of Christopher Cantwell’s Superman serial, and a stylish one-shot in which Batman faces a demon that is brought to the page by artist Jorge Molina.
Bruce’s mother told him everything he knew about baseball. Always said everyone gets a chance. It’s not over until it’s over. And so, when Bruce is Batman, he knows that he’s going to have to protect an unsavory individual from justice at the hands of Mr. Baseball. Elsewhere, Stormwatch is entering a very dangerous facility and coming face-to-something-like-a-face with the villain known as Malware. Elsewhere still, Batman is up against a vision of evil in the darkness.
Culver’s “Mr. Baseball” is an interesting attempt to fuse a few different things together in a story that reaches back to BEFORE the death of Bruce’s parents for a bit of inspiration. His life had been so dominated by that one moment that it’s nice to see at least a part of him defined by something else. Brisson’s execution of Stormwatch’s break-in is a fun read that takes up exactly as much space as it needs to. The stylishly poetic story that ends the issue feels...a bit forced in its poetry, but it’s a concise look at Gotham’s Dark Knight.
Molina’s execution of that final story is GORGEOUS, though. It’s a high-definition sort of black-and-white visual that feels photorealistic in places. Molina’s realization of the costume might feel a little bit awkward, but it’s interesting. The drama in the issue-opening Mr. Baseball story comes across with heavy power thanks to Schmidt’s deft emotional delivery. Ravager and Shado are particularly cool in the latest chapter of the Stormwatch series. Spokes does a brilliant job of making their action seem totally heroic. Visually, there really isn’t a weak feature in the entire issue.
The sharp and stylish anthology series continues to find a variety of different appealing angles on action and drama in the DC Universe. Brisson’s Stormwatch series has been entertaining enough that it could easily fit under its own title with the current creative team. Not everything’s brilliant, but it all fits together quite well in a package that feels like it could keep going and even potentially introduce entirely new features with marginal characters that could lead to something bigger down the road.
