Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Legends of Justice is interesting as a mixed bag, and again it reminds me of DC’s 1990s Showcase series.

The shining star here is surely Karl Kerschl’s excellent Gotham Academy story, and uncharacteristically I’d say buy the whole book just for that (unless DC sees fit, as they should, to collect this and other Maps Mizoguchi miscellania with the newest Gotham Academy miniseries). The book has ups and downs from there — some excellent, some fair, some poor — but again, there’s a lot to like in the variety of the package as a whole.

[Review contains spoilers]

There’s a moment from James Tynion’s Detective Comics run that’s stuck with me, Bruce Wayne taking Batgirl Cassandra Cain to the ballet. As I said in that review, I think there’s conceptions of Batman in which everything Bruce does is an act and everything Batman does is real. I rather like to think of Batman as having three identities, not two — Batman, the Bruce Wayne playboy act, and then the real Bruce Wayne. This is Bruce as the utopic ideal of a child of wealth, a Bruce who grew up rich but kind, who appreciates literature and art and supports those things with his attendance and money. It’s the kind of thing we see less now than in the Golden and Silver Ages, Bruce and Robin Dick Grayson home reading until the Bat-signal lights the sky.