To the extent the Brave and the Bold title is and isn’t historically a team-up book, Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Across the Universe delivers three team-up tales. The team-ups are more commonplace — Nightwing and Deadman, and Batman and Guy Gardner — than they are madcap (that comes in later volumes), but each with their own built-in appeal.

The headline is assuredly 100 pages of Nightwing and Grayson writer Tim Seeley working with inimitable Deadman artist Kelley Jones, a story frankly long enough to nearly be its own graphic novel. Ultimately the balance in Seeley’s story feels off, dragging at some points and then rushing at others; even as the weirdness of Jones' art is key to its charm, it also at times makes it easier to spot where things are going wrong. Still, for what this is supposed to be, no reason this couldn’t be easily slotted into the next reprinting of Deadman by Kelley Jones.