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.

[Review contains spoilers]

Seeley and Jones spin a ghost story (aren’t they all) in which Nightwing Dick Grayson tries to help a seemingly lost spirit, and Deadman, cut off from his guide Rama Kushna, is drawn to help him. An impressive amount of this is turned on its head by the end; Seeley reveals the woman Nightwing hopes to save is leading him into a trap, and where it’s suggested maybe Rama Kushna has fallen out with Deadman, it turns out she’s also endangered and send Deadman to Nightwing to assist them both.

The obvious connect in teaming Nightwing and Deadman is their circus background, and Seeley peppers the story with “carny” tropes, superstitions and sayings, underground big tops and carnival mythology. But notably the heroes don’t truly mesh, with Seeley presenting Deadman as a self-important motormouth that exhausts people, all the easier for the audience to believe Rama Kushna might have tired of him. This is different than a few other portrayals of Deadman, including Tom Taylor’s in the recent Nightwing Vol. 7: Fallen Grayson.

Too, Nightwing objects to Deadman possessing innocents, while Deadman suggests Nightwing is too timid in battling their enemies. Despite their superficial similarities, Rama Kushna eventually reveals she brought Nightwing and Deadman together because of the mystical “balance” of their differences — that Deadman was chosen for his heroic path while Nightwing chose it himself; that Nightwing is, of course, alive, and Deadman is, well, dead; that in their defining performances, Boston Brand “fell” while Dick Grayson “leapt.” All of that is interesting, as is the idea that given so much time together and supernatural co-mingling, Nightwing can now see Deadman when others can’t; I’ll be curious whether any other writer picks that up.

It occurred to me whether Jones has any other more distinctive depiction than his Deadman.¹ The artist certainly hasn’t lost a step since his 1980s-1990s Deadman work, Boston Brand’s desiccated, skeletal shape still immediately recognizable. What I’ve often appreciates about Jones' work, and which we see here, is how his depictions convey both mood and information; Jones suggests Deadman possessing someone through a creepy image of Deadman seeming to have their head in his mouth. The monstrous Unfallen is also classic Jones, equal parts Alec Holland and Anton Arcane.

Due perhaps to the vagaries of writing an anthology story split up among issues, there’s notable repetition, Seeley litigating Deadman’s origins quite a bit. There’s some phrasing, too, railing against “influencers” and “corporate circuses,” that comes up more than once, that feels less thematic than a line no one realized was in there twice. The story drags in multiple fight scenes on trains, but then later Nightwing and Deadman are joined too quickly by a band of travelers who just so happen to be evil monks.

Sometimes Jones' characters' facial expressions — angry, tired — don’t match Seeley’s narrative. There’s also a few pages of Deadman just flitting around, not that there’s anything wrong with that, that made me wonder if not enough script had been provided.

In the second story, Mark Russell takes over for Juan Gedeon and Daniel Warren Johnson writing Booster Gold meeting the Jurassic League. Artist Jon Mikel did work on The Jurassic League, though not that many pages if I understand correctly. The story does not really continue the saga of the dinosaur League (Batsaur’s “It’s a no from me, dawg” is funny but off-character), and this is distinctly a story of the “mess up” Booster and not the “secretly a hero” Booster. Still, given time travel shenanigans, as one reality overwrites another, Russell poses an interesting sci-fi question as to who gets to say which reality is “real” or not. (Also a Firestorm dinosaur!)

Joshua Hale Fialkov’s New 52 series I, Vampire remains a favorite (one of those forgotten greats of the New 52 that, you know, would make a fine compendium), so I was eager to read him here in the third story. I’d known there was a Batman and Guy Gardner team-up somewhere in Brave and the Bold, though I intentionally didn’t flip forward, so I was genuinely surprised when Hal is ordered but Guy arrives.

All along I was trying to guess where the story would go — not the bit about the alien, but with Batman and Guy, who seemed here more classically antagonistic than maybe they are in modern times. Surely this is one of those, as it goes, where Batman and Guy start out antagonistic but end up grudgingly respectful?

In the end, it is — Batman has to call for Guy’s help, Guy saves him — but only so mildly as to also be able to say there’s no grudging respect at all. I didn’t mind that; I felt in a way the real surprise of Fialkov’s story was playing against type, that these two characters who don’t like each other should solve a mystery but continue not to like each other. The story is my first exposure to Lisandro Estherren’s art, wonderfully creepy and perfectly suited to Fialkov’s writing.

Batman: Brave and the Bold: Across the Universe differs from Brave and the Bold: Out of Darkness and Legends of Justice in that there’s just three stories here, versus five and six respectively. Both of those books are longer, so we can’t say Across gives more pages to fewer stories — though the next book, Myths and Mysteries, is only 10 pages longer and has 10(!) stories in it. So even if Across' flaws are apparent — even if there’s yet to have been a Brave and the Bold story that seemed “ready for primetime” — Across the Universe is cut from a different cloth. Nigh 100 pages of Kelley Jones work. Just imagine.

[Includes original and variant covers]