I was going to call Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Myths and Mysteries the penultimate collection of this series, but then I realized I’m not certain. There’s not another collection solicited after the next, Tomorrow’s Heroes, though there are still stories from this Brave and the Bold that DC never collected, including a Knight Terrors tie-in! So another collection could arrive eventually, it’s just not on the schedule right now.

But after a couple Brave and the Bold volumes spotlighting a pretty good cross-section of the DC Universe, Myths is mostly a Batman anthology. It’s in the title, sure; this series has been remarkably restrained in that sense up to this point; and it’s not as though Question Renee Montoya, John Constantine, and Swamp Thing aren’t also here in their own stories.

Five out of 10 of these, however, star Batman or are Bat-adjacent, short stories without any real continuity ties. That begins to remind of the end of the Batman: Urban Legends anthology title, when it seemed like some of the stories existed just to fill space in the book and not the other way around. And if this is the penultimate collection of Brave and the Bold, that maybe does indicate it’s time to wrap things up.

[Review contains spoilers]

Owing perhaps to collecting 10 stories, Myths lacks the big set piece of other Brave and the Bold volumes, neither 100 pages of Kelley Jones art like Across the Universe nor a sweeping Gotham Academy story like Legends of Justice. The closest it probably gets is either Alex Segura’s story of Renee Montoya or Zipporah Smith’s team-up of John Constantine and … Streaky the Super-Cat.

Segura’s Renee Montoya piece is not particularly significant, though it’s the most continuity-forward story in the book since it leads in to Segura’s DC All In Question: All Along the Watchtower miniseries. I give Segura points for referencing minutiae from the Batman: Officer Down event from 25 years ago, though taking the common criminal from that purposefully street-level event and turning him into the costumed supervillain dubiously named Zer0 doesn’t necessarily feel like progress.

Smith’s Constantine story is notable as the book’s oddball team-up. On one hand, “Constantine and the Super-Pets” is maybe the worst realization of the decision to bring Constantine back into the DCU proper in the New 52; on the other hand, who doesn’t want to see Constantine paired with Streaky? The basis of Smith’s story is awkwardly complex — a sibling is mad because of a perceived slight Constantine committed against another sibling — and this is more comedic than perhaps we want Constantine to be, but Mike Norton certainly provides the right animated art for the tone.

Passably fine too is Smith’s Swamp Thing story that ends the book; the technical explanation of the Green followed by, “So where magic lives?” is pitch perfect. I have enjoyed artist Karl Mostert before, and he does well with the gore here, though elsewhere in the book, Stevan Subic’s art is more horror-tinted, and I’m curious how an artist like that would have changed the story.

But those are three exceptions against what’s a whole lot of Batman, at a time where Batman in a variety of forms is already plentiful. Christian Ward’s “Doubt” is a tale of Batman being brave (if not also bold); Zac Thompson’s “The Hum” teams Batman with Scarecrow. Michael Conrad’s “What’s a Calendar” uses the Officer Calvin Brooks character who appeared in Conrad and Becky Cloonan’s Batgirls, but still it’s really just a Batman/Calendar Man story; “Bats Again: A Microstory” is a fine two Man-Bat pages by Poison Ivy’s G. Willow Wilson, but here, too: Batman.

I’ll mention Rich Douek’s “Leftovers” separately just because I’m a sucker for a scary Zsasz story, and the art by Subic delivers. I thought this was a good illustration of why Batman doesn’t kill; the character Caleb is in clear, imminent danger — I don’t think anyone doubts that Zsasz will kill Caleb now or later if Zsasz is allowed to live — but in trying to kill Zsasz, Caleb essentially becomes him. If metaphor is perhaps a bit too concrete on the page, I thought this was well done anyway and worthy of a DC Halloween anthology.

Rounding out the book, Jay Faerber contributes the story “First Watch”. It’s a fine story of regular Metropolis police officers in the shadow of Superman and the Special Crimes Unit, though the arc of the officer from feeling useless to making a difference isn’t very surprising or original.

Faerber was a DC stalwart in the early 2000s (Titans, etc.), but I don’t think we’ve seen DC proper work from him since, and with the dated reference to the SCU, I wondered if this story hadn’t been sitting around in a drawer for a while. Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, Jerry Ordway, and Kerry Gammill all get name-checked, which is a nice nod to the Superman Triangle Titles, but also strangely three writers and one artist (or two writers, a writer/artist, and an artist)? And yet Farber’s bar scene doesn’t take place at the Ace of Clubs, so who knows?

Finally, completely mystifying is DC editor Rob Levin’s story of the villain False Face warring with Gentleman Ghost. I’ll say the story does make good use of both False Face’s ability to imitate other people and Gentleman Ghost’s long-livedness — but where pairing these two comes from, absent a superhero to be found, I don’t know. I wondered if Levin was riffing on something, some meeting between the characters in some other comics (False Face makes a reference to such), but I couldn’t find it, and I couldn’t quite figure how this story came to be occupying this space.

Anthologies where writers and artists just try their hand at characters are not my thing, though surely I can think of examples I’ve enjoyed in the past. Again, both Brave and the Bold: Legends of Justice and Across the Universe had big-swing stories in them that made the volumes feel worthwhile even if every story didn’t wow. Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Myths and Mysteries is the first one of this iteration without as much to recommend in it.

[Includes original and variant covers]