Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Tomorrow’s Heroes is the final collection of this series. I’m not sorry to see it end, and I wonder when DC will try an anthology series again.

It was in the air for a while — obviously DC has a history of anthology titles, but then they started showing up as part of crossover events, Death Metal and Lazarus Planet and so on; many high profile titles had backup stories; and then to Batman: Urban Legends and to Brave and the Bold. But I don’t think either of those dazzled audiences, and I wouldn’t be surprised if DC’s had enough for a while. (The various holiday-themed anthologies still seem to have a following, and without the higher pressure of the stories taking place in a monthly series.)

Zany team-ups is the name of it this time, and in that, the book delivers — Wonder Woman and Plastic Man, Green Arrow and Captain Marvel, Zatanna and Bat-Mite, Martian Manhunter and Animal Girl Maxine Baker. Not any of these are poor, so much as sometimes these and others suffer from being necessarily surface level, the perils of short-form anthology stories. The book is about the same length as a six-issue collection, but it took me longer to read it than I wanted, because in the equation between going to sleep or continuing to read, sleep won out. It’s just not that exciting of a book.

[Review contains spoilers]

Probably the best of the bunch is the initial story, “Man’s Underworld,” by Dave Wielgosz and Nikola Cizmesija (see also from Every Day Is Like Wednesday). What drew me to this right away (other than that Wielgosz remembers Woozy Winks) is that Wielgosz writes about a “post-silly” Plastic Man — not the often-salacious Plas specifically from Grant Morrison’s JLA, but rather a Plas who was salacious during the JLA days but now feels the need to reform.

That makes for a much more interesting team-up with Wonder Woman; not that Plas isn’t the comedic relief here, but it’s tempered by a specific effort to do better. This is maybe the opposite of Joshua Hale Fialkov’s (also good) Batman/Guy Gardner team-up in Brave and the Bold: Across the Universe — there, Batman and Gardner are adversarial and continue to be so, whereas here, we find a different Wonder Woman/Plastic Man team-up than the kinds we saw before.

I liked Cizmesija’s deceptively simple line work on Dan Watters' Sword of Azrael, and it’s equally appropriate here. There’s a few background gags — Diana tossing people and so on — that are rendered well, and overall Cizmesija’s trend toward absurdist works quite right for Plastic Man. Plas was a criminal, he feels bad about it, we know, we know, but still I’d read another Plastic Man story by this team.

Troy Peters and David Baldeon’s “Downtime at the Diner,” with Captain Marvel and Green Arrow, is silly, though Baldeon’s animated style clearly invites that. Still, Marvel and Arrow sure is a team-up we’ve never seen before. Similarly, Michael Conrad and Christopher Mitten’s “Hive Mind” (Martian Manhunter and Animal Man/Animal Girl) goes across pretty common tropes — the Red wants to teach Maxine that death is a part of life — but Mitten does a nice Travel Foreman impression, and it’s worth admission to hear J’onn call Buddy “Bernhard.”

Less successful stories here include “Flash: A Day in the Life” by Cavan Scott and Travis Mercer. Mercer favorably reminds of the Flash’s adventures under Brett Booth, but this “six missions before breakfast” story has surely been done before. I have enjoyed Stephanie Williams' Nubia stories, but here her tale of Mal and Karen Duncan is too straightforward — heroes on vacation aren’t going to get involved, then they do. As with Williams' Bumblebee story from World’s Finest Vol. 5: Secret Origins, I’m not sure what continuity Williams is writing in or what she perceives to be Karen and Mal’s history (why someone wants Mal’s autograph, for instance), and that confuses how we’re meant to understand the proceedings.

It is clever that letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou both writes and letters a story of the villain Onomatopoeia (Otsmane-Elhaou’s letters were especially good in Green Arrow Vol. 4: Fresh Water Kills). It did feel a little cheat that Otsmane-Elhaou gives Onomatopoeia thoughts and dialogue, even an identity, when historically the villain has been mute outside of sound effects; it’s fine, it’s an anthology, I just wondered about a version of the story that “played by the rules.” The end is purposefully vague, Onomatopoeia obviously out of touch with reality, but neither could I tell you exactly what happened there, maybe the sign of a story that needed another pass.

Perhaps the whole of Brave and the Bold, I’ve been waiting for the Aquaman Jackson Hyde story, which was a lead-in to Jeremy Adams' Aquaman series. The story accomplishes its goal, which is to introduce an artifact that reappears in Adams' work, but the storytelling is surprisingly rough, such that I even checked to see that this was indeed the usually capable Adams. Obviously this is playing on relationships from the alt-continuity Young Justice cartoon, teaming Jackson and Miss Martian, but I felt here too that I wasn’t sure what Adams perceived as their continuity; when they encounter one another, M’gann says “Oh … it’s you,” as if there’s a problem, but then everything seems fine.

The dialogue is stilted — “I can hold it steady.” “Thank you.” “Shall we?” “We shall.” — and the details sometimes muddy. M’gann wonders how Jackson can speak on a planet that seems to have atmosphere (it has bodies of water) and we only understand through exposition that it doesn’t or shouldn’t. Really, anyone who went straight to Adams' Aquaman didn’t miss much.

Robins Tim Drake and Damian Wayne team up, dislike one another, and then come to have grudging respect; Zatanna believes she helped create Bat-Mite in a story told backward (but then she probably didn’t). Not any of it presents the characters poorly, truly; it’s just that there aren’t any surprises here.

Setting aside the “Batman Black & White” stories and one lead-in to Batman Beyond: Neo-Gothic, I only spot two “story sets” that didn’t get collected by the time we got to Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Tomorrow’s Heroes. One is a Lois Lane story by Torunn Grønbekk from issue #10, “The Game, Prologue”; it was solicited to have a follow up in issue #12, but that never appeared (maybe it explains Rob Levin’s bizarre False Face story).

There was also Ed Brisson’s sizable six-part Stormwatch story, “Down With the Kings,” which maybe DC didn’t collect in expectation it would appear with a series of its own that didn’t manifest. More’s the pity on that one; I liked Brisson’s Batman, Incorporated work and the Stormwatch story tied in to Knight Terrors. I wouldn’t hold out hope for that to see collection ever; DC’s been pretty good about collecting most things, but I don’t expect there’s much market to make that worth it.

[Includes original and variant covers]