NULL-MYTHS: "THE BRIDE AND THE BOLD" (ALL-NEW BATMAN/BRAVE AND BOLD #4, 2011)

I'm nostalgic enough that I think I enjoyed the 2008-11 cartoon teleseries BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD just as its creators intended: as a salute to the antic wackiness that dominated many Silver Age DC Comics. As I noted in this essay, the creators of the teleseries, rather than seeking to produce another "campy" Batman, rather sought to orient the crusader toward the form of "hip humor."

It's a tough form of humor  to do well, given that hipness rather easily devolves into Borsht-belt schtick-- and that's what I found on display in a TPB that collected several issues of DC's attempt to emulate the cartoon. The comic was launched in the same year that the cartoon wrapped up, and most of the adventures are mediocre but inoffensive visits to the goofier side of the DC Universe. "The Bride and the Bold," though, provides a good exemplar of a null-myth, in that writer Sholly Fisch fails to exploit the symbolic aspects of his narrative.

Oddly, Fisch starts off his story by referencing one of the most mythic comics of DC's Golden Age. Eros, the Greek god of love, seems to have been doing a close reading of William Marston's early WONDER WOMAN issues, for he complains that Wonder Woman isn't spreading "love" as Marston's heroine claims to be doing, that instead the Amazon is just getting into a lot of brawls with super-villains. Indeed, at the time that Eros gets so torqued off, the Amazon happens to be teamed with Batman in stopping the improbable criminal alliance of Giganta and the Mouse-Man. Eros then takes it into his head to force Wonder Woman and Batman to fall in love, apparently with the idea that greater love will be promoted in the world if two superheroes get publicly married.

This leads one of Batman's many amours to assume the role played by Doctor Doom in the wedding of Reed and Sue Richards, as she sends every nearly goofball villain in DC's history to disrupt the wedding.

I have to admit I liked seeing the resurrection of the DC-World's Zaniest Villains, even in a story as paper-thin as this one. One balmy Marston villain even makes the cut, the Blue Snow Man, though most of the Wonder Woman foes are from the nutty Silver Age Kanigher era, like the aforementioned Mouse Man, the Paper Man, Egg Fu and the Crimson Centipede.

Though Fisch's apparent reverence for Distinguished Craziness may equal that of the BRAVE AND BOLD cartoon, he's unable to give Eros, his primary "villain," a compelling reason to do what he does, and as a complete cop-out reveals at the climax that the two heroes weren't really enthralled, but went through the wedding because-- well, they read the script, so they knew that someone would send a lot of villains to fight them. Sorry, Solly; that's not hip, it's just lame and lazy. The BRAVE AND BOLD cartoon knew how to make the simple motivations of both heroes and villains take on mythic import, if not mythic content-- and I suspect that the remainder of the issues in the comic's 16-issue run fail this test as well.


NOTE: Though there are a huge bunch of DC heroes at the wedding who engage the villains in battle, none of the heroes in the story are "centric" to the story except for the primary team-up figures, Bats and WW.