Summary: <br> Batman team-ups from the 1970s including Batman tries to exorcize himself of the ghost of a Portuguese sailor, trying to foster mutual understanding between adults and some well-intentioned teenagers who are holding Gotham City hostage with a nuclear bomb!And will the Metal Men refuse to help Batman because of robot lib?<br> Affiliate link added. <br> Transcript below:<br><br> <br> Batman joins forces with the fastest man alive! Killers[?] from another dimension and three random British people. We’ll tell you all about it as we look at Showcase Presents Brave and the Bold: Batman Team Ups Volume Two.<br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here’s your host, Adam Graham.<br> I love a good team up book and DC was kind of the leader in getting those started. They had the original monthly team up between Batman and Superman in World’s Finest. In the Silver Age they took Brave and the Bold, what had been a series with a colored past and various formats – more recently a tryout book like Showcase Presents, and the featured team ups between various superheroes. Batman team ups begin to dominate, and then with Issue Seventy-Four it became an exclusive Batman team up book. I am reviewing this using Showcase Presents the Brave and the Bold: Batman Team Ups Volume Two, but there have been some more modern collections from DC called Brave and the Bold: The Bronze Age Omnibus and then just plain Brave and the Bold. Bronze Age, the one that’s the Omnibus takes Issue Seventy-Four and goes all the way up to Issue 121, while the Brave and the Bold goes from Seventy-Four to Ninety-One.<br> Now while these stories are set in where many define the Bronze Age to be – they were written in the 1970s and the art reflects a lot of that ’70s artistic style, particularly in this collection. You have art by Ross Andru and then Nick Cardy, they fully invested into the 1970s style. However, a lot of the stories have a Silver Age feel to them. At this point the comics were changing – there was more of a focus on being a little more grown up, not talking down to kids; and Marvel had captured the imagination of a lot of older kids by – while still being fairly family friendly by modern standards – also being a bit more grown up. DC is trying to do this, and there’s a sense of trying to be a bit more mature, but there’s still this underlying layer of goofiness that comes off so often. And it’s not like the intentional goofiness of the ’60s stories, so there can be some of these that are just a bit awkward. That said, we’re going to take a look at the first few issues. I won’t cover every single team up. Someone not particularly impressive either as good or bad.<br> Most of these – with one exception…all of these actually are written by Bob Haney – the art is by various people: Nick Cardy is on most of the ones that we cover here. <br> Issue Eighty-Eight was a notable, ‘Count Ten and Die’ because it had Wildcat, i.e. Ted Grant, a former boxer meeting up with Batman, and Batman bringing him out of retirement both as a boxer/boxing coach and eventually as Wildcat. And it’s a fun adventure that involves Batman and Wildcat having to contend with the Soviet propaganda machine. I enjoyed that one pretty well. I<br> Issue Ninety is another one of those stories which really is not so much a Bronze Age story as it is a Silver Age story with a bronze coat of paint. Adam Strange is the guest character and I love Adam Strange. He is this character who was on earth and hit by a Zeta beam that took him across the galaxy, and he goes to this planet Rann where he is a hero who manages to save the day. And he’s continually being shot back and forth between Rann and Earth by the Zeta beam. Anyway,
