The Brave and the Bold #88
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeThe Brave and the Bold #88 sits at the precise hinge point where DC's Batman team-up series crossed from the breezy, camp-inflected Silver Age into the grittier Bronze Age. The issue pairs Batman with Wildcat — a Justice Society of America relic from the Golden Age — at a moment when DC was just beginning to rehabilitate its older characters and bridge its publishing eras, and Bob Haney's script frames Ted Grant's comeback explicitly as a story about a hero proving he still matters, a theme that resonated with readers discovering the Golden Age for the first time. The cover, produced during Neal Adams' landmark run on the series, belongs to the concentrated period when Adams' hyper-realistic draftsmanship was actively transforming what a superhero comic could look like. That combination — a nostalgic character given new emotional weight, wrapped in Adams' modern visual language — made the issue a small but meaningful building block in the Bronze Age reinvention of Batman.
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The issue was edited by Murray Boltinoff and written by series stalwart Bob Haney, whose tenure on The Brave and the Bold was characterized by genre-blending plots and a deliberate disregard for strict DC continuity — Wildcat was an Earth-2 Justice Society hero being placed alongside the Earth-1 Batman with no in-universe explanation, a practice that critics later identified as both a creative freedom and a continuity headache. Interior art duties fell to penciler Irv Novick and inker Mike Esposito, while the cover is attributed to Neal Adams across most reference databases, placing it squarely within Adams' pivotal late-1969 to early-1970 stretch on the title that helped spark DC's Bronze Age aesthetic. The issue went on sale December 23, 1969, despite its February-March 1970 cover date, as confirmed by U.S. Copyright Office filings.
Trivia · 7 facts
- Cover date: February–March 1970 (indicia publisher: National Periodical Publications Inc.); on-sale date: December 23, 1969, per U.S. Copyright Office filings.
- Main story: 'Count Ten...and Die!' — script by Bob Haney, pencils by Irv Novick, inks by Mike Esposito, letters by Ray Holloway; editor Murray Boltinoff.
- Features Batman teaming with Wildcat (Ted Grant), a Golden Age Justice Society hero; the story uses the Cold War setting of the World Youth Games in Vienna, Austria, with Ted Grant coaching the U.S. boxing team while Batman tackles a Soviet espionage plot.
- Also contains a one-page feature, 'The Greatest Heroes of Them All, Part 2,' scripted by Marv Wolfman — a credit confirmed via the letters page of The Brave and the Bold #90.
- Two backup suspense stories — 'Death Turns the Dial!' and 'Killed With Kindness!' — written by Murray Boltinoff and illustrated by George Tuska, round out the issue's 36 pages.
- The main Batman/Wildcat story has been reprinted at least five times, including in Showcase Presents: The Brave and the Bold Batman Team-Ups Vol. 2 (2007), the Batman: The Brave and the Bold – The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (2017), and the Batman/Wildcat collection (2017).
- The 2008–2011 animated series Batman: The Brave and the Bold drew heavily on this era of the comic run and featured Wildcat as a recurring character, directly extending the legacy of team-ups like this one.
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Gigant #3/1970 (1970), Batman Classics #120 (1980), Läderlappen #4/1980 (1980), Lynvingen #4/1980 (1980), Läderlappen #10/1980 (1980), Lynvingen #10/1980 (1980), Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams #2 (2004), Batman: Gotiske netter [Alle Tiders Superhelter] #[nn] (2005), Showcase Presents: The Brave and the Bold Batman Team-Ups #2 (2008), Batman Collection: Neal Adams #2 (2009), Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams #2 (2013), Batman by Neal Adams Omnibus #[nn] (2016), Batman: The Brave and the Bold - The Bronze Age Omnibus #1 (2017), Batman / Wildcat #[nn] (2017), Batman in the Brave and the Bold: The Bronze Age #1 (2018), Batman by Neal Adams #2 (2019)
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