Too Many Robins ...And They All Lay Eggs! / Steve K.

In 1988, DC conducted a now-famous telephone poll in which readers were asked to vote yay or nay to Robin surviving a brutal beating and explosion at the hands of the Joker. “Nay”, they said, and so Robin was pronounced dead and written out of the series in Batman #428. There were lunchboxes to sell, though, and so DC almost immediately began planning the introduction of a new Robin. Tim Drake debuted in cameo in Batman #436, and became the new Robin in Batman #442, published late in 1989. DC took the opportunity to rethink the Robin concept at that time, devoting a ton of energy to making sure Tim was likable, and playing up his non-physical skills (computer prowess, detective work). Batman was shown as reluctant to work with a partner, particularly a child, and the books went out of their way to sell the idea that the danger to Robin was being minimized at all times.

This worked exceptionally well, perhaps so well that the snake ate its own tail. The new Robin proved extremely popular, and DC quickly began spinning him off into his own miniseries (which outsold the Batman titles by a fair margin). This ran directly counter to the idea of Robin being a less physical support network for Batman, as being the protagonist of his own series meant he needed to be in the thick of the action. (And by 1991, DC had him confronting the Joker, solo.) Robin also proved to be extremely popular on Batman: The Animated Series. (On this series, Robin was Dick Grayson, but he wore Tim Drake’s costume.) In 1993, DC took the unprecedented step of spinning Robin off into his own ongoing series. Even Chuck Dixon, who wrote the series for its first 100 issues, was skeptical that it would work—but it did, and so by the mid 1990’s the concept had reverted to something close to its original incarnation. Though the face behind the mask was Tim rather than Dick, Robin was once again a teenager (14 years old for most of the 90’s) who went toe to toe with the baddies. The rise in importance of Barbara (Oracle) Gordon in the Batman mythos (which occurred in 1994-1995) took the focus off of Tim’s computer skills. Interestingly, Batman continued to operate solo a large percentage of the time despite Robin’s popularity. Robin was a fixture alongside Batman in Detective Comics (also written by Dixon), but appeared only sporadically in Shadow of the Bat and almost never in Batman.

Meanwhile, DC often seemed at a loss for what exactly to do with Nightwing. The problem with splitting Robin into Robin and Nightwing is that the characters were, at least in part, redundant. DC’s solution to this was to emphasize Nightwing’s connection to the Titans, to play him less as a Bat-sidekick and more as an independent player who led the Titans for years. This worked fine until the Titans’ star faded, and the franchise eventually crashed. Nightwing was removed from the Titans in 1994 (New Titans #114) and returned to the Bat-office, which really had no clue what to do with him. Dixon was once again enlisted to solve this problem, and graduated Nightwing into his own successful solo series in 1996, setting him up as the (mostly solo) protector of Bludhaven, which was a neighboring city to Gotham. Dixon’s run on the title was well-regarded by many, but his setup for Nightwing didn’t “stick” and was undone following his departure.

Complicating matters further was the return of Jason Todd to the land of the living in 2005. Jason’s mean streak was played up upon his return, such that he was now exceptionally violent and prone to killing, carving a niche for him as the “Bad Robin”. Though Jason adopted the identity of the Red Hood, the problem of too many Robins was complicated further—now there were three.

(I feel like I need to throw in a Stephanie Brown footnote here somewhere. Brown briefly assumed the role of Robin for a few issues in 2004, as part of a storyline setting up her death. I don’t consider her more than a footnote, and her role as Robin wasn’t all that different from Drake’s.)

So then along comes Grant Morrison, and with him yet another Robin—this time Damian Wayne, the bratty son of Batman and Talia Al Ghul. Damian became the fourth Robin in 2009, and represented a complete reinvention of the concept. Damian was much younger than Tim, and was presented as uber-competent. In stark contrast to nearly 40 years spent trying to make Robin more “realistic”, Damian was anything but. He fit perfectly with Morrison’s contextualization of Batman as a pop hero, but made no sense at all beside the Grim Avenger of the Night characterization. Damian was killed off in Batman Incorporated #8, written by Morrison, who made clear that that was his plan all along.

Damian’s emergence as Robin necessitated a name change for Tim Drake as well, and because DC really really likes Kingdom Come an awful lot, Tim took on the identity of Red Robin. Tim had been played subtly older for a while even prior to the change, but once he became Red Robin he began to be played pretty clearly as at least 17 or 18 years old. So now DC had three former Robins, all late teens / early-to-maybe-mid 20’s, and Dick and Tim were more redundant than ever.

It’s been pretty widely documented that one of the big goals of the New 52 initiative was to line DC’s IP up across various media. Corporate synergy and all that. Another goal was to streamline the DC Universe, and specifically to eliminate the legions of multiple and “legacy” characters that had cropped up over the years.

Though DC claimed at the time that it was not rebooting the Batman mythos with the New 52, in fact it did. The stories continued on from their previous spot, but large swaths of Batman and company’s backstories were altered. The publisher’s insistence on a strict five-year “timeline” in which all its continuity took place necessitated some re-thinking and re-working of the characters and their backstories.

It seems to me that the post-New 52 Batman mythos draws its inspiration primarily from two places: the Nolanverse and the Arkham video games. Those are, after all, the two biggest commercial successes of recent years that involve Batman. I have found it very useful to think of the Snyder/Capullo Batman as being set in the Nolanverse, and the Layman/Fabok Detective Comics as being set in Arkham City. I don’t mean that in a literal sense—clearly both books exist in the same continuity and are part of DC’s shared universe—rather, I mean it in an aesthetic sense. Batman evokes the feel of the movies, complete with a heavy emphasis on Bruce Wayne and a more “realistic” slant. Detective looks and feels like Arkham City—Batman is armored, everything is amped up, there’s lots of high-tech weaponry and whatnot.

So what do the Nolanverse and Arkham City have in common? Well, one thing they have in common is that both interpretations of Batman minimize Robin and his role in the mythos. The Nolanverse includes Robin in only a roundabout way. Arkham City does feature Robin (the Tim Drake version), but he has a very small role in the main game and is played older—he looks and sounds almost grown.

It’s likely that, if you’re younger than a certain age (say, 25-ish), you don’t default to Batman & Robin as a team the way I do. A lot of that is down to the Nolanverse and Arkham games—more people know Batman from those vehicles than know him from the comics.

And so it’s amidst that backdrop that DC re-conceived Batman and his associates in the New 52. Even prior to Damian’s death, Batman worked mostly alone in his own titles since the New 52 began. Curiously, though, and despite the efforts elsewhere to eliminate multiples and streamline continuity, DC elected to keep all four Robins in continuity and active. Even after Damian’s passing, Nightwing, Red Hood and Red Robin are all (a) still part of the canon, and (b) still active. The obvious candidate for elimination from the continuity would have been Tim, but then again he did hold down a solo series for sixteen years.

In order to explain the seemingly unexplainable—the notion that there have been four Robins in only five years—DC made some rather significant changes to Dick Grayson in Nightwing #0. Gone are the days when Dick was Bruce’s ward or adopted son. In the new continuity, Bruce became a mentor to Dick after his parents’ death, but it was much more of an arms-length relationship. Dick had a “part-time job” that explained his forays to Wayne Manor, but he never lived there. Even more importantly, DC characterized Dick’s time as Robin as something that was relatively brief; in essence a stepping stone on his way to becoming Nightwing. Nightwing is the endpoint—Robin was a temp job.

(As an aside, in 1994 at the end of the Zero Hour miniseries, DC made its first attempt at publishing a timeline, which attempted to fit its continuity in a 10-year stretch. Fans were outraged that Dick was only Robin in that timeline for four years. Chew on that for a moment.)

I submit that these changes have the (very likely intended) effect of marginalizing the concept of Robin in the current continuity. Not only does Batman not have a current partner by that name, but he never really did. At best he had a series of apprentices whom he mentored for short periods of time. He still has what appears to be a close, if rocky, relationship with Dick Grayson, but he appears to have virtually no relationship at all with, say, Tim Drake. There was a time when Tim’s (and DC’s) take was that Batman “needed” a Robin—clearly that is no longer considered to be the case. The concept has been cast aside, which begs the question of why DC has all these former Robins still running around. I’d submit that the only one who’s really viable as a solo character (at this point) is Nightwing, and none of them are used regularly as Bat-sidekicks. They’re just curiosities.

I still have a soft spot for Robin and probably always will. Theres something about Batman ’66 where they’re still a team that just feels completely right. Were it up to me, Robin would still be Dick Grayson. He’d be a young adult and not a full-time partner to Batman, but he never would have left the role. I say that as someone who was a huge Tim Drake fan back when he didn’t suck, and who loved Damian’s turn as Robin, but I think the Robin concept was stronger when there was only one of him. (Picky thing, but I’ve also never liked the name “Nightwing”. which I find utterly generic.) I think we may well have reached the point of no return with kid sidekicks, where they just don’t work anymore. Some of the details of how DC has handled Robin’s backstory in the New 52 are, in my mind, wrong-headed; but the marginalization of the idea feels right—at least for right now.