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#the animation is nice too. like not spectacular but better than most (comedies) that ive seen recently
5-pp-man · 2 years
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And they were roommates
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ty-talks-comics · 4 years
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Best of DC: Week of March 18th, 2020
Best of this Week: Robin 80th Anniversary
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All of the Robins are awesome.
Every Bat-fan has their favorite as they usually define the era when they began their love of Batman and comics in general. Older fans love Dick Grayson for being the first and greatest Robin that helped make Batman brighter. Edgy 80s kids and teens both love and hate Jason Todd for being the bad boy that died. Younger fans love Tim Drake for being the one to carry the name in the later seasons of the animated series and being one of the best and smartest Robins. Girls get representation from the spunky Carrie Kelly and the awesome Stephanie Brown. No one like Damian. (I’m kidding, he’s super fun.)
There’s a Robin for everyone and this 100 Page Spectacular celebrates the long history of Batman’s greatest sidekicks (though misses a chance to give Carrie Kelly her own short story) and does an amazing job in displaying each characters personalities by some of the best people to have written them over the years. Because there are so many, I’m only going to talk about the ones I really enjoyed!
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The first FOUR stories follow Dick Grayson and some of his best eras.
“A Little Nudge” is written by Marv Wolfman with pencils by Tom Grummett, two parts of the legendary team behind the best years of the New Titans (1989). This story follows Dick Grayson as Batman begins to nudge him in the direction of becoming his own man by being increasingly irritable to his protege. At this point in time, Dick was dealing with the stresses of outgrowing his childhood identity and Batman’s continuing overbearing nature. Where Bruce was all about being cold and methodical, Dick thought with his gut.
Grummett, Scott Hanna on inks and Adriano Lucas on colors illustrate Dick’s frustration through his increasingly sour facial expressions and sudden heroic actions. The costumes are as colorful as those old days with Dick wearing the bright yellow cape, bright red tunic and the elf shoes. In the middle of the dynamic duo’s fight with Natural History Museum thieves, Dick stops fighting when a child gets shot, against Bruce’s orders, and stays with him until the bad guys either get away or get taken down by Batman. 
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Later on, Dick tells Batman that he’s outgrown the Boy Wonder name and sets off to become his own man as Nightwing. Wolfman gives readers an excellent inner monologue from Bruce where he owns up to the fact that he was nudging Dick in that direction because he had just turned eighteen and Bruce believed in him. Batman always supports his kids, especially his first and it turns the story of separation into something heartwarming.
“Aftershocks” is a fun story by Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel who worked on my favorite Nightwing series in the 1996 - 2005 era of the character. This wasn’t anything major, just Nightwing doing everything he could to save people after an earthquake causes massive damage to a suspended bridge in Bludhaven. This era of Nightwing was characterized by him mostly striking out on his own and becoming a Bludhaven police officer, being inspired by Jim Gordon. 
Dick really came into his own and developed a rogues gallery to himself during this time, not to mention the sweet costume with the blue “wings” running down his arms into his fingers and those big, bulky gauntlets and boots. This era was the epitome of the 90s with big set piece moments, big muscles and Nightwing just being a nice and generally charming guy. After diving off of the bridge to attach a winch to a falling car, the woman inside asks to name her baby after him and he smiles and says, “Robin works, right?”
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“The Lesson Plan” is a story from my favorite modern age creators in Tim Seeley, Tom King and Mikel Janin. The Grayson series took place shortly after Dick’s identity was exposed to the world during “Forever Evil” (2013) by the Crime Syndicate. At this time he was acting as a spy for an agency called Spyral while spying on them for Batman. I never think of Tom King as a comedy guy, but this story was almost gut bustingly hilarious. It was just a world trotting adventure where he teaches one of the students of St. Hadrian’s how to be a spy.
Truly this series was Dick at his most handsome, witty and skilled. He jumps out of a helicopter and grabs onto the cords of a cable car before rescuing a woman held hostage by terrorists on walruses. Dick, the student and the hostage ten fight off more terrorists in Tanzania, riding a bus headed for Los Angeles of all places before Dick finds himself in something Dejah Thoris would wear and having a night with the hostage who reveals herself to be a gorilla from Gorilla City. It’s absolutely absurd, but it is immensely fun and welcome since that whole series is well regarded by fans.  
“More Time” by Judd Winick, Dustin Nguyen and John Kalisz is a far more somber tale about Jason Todd potentially a short time after the events of Under the Red Hood. Jason Todd was the second Robin and met his unfortunate end in the 1988 story, A Death in the Family by Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo. Jason eventually returned in the Batman: Under the Hood story where Winick and Doug Mahnke re-envisioned the former Robin as a violent vigilante Jason does have something of a strained relationship with Batman, but it wasn’t always that way as this story illustrates. 
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One thing that Dustin Nguyen has always been great at, it’s making kids super adorable and he does so in this story as it flips back and forth between the past and the present as Jason gives Bruce a birthday present in the form of his father’s watch, which Jason sought to fix. Nguyen and Kalisz characterize the past with Jason appearing as a happy, young kid under the dim lights of the Batcave and a twinkle in his eyes. He’s happy to have a home and a father to care for him so he wanted to do something nice for him.
Present Day Jason is characterized by dark backgrounds with bright oranges, smoke and heavy blacks for the shadows. Jason is far more tired, grizzled and angry, but he still finds the time to place the same gift box from all those years ago on the Batmobile for Bruce to find. At this point in time, they may have been at each other throats, but the love between them was still there, buried deep - culminating in two side by side panels of past and present Jason saying, “Happy Birthday, Bruce.”
“Boy Wonders” is a story about Tim Drake by James Tynion IV, Javier Fernandez and David Baron and sees Tim taking advice from all of his brothers. Next to Chuck Dixon and Geoff Johns, James Tynion IV has had one of the longest lasting impacts on the Tim Drake character throughout his run on Detective Comics by emphasizing the power of his mind in comparison to the other Robins and why he could ultimately be the successor to Batman above each of them or eke out a new life for himself.
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While taking down the cast of The Warriors on a speeding train with Nightwing, Tim contemplates what his future will be. He looks to Dick as the one who did everything that he’s doing now and Dick tells him that as the smartest Robin, the best thing he could do is use that mind to bring up the next generation of heroes. Jason, the reason he’s even wearing the costume of Robin in the first place, tells him to take everything he’s learned from Batman  to become BETTER than him. Arguably, it’s Damian that gives him the best advice by telling him that he’s the most capable of all of the Robins and that he should choose a path himself instead of relying on the advice of others.
Of course, this story takes place before the events of Detective Comics Rebirth where Tim does chart his own path in making Gotham safer with his Gotham Knights Protocol, but things don’t exactly turn out well for him. For all of the talk about how Tim is the smartest, he unfortunately could never get out of his own way long enough for things to go right...especially now that he’s going by “Drake” in that awful brown costume.
“Fitting In” is a Stephanie Brown story by Amy Wolfram, Damion Scott and Brad Anderson which sees Stephanie trying to live up to the standards of each of the boys that came before her. Stephanie was absolutely the shortest term Robin that Batman took on, as he only allowed her to take up the mantle in an attempt to get Tim back after his real father told him to hang up the cape after discovering his sons identity.
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Even still, Stephanie did everything she could to earn Bruce’s respect and Wolfram plays on this and that past story by making it more about Tim than Steph. She has to train in the same costume that Tim did, but she proves more...voluptuous than Tim. Her costume bursts at the seams and Alfred designs the costume that she’s known for. She and Batman then get a call about fire at an amusement park and ride off to take down Firefly.
Unfortunately for her, she gets captured, but being the innovative girl that she is, she manages to free herself and take down Firefly at the same time. Damion Scott’s art is very well suited to the cartoonish action and paints her as a capable sidekick despite initially being a damsel in distress. I honestly wish her run as Robin would have been longer because she honestly fits well in the role as the bubbly Robin in contrast to the hell that Tim was going through at the time.
A point can be made that this story also had some needless sexualization, but given Bruce's lack of respect for Stephanie and him just wanting a replacement Tim at the time, this was well written from that perspective. He never cared for Stephanie and her time as Robin was mostly her trying to live up to Tim's standard which eventually left her to try too hard and "die" because of it. I’ll always take more Stephanie Brown as I can cause even now there’s not enough of her and I’m damn sure not reading Young Justice by Brian Michael Bendis.
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“My Best Friend” is the one that makes me the most sad as it revolves around Jon Kent writing an essay on Damian as well...his best friend. I feel like the Super Sons series was also done a dity hand by BMB as he took Jon and aged him up for his Superman story when we could have gotten more fun stories between Damian and Jon. As far as homages to one of the better Rebirth series this one was just fun.
There’s not much to say other than Jon reminisces over a few of their adventures and tells readers about the side of Damian that we don’t often see because the Bat-boy is always a little bit too intense. Jon reminds us that they’ve fought for most of the time they’ve known each other, but when it comes to being heroes, Damian always had his back. It’s heartwarming. Of course there’s the continuity issue of them going to the same school in this story cause Jon was only ten at the time and Damian was thirteen, but honestly I only care about the friendship.
“Bat and Mouse” is a story by Robbie Thompson and Ramon Villalobos which sees Bruce and Damian having separate brooding inner monologues about how neither understands the other anymore and about how they want to open up to each other, but the distance between them has grown too wide. Admittedly, this is a much darker story in the respect that Batman and Robin haven’t really been the same since Damian started his new Titans team and started down a darker path that his father has yet to find out about.
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Thompson captures this feeling that Damian is arrogant but scared. He feels like he’s outgrown what Batman has become because he’s willing to get rid of threats almost permanently through erasing their memories and villainous tendencies (see Teen Titans, 2018). At the same time, he’s afraid that maybe what he’s doing isn’t the right path and he so desperately wants to reach out to his father, but feels like he can’t.
Batman is the same way in that he loves his son more than anything and wants to regain the relationship that they had in the past, but doesn’t know how to say the words either. He knows that Damian is hiding something big, but he doesn’t want to accuse the boy and deepen the already cavernous rift. Even as they take down the robotic villain Quietus, they show signs of breaking through their equally cold exteriors, but fail to do so and I get the feeling this will all come to a head soon.
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The Robins will always be some of my favorite characters in all of comics. Each of them have distinct personalities and quirks that set them apart from a lot of comic characters, especially when it comes to the trauma that they’ve faced alongside Batman. This special won’t be for everyone, just like each era of Robin isn’t for everyone, but overall, I really enjoyed it and the creators selected to honor these fantastic characters.
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