Who
Killed Dick Robin?
Robert M. Price
In Kingdom Come, Alex Ross portrays the Flash as a
being always vibrating, existing on several planes and in several times at
once. There is even the hint that he is mainly just Speed Force, a momentary,
half-visible fold in its flow, hard to fix on, even to see. The same could be
said, I think, for Robin, the sidekick of Batman. He is a "character"
who in every way has become so unstable, so chaotic, that we can scarcely
consider him a genuine character at all. Instead, he is a perfect example of an
"actant" as defined by Structuralist critics. That is,
"Robin" is a personified narrative function, a living role and not so
much a character playing that role. His actantial role is that of archetypal
sidekick. And that is, in turn, a particular narrative strategy for involving
the reader. On the one hand, Robin is a sounding board for Batman, enabling him
to explain his plans to the reader without always having to be shown thinking
in dotted-line thought-balloons. Jimmy Olsen was created on the Superman
radio show for exactly the same reason: the audience was not supposed to be
hearing the hero's thoughts, as if they were reading minds! In this respect,
Robin is an analogue for Sherlock Holmes's assistant Watson, or for Simon Peter
in the Gospels, Ananda in the Buddhist stories.
More than
that, Robin was an anchor point for the daydream fantasies of young boys
reading Batman. Of course they would like to be Batman, but
wouldn't it also be great if Batman was your chum? Robin enabled the young
reader to imagine himself part of the story. This is the whole justification
for Robin's presence in the story. It sure can't be because he has any good
reason, from within the narrative world, for being there! Would Batman really
take a young kid into gunfire and fist fights with him? That is almost as weird
as what Frederick Wertham (Seduction of the Innocent) thought was going
on: pederasty between the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder. Batman and the
reader were confronted with the absurdity of the whole Robin premise when the
Joker killed the second (or was it the third?) Robin. The Great Detective
couldn't have seen this coming?
Joel
Schumacher's much underrated film Batman Forever obviated the difficulty
by having Robin already an adult, and by having Robin force himself on Batman
as his partner, sort of like Bucky Barnes did Captain America, threatening to
blab Cap's secret identity if he didn't take him along.
Robin's
costume is an unstable entity right out of the starting gate! What is he
supposed to be: Robin Hood? Or Robin Redbreast, a sunnier winged creature than
Batman? The medieval jerkin design suggests the first. We might almost imagine
that Robin grew up to be Green Arrow, hence the consistent copying of all
Batman's gimmicks: the Arrowmobile, the Arrow Cave, the Arrowplane, trick
arrows like trick batarangs. But that's never been part of the story. And the
red coloration secures the bird imagery.
But if
Robin didn't grow up to be Green Arrow, who did he grow up to be? In the
early 60s Robin inhaled a "maturity gas" that made him temporarily
grow up physically, whereupon he took on the identity of Owlman, who looked
sort of like an owl version of Hawkman, with merely ornamental wings. His
short-sleeve shirt and his trunks, as well as his short boots and gloves, were
green and scaled, like his Robin trunks. It was pretty arbitrary, from robin to
owl, as if one bird might grow up into the other.
On the
late, lamented Earth 2, a grown Robin replaced the retired Batman and donned an
utterly grotesque costume (though I want to see the action figure wearing it!)
that looked like the standard Batman costume except that instead of a hood, he
had a domino mask shaped like a bat. His cape was serrated but yellow, and
there was an "R" emblem inside the bat on his chest. This reminds me
of that early Hulk issue where Dr. Banner, his Gamma-powers still inchoate,
changed into the Hulk--except for his face! He had to put on a rubber Hulk
mask! Here, it appears as if Robin grew up out of his tadpole stage into the
adult--but not quite! Arrested development. Still partly Boy Wonder.
So in the
seventies Neal Adams redesigned the adult Robin costume. Now it was just a
long-sleeved, long-pants version of the old kid Robin suit! The message here
was that he had never managed to grow up at all! He was just a little warmer.
Batman was gone, and in his pace was no successor, only a sidekick, as if Robin
were a dog waiting by the door for his master's return, not knowing he would
never be coming back. I know some fans have a sentimental attachment to this
costume, but I fail to see it. Moot point anyway, since they killed this Robin
off in the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Wolfman
and Perez were busy treating Robin as a superhero in his own right as the
leader of the New Teen Titans, a team mate, sure, but not a sidekick. So
eventually they got him out of the ballerina suit, too. Now he became the new
Nightwing. I'm sorry, but I so loved the pre-Crisis Nightwing, Superman's
Batman persona in Kandor, that I could never get used to this new Nightwing version
of Robin. But it isn't only my prejudice! Look at the name they gave him, the
name of an overt Batman imitation! Hardly the way to establish a secure
superhero identity of his own. But it was a Catch-22 since, if you severed the
connection with Batman completely, then what difference did it make if the guy
was named Dick Grayson? It would be like..., I dunno, making Hal Jordan into
the Spectre?
I guess
the Perez Nightwing costume looked a little too fancy for the gritty mood that
overtook all of DC in the wake of The Dark Knight Returns, so they gave
him a stark new costume that only makes him look like sort of a human batarang.
No, it was left to Alex Ross finally to come up with the answer: an adult
identity for Dick Grayson and a costume to match. In Kingdom Come, he
reappeared, taking Batman's place in the League, as Red Robin. The red breast
was there, all right, but no more Robin Hood hotpants. He looked kind of like
Batman, what with the black hood and cape--but then robins actually look like
that, don't they? It looked maybe a bit too much like Dr. Midnite, but I'm not
complaining. As Red Robin, Dick Grayson seemed to have embraced both his
destiny and his distinctiveness. At the same time, he became a second Batman
opposed to his old mentor, Batman's successor while the original was still
alive.
Another
attempt at a serious Robin costume was that created for Tim Drake, the third
Robin, that is, unless you count Earth 2's Dick Grayson, in which case Tim
Drake would be the fourth Robin after Jason Todd. This outfit, which hardly
needs to be described here, is certainly an improvement on Neal Adams's
version, though perhaps the black gloves, boots, and outside cape are too much
like the Earth 2 gray and blue Robin. Or maybe that's only because the cape has
a yellow lining, as if to remind you forcibly of what Robin used to look
like, or what a real Robin would look like, I guess. But this one is
still definitely a sidekick's costume. And it reminds me of the Robin costume
in the 1949 movie serial Batman and Robin, where Robin sports a dark
cape and green tights (or so I always guessed, the serial being in black and
white).
But this
costume also appeared on Dick Grayson, as his one and only Robin costume in Batman
the Animated Series before he abandoned Batman and became Nightwing. Dick's
costume in Batman Forever and the horrible Schumacher parody Batman
and Robin seem to be based on this version, too. When Tim Drake arrived in
the cartoon, he had red leotards and black gloves, boots, outer cape. No green
at all. Good side-kick costume. And in this continuity there was no Jason Todd
at all.
In the
eighties, during the New Teen Titans craze, the creative team finally decided
to settle once and for all the mystery of "Who Is Donna Troy?" But
there was never any mystery, just a goof. Wonder Girl was supposed to have been
Wonder Woman back on Paradise Island when it was known as Smallville. She was
simply Wonder Woman as a teenager. She couldn't have existed at the same time
as Robin, Aqualad, Speedy, and Kid Flash. But the editors felt they had to have
a girl in their group, so Wonder Woman suddenly became a separate character,
some kind of honorary Amazon girl-scout. Wolfman retconned all this, but the
resulting narrative, merely a gesture of uninspired expediency, seemed to be
just what it was, a piece of cumbersome rationalizing. (John Byrne could write
whole issues of this stuff, like the 1989 West Coast Avengers comic
where he has to explain that the Vision was not made from the carcass of the
Human Torch after all, since the Torch cannot really be dead, since Byrne wants
to put him in the West Coast Avengers!)
So who is
Donna Troy? For that matter, who is the post-Crisis Wonder Woman? The
post-Crisis Hawkman? Precisely nobody: a cipher, an instantiation of retconning
by the seat of your pants, covering your narrative butt. And I am saying that
"Robin" is nobody, too. Just the name of an actantial role, with
neither name nor costume nor identity to call his own. Holy schizophrenia,
Batman!