Robin: Ending High
February 18th, 2009 by Esther Inglis-Arkell | Tags: Batman RIP, DC comics, robin, stephanie brownRobin ends on a note of triumph. Or rather, its character does. Kind of. Tim Drake has established himself as someone so righteous he can dictate The Rules Of All Superheroes to Spoiler, so cunning he can set it up so he beats Shiva in a fight, so self-sacrificing that he can break up with the girlfriend that I am flat-out shocked he still has, since he hasn’t seen her in the last six or so issues, and so fair-minded that he can pacify Jason Todd, who comes by to view Batman’s last will and testament, which has been set up to be recorded in a big black obelisk in the Batcave.
Truly, Tim is the badassiest of all badass heroes, and that newfound badassery is worth the several dozen pints of personality he lost. What the world needs is another grim n’ gritty superhero with a tortured past, and what the Batverse needs is another adult hero in the shadow of the bat, and if I were a lesser blogger, I’d sneak in a little jab about how Detective Harper, Zoanne, Stephanie Brown, and Lady Shiva all got nudged aside so the male character could commune with their dead daddy figure in a big, erect phallus but I’m far too – oh did that slip out?
Well, it’s not like I’ve made a secret of my feelings toward this character’s trajectory. I will sum it all up with this – when anyone told him that something sucked, my old physics teacher used to say, “There is no ‘suck’ or ‘blow.’ There are only differences in pressure.” I can now prove him wrong, since this new grim, infallible, omnipotent Robin somehow manages to both suck and blow at the same time.
The character is on top of the world, but I’m feeling pretty cold about him. Of course it’s natural for characters to progress as their comics go on, but this one grew out of any interest I had in him. Oh, well. With comics, every Wednesday has the possibility of a fresh start. So, out with the old, in with the Battle For The Cowl, and on to next Wednesday.
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Hi Esther –
I wanted to comment that I agree with your review here. I’m not a particular Robin fan, either, but I’ve been watching the Batbooks all in their windups here post-FC post-RIP and both the boys’ books have been really disappointing.
Dick’s because it failed to do anything with a storyline for the last 3 issues, and the O&O segment was terrible.
Tim’s because over the last two years he’s become an insufferable Bruce Redux, developed as a hero but not as a person. My friends are bigger Robin fans, and they’re down on it for that, because he used to be a really interesting person.
Great review. As sorry as I am to hear that Robin’s storytelling nosedive conntinued right up to the end, I really appriciate your reading of the issue, particularly in regards to the female characters. I don’t know why DC keeps pushing all the Robins to be more and more similar to each other…Tim get grittier, Jason gets less evil, and Dick…okay I haven’t read Nightwing in years, but he’s seems pretty square too. If I want to read about solo book about a young male hero, I’m sticking with Blue Beetle. Oh wait.
To be honest, Tim Drake’s been kinda screwed since Identity Crisis. Before that he was DC’s Peter Parker, trying to balance family life with crime fighting and way too many girlfriends. After IdC and War Games, all that was left was the inevitable decline into Bruce Jr as AHR pointed out.
[…] Inglis-Arkell was left unsatisfied: Well, it’s not like I’ve made a secret of my feelings toward this character’s trajectory. I […]
To be fair, the end of that series also pretty much took a shit on Spoiler as a character, for no reason that I could discern.