To understand where Robin went ‘wrong’, first we have to understand how Batman’s sidekick has evolved over the years. Legend has it that long ago in the distant past, around 1940, DC thought that Batman was getting too dark for the supposed target audience of comics—kids—and came up with a way to lighten him up a bit. Robin was introduced as Dick Grayson, a young circus acrobat whose parents were murdered by a small time mobster. Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne and later discovered that his benefactor was in fact Batman; Bruce trained the boy and set him loose as Robin, the Boy Wonder. The rest is history; Robin became the first superhero’s sidekick, and inspired a wave of imitators.
Several parallel universes and four decades later, Robin had grown up a bit. Instead of a twelve year old boy, he was a 19 year old college student, at odds with Batman more often than by his side. Something had to give. So the then-writer of “New Teen Titans”, Marv Wolfman, decided to get rid of the Robin identity altogether (and thank God he did, given that no young adult male should be running around in hot pants)…
The result was Dick Grayson becoming Nightwing. A new boy, also a circus acrobat, was brought in to replace Dick. His name was Jason Todd, and he was essentially a carbon copy of his predecessors. The only difference was that he had red hair—which he died black anyway to be more like Dick.
Then along came a Crisis. Or rather, a story called Crisis On Infinite Earths. The end result of that is a moment taken straight out of Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Everything You Know is Wrong”—a bunch of little details about the universe of DC Comics had changed. Some things remained. Dick was still Nightwing, and Robin was still Jason Todd, but now Jason was no longer the red haired boy readers had tolerated; he was now a rude street urchin who badmouthed Batman and sometimes went a little too far with criminals. As in tossing them out of tall buildings too far. Needless to say, the criminal in question died.
Jason was hated, and DC actually polled the readers on whether he should live or die. Well, he died. So, once again, DC was without a Robin. Along came the third try. Third time’s a charm, right?
It was. The new Robin, Tim Drake, was a resounding success. He was different enough from Dick that he felt like his own character, but never as much of a rude little prick as the new and improved Jason. Tim got a duo of mini series dedicated to him, then his own solo title.
Part of the reason behind Tim’s success was undoubtedly his reliability. Sure, he was super-good at something, like all the Bat-Family must be. In Tim’s case, it was computers. But Tim was different. He had parents that were living, and in the course of his origin, only lost one of them. He continued to have a father for most of his published history—more on that later.
Tim first appeared as a thirteen year old, having deduced Batman and Robin’s identities at the age of nine. He soon grew into a fourteen year old in the first Robin miniseries, in which he traveled the world learning martial arts from teachers even more skilled than Batman himself. All the while Tim kept his identity a secret from his father and the rest of his supporting cast, while facing villains as dastardly and classic as the Joker or as new and bizarre as the General, a young boy who happened to be an evil military genius.
But somewhere along the way something happened. Tim turned fifteen sometime in the early 90s… and then stopped aging completely, even by comic book standards. A combination of factors led to this, but the main thing was the creation of a new generation of young heroes. Superboy, a clone with powers that mimicked Superman’s appeared, along with a super-speedster from the future named Impulse. Soon a new Wonder Girl joined them, along with a legacy hero named Arrowette. Tim and his friends were slipped into a generic age category—the high school age group. Though created over the course of the 90s, all of the “Young Justice” age group were pegged as being fifteen around 1997 and remained fifteen for years—despite DC comics having 1999 take place in real time and celebrating the new millennium in 2000.
Tim finally celebrated his sixteenth birthday in 2003, the age he would official remain during his early tenure in the newest incarnation of the Teen Titans. On one hand, things finally started to get moving again. On the other, some things changed for the worse. Tim’s father, Jack Drake, was killed off by one of the Flash’s supervillains, while his girlfriend Stephanie was tortured and murdered by the Black Mask.
Time skipped forward a year after the second Crisis, and Tim, now seventeen, was adopted by Bruce. He’s moved away from his computer nerd persona, becoming not entirely unlike Dick Grayson. And while his girlfriend… well, got better, Tim remains incomplete. While supposedly a genius, Tim remains in high school. Some of this may be attributed to the sheer amount of school he missed since becoming Robin, but it has to end some time.
I suppose this is where the opinion comes in, so feel free to disagree. Tim needs to graduate. He needs to move on. Despite all that’s happened and all that DC has editorially mandated to change about Tim, he and (what’s left of) his generation still remain in high school. And as someone who graduated high school not to long ago, I must attest that it feels forced. High school ends in the blink of an eye, and DCs teen heroes have been there far too long. Tim is by DC’s own timeline eighteen at this point—that’s five years of association with Batman and four of actually being Robin. He’s no longer the socially awkward computer genius he debuted as. He no longer has a father to hide his identity from.
I feel that Tim is becoming harder and harder to relate to because in almost every way, he’s grown up. He’s an adult trapped by the decrees of editors in a teenage wasteland. Perhaps being a young man in college myself, I am biased on this point, and I fully acknowledge that. Though in my defense, I don’t have trouble relating to other characters in Tim’s demographic, or those older and younger than myself. I simply think—as a fan of the character— that keeping him artificially pigeonholed at a certain age will eventually look ridiculous and make him less relatable to people of all age groups.
So what about the high school demographic? Well, DC has plenty of characters to fill the supposed void that would be left behind if Tim and his generation grew up. The new Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes is a new member of the Teen Titans and an excellent new character. He was only introduced in 2006, and is already more relatable and likable than the person Tim has developed into. Kid Devil, Rose Wilson, Miss Martian, and several other young characters can easily pick up the torch of teen vigilantism.
So yeah. It’s time for Tim to move on. He doesn’t have to reinvent himself as Nightwing.
Just give the kid his diploma already.
