Quarter Bin #37 "Robin"

ROBIN #126 (DC)
From July 2004:
The brief career of Stephanie Brown as Robin begins! Bill Willingham’s run on ROBIN was something I skipped at the time for reasons that are still a little curious to me now. Growing up, I suppose I was attracted the very characters that were designed to interest me, Spider-Man and Robin, youth figures who were created to be surrogates for young readers many decades before I was born. I wasn’t able to read comics right away, and by the time I could, Peter Parker was in the midst of his infamous clone saga, something more involved than I was ready for at the time, but Robin was Tim Drake, and he was just coming into his own. After a couple of mini-series, the first-ever ROBIN ongoing series was launched in 1993, on the heels of “Knightfall,” with Tim being the first Boy Wonder to strike out on his own without resorting to another family unit (i.e. the Teen Titans, which was what Dick Grayson had done before hi, eventually reshaping his vigilante career as Nightwing). ROBIN was one of the first comics I read in earnest from the very beginning, and kept reading into 1999, when I was forced to quit reading comics. In 2004, when I started my journey back, for whatever reason, I didn’t think to jump back into the series, probably because I’d heard what was happening, or possibly because Tim experienced his most important story in this period in the pages of IDENTITY CRISIS, when his father was slain by Captain Boomerang. I didn’t see how the events in his own book reflected these events (I still don’t). And then there was also Stephanie Brown.

I knew what had happened to her, the second Robin killed in the line of action, during “War Games.” Stephanie was a character who’d been featured in Tim Drake’s stories for as long as I could remember, initially depicted as Spoiler, a wannabe vigilante looking for approval, and to step out of the shadow of her criminal father, the Cluemaster. She also had a crush on Tim that he didn’t know how to act on. For me, it was a nice parallel to the relationship I was reading between Superboy and Supergirl at the time. Eventually, during my time away, Tim decided to quit being Robin for a while, and Stephanie assumed the role, in this very issue, as an act of revenge against him. This issue is exactly the synopsis of Stephanie Brown’s heroic ambitions, and the methods she continually employed to achieve them, regardless of the obstacles that kept getting in her way. Batman appears to approve of her decision in the story, but like the post-CRISIS Jason Todd stories, there’s a bigger story that Willingham and the greater Batman family of creators are driving toward, which is “War Games,” in which Stephanie makes the fateful decision to force Batman’s hand when things start to spiral out of control for her again. Long story short, the fourth Robin has an incredibly short shelf-life. Like Jean-Paul Valley and the Reign of the Supermen, Stephanie Brown is a storyline substitute. Tim Drake never even leaves the picture.

There are a number of problems with the execution. For one, Willingham does not appear to be in control of the story even when he’s writing it. This particular issue is an exception. Though he’s writing Tim Drake consistently during the Stephanie Brown: Girl Wonder arc, the story is still not important enough in 2012 to merit a collected edition as a Robin event. It’s secondary character syndrome, the reason Tim Drake doesn’t have his own book in the New 52, even though he managed to have one from 1993 until last summer. Like most other characters besides the lucky Dick Grayson, he’s a legacy character who has failed to mark his own distinctive, separate path, even when he transformed into Red Robin (then again, “Robin” was still in the name, wasn’t it?), and so has been lost in the shuffle.

Stephanie Brown, meanwhile, may in the end have a better fate. Though she was killed off once already, it was with enough controversy that she was brought back, became Spoiler again, and then became the new Batgirl (another thankless role). She’s gone missing in the New 52, but then, she can always fall back on the identity of Spoiler. Hers is a story that can be repeated, and have greater meaning with all the added adversity she triumphs over, no matter how many times she assumes someone else’s name. She’s a cipher, like Lisbeth Salander. Call her the Girl with the Purple Hoodie.

ROBIN #s 143-145 (DC)
From December 2005-January & February 2006:
Willingham, meanwhile, continues on well past Stephanie’s brief reign as Robin, and sure enough, Tim is back in the saddle, thrust into the thick of the O.M.A.C. crisis (which led to the INFINITE CRISIS), and a tie-in with Willingham’s Shadowpact. The three-part story features art by Scott McDaniel, and that was the main reason I bought these particular back issues, curious enough about books I deliberately avoided on original release because the series no longer felt like anything I was familiar with or would care about (soon, however, Adam Beechen took over as writer and I started reading Tim’s adventures again). I have never been able to get into FABLES, so my main experience with Willingham is SHADOWPACT, his fringe heroes book that featured a motley assortment of awesomeness (until he traded off to pal Matt Sturges, who didn’t understand the book as well). If I didn’t understand what Willingham was trying to do with Tim, I knew I loved his Shadowpact, and I love Scott McDaniel even more. These issues follow Tim as he adventures with some commandoes he hooked up with to try and rediscover his motivation to be Robin, and then transition into adventures that are more Shadowpact than Robin in nature, so they’re easy to read an enjoy no matter how I feel about this period in Tim’s career.

Yes, Damian Wayne is the most interesting Robin in ages, but pointedly his tales are all told in association with one Batman or another. He doesn’t have his own book, and he doesn’t come off as well when he’s, say, trying to work as a more conventional Robin, attempting to work with the Teen Titans. He’s more like Stephanie Brown than Tim Drake. That may be a good thing.