Batman & Robert

The artist formally known as Bert Gervis.

    Recently DD's taken to calling the Boy Wonder Robert instead of Robin, which is all shades of cute. We try to correct him, but he's not having any of it. It's Batman & Robert and that's that.

    Which got me thinking about everyone's favourite sidekick... or sidekicks, rather.

    Dick Grayson was my Robin. Up until 1987 my only exposure to Batman was through the 1960's TV Show and the UK reprints of US Batman comics. Every weekend my Dad, my younger brother and myself would pop into WH Smiths or John Menzies and stock up on comics; 2000AD, Beano, Eagle, the UK reprints of John Byrne's Man Of Steel, Transformers and, of course, the aforementioned UK Batman comic. What was immediately noticeable to me was the tone of the strips differed significantly to the TV series that had nurtured the initial pluck of my heartstrings. This Batman was more serious, there was no Batpoles or Batphone, no Chief O'Hara or Aunt Harriet and, which was the most apparent,  no Robin. This blew my little mind. How can there be a Batman without Robin?The pair was so interconnected that they were two halves of a whole. There was an emptiness I was very aware of even at, or maybe because of, my young age. Batman's isolation was deafening to me. Sure, it was explained quite clearly Dick was away at college and (if i remember correctly) they brought him back on the rare occasion which I duly accepted, but still it never quite sat right with me.

    Little did I know my fragile little mind was about to be blasted into tiny little bits.

    As one might expect the UK reprints were somewhat behind the US. What I didn't realise at the time was all these great stories I was lapping up week after week were around, and sometimes even over, 10 years old, mostly from the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams period. This was no bad thing in itself, but my finger was so far off the pulse I might as well have had my hand rammed down my throat. US comics had been available in the UK for some years but even so, in the mid-eighties and especially in South Wales, locating them was a whole different kettle of fish. Not only did you have to find a shop that stocked US comics, then you'd have to make sure it didn't just stock US reprints of UK comics (which seemed to be a very pointless par for the course where I lived) and if you even got that far you had to hope against hope the shopkeeper would regularly stock the comic, selling consecutive issues. It seems ludicrous now, but this last part was a virtual impossibility, with shop keepers seemingly ordering comics on an ad hoc basis. The whole thing added up to a metaphorical Russian doll of disappointment.

  Then, one day, came an unscheduled pit stop on a summer day trip to nowhere in particular, or at least nowhere that I can remember. It was in a small convenience store in a village or a small town in mid Wales; a dark gloomy affair with a little old lady behind the counter and a wire frame rotating comic book rack strangely full of US imports. I can't remember what other comics were in the rack, probably a few QC Judge Dredd reprints, which was the standard for the day, and a Spider-Man or two but the comic I end up walking out with is Batman #410,  pictured right. I jumped back into the boot of my Dad's beige Toyota Celica (don't ask) with my brother and I eagerly crack open the pages of my new prize.

    I don't recall the cover of the issue directly. In my head it was always a Steranko style image of Two-Face, but after a bit of research it seems that was just fiction of my own making and that this was image was the true cover. It's easy to see why 8 year old me was compelled to buy it: Robin in peril! A Mexican stand off! A bizarre villain i'd never seen before! (That's right, folks, this issue was my introduction to Two-Face.) And the Batman, notable by his absence, but his shadow looming large over proceedings. It actually does surprise me that I have very little recollection of this cover. Hopefully senility isn't setting in prematurely.

    Back in the boot of that battered 80's faux sports car our young protagonist eagerly opens his new comic book, spurred on in part by the fact that Robin features prominently in this issue and he can't remember the last time he read a Batman story where Dick Grayson featured in his Robin guise or even if he'd even read such a story before. This was a landmark moment in my short life; the caped crusader and the boy wonder fighting side by side in glorious ink against this mean looking half alien gangster thing who was so obviously not to be trifled with, but was even more obviously going to succumb to a flurry of fists and Batarangs faster than you can say "BAM! BIFF!" courtesy of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, thank you sir.

    Except it wasn't Dick Grayson.

    Dick was now fighting crime as some sort of Elvis impersonator as far as I could tell, and filling his shoes as the smaller half of the Dynamic Duo was a runt of a car thief with a massive chip on his shoulder? What the hell was this? Who the hell was Jason Todd and why the hell was he screwing with my comic book equilibrium?

    It's safe to say that like most of the Batman readership I never took to Jason Todd. For me it was that initial shock that did it. I guess I didn't have the buffer of seeing Dick drop the mantle of Robin and become a hero in his own right, as far as I had been concerned he was still Robin, just away in college. Jason Todd was a cuckoo in the nest. Then again even readers who'd followed the events leading up to Jason Todd's appointment as Robin didn't like him, so maybe it wasn't that at all. Maybe he was just a rubbish character. But now I can see my boy will experience a similar situation in a few years time and I guess it'll be even more complicated for him. I stopped reading Batman regularly during the No Man's Land storyline (no slight on the story itself, I was being increasingly absorbed by DC's Vertigo imprint) so Tim Drake was Robin when Bats and I parted company, but i've recently learnt that since then there has been another TWO Robins. When did that happen? And one of them was a girl?!? (Immediately, I thought it was Carrie Kelly but then I had a stern word with myself) I know I hadn't read Batman since the late 90's but the character remained on my radar, I was aware of Hush and the return of Jason Todd and Thomas Wayne albeit in an incredibly vague way (my awareness, not their returns), but how the hell did not just one but two Robins pass me by? Apparently I wasn't as clued in on the happenings of Gotham City as I thought.

The Robins : Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake,
Stephanie Brown and Damien Wayne

    In the grand scheme of things this isn't really important. It's totally incomparable to war, famine, poverty and the ills of the real world, but I do believe the transition between Robins one and two was a milestone in my appreciation and understanding of, not only comics, but ongoing narratives in fictions of all kinds. And it's a milestone that my son will inevitably reach, and no doubt sooner than I did with comics and media generally being more readily accessible these days than back when I was a kid. It might not even be the issue for DD as it was for 8 year old me in the boot of that crappy Celica.

    Looking back 25 years to what really was a non-event that now i'm convincing myself i'm blowing out of all proportion here, i think picking up that issue taught me about the importance of progression within stories. I'd taken for granted the evolution in my other comics as much as I'd taken for granted the familiarity and the perpetually unfluctuating world of those Batman reprints and, to a  much greater extent, the TV series. There was no great character development, no long running arcs, just Batman and Robin (well pre-Denny O'Neill, at least) facing off against the villain of the week. At least that was my experience anyway and I loved that very much in the way people stay in the comfort of a stale relationship, i guess. And like a stale relationship it takes being dumped to see the wood through the trees. And like being dumped, i didn't like it at first, I wanted things to be like the way they were. I was happy, why weren't they? Was it me? I think in that instant I didn't think things could be good again and Jason Todd, being the rooster in the hen house, took the brunt of my wrath. I still don't like the brat to this day.

    But to flog the break up metaphor to death, it did get easier. And it got better. Stories blossomed with the new life breathed into them. Characters became three dimensional and a whole world grew from the ashes of my shattered infant preconceptions of the character. And my enjoyment in this new Gotham grew beyond anything I had felt before. Fresh new horizons and all that jazz.

    Writing all this out, it's occurred to me that while DD will face this change in perception of the world of Batman, it's unlikely to be as significant an event as it was for me. The wealth of Batman media that's available these days, and how readily available that product is is beyond anything I could have imagined as a child. Already he's indulging in three separate Batman universes: the Adam West incarnation, Batman - The Animated Series from the 1990's and Batman - The Brave And The Bold. In all likelihood such things as multiverses probably won't even register on his radar as something to concern himself. I guess we'll deal with that bridge when we come to it. If there's even a bridge. Who know's, huh?

    I guess this is kind of the point of this blog, with me learning and discovering as much as he is.

    DD's just rocked up next to me. He's pointed at the first Robin in the roll call of Robins above and said "Ooh, Robert!". Seems Dick Grayson is still his Robin. For the time being, at least.