Four Reasons Being Batman's Robin Would Be Awful

When the character of Dick Grayson, aka Robin, the Boy Wonder, made his debut in Detective Comics #38 (April 1940), Batman's comics readership doubled in the blink of an eye. Younger readers were instantly drawn to the colourful, relatable sidekick who began to accompany Bruce Wayne on his nocturnal crime-fighting adventures during the days when he was still pro-murder, smoked like a chimney and routinely threatened physical violence against women in absurd ways.

And, in those early days, for a kid dreaming of being Robin one day, it was probably great. It was all beating up classy bad guys with tommy guns, dropping witty banter while face-kicking guys holding sacks with dollar signs on them, and regular slightly-too-nude-for-comfort sauna sessions with an outrageously buff billionaire philanthropist/guardian to pass the downtime.

But 2014 is Batman's 75th anniversary -- which DC has been commemorating with a bunch of awesome videos and other material -- and a lot has happened over the past three-quarters of a century that has made me think that maybe the whole Robin thing isn't really what it's cracked up to be.

Oh, sure, for the first 40 years or so, being Robin was tits. Or, at least, it seemed that way. But as Dick Grayson grew from being a 12-year-old circus prodigy into a 17-year-old angst factory, he got frustrated in his role as permanent resident of Batman's shadow, and not just the very literal shadows on account of hanging out in a fucking cave all the time.

But, moreover, he was almost an adult, and he was dressing like this:

Can you imagine being an 18-year-old, almost fully formed person, arriving at the scene of a bank robbery to confront serious criminals alongside a terrifying bat-ninja while looking like you were dressed for the violence party by your exceedingly spiteful stepmother? It would be enough for you to want to quit.

Unsurprisingly, that's exactly what Grayson did, deciding in about 1982 that he'd finally had enough of Batman's condescending shit. He went out solo, developing a bad-ass twilight-stalking persona of his own -- Nightwing -- a world away from his years of humiliation and looking like a jackass next to Batman.

When Bruce Wayne took in Dick Grayson, it was because the latter's parents had been killed in a circus "accident", and the former sympathised with him, having witnessed his own parents gunned down in the appropriately named Crime Alley several years prior. For second Robin Jason Todd -- at least at first -- it was the exact same thing.

Todd was introduced in 1983 to replace Grayson following his transition to the Nightwing persona to satiate Batman's ongoing need for supple young boyflesh. And when I say "replace" Grayson, I mean -- Jason was the son of circus acrobats Joseph and Trina Todd, who meet their unfortunate end via gargantuan man-beast Killer Croc. Bruce Wayne, seeing a prime opportunity to relive some of the best days of his life, adopts Jason and gives him Dick's old costume before Jason -- naturally a blondish sort of chap -- dyes his hair black to complete his creepy transition into Dick 2.0.

In 1985, after the continuity-wide reboot event Crisis On Infinite Earths, Todd was recast as a street orphan who is adopted by Batman when he is caught trying steal the Batmobile's tyres, because that's the kind of don't-give-a-fuck chutzpah Bruce apparently looks for when considering which child to turn into a living weapon next.

The apparent "no parents" rule

Neither of Bruce's first two choices to fill the sidekick role had parents, which at first seems like it's a decision based in fairly practical reasons -- no one to miss them -- but, as time wears on and other Robins get added to the equation, it becomes kind of an incredibly depressing running theme.

Firstly, it turned out that Jason was not an orphan, but had a mother who was ALIVE ALL ALONG -- who, not long after meeting him, promptly turns her son over to the Joker in an effort to stop the criminal's blackmail.

But it doesn't stop there -- third Robin Tim Drake was halfway ready when he first took on the mantle, his mother already having shuffled off the mortal coil. But he still had a dad, who frequently clashed with the boy over his choice of nighttime hobby, and probably rightfully so -- Tim finally earns his Bat-sidekick wings when his father takes a razor-edged boomerang to the chest courtesy of Flash villain... sigh... Captain Boomerang.

Even fifth Robin Damian Wayne got in on the act via technicality, with his absent mother off leading the League of Assassins and daddy dearest himself being flung backwards through time, resulting in Dick Grayson temporarily stepping in as Batman to the suddenly "orphaned" Damian's Robin. Actually, speaking of Damian, there's one more aspect that really, really sucks about being the younger half of the Dynamic Duo.

The rampant death

I may have mentioned this factoid before, but if you step into a Robin costume, there is a 60% chance that you will die as a result of that decision. Of the five Robins to date -- Grayson, Todd, Drake, Stephanie Brown, and Wayne -- three of them have ended up meeting their maker in the process.

Todd was caught in the warehouse explosion that killed his mother, after being beaten to hell and back by the Joker, which left him dead for the better part of about 20 years or so before he was resurrected as the vengeful Red Hood. You'd think coming back to life would be OK, but not as a grown man left emotionally crippled by what he sees as his "father's" betrayal -- his inability to kill the Joker, despite the Joker having once killed him -- and on a permanent murder quest against the world.

Stephanie, who was Robin for a brief period in the 2000s, had the shit beaten out of her by mob villain Black Mask following a botched attempt on her part to implement one of Batman's contingency plans to collapse all crime in the city by uniting it under one person -- but having left out some important details in his training and education for Steph, she accidentally blows the whole thing and gets herself, and, like, half the city, killed.

And poor, young Damian -- trained to kill and die by the League of Assassins before joining Bruce's crusade against crime -- after a blistering stint as both Dick and Bruce's Boy Wonder and swiftly rising to the upper ranks on character-of-the-year lists around the world, suffered the indignity of being murdered by his own hyper-aged clone, who was also working for his mother, because somewhere along the line this stopped being Batman and started being Nights Of Our Lives.