Who is your favorite Robin?

[CyberCubed]

There have been around 5 Robin's give or take:

- Dick Grayson
- Jason Todd
- Tim Drake
- Damian Wayne
- Carrie Kelly in Dark Knight (the only female Robin)


I love Dick Grayson, as he's exactly what Batman's first apprentice/partner should be. He has a similar backstory to Batman, starts off as a cocky kid, gains experience as Robin, then becomes Nightwing and leads the Teen Titans and comes into his own as one of the best heroes of the DC universe. The short time where Dick actually becomes Batman was beautiful, as he finally developed spectacularly.

I enjoy Tim Drake as well, but the other two I only have a passing interest in due to their limited runs and deaths.

[Luigiperps]

Carrie Kelly is NOT the only female Robin, there is also Stephinie Brown, who was in mainstream comics, unlike Carie Kelly.

My favorite Robin is Dick Grayson, but I love all Robins

[Jester]

Dick Grayson.

[MikeandRaph87]

I only knew of Dick Grayson growing up an was disppointed ot discover Robin was not Robin and Batgirl was not Batgirl. Dick Grayson is the first,best, and definitive. He is a bettter leader than his mentor, a natural athelete, and has respectable detective skills, not to mention has the most connections in the DCU aside from Superman, and is the leader of tomorrow's heroes. I think he is best in the Robin or Batman costumes. If he is is Nightwing is not nearly as inteeresting and does not seem to have a solid direction and constantly crapped on my creators. I will read anything that has Dick as either Robon or Batman.

[Zulithe]

Damian. Loved the dynamics he brought to the bat family. All the other robins feel so plain compared to him. Course Dick/Nightwing has a lot to offer as well

[NSP]

Tim Drake has always been my favorite Robin! A great character whom had a nice long run as Robin! And hes one of the few DC characters whos a Master of the deadly Lepord Blow.

This thread needs a poll!

[Gwydion]

If this is based strictly on their time as Robin, then Damian. I loved his dynamic with Dick as Batman, and I was sad to see the team broken up in such a relatively short time. But if it's more "anyone who's ever been Robin", then Dick. I loved his growth and development up until the New 52 (stopping reading at that point so I have no opinion).

Gotta show a little love to Steph, though. Loved her as Batgirl.

[TurtleTitan97]

Tie between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake.

[Guitar_Raph]

Dick Grayson. Either Burt Ward or Casey Kasem both did Robin well.

[CyberCubed]

Originally Posted by MikeandRaph87

I only knew of Dick Grayson growing up an was disppointed ot discover Robin was not Robin and Batgirl was not Batgirl. Dick Grayson is the first,best, and definitive. He is a bettter leader than his mentor, a natural athelete, and has respectable detective skills, not to mention has the most connections in the DCU aside from Superman, and is the leader of tomorrow's heroes. I think he is best in the Robin or Batman costumes. If he is is Nightwing is not nearly as inteeresting and does not seem to have a solid direction and constantly crapped on my creators. I will read anything that has Dick as either Robon or Batman.

I respect your opinion but Dick still being Robin to this day in 2013 would be a horrible idea. The whole point of Nightwing is Dick changed and grew. It allowed him to be more than Batman's "kid sidekick" and move on.

I'm not sure why this bothers you when plenty of other things changed in various comics/cartoons you follow. Things staying the same and stagnant is boring.

[Leo656]

I hate to say "tie" but I have an equal appreciation for Dick and Tim, both. Dick was the first, most well-known, and arguably the best, but I kind of like Tim a little better as Robin, for several reasons.

First off, I prefer Grayson as Nightwing, now. Regardless of movies, cartoons, etc., Grayson has not "really" been Robin for longer than I've been alive. That was a little jarring at first when, as a kid, I was familiar with the Adam West show, and when I was old enough to read comics I came to discover Jason Todd was now Robin and the "real" Robin was now Nightwing. But I accepted it as simply the story moving forward and it was a necessary step in Dick's life, and frankly, Nightwing is awesome (the original "disco" costume notwithstanding... the 80s were messed up for everyone).

Secondly, Tim was the only Robin who ever really "earned" it. Both Dick and Jason were a result of Bruce taking pity on a young boy who had gone through a tragedy. Tim deduced Batman and Robin's secret identities all by himself (effectively proving himself, even as a kid, to be a Batman-level detective), saved Batman from certain death at the hands of Two-Face, and helped provide Bruce with much-needed closure after Jason's death. Bruce was adamant that Robin died with Jason, but Tim was able to prove to him that Robin is a necessity and that he had done a very poor job of coping with Jason's death (mostly Batman "coped" by beating guys half to death and leaping headlong into impossible odds as if he had a death wish - something he had always warned Jason about. Man, I miss the depth and nuance of 1980s comics).

Tim all but forced Bruce to make him Robin, and unlike Jason, he was not just an exact clone of Grayson. From the origin to the costume, he was an entirely different Robin - one that was entirely self-capable and didn't even actually NEED Batman anymore after a while, as his solo book would attest. In fact, a biased person could point out that it only took a month for Tim's Robin to get his own mini-series, and less than two years to get an ongoing, while Grayson never got a solo book until waaaaaay after he became Nightwing and almost 50 years after his creation!

Where Jason was never accepted by fans, Tim very quickly became one of the most popular DC characters and elevated the entire idea of the Robin character, making him less of a joke and more of a real hero (comics readers would always know Robin was NEVER a joke, but that's the line non-fans want to go with, so whatever). I also loved that they made him a computer expert, and it was actually a couple of years before that was "in", so it made him very cutting-edge in his approach to fighting crime (it was occasionally implied that Tim was better with computers than Bruce).

I love Grayson as Robin for all the obvious reasons, but Tim was the one I grew up with, so I kind of lean towards him. I never liked Damien, honestly. I've never liked the concept of Bruce having a son, for starters; it ages the character needlessly and pretty much the only reason he was created was so Batman would have to endure the tragedy of having his only son die... because if there's anything Batman was missing, it was MORE tragedy. It also seemed like they purposely made him a very caustic character so Dick would have the same experience Bruce had raising Jason, and it just seemed a bit contrived. I also thought the whole "artificial aging/grown in a test tube" thing to explain why Batman's son was like 10-12 years old was more "Sci-Fi" than Batman ought to be, in a way. I just never bought the entire concept, and I *hated* how much of a prick the kid was, to the point where having him in the books made me not want to read them as much.

I guess Stephanie/Spoiler was ok, but she was really only Robin as a plot device in a storyline in which she continued to make bad decisions until she got in way over her head and finally got herself killed, and then they un-killed her and had her go back to being Spoiler, anyway. So I kind of don't count Stephanie, technically she was Robin, but barely. Now, in truth, I didn't hate Jason as much as some, but in truth he's more important as a character in general - former "bad seed"-turned-sidekick-turned-corpse-turned-resurrected guy out for revenge - than he was specifically as Robin. I'm glad he existed - his arc did a lot to redefine the Batman mythos, and he makes a good villain - but I'm glad he didn't stay Robin. He meant more dead, and now as a villain, honestly.

[NinjaPug]

Dick Grayson but a lot of that has to do with what happened with his character after being Robin.

[CyberCubed]

In fact in the comics wasn't Dick the cheesiest/goofiest/campiest Robin? I mean he existed in all those old stories and its where his campy TV version on the Adam West show was based on.

By the time Tim Drake came storylines in comics were obviously improved, but Dick Grayson was written during all the goofball Batman stories in the 40's, 50's and 60's.

[Leo656]

The Robin character probably would have been better written if comics weren't marketed entirely for children until the 1980s. I have a deep love and appreciation for comics from every era, but being completely objective, most of everything ever made before the 1980s was... not good. It's amazing in a way how characters like Batman, Robin, Superman, etc. have survived so long and become so iconic, considering the decades of absolute pablum put on the printed page. Sure, a lot of the stories were fun and whimsical, but literally everything was solely written for the lowest common denominator, presented at essentially a 5-year-old's level. Writers of the day have often admitted this. Kids were the audience; if something could appeal to anyone older than 10, it was "too highbrow". There were exceptions, mostly starting in the 70s, but they were the exception not the rule.

When the industry matured in the 1980s, characters across the board were presented better and given more depth. Robin was probably the greatest beneficiary of that, as the character stayed humorous but was never "goofy" again. When people talk about Robin being a silly, stupid, or childish concept, they're exclusively referring to Robin from the 40s through the early/mid-1970s.

[CyberCubed]

When did Dick become Nightwing in the comics? I thought it was around 1981?

So when did Dick get written better as Robin, the late 70's?

[Slade]

Well, I'll be different since nobody else gave him any love. Jason Todd.





Nah, I don't care to much for Robin. Guess if I really wanted to pick though, it would really be Grayson.

[Leo656]

Turns out I wasn't quite right, Dick became Nightwing in 1984, so it was after I was born but I was very young. So yeah, actually Dick's evolution as a more mature Robin actually started when Batman's resurgence as a "darker, more mature" character began in the 1970s during Neal Adams's run on the books.

For the record, it greatly annoys me when Frank Miller and "Dark Knight Returns" get all or most of the credit for separating Batman from people's memories of the Adam West show, because that REALLY started with Neal Adams in the 1970s, and frankly, everyone since then, from Miller to The Animated Series to the present day, has been building on what Neal Adams did with the character. HE made Batman "The Dark Knight", NOT Frank Miller, and that's a fact I wish more people acknowledged.

Robin's elevation was a happy side-effect of that. So there were a few good years before he "graduated" to Nightwing in 1984, but they dealt more with specifically the themes of him slowly out-growing the Robin role and he and Bruce growing apart as two adults who no longer agreed on everything. After the late '70s, Dick as Robin was more established as "leader of the Teen Titans" than "Batman's sidekick", and in fact the two rarely went on adventures together anymore by the mid-'80s, and after that they didn't team up again until well after Jason died. It was well established that Bruce and Dick had grown into two entirely different people as adults and that Bruce refused to let "the sidekick" dare question him for any reason, so they split.

Bruce's bitterness directly led to him recruiting Jason as Robin almost immediately after Dick gave it up, despite the fact the kid was entirely wrong for it, but decisions made out of anger and grief are rarely wise ones. Which is why he did not want Tim to be Robin; he knew he only recruited Jason as a shallow replacement for Dick (which ironically is how fans always saw Jason, to begin with), and that was what led to him being killed, and he didn't want to repeat the cycle. Tim, by being awesome, forced his hand and got to be Robin anyway. By the end of it, the entire concept of "Robin" had been elevated from "sidekick" to "legacy character". I really love the Batman/Robin stories from that era, because they successfully evolved a dynamic that had been stale since the 40s.

[Gwydion]

I have to admit, I do really enjoy the earliest issues with Tim. There's some great stuff in there. I don't know why I was never really able to grow attached to him as a character (especially when I wound up liking someone like Damian so much - go figure). I liked him when he was working with other people; I wasn't that interested when he was working by himself for some reason.

I think it ultimately has to do with BTAS. I only just got into comics a few years ago, so my first introduction was the cartoon, and I very much disliked him in that - admittedly mostly because he took Dick's place, but even now I can't say I care for him. Even though they are completely different, the name "Tim Drake" still makes me think of this version.

I like pretty much all the characters that at one point were Robin at least a little, though, even Jason. I thought A Death in the Family was great, and his resurrection had a lot of potential (though I feel most of it was squandered, sadly). I'm just bummed that they felt they needed to kill off Damian, too. As was already mentioned, it's not like Batman needs more tragedy. :/ But then I didn't like most decisions dealing with the New 52, so I guess an ex-reader has no right to complain anyway.

[Leo656]

Yeah, Tim in the cartoon was more like Jason than Tim. I guess they felt they had to skip over Jason because they could never kill him off, so they went right to Tim and merged his personality with Jason's as a compromise.

That kind of thing makes "Under The Red Hood" a bit awkward to watch as an animated film, simply because the entire history of Jason Todd outside of comics only exists in this one film, he was never used in any other animated series or films. It's great as a stand-alone film, and it was a good and very faithful adaptation from the comics, but it's a bit clunky in that it's entirely built around Jason's death and return, both played as a huge, earth-shattering deal, but casual fans who don't know comics have no idea who this kid Jason is or why all this should matter. The film tells the story well, but it would have had more weight if Jason's character had been more established in other cartoons etc. before that one. In the comics, it all played bigger, as Jason had been well-established for a few years before he died and the "Death in the Family" storyline led to an entire decade worth of stories directly related to the fallout, so his return was a huge deal. In the film, to a casual viewer it carries less weight.

The comics did, however, waste the opportunity with Jason's comeback. I wasn't against bringing him back, and even the explanation wasn't the *worst* they could have done, but aside from a few moments during "Battle For The Cowl" after Bruce "died", none of the stuff they did with Jason really seemed to justify bringing him back. And then the New 52 ruined everything across the board, making it even more irrelevant. I really didn't like the little bit I saw of "Red Hood and the Outlaws".

EDIT: I forgot to mention something else I liked about Tim, some of the depth you only get from reading comics, is that Tim had his own entirely unique fighting style as Robin. Where Dick was more of an acrobat, Tim extensively studied martial arts abroad, mastered fighting with a collapsible bo staff and slingshot (the comic makes it way more bad-ass than it sounds, seriously!), and his "R" logo was a detachable shuriken, which I thought was a neat touch. What I loved about Tim was his self-sufficiency. As soon as he became Robin, literally the first thing they did was give him a 6-issue mini-series with Batman entirely absent to show that this kid was no sidekick, and in the follow-up, they have him take on the Joker, all by himself, with Batman out of town in one of the very first Joker stories after Jason's death. For anyone who hasn't read them, the original Robin 6-issue mini and the 4-issue "Robin II: Joker's Wild!" are fantastic and easy to find for cheap. Very high recommendation, pick them up right away. You won't miss Bruce at all. I Swear.

[CyberCubed]

So with Damian gone are they going to introduce a 5th Robin? Sounds like a horrid idea to me, Batman's basically 2 for 2 now, with 2 Robins lived and 2 Robins died...so how could he possibly let yet another Robin join him?

I'd rather Tim Drake just remain a permanant Robin than cycle through a 5th Robin who will eventually die or leave and pave the way for a 6th, etc.

Also none of this makes any sense since Batman himself doesn't age, so how can all these Robin's grow from younger kids to adults while Bruce doesn't age? WTF.