Holy Hollywood, Batman!

By: Mike Rutschky

Earlier this month Christian Bale, hands down the greatest actor to ever dress up in pointy
ears and mutter “I’m Batman,” professed to a reporter that if the character of Batman’s
pixie-ish sidekick Robin were to ever be written into the current line of Bat-films he
would quit the series. While there were many fans that understandably followed Bale’s
sentiment with a resounding “Hell Yeah,” or at least a relieved “thank God,” I was just a
teensy bit disappointed. I mean I know that Robin and the other Bat-step-children are
synonymous with the downfall of the previous Batman film franchise, but there are some
instances that Bale and the other nay-sayers seemed to have forgotten in which Robin not
only worked, but worked well. It now leaves a presumably outnumbered minority pocket
of fans that would have loved to see Christopher Nolan’s real-life crime drama adaptation
of a young circus boy who Batman drafts into his war on crime.

Now before we get into our LivFic supposition of whatever “Robin Begins” might play
like I should address the reference in that last sentence to Robin’s currently running
origin series, All Star Batman and Robin: The Boy Wonder (specifically a scene in which
a brutish Batman hoists the newly orphaned Dick Grayson into the air like a newborn
puppy and grunts “you’ve just been drafted”). Although Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s
initial concept for the origin of Robin and why he’s needed was intriguing and valid in
my opinion, the book has really strayed into the land of self-parody. Actually, it was
practically born and raised there. I agree with the argument that the creative team
attempted to make in favor of Robin, but let’s hope that no one actually tries using that as
source material. Batman is not an unlikable dick head and Robin shouldn’t be trained by
being locked into the Bat-cave and made to survive on rat meat.

On the contrary, Batman (Bruce Wayne) is a very honorable man who has vowed to do
everything in his power to make sure no one else will ever have to suffer the way that he
did as a child. Robin (Dick Grayson) is the first person he meets who does. The son of
two celebrity acrobats, young Richard Grayson watched his parents die in front of him
after their trapeze wires are tampered with by Boss Zucco’s enforcers. Bruce Wayne sees
a kindred spirit in the boy and offers to provide Dick with the same training and guidance
that he sought after his parents were murdered. The young acrobat agrees to join Bruce
in apprehending Boss Zucco, and after dawning a costume much like Peter Pan’s and that
of his namesake, Robin Hood, the team take to the streets of Gotham as the dynamic duo,
Batman and Robin.

So why doesn’t he fit into the gritty realism of the Nolan Bat-verse? Well, generally
people believe that it weakens Batman’s persona to have a brightly colored kid tagging
along with him while he’s trying to scare criminals shitless in the middle of the night. An
overwhelming majority of people simply think that it’s perverted and laughable for a
grown man to have an intimate friendship with a young boy. This last one always pissed
me off. Do you know who started this gutless prejudice against superhero sidekicks?
Fucking Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who wrote the book Seduction of the
Innocent back in 1954, a book that asserted that superheroes equated to pedophiles. This
man tried to end comics, and there are still ignorant fanboys out there pretending to be
macho who side with him over Batman? You’ve got to be joking. Sidekicks serve as a
young reader’s touchstone in the surreal superhero realm. This might make them less
valid now that the majority of readers are closer to the superhero’s age but it doesn’t
make Batman a diddler for having a Robin.

Notice how I said “a Robin,” rather than simply saying “Robin” and referring to Dick
Grayson. That’s the key as to why Robin does work; why Batman does need him. Once
Dick Grayson had spent sufficient time under the tutelage of Batman he “graduated” so to
speak and rechristened himself as Nightwing. Nightwing wears a more ninja-esque
costume (or Daredevil-esque if you want to be a dick) and works alone out of the
neighboring city of Bludhaven. The choice to become Nightwing was Dick Grayson’s
alone, just as it was his choice to become Robin in the first place. But Batman saw
Dick’s progression and soon found a replacement pupil in Jason Todd, and another later
in Tim Drake. Batman needs a Robin just as every master needs an apprentice. Bruce
Wayne surely sees himself as a prototype, the first of his kind and therefore the mold
from which others must be spawned. No matter what writer’s interpretation of the
character you go by, one of the major constants is that Batman is fighting a war. To fight
a war you need other warriors; you need an army. Batman is building an army.

In this regard, Robin certainly can make sense thematically in Christopher Nolan’s series
of films. However, whether or not he would blend in aesthetically, bounding across
rooftops in pixie boots alongside a darkly clad Christian Bale, is another story. I prefer
the approach that Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale took to Robin’s costume in their maxi-series,
Dark Victory. The story told a more decompressed origin of the Boy Wonder, and
explained that Robin’s costume was simply the uniform of the Flying Graysons. With
this being the case the whole costume makes a lot more sense, even allowing for the “R”
emblem to have initially stood for Richard (why people close to Commissioner Gordon
or in the media never connect these dots and deduce his secret identity is something
you’ll have to excuse).

In the drawing I included at the top of this column I made the decision to make Robin’s
pixie shoes into boots, to cover his arms and legs with a black bodysuit, and replace the
yellow in his cape with the lime green that it was colored on the cover of Batman #1 (no
doubt an early printing technique to differentiate it from the all yellow background). At
first this was purely a matter of artistic preference. I really don’t like Robin’s current
costume in the comics; green is a complementary color to red and helps his shirt and
emblem “pop out.” The red and black costume might be more edgy and more similar to
the American Robin species of birds, but it’s not very visually appealing to me. At any
rate, I realized after I had finished the picture that the color choices I had made indicated
a very plausible backstory for the movie Robin’s costume. I can see Bruce initially
sending Dick out in black body armor the same as his own, perhaps with a simple ski
mask to cover his face. This was Bruce’s solution to the problem when he first made
contact with Commissioner Gordon as Batman. Perhaps Dick decides after his inaugural
mission to honor his dead parents by wearing the tunic, cape, boots, and gloves of the
Flying Graysons over his body armor.
My final suggestion for a gritty and realistic treatment of Robin is that he should be
young. 12 years old at the oldest. The younger the victim, the more plausible it would be
that Bruce Wayne would take him under his wing and adopt him as his ward. It also
makes more sense for his training to be started early in life, rather than when he’s a
college-aged young adult. Of course this may not make him very effective in combat, but
I see Robin as mostly hanging back during the times when Batman needs to be the Dark
Knight and observing how it’s done, then resuming his role as Batman’s partner when the
hero goes back to being the Caped Crusader.

I’m a very big fan of Robin in the role of the Boy Wonder, the young sidekick who makes
up the second half of the Dynamic Duo. In my eyes a picture or story with just one of
them acting solo has an underlying feeling of being unbalanced and incomplete. There
are a lot of yin/yang elements in Batman, and his relationship with Robin is a big
example. Where there’s darkness, Robin brings light. Where there’s cynicism, Robin
brings naiveté. The two define each other and give each other purpose. You can’t fully
appreciate just how huge, dark and menacing the Dark Knight is without seeing the
Technicolor boy acrobat that follows him around and keeps him in check. These
elements were an essential part of what drew me to comics as a kid, and they are essential
to Batman’s mythos as well.

Perhaps before the next Batman film goes into development Mr. Bale will have a change
of heart about Robin, and we can get a Christopher Nolan adaptation of Dark Victory to
complete the trilogy (the first film being an adaptation of Batman: Year One and the
second being based on The Long Halloween). Or maybe he’s still just a little bit sore
about losing the part of Robin to Chris O’Donnell back in 1995.