Teen Titans #0
Summary: This issue is actually pretty close to Tim's original origin in some ways, which is a good thing. Basically you have Tim trying to figure out who Batman is. He's realized that the prior Robin(Jason Todd) had vanished and that Batman hasn't been the same(although Bruce is kind of meh about Jason being "dead" in this one). He sets up a way to meet Batman(something about gunrunners and other weirdness), so Bats shows up, telling Tim that he had tolerated him digging around for long enough and to knock it off, before pulling the famous Batman vanishing act. Tim takes that as a challenge(which you think Bats would have realized) and ends up making himself a target of the Penguin, forcing Bats to rescue him(and his parents, who were nearly killed in the crossfire...). With that, Tim's parents end up going into the witness protection program, while Tim doesn't... For some reason. So Tim says adios to his folks, and Bats takes him in(some how...). From there, Tim decides he doesn't want to be Robin, out of respect to Jason dying, and becomes Red Robin('cause that's so much different).
Thoughts: First things first... This issue seems to give us another case of Bruce being forced to take in yet ANOTHER Robin! Anyway, this was about 7,000,000 times better than Jason Todd's origin story, and was better than Dick Grayson's as well. Still, I don't know why we didn't just stick with Tim's original origin story... For me, Tim's original story was better than this one, due to the weird things that happened here... Why did Tim's parents go into witness protection, but not Tim? Why would Tim put his parents in such mortal jeopardy if he's supposed to be so smart? How did Tim end up with Bats? Was he taken in by Bruce? And if he was, wouldn't Tim still be a target of Penguin? Plus, it appears that "Tim Drake" was the name given to him by witness protection... Maybe... Even that wasn't made 100% clear, especially since everybody was calling him "Tim" prior to the whole mess with witness protection. All of that was glossed over. The way Tim ended up being adopted by Bruce in the pre-New 52 DCU made a lot more sense than the way he ended up with Bruce here... If he did... Eh. I guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Things could have been SO much worse(as we saw in Red Hood and the Outlaws #0). It's funny how low I've set my standards for anything written by Scott Lobdell nowadays... So I'll say this was an okay comic and move on.
Score: 6 1/2 out of 10.
So Tim's first Robin costume was the Superboy RIP one... And why are they on the cover of a newspaper?!
LMAO... so wait.... he went into witness protection and all they changed is his LAST name? Also... if he's hiding from Penguin, who has clearly seen his face, why are his parents the ones who are gone and he's in the CENTER OF PUBLICITY by being EVERYWHERE with Bruce Wayne? Wouldn't he be easily recognized on the cover or a newspaper or something by Penguin?
ReplyDeleteAnd lastly, I love that they must've set up a photo up for that cover. "You stay here, we'll swing towards you, perfect shot!" Who are they working with, Peter Parker?
I honestly don't know, JT... This issue left me just plain confused at parts due to Lobdell's substandard writing. Penguin's henchmen went after Tim and his folks in their home, which means Penguin HAD to know who Tim was, and if he didn't, when he sent out his goons, you'd have to think he'd have taken an interest when Tim a) didn't die, and b) was saved by his archenemy! So yeah, Bats saved Tim. His folks wound up in witness protection. Tim, apparently, ended up with Bruce Wayne, you know, one of the most famous faces in all of Gotham... And they may have, or may not have, changed Tim's last name, since that was kind of vague. And that my friends, is how you trick Penguin. Change your last name and hide in plain sight. Yup...
ReplyDeleteThat picture bugged me so much... Since when is Bats so sloppy that he'd let a photographer get the PERFECT picture of him AND his Robin, whose facial features aren't exactly hidden!
That's why Bin Laden got caught. If he's just changed his name to Osama Drake or something and hid right in plain sight, like as a journalist on CNN, we'd STILL be looking for him.
ReplyDeleteHA!!! And kept his look and everything, then yeah, nobody would have caught him. That's how it worked with Tim, I guess. Penguin must have been all, "Isn't that Tim ____ with Bruce Wayne?! Nah... That wouldn't make any sense at all..."
DeleteYeah, this comic sounds a lot better than the others. I think I may prefer part of this version a little more. Tim putting his folks in danger was a bit dicey, but beyond that he sounded pretty cool
ReplyDelete@X-man75 I've been wondering. Who's that on your avatar pic? Jason Todd's kind of speaks for itself, but I haven't been able to pin down who yours is. X Man by any chance?
Yup, my avatar is indeed X-Man. There was an X-Man/Spidey crossover where the two fought Morbius around Christmastime, and Nate kind of/sort of turned into a vampire. Which is my avatar now and forever!
DeleteAh, okay cool :) I guess yours speaks for itself too :P
DeleteI got to admit, X-man, I wasn't that keen on this issue compared to the other Bat-origins. My main gripe would be that it made Tim Red-Robin straight away -- not Robin -- as well as being the person who inadvertently forced his family to go into hiding.
ReplyDeleteApart from that though, not a bad read. Very innovative take on the original.
Actually Tim becoming Red Robin straightaway didn't really bug me because he basically WAS Robin, just by a slightly different name. Now if he had just taken the (Red) Robin name and never worked with Bruce, then I'd have been angry... The thing with his family though? That was dumb.
DeleteWhat is worng with Tim's Fathers? Hey boy you are too good to live with us so you better pack your stuff and get out of here... Sorry I dont get it.
ReplyDeleteThe other stuff that bugged me is Batman voice, it just didn't hear like Bruce to me don't know exactly why but not.
And lastly, Dick Grayson guessed Bruce identity by gestural sign (ala Cass Cain body reading) But the Best of the Robin detectives couldn't? That was the whole point of Tim Drake knew Batman and Robin identitys and came to help Bruce when Jason died..
And also I would have liked Dick Grayson to be involved like in the original story it gave a sence os Legacy..
A by the way maybe not the news you want to hear but this is all the "West" you are going to get from DC for now.
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/wally-west-the-flash.html
Right? What kind of parents are happy to just leave their son to an unknown future?! "You'll be better off without us, Tim... Bye." Tim: "Cool."
DeleteWell, they did kind of/sort of leave it open that Tim may have known that Bruce was Bats. Bats says something like, "And when I told him who I was, he didn't seem surprised." They could implicitly stated Tim DID know, just to solidify his status as the top detective Robin. I still preferred the original Tim origin WAY more, but at least this one wasn't as bad as Jason Todd's...
What a jackass Dan Didio is... I wish I knew what he had against the Wally West character. That link actually made me like Francis Manapul way more than ever before. Good for him rallying for Wally. As I've said all along, once Wally comes back, I'd be willing to read the Flash comic.
Yeah the only problem is that they cant make Him Flash in the moment he apears since Barry is the star...
DeleteSorry, I'm behind the times. Damn travel. I'm relieved that you had the same response, X, as I did, that it was better than the other Robin origins but, given how bad the other ones were, that praise isn't all that profound.
ReplyDeleteI'm annoyed by the revelation that he is no longer "the boy who figured out Batman's identity," but I can live with it. My main problem is that they've changed Tim from an affable kid who just happened to be a brilliant detective and technical genius to a cold robot who is a great detective and technical adept. Tim's entire interaction with Bruce is as if he's interning for Batman, Inc. In "A Lonely Place of Dying," Tim discovering Batman's identity was incidental to the reason that he made contact in the first place: he was trying to convince Dick to become Robin so that Batman wouldn't be so reckless. Tim never even thought of himself as Robin; it was all about getting Dick to take on the role again, because he understood how important Robin is to Batman.
Here, however, he wants the internship so that he can become his own superhero one day. On some level, it explains why Lobdell has been portraying him as a loner throughout "Teen Titans" and why he seems almost estranged from Bruce. But, it seriously changes who he is as a character. We're no longer dealing with the kid who drove himself insane discovering that Bruce was lost in time or risked his life to make sure that Jason Todd didn't win the mantle of the Bat. Now, he seems like he'd be secretly OK with Bruce dying so that he could get a shot at being Batman himself.
At the end of the day, I just like this kid a lot less.
You're actually not that far behind, JW. I mean this comic isn't even a week old yet! :)
ReplyDeleteYour point on Tim basically being a little Batman clone is a great one... I hadn't thought of that... But yeah, when Tim first appeared it was to try to coax Dick back into the Robin guise. Here, he just wants to use Batman to further his own dreams of super-heroics, with no regard to who may get hurt(his OWN parents!!) in the process. He's actually not a very likable character, as he was written here. Which sucks, because I always thought Tim was the most likable of all the Robins. It was still better than the butcher job the other Robins got, but fell way short of Tim's original origin.