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TRUSTY TEENS: READING AMERICAN ADOLESCENCE THROUGH THE

Lauren . ’Connor

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2019

Committee:

Jeffrey A. Brown, Advisor

Jong-Kwan Lee Graduate Faculty Representative

William Albertini

Jolie A. Sheffer

© 2019

Lauren R. O’Connor

All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT

Jeffrey Brown, Advisor

Though the field of studies has seen rapid expansion in recent decades, and numerous characters from this subset of American literature have received pointed attention, the field has largely ignored the portrayal of adolescent figures. Yet the portrayal of teenagers in comic books reflects the primary readership of the medium, especially in the popular genre of , teaching important if informal lessons to consumers about their present and future roles in society. This dissertation analyzes the most enduring adolescent figure in

American comics and one of the most widely-known adolescent figures in all of American literature: , sidekick to . Through close reading and textual analysis of comics featuring Robin, I find that depictions of Robin reinforce an image of idealized maturity inextricably linked to white heterosexual masculinity, while simultaneously shoring up the youthful or childish connotations of queerness, -whiteness, and femininity. The ways in which comic creators have depicted adolescence intersecting with other social identities reveals an investment in establishing a sense of heroic inheritance for white male teen characters and a pattern of exclusion for non-white or female adolescent characters. This dissertation marks an intervention in the field of , which often focuses on adult-oriented comics and adult figures while ignoring or eschewing the largely juvenile roots of the medium. Instead, I lean into the youthful associations of superhero comics and argue that these depictions provide insight into what mainstream adult culture believes adolescence is and ought to be, and in turn what adulthood is and who is granted its rights and privileges. iv

For Brian ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am incredibly fortunate to have many wonderful people to thank for their support throughout my work this project. My dissertation committee chairperson, Dr. Jeffrey Brown, has pushed me to think in new ways, never settle for my first (several) ideas, and given me the tools to conduct meaningful, deep research. Dr. Jolie Sheffer has challenged me to be a better writer and more organized scholar, all the while providing warmth and encouragement. Dr. William

Albertini has asked me many excellent questions and suggested new points of view to explore throughout this process. I would also like to thank my graduate representative, Dr. Jake Lee, for his insights as a scholar outside of the humanities; he has helped me to think beyond my own field and experiences. I maintain that I truly hit the dissertation committee jackpot.

Aside from the committee members named on this document, there are several other folks at BGSU without whom this project would never have made it this far. Dr. Jean Gerard helped me identify theoretical texts and arguments in the field of adolescent studies. Dr.

Andrew Schocket and Rebekah Patterson generously provided administrative and emotional support throughout my program. I am deeply grateful for the Dissertation Research Fellowship

Award granted to me by the BGSU American Culture Studies Department; this fellowship gave me the time and flexibility to pursue new and important lines of inquiry in my final year of research.

My friends and classmates have also shaped me and this project in ways I could never have imagined on my own. Elena Aponte provided essential feedback on my writing and quickly became a fast friend. Tessa Pyles likewise offered thoughtful criticism of my ideas and my work, and I am thankful for our many shared moments of levity. Steven Bellavia guided me through vi my first year in graduate school with patience and warmth, and he has been a precious friend ever since.

I want to thank my parents, Robert and Regina, for encouraging me to pursue my interests, speak my mind, and read, read, read. They have nurtured me and loved me my entire life, and I am eternally grateful. My sister and best friend, Meaghan, has kept my spirits up, made me laugh, and been a total inspiration throughout this process. I also want to thank my godfather, Jinx, for giving me my first ever, and several of my former teachers, Bill and Colleen Hiles, Moralee, and Chuck Springwood, without whose encouragement I would never have begun this adventure.

Finally, I want to thank my best friend and my partner in all things, Brian Trainor, though

I will never have the words to express just how grateful I am for his presence in my life. It was only with his thoughtful criticism, informal but essential research suggestions, and unending support that this project came to be (this is where he says that is not true, but trust me, it is).

More than that, I would not be the person I am today without his love, his time, or his selfless encouragement. Brian, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Studying Adolescent Representation in Comics ...... 4

Specialized Terms ...... 17

Chapter Outlines ...... 21

CHAPTER I. THE ORIGINS OF ADOLESCENCE ...... 26

The “Deployment” of Adolescence ...... 27

The Victorian Era and the Beginnings of Childhood...... 30

Searching for the Child ...... 30

Race and Childhood ...... 33

Missing Links: -de-Siècle America and the Invention of Adolescence ...... 35

Recapitulation Theory: Seeding the Idealized Adult Identity ...... 37

Lifespan Development Theories ...... 40

Age-Based Grouping and the Birth of the Youth Market ...... 43

Measuring Growth: Defining Adolescence in the Interwar Years...... 45

Surveilling Adolescence through Secondary Education ...... 48

Standardized Testing: “Mental Age” as a Function of Class and Race ...... 50

Adolescence Reaches Popular Culture ...... 52

Coming into Focus: American Teenagers in the Mid-Century ...... 54

Erik Erikson and the Adolescent Identity ...... 56

The Persistence of the Teen Sidekick ...... 60

vii

CHAPTER II. ROBIN, , BATMAN: THE SHIFTING SEXUALITY OF DICK

GRAYSON ...... 63

The Abnormality of Adolescent Sexuality ...... 65

“The Sensational Character Find of 1940!”: Dick as Robin ...... 70

Robin’ Innocence: The “Too Little” End of the Spectrum ...... 73

The Anti-Comics Crusade...... 75

Heteronormalizing Robin: Toeing the Line of “Too Much” ...... 78

Nightwing: Becomes a (Straight) Man ...... 82

Replacement Robins and Nightwing’s Relative Maturity ...... 85

Progressing Towards Idealized Adulthood: Dick Grayson as Batman ...... 88

“Batman: Prodigal,” Sans Son ...... 89

Batman Needs Robin: Dick Grayson’s Parenting of ...... 91

CHAPTER III. THE SIDEKICK’S SIDEKICK: BATMAN, ROBIN, AND THE ERASURE

OF BLACK ADOLESCENCE ...... 99

A Robin of a Different Color ...... 101

Duke Thomas: Mature ? ...... 104

Arrested Development: Duke Thomas and the Forced Dependence of Black

Americans ...... 110

The Robin War’s Two Fronts ...... 116

After Robin War: A Signal in the ...... 123

CHAPTER IV. GIRLS WONDER: YOUNG FEMALE ROBINS IN THE MODERN AGE OF

COMICS ...... 127

Youth and Femininity: A Lasting Partnership ...... 128 viii

The Place of Girlhood in the Modern Age of Comics ...... 131

The Amazing Transforming Carrie Kelley ...... 135

Miller’s Misogyny ...... 137

Carrie Kelley as Smart Sidekick ...... 141

From Child to Lover: Carrie’s Heterosexualization of Batman...... 143

Catgirl and the Limits of Girl Robin-...... 146

Robin War Redux, or the “Fridging” of Carrie Kelley ...... 150

Stephanie Brown Spoils the Fun ...... 152

Daddy Issues ...... 153

Sex and Stephanie Brown: Spoiler Spoiled ...... 155

Stephanie Brown, Girl Wonder? ...... 159

War Games: To the Victor the Spoiler ...... 162

Girl (Robins), Interrupted ...... 167

CONCLUSION ...... 170

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 179 ix

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

2.1 Gayle Rubin’s “ Circle” Diagram ...... 67

2.3 Adding Absence of Sexuality to Rubin and Warner’s Diagrams ...... 70

2.4 Cover of #38 ...... 71

2.5 Cover of Batman & Robin #1 ...... 94

3.1 Duke Thomas’s “Signal” Costume ...... 125

4.1 Batman and Robin/Carrie Kelley in TDKR ...... 138

4.2 Carrie Kelley’s Introduction in DK2...... 148

4.3 Stephanie Brown’s Torture ...... 164

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1.1 Robin Basics ...... 14

2.2 Michael Warner’s Interpretation of Rubin’s Circle ...... 68

1

INTRODUCTION

Arguably the most widely-known adolescent character in American literature is Robin, sidekick to Batman. Even from a very young age, nearly all Americans can finish the phrase

“Batman and …” Many of those who are perhaps too young to know much about classical literary adolescents, like The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield or the titular Huckleberry

Finn, or perhaps too old to accurately describe The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen, can likely recall that Robin is a costumed superhero who fights crime in City.1 Yet Robin is frequently left out of all manner of academic study in which mere mention, let alone analysis, of the character would be warranted. For example, historian Jill Lepore begins her 2017 bestseller

The Secret History of with these lines: “Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from and Batman, no other comic- book character has lasted as long.”2 Lepore continues, “Superman first bounded over tall buildings in 1938. Batman began lurking in the shadows in 1939. Wonder Woman landed her in 1941.” However, Robin was introduced in 1940 and has never been out of print since. Why the omission of Robin from this list which includes his partner? More importantly, what might we learn if we do turn our focus to this character? Just as Lepore’s work reveals that

Wonder Woman can teach us much about women’s history in the United States, Robin appears to be a similar avatar in the history of American adolescence.

The objective of this research is to examine Robin as an enduring representation of

American adolescence and consider what this representation indicates about conceptions of adolescence and adulthood. What themes and traits are reflected in the relationship between

1 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884 (: Dover Publications, 1994); . . Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1951); Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008). 2 Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), xi. 2

Robin and Batman? How does this relationship change over time and amongst different Robin figures? How do comic book creators signal adolescence? What behaviors, thoughts, and motivations do they for teenage characters? What might these “scripts” be communicating to adolescent (and other) readers about the American teenager’s role in society?

I began to develop an interest in how adolescence is perceived and portrayed while working as a high school counselor. Unlike the role of teacher, the role of school counselor in the

United States provides the opportunity to work with students in a wide variety of settings, including but far from limited to a classroom. I had learned all about the behaviors and emotions to expect from teenagers during my three-year counseling licensure program. We were taught several theoretical frameworks for understanding adolescent development, but all of them proposed a rather common set of traits and milestones to expect. However, I began to notice in practice that there was a marked difference in the students’ behaviors between one-on-one appointments, in a classroom full of their peers, or in the presence of an authority figure such as the principal. Depending on some of a given student’s social identity markers, they seemed to experience school and maturation wildly differently from the patterns the models proposed. I wondered if “adolescence” was not the fixed, universal category that a large swath of medical and psychological literature would have us believe. Adolescents, as it turns out, are remarkably flexible in their ability to behave in ways not typical of adolescence. Furthermore, adult members of our society often present a marked dislike and lack of trust in adolescents, but sometimes adolescents are hailed as innovators, leaders, and a bright hope for our collective futures. Adults tend to also either forget their own adolescence or look back on how they behaved with chagrin.

How can this be? How can we hold such contradictory ideas about a group to which everyone at 3

some point belonged? How can this supposedly universal experience play out so differently from one person to another?

The short answer is that adolescence is to a large extent a socially constructed category.

Many of the behaviors and emotional expressions associated with adolescents are not rooted in any sort of material foundation, which accounts for the absence of individuals resembling modern American teenagers in other parts of the globe and in pre-twentieth century literature.

My investigation thus relies on the assertion that adolescence is merely what the larger culture thinks it is.

In order to investigate how mainstream society views adolescence for this project, I turn to an enduring genre of popular media intimately associated with adolescents: the superhero comic. I likewise became interested in this medium and genre while working directly with adolescents—while certainly not all of my high school students were consumers of superhero comics, a large enough percentage of them were reading such stories that I decided it was in my professional interest to pick up a few as well. A few turned into many, and I developed a keen interest in the medium and cultural criticism surrounding it.

Superhero comics provide an excellent vantage point from which to assess the larger populations’ perceptions of adolescents in that these comics have long been produced, by and large, with adolescent readers in mind. Therefore, analyzing these materials closely can reveal what adults think adolescents want to read and consume. Additionally, superhero comic books regularly feature adolescent characters in the form of the sidekick, demonstrating what the adult creators think adolescents are and ought to be. The superhero sidekick is a rather peculiar amalgamation of several literary tropes, dating back at least to Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza and, 4

depending on whom you ask, potentially many centuries earlier.3 In comics, are typically teenage characters who assist, and are often a ward of, a costumed superhero. They are also characterized by a lack of experience or knowledge compared to their heroic partners, who provide and tutelage. While many superhero comic books, especially those produced by , have successfully portrayed non-sidekick teenage (Spider-Man, several of the X-Men, 2014’s Ms. Marvel, etc.), the invention of the teen sidekick represents an important contribution of comics to popular understandings of how adolescence functions in relation to maturity.4

Studying Adolescent Representation in Comics

In recent decades, the field of comic studies has flourished. The study of superhero comics especially has grown immensely popular from a number of angles. Some literary scholars, such as Richard Reynolds, have approached superheroes as modern American myths, reading their stories through the lens of heroic mythology polished by Joseph Campbell.5 Others, most famously Scott McCloud, have analyzed the artistic contributions of the medium, probing how text and image work together to tell stories.6 From a cultural studies standpoint, scholars have studied the portrayals of different identity groups in superhero comics, such as women, black Americans, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people. Carolyn Cocca’s Superwomen

(2016) and José Alaniz’s Death, Disability, and the Superhero (2014) are excellent examples of

3 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote 1605 (San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2013). 4 and , Amazing Fantasy #15 (New York: Marvel Comics, 1962); Stan Lee and Kirby, X- Men #1 (New York: Marvel Comics, 1963); . Willow Wilson and , Ms. Marvel #1(New York: Marvel Comics, 2014). 5 Richard Reynolds, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994). 6 Scott McCloud, : The Invisible Art (: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994). 5

these scholarly trends.7 Largely absent from the current available literature is any detailed analysis of the representation of adolescents in comics, a lacuna this project seeks to address.

This project is thus embedded within the field of comics studies and makes two significant contributions to its growing body of scholarship. The first contribution is to offer an extended analysis of a heretofore under-studied character (Robin), one whose longevity and popularity places them in the same category as the oft-investigated Batman, Superman, and

Wonder Woman. Furthermore, this study positions Robin as the originator of a character type, the teen sidekick, a figure somewhat unique to superhero comics but ubiquitous within the genre.

Scant research has addressed the role of adolescent representation in comics, and even less work analyzes the role of the adolescent sidekick. Addressing this figure contributes to scholarship on some of the most enduring and recognizable fictional characters in the American literary canon.

There is to date no book-length study of Robin, despite multiple publications focused on

Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.8 Kristen . Geaman has edited a volume entitled Dick

Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing, and Batman, a collection of essays and interviews about the first character to take on the mantle of Robin.9

Though the essays range widely in topic and orientation towards their subject, one of the major themes that emerges from this collection is that Robin/Dick Grayson has been an incredibly important character within the larger context of the genre, drawing a wide and loyal fan base. Yet even within this volume, only one author (the editor, Geaman) makes an effort to specifically

7 Carolyn Cocca, Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); José Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). 8 In addition to Lepore on Wonder Woman, see Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural (London: Continuum, 2012); Travis Langley, Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (DeKalb, IL: Wiley & Sons, 2012); Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017); Larry Tye, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring (London: Random House, 2015); and many more. 9 Kristen L. Geaman, ed. Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing, and Batman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015). 6

situate Robin/Dick Grayson as an adolescent, comparing Dick Grayson’s literary journey to that of the traditional bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story.10 The bildungsroman itself positions adulthood as the goal and ending of the story; it renders adolescence as little more than a pathway to the teleological inevitability of maturity, rather than a culturally constructed phenomenon worthy of investigation on its own.

In the field of comics studies more broadly, few scholars have taken up the of adolescent representation. Scott Bukatman approaches such an attention in his discussion of the body. He notes that “Superhero comics embody social anxiety, especially regarding the adolescent body and its status within adult culture.”11 Bukatman argues the uncontrollable, uncontained, pliable bodies of superheroes such as Marvel Comics’ X-Men can be read as metaphors for teenage bodies. However, actual teenage bodies as presented in comics are not

Bukatman’s focus; instead, “adolescence” either appears as a vehicle for him to wax poetically on his own experiences as a comic book reader in his youth (and adulthood), or as a neat metonym for contradiction. He writes that the mutant body is a site of “infinite malleability and overdetermined adolescent iconography,” thus reducing teen representation to a set of signifiers to be employed by adult comic writers rather than a potential avenue for interrogating beliefs about adolescence itself.12

Outside of comics studies, Ron Buchanan offers a detailed discussion of sidekicks in

Western literature more broadly. Buchanan argues that the purpose of the sidekick is to make the story itself accessible to the audience: “The sidekick becomes a modern equivalent of the Greek

10 Kristen L. Geaman, “Boy Wonder to Man Wonder: Dick Grayson’s Transition to Nightwing and the Bildungsroman,” in Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing, and Batman, ed. Kristen L. Geaman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015). 11 Scott Bukatman, “X-Bodies: The Torment of the Mutant Superhero,” in Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture, ed. Rodney Sappington and Tyler Stallings (San Francisco: Bay Press, 1994), 51. 12 Bukatman, 51. 7

chorus, performing traditional tasks of providing interludes, reacting as a miniature audience, reinforcing the actions of the major character, providing information about new characters, and marking passages of time from one event to another.”13 Yet in focusing on adult sidekicks such as Sancho Panza (Don Quixote), Horatio (Hamlet), and Dr. Watson (of Sherlock Holmes stories), he likewise elides analysis of the adolescent characters who are often written into the role. The nature of hero-sidekick partnerships in which one character is doubly marginalized, as in the case of the teen sidekick, demands its own consideration as a separate narrative and point of reference for readers, especially when those readers most likely share in adolescent marginalization.

While Bukatman addresses adolescents in comics but avoids discussing the teenage body in sidekick form, and Buchanan describes the sidekick without addressing the ubiquitous teenage version of comics, Neil Shyminsky writes at the intersection of comic sidekick and adolescence.

Shyminsky identifies yet another purpose of the sidekick character: to narratively “straighten” the hero character, serving as a sort of gay rod by absorbing frequent homoeroticism within superhero stories.14 Shyminsky’s article-length study offers merely a glimpse into a trove of primary information nearly eighty years deep, but he charts an important course into the lively debate on sexuality as represented in superhero comics. I will elaborate on

Shyminsky’s argument in Chapter Two of this project by expanding on his brief but important discussion of youth and queerness.

The second contribution of my study is that it calls upon cultural studies of youth and adolescents as a new and lens through which to analyze comics. The medium flourished

13 Ron Buchanan, “‘Side by Side’: The Role of the Sidekick,” Popular Culture Association in the South 26, no. 1 (2003): 24. 14 Neil Shyminsky, “‘Gay’ Sidekicks: Queer Anxiety and the Narrative Straightening of the Superhero,” Men and Masculinities 14, no. 3 (2011): 288-308. 8

in the mid-twentieth century originally as a form of youth entertainment, with the superhero genre most closely associated with children and teens (other genres, such as horror and detective stories, had notable adult audiences, though youth participated in these genres in large numbers as well). Despite the ubiquity of comic books (and other media featuring comic book characters) in twentieth century American culture, little concurrent scholarship addressed the artistic, literary, or even economic impacts of the medium during its first several decades.

As Angela Ndalianis proposes, the youth association may have been a key factor in the academy’s ignorance of the medium: “Despite [comics’] immense popularity, the public perception for a long time was that comics were a kid’s medium—or, more specifically, a young boy’s medium. As such, it was generally perceived … as the lowliest of popular culture media.”15 However, we can locate a turning point in public perception of the medium in the

1980s. After slumping sales in the 1970s, the superhero comic book industry was revived in the

Reagan era thanks to a wide variety of cultural and economic factors, including direct market sales, relaxation of industry self-censorship codes, and the transition from youthful themes and appearances to darker, more violent, “adult” styles of comics. Around this time the term (a “pretentious label,” according to comics historian Bradford Wright16) became popular, and select superhero comics were lauded as quality literature deserving of study and criticism for the first time in the industry’s history. These comics were typically intended for adults, populated by irreparably flawed adult characters, and featuring sexual and violent content. Examples of this

15 Angela Ndalianis, “Why Comics Studies?” Cinema Journal 50, no. 3 (2011): 113. 16 Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 271. 9

phenomenon include ’s (1986) and ’s

Watchmen (1986-7), two oft-studied comics.17

Ndalianis notes that with the new maturity of comics came academic curiosity and literary legitimacy. She writes that the field of comics studies “is nurturing an active critical discourse about what constitutes the form of the medium, its , the ways it engages its readers, and its cultural, social, and historical ,” yet little of this scholarship has read the medium as a specifically adolescent phenomenon, considering the first forty-odd years of the genre’s existence were oriented almost entirely towards a youth market. 18 In emphasizing the idea that comics “grew up” in the 1980s and 1990s, critics and scholars nod to its origin as an adolescent phenomenon. The of the real-life American teenager thus haunts academic conversations about comics—but haunting is largely all it has done in the past few decades of developing comic scholarship. A humorous piece from satirical news outlet The Onion drives this point home: “Comics Not Just for Kids Anymore, Reports 85,000th Mainstream News

Story.”19 The subtext of journalistic and academic assertions that comics “are not just for kids anymore” is that only now are they worthy of our attention. Much of this scholarship seems intent, overtly or indirectly, on justifying why the medium is valuable despite the connotations of comics as juvenile.

My project, on the other hand, is interested in the value of superhero comics because of their connotations as a cultural product intended for adolescents. In this way, my project disrupts the tendency among comics scholars and fans to eschew the youthful connotations of the

17 Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986); Alan Moore and , (New York: DC Comics, 1987). 18 Ndalianis, 116. 19 “Comics Not Just for Kids Anymore, Reports 85,000th Mainstream News Story,” The Onion, last modified 10 July, 2012. https://entertainment.theonion.com/comics-not-just-for-kids-anymore-reports-85-000th-main- 1819573609. 10

medium in favor of making it seem more highbrow or intellectual. Rather than asserting comics

“grew up” or “overcame” their childish roots, I am choosing to lean into the childishness and adolescent connotations, and then ask what we can learn about youths from studying media intended for them. In this I follow Bradford Wright, who has written extensively about the role of comics in shaping American youth culture and who compares comic books to rock and roll music. The consumption of both, Wright argues, served as declarations of teenage independence.

Wright asserts that comic books “have played a crucial explanatory, therapeutic, and commercial function in young lives,” but does not discuss the actual presentation of youthful characters within comic narratives.20 I diverge from his work in that this project hones in on the reflection of comics’ primary readership within the texts themselves. The adolescent Robin figure has a nearly 80-year publication history and is incredibly widely known, yet much of this knowledge of the character comes with bias or derision. Focusing on this figure allows us to consider what we can learn about attitudes towards adolescents from the ways in which they have been portrayed in this medium primarily intended for them.

In particular, this study draws on adolescent scholarship which affirms (my formerly- sneaking suspicion) that adolescence is a socially constructed identity, temporally and geographically conditional. The scholarship on adolescence as a social construction is rooted in post-structuralist queer theory’s interrogation of assumed norms and binaries in an effort to demonstrate their immateriality. Several important cultural studies on children and adolescents have come from queer theorists including Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, Kathryn Bond

Stockton, and James Kincaid.21 Chapter One of this project functions as a sort of theoretical

20 Wright, xiii. 21 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer 11

literature review, sketching out the framework I use in later chapters to specifically consider

Robin.

Much of the work operating at the intersection of queer theory and adolescent studies has asked, and proposed to answer, why adolescence exists in its current form in the United States— i.. what purpose does it serve and what is its relationship to other developing social identities?

Nancy Lesko follows Michel Foucault in theorizing that adolescence is a technology, “a complex of mechanisms through which authorities have sought to shape, normalize, and make productive use of beings.”22 Lesko asserts that adolescence was deployed in the early twentieth century to affirm an idealized form of maturity in a nation rapidly becoming more diverse, and this deployment was channeled in no small part through popular culture, including comics. The idealized form of adulthood promoted through adolescence and adolescent pop culture representation seeks to preserve heterosexual white males’ domination of American public life.

Lesko chronicles that it was specifically this identity which psychologists, sociologists, and medical professionals framed as the result of proper and successful maturation—as did early comic book writers, by creating perfect heroes who almost invariably embodied white heterosexual masculinity, Batman included.

In positing that adulthood, at least its socially ideal form, is culturally constructed, I also plan to work against well-circulated models of individual development. Individual development theories, including popular stage-based frameworks put forth by Sigmund Freud and widely popularized by Erik Erikson, established a pseudo-medical discourse which serves to obscure the

Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992). 22 Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 15. 12

largely performative nature of certain phases of life.23 Describing “adolescence” and other stages of life as though they were fixed and definable made room for a vast body of research about what is “good” or “bad” behavior for an individual of a certain age—these models scripted what is considered “normal.” These models also worked to hide the construction of adulthood by over- emphasizing (or obsessing over, to put it less mildly) the attributes of other life stages. My project is founded in the belief that models of individual growth and the common discourses surrounding maturation require critical investigation, and that popular culture texts can be a useful source in analyzing the cultural work performed by adherence to these models.

I plan to expand on post-structural texts which demonstrate that many identity categories are not biological, physical, or material—for example, Judith Butler’s assertion that “the ‘reality’ of heterosexual identities is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets itself up as the origin and the ground of all imitations.”24 I argue that childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are all largely performative, socially constructed in a way that allows adulthood, like heterosexuality, to situate itself as the invisible norm. This project also asserts that the construction of adulthood as a fixed inevitability lays necessary groundwork for the positioning of other constructed identity categories as “normal.” The perception of other unmarked categories (whiteness, heterosexuality, etc.) is inextricably linked to the perception of an adult body, as they are inextricably linked to each other. The concept or idea of adolescence, as

Chapter One will make clear, serves to shore up the conceptual linkages between maturity and other unmarked categories.

23 Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1905 (London: The Hogarth Press, Ltd., 1962); Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: . W. Norton & Co., 1950). 24 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 14. 13

The significance of this conception of adolescence for the field of comics studies is twofold. First, it frames the primary readership of the medium as a socially constructed demographic, one borne of a specific need to clearly define an idealized form of maturity and then restrict access to it. Second, it implicates depictions of adolescents within the text as potential sources of this construction. Creators and writers of Robin did not mark the character’s adolescence in a vacuum; they relied on cultural contexts and social understandings of what a teenager is in order to communicate Robin’s “teen-ness” to their readers. I thus situate my study of Robin, the most famous and enduring adolescent representation in comics, within a theoretical orientation which seeks to interrogate the construction of adolescence in reality. The overarching argument of this dissertation is that the teen sidekick figure Robin has for decades reflected important cultural assumptions about adolescents and the ways in which “adolescence” helps to define idealized, normative maturity as heterosexual, white, and male.

The figure of Robin has always presented a contrast to his mature heroic partner, Batman.

However, while Batman has remained relatively constant since his introduction in 1939, “Robin” has undergone drastic changes to his identity. In his publication history, the hero Batman has actually been billionaire playboy for all but roughly five (non-consecutive) years, during instances in which Bruce Wayne was missing or dead and others wore the costume. Even in these moments, “Batman” has always been a well-off, white, straight male. The role of Robin, on the other hand, has been filled by no fewer than seven important figures (see Table 1.1). Four are young white males, one of whom has become what we may colloquially term a “gay icon” and another of whom was extremely poor; one is a young black male; and two are young white females. This malleability of Robin’s identity alone indicates that comic creators see much more flexibility and fluidity in youth than in adulthood, which is rendered rather . 14

Character Final Issue as Robin Other Key Featured Titles Name Aliases Dick Detective Comics #38, The New Teen #39, Nightwing, Detective Comics, Batman, Grayson and Bill and Batman The New , Finger (1940) George Perez (1984); Nightwing, Batman & Robin resigns from the role Jason Batman #408, Batman #428, Batman, Detective Comics, Todd Allan Collins and Chris and (1988); Red Hood, Red Hood and Warner (1987)* murdered by the the Outlaws Carrie Batman: The Dark Batman: The Dark Knight Catgirl, Batman: The Dark Knight Kelley Knight Returns #1, Returns #4, Frank Miller Returns, Batman: The Dark Frank Miller (1986) (1986); Knight Strikes Again Tim Batman #436-441, #1, Christopher Red Robin Detective Comics, Batman, Drake Marv Wolfman, Pat Yost and Ramon Bachs Robin, Red Robin Broderick, and Jim (2009); passed over in Aparo (1989)** favor of Damian Wayne Stephanie Detective Comics #647, Robin Vol. 4 #128, Bill Spoiler, Detective Comics, Robin, Brown and Tom Willingham and Damian Batgirl Batman, Red Robin, Batgirl Lyle (1992) Scott (2004); fired Damian Batman #655-7, Grant Ongoing as of March, 2019 -- Batman, Detective Comics, Wayne Morrison and Andy Batman & Robin Kubert (2006)*** Duke Batman Vol. 2 #21, Robin War Part 6, Tom Signal Batman, We Are Robin, Thomas and Greg King (2016); surrenders Robin War, All-Star Batman Capullo (2013) role to Damian Wayne

Table 1.1: Robin Basics

*This issue is the more popular and well-known of ’s two introductions. The first came in 1984, but it was re-written after the DC Comics “event” storyline Crisis on Infinite Earths. **Though partially appeared in Batman #436, 439, and 440, he was not named and shown in full until issue #441. ***Like Tim Drake, Damian Wayne appeared in shadow and silhouette in Batman #655; he was shown in full in Batman #656 and named in issue #657.

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More importantly for this project, investigating the changing social identities of Robin over the decades provides insight into how cultural producers saw issues of sexuality, race, and gender intersecting with adolescence. It is for this latter reason that four of the seven major

Robin figures rise to the forefront of this project—though creators have surely utilized Jason

Todd, Tim Drake, and Damian Wayne to communicate salient ideas about American adolescence in their own temporal milieux, this project highlights the characters who illustrate “detours” on the pathway to idealized maturity: Dick Grayson (queer), Duke Thomas (black), and Carrie

Kelley and Stephanie Brown (female). How writers “script” adolescence for these characters and the ways in which they shore up Batman’s maturity, often at the expense of their own, appears more pressing in this first extended foray into Robin-hood. My hope is that future work will take up the briefer mentions of Jason, Tim, and Damian in this study to more closely examine their particular expressions of adolescence.

This project’s research aims are achieved through close readings and visual and textual analysis of Robin and the characters who have “played” Robin in comic books of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The presence of both text and image in comics, along with “gutter space” and metalanguage, require a combination methodological approach. I will draw upon the foundational work of Scott McCloud in understanding the relationships between text and image, image and negative space, and the concept of “closure”—the contract subconsciously made between producer and consumer that explains how to “read” comics.25 Questions I ask myself when utilizing this methodology refer to characters’ language (word choice, linguistic emphasis, and amount of speech) as well as their appearance (relative size, facial expressions, costume, coloration, positioning with the frame). Investigation into these visual and textual markers provides the basis for my analyses of character and story.

25 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York City: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994). 16

Several comics scholars provide excellent models of analyzing comics for cultural significance. In “Bare Chests, Silver Tiaras, and Removable Afros,” Blair Davis analyzes the costumes and accoutrements of black superheroes, concluding that the appearances of black superheroes fail to communicate the same importance and heroic nature that the costumes of white superheroes do.26 Similarly, Jason Dittmer reads superhero suits, accessories, and catchphrases as promotional material for nationalism, anti-communism, and American hegemony. Dittmer’s and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics relies largely on visual and textual analysis to demonstrate the embedded iconography of comics and how these signifiers work to make truth and synonymous with the American way.27 Although other scholars have engaged in audience reception studies

(Brown; Kent),28 fandom studies (Healey),29 and examined the political economy of the comics industry (Nyberg; Hatcher),30 this particular study will be limited to textual and visual analysis, save an important but brief detour in Chapter Four which touches on fan engagement and producer response to the treatment of a female character. This project’s theoretical orientation prompts questions about historical understandings of American adolescence, and textual analysis of key adolescent characters will provide one set of responses to these questions. Ideally, future

26 Blair Davis, “Bare Chests, Silver Tiaras, and Removable Afros: The Visual Design of Black Superheroes,” in The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, ed. by Frances Gateward and John Hennings (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 193-212. 27 Jason Dittmer, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). 28 Jeffrey A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and their Fans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000); Miriam Kent, “Unveiling : Ms. Marvel and the Reception of the New Muslim Superheroine,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 3 (2015): 522-538. 29 Karen Healey, “When Fangirls Perform: The Gendered Fan Identity in Superhero Comics Fandom,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and . Lee Harrington (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 144-163. 30 Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); Molly Hatcher, “The Dark Knight under Revision,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4, no. 2 (2013), 257-277. 17

work on the subject will employ different methodologies in conducting additional research on the production and reception of these texts.

Specialized Terms

For the purposes of this study, I must clarify the ways in which I will be using a number of terms. The primary subject of this study is Robin, important for his role as the first and most famous adolescent sidekick character. Here, I use the term “adolescent” to refer to a person the public would not recognize as an adult, but would acknowledge as no longer a child.

Medical and psychological definitions of adolescence vary in their precise parameters—ages 12-

18, 12-21, 10-21, fifth grade through the end of high school, fifth grade through the end of college, etc. This lack of clarity in the precise definition of adolescence is evidence of its (and the life stages it interposes’) lack of material referent. James Kincaid asserts that the child “is not defined or controlled by age limits,” but is instead a “position brought into being” by its eroticization in Victorian culture.31 Similarly, I argue that the adolescent is not so crisply defined, and was “brought into being” by its usefulness in shoring up conceptual linkages between maturity and whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity around the turn of the twentieth century.

I also use the term “teenager” somewhat interchangeably with “adolescent.” Despite the linguistic reference “teenager” makes to the years ending in “-teen,” the term originates as a description of a socio-political state of being, not a particular age range. While individuals throughout history have experienced their thirteenth through nineteenth years, there is no record of the word “teenager” in print until the 1940s (though there is some disagreement as to the specific date of the term’s first appearance). Leerom Medovoi, in his Rebels: Youth and the Cold

War Origins of Identity, credits historian William Manchester’s work for illuminating the first

31 Kincaid, 5. 18

published record of the term: in a 1945 New York Times Magazine article titled “A Teen-Age

Bill of Rights.”32 Though the article did not specify an age-range, Medovoi traces the way it responds specifically to the pre-war construction and refinement of the “adolescent.”

Medovoi summarizes the construction of the “adolescent,” noting it was designed as “a dependent whose physical maturity belied the need for adult supervision and instruction.”33 This supervision was achieved primarily through education: schools became a means for the professional middle class to impart its values and ensure its reproduction, as I explore in detail in

Chapter One of this project. Medovoi notes that “adolescence represented a condition of—and case for—a lengthening state of dependency.”34 It was this sense of extended dependence, this sort of enforced childhood, against which the “Teen-Age Bill of Rights” protested.

The “adolescent” and the “teenager” are thus two sides of the same coin, bought and sold by adults for their value in maintaining hegemonic order and opening new markets. The

“adolescent” represents a pseudo-scientific construction, used to justify Western imperialism and as a means of reproducing middle class norms; the “teenager” is the socio-political response to the “adolescent,” intimately linked to demands for freedom and individuality. These demands were ultimately neutralized by a marketplace which was more than willing to accommodate rebellion and individuality through the consumption of cars, comics, and rock and roll, thus reinforcing the dominance of the adult and bourgeois values yet again. My usage of “adolescent” and “teenager” as relatively interchangeable highlights the ways in which they both function to achieve the same end: casting the younger individual, regardless of actual age, as inherently different and in need of some form of administration and control.

32 Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 25. 33 Medovoi, 25. 34 Medovoi, 25. 19

Turning from youth studies to the field of comics studies, it is useful to note here that different historical periods of comic production are often described in terms of “Ages.” These

“Ages” are informal classifications based on loose time frames and over-arching trends and conventions, and because Robin has been present since the very beginning of comics, occasional mentions of different Ages arise throughout the following chapters. of comics is usually defined as the introduction of Superman through the late 1950s, with simple themes of good versus evil; stories taking place on a recognizable Earth; bright, primary-color artwork; and heroes with few character flaws. The end of the Golden Age and beginning of the Silver Age is often marked specifically by 1961’s The #123, “Flash of Two Worlds,” which introduced the multi-verse concept.35 The Silver Age, lasting until the early 1980s,36 saw wacky stories of body-switching, planet-hopping, and even gender-bending. Comics historians Will Jacobs and

Gerard Jones describe the Silver Age as a time of “exuberant fun” and “the greatest extremes of experimentation” in terms of content.37 Finally, the Modern or Dark Age of comics lasted from roughly the early 1980s through the early 2010s. It is marked by considerable violence, mature themes, hyper-sexualized artwork, and deeply flawed heroic figures. Chapter Four of this project offers a more detailed analysis of the Modern Age, as its subject is inseparable from this general zeitgeist in comic book publishing history.

Additional comics terminology I use throughout include “title” and “trade.” A “title” in comics refers to both a serialized monthly release, akin to the title of a serialized television program (i.e. Friends, The Sopranos). Many of these titles have been running for decades. For

35 , , and Gardner , “Flash of Two Worlds,” #123 (New York: DC Comics, 1961). 36 Occasionally, a comics fan or scholar will break out the 1970s to early 1980s as a separate “Bronze Age,” marked by social and political awareness. However, many within the field typically fold these years and themes into the late Silver Age or early Modern Age. 37Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs, The Comic Book Heroes (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997), 154. 20

example, stories about Batman have been published under the titles Batman (1940-2011),

Detective Comics (1939-present), All Star Batman (October 2016-December 2017), Batman &

Robin (August 2009-August 2011), and many, many more. Within these “titles,” each numbered monthly issue also has a title, and oftentimes a handful of issues make up a story arc with its own sub-title. Individual comic issues that make up such a story arc are then often collected into what is known as a “trade,” short for . Trade paperbacks may also combine more than one story arc, and the paperback itself may be given its own title or sub-title, which may or may not be the title of one of the story arcs contained within. For example, “Pearly and the Pit” is the title of a single issue published in the story arc “Blackest Knight” which was published in the

Batman & Robin title. The story arc “Blackest Knight” was then re-printed as part of a trade paperback of Batman & Robin issues, entitled Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin. This trade paperback contains both the “Blackest Knight” story arc and the “Batman vs. Robin” story arc.38

38 There is no standard format for citing comic books in any of the major academic citation styles. I have chosen to document my sources in this project using the notes and bibliography option from the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), 17th Edition. Many comic book issues have upwards of eight creators working on them, including one or more authors, , , , breakdown artists, and frequently several artists who created what are known as “variant” covers for the issue. Following the tradition of many other comics scholars, I am citing the author or authors and lead artist (typically the ). In instances where I am referring to a particular issue of a comic, I note the comic’s author or authors and lead artist, followed by the sub-title of the story arc (if applicable) and title of the issue in quotation marks, then the “title” of the comic series in italics, the number of the issue within that “title,” and the publication information. Comic books often do not have page numbers, and even collected trade paperbacks featuring page numbers are extremely rare, so readers will note the vast majority of comic citations in this project do not feature page numbers. My footnote citation for the issue described above looks like this: 1 and , “Blackest Knight: Pearly and the Pit,” Batman & Robin #7 (New York: DC Comics, 2010). When referencing a full story arc published in trade format or a full trade paperback, I am citing the trade per CMS guidelines for books with multiple authors. For the above trade paperback, my footnote citation looks like this: 2 Grant Morrison, , and Cameron Stewart, Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin (New York: DC Comics, 2010). Though Andy Clarke did not work on “Blackest Knight,” he was a lead artist on the other story arc contained in Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin, which is why his name appears in the second citation but not the first. Nearly all of the comics I am citing in this project are from DC Comics, one of the two mainstream producers of comic books in the United States (the other being Marvel Comics). Until 2015, DC Comics was housed in New York City. In 2015, they moved to Burbank, . For all works published prior to 2015, I am noting New York City as the publication location; for all works published in 2015 and beyond, I have listed Burbank as the publication location.

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Chapter Outlines

The first chapter of this project offers a rough outline of the development of adolescence from the late Victorian era up to the 1950s, when adolescence crystallized into an image still recognizable today. This chapter functions largely as a review of the literature on the formation of adolescence in the American consciousness. In order to contextualize the social identity of

Robin and the ways in which various Robins have reflected particular scripts of adolescence back to their readers, it is important to have a shared understanding of the social construction of

“adolescence.” Contrasted with many other socially constructed binaries (gender, sexuality, the dominant black/white understanding of race), little critical cultural inquiry into the socially constructed triad of child/adolescent/adult exists. This chapter traces the development of age- based social identity categories and summarizes the function these categories served in the larger cultural contexts from which they were refined.

As Lesko argues, the dominant social, political, and scientific institutions in the United

States forged adolescence into a tool for adult white males to preserve their hegemony in a society which was quickly becoming more diverse. This chapter will highlight Lesko and others’ historical and sociological studies to demonstrate how the technology of adolescence helped to define idealized maturity as heterosexual, white, and male, and in particular how popular culture artifacts contribute to the upkeep of this technology. Comic books were one such popular culture artifact, and their development neatly parallels that of adolescence. The latter half of this chapter thus also sketches the history of American comic books and highlights Robin’s debut as concurrent with the entry of “teenager” into the common lexicon. Subsequent chapters will then focus on Robin as a touchstone to investigate how creators have used the character to both 22

support and occasionally challenge the constructed expectations of adolescence and idealized adulthood.

Chapter Two takes the first character to be Robin, Dick Grayson, as its primary case study in exploring how adolescence shores up conceptual links between maturity and heterosexuality. In particular, this chapter analyzes the ways in which Dick Grayson’s sexuality has reflected conflicting notions about adolescent sexuality and resolved these conflicts through the character’s simultaneous transitions to maturity and heterosexuality. This chapter closely reads the three key superhero identities which Dick Grayson has filled in comics, Robin,

Nightwing, and Batman. For each important transition, creators intentionally and frequently used heterosexual activity as evidence of Dick Grayson’s maturation, knitting together the identities of “straight” and “adult.” Importantly, creators simultaneously tied youth and queerness together by portraying Dick Grayson as able to engage in heterosexual activity only after he has grown out of the Robin identity and “Robin” was replaced with another, younger boy.

This chapter also highlights the ways in which depictions of Robin/Dick Grayson communicate that for young white males, idealized maturity (epitomized in the form of Batman) is available once they can perform socially-appropriate heterosexuality. Dick Grayson’s eventual donning of identity indicates a line of succession or an inheritance, establishing a pattern which would exclude later Robins who do not embody the same unmarked social identities as Dick Grayson. Finally, Chapter Two situates Damian Wayne, another Robin, as a figure who shores up the maturity and heterosexuality of whomever wears the Batman suit in a very specific way: by offering Batman an opportunity to act as a father.

The third chapter of this project explores the unavailability of idealized maturity when the adolescent in question is not a young white male. Shifting the focus from the earliest Robin 23

to the most recently introduced Robin, Chapter Three closely reads the story of the young black character Duke Thomas. This chapter makes the case that through a handful of comic titles featuring Duke Thomas, authors have used Duke to bring diversity to Batman-family titles, allowing them to address hot-button political issues such as juvenile gang activity, stop-and- frisk, police brutality, and white privilege. However, these creators ultimately portray Duke as more of a sidekick to Batman’s sidekicks, lacking agency and without a place in the pseudo- family line from Batman that other Robins have enjoyed. Though the creators’ intent is at times unclear, this chapter additionally makes the case that their attempts to raise awareness of the ways black youth are pushed out of adolescence may in fact reify this exile by portraying Duke

Thomas as merely a convenient reminder of the conceptual linkages between whiteness and the normative process of maturation.

Chapter Four continues the work of Chapter Three in analyzing two other Robins who only served in the role for very brief moments: Carrie Kelley and Stephanie Brown. These characters’ adolescent femininity renders them doubly marginalized, doubly empty, and thus doubly well-suited to reinforcing Batman’s masculine primacy and patriarchal authority. This chapter begins, however, with a contextualization of the Modern Age of comics, during which both of these characters were introduced and their stories unfolded. As noted above, creators catered to a restricted market during the Modern Age, a market comprised almost completely of adolescent and young adult male readers. This chapter argues that the notion superhero comics

“grew up” during this time period should be read as an assertion of patriarchal authority and a negative response to the gains of second-wave feminism. The depiction of young adolescent females within this context provides insight into the teen girl’s role in a world dominated by adult men: doing whatever the men need them to do, or getting out of the way. 24

Despite Carrie Kelley’s introduction as Robin in Frank Miller’s wildly popular The Dark

Knight Returns, she has been discarded as a potential Robin ever since this four-issue mini- series. Carrie’s role(s) in The Dark Knight Returns and its sequel illustrate the utility of the empty, transmutable teen girl in crafting fantasies of patriarchal control when she is a willing participant. Through Stephanie Brown, the second female character to play Robin, authors graphically illustrate the ways in which adolescent girls who defy patriarchal authority can be useful to it nonetheless. Unlike Carrie, Stephanie does not transform to meet Batman’s every need; instead, she challenges his authority and is severely punished for her intrusions into male spaces and roles. The story arcs of both female Robins reify the conceptual linkages between idealized maturity and masculinity, one through her service to patriarchal order and the other through her punishment for threatening it.

Scholars of comics and the superhero genre have analyzed in great detail the portrayals of women, non-white people, folks with disabilities, LGBTQ-identifying people, and, of course, many, many traditionally masculine straight white men. However, largely missing from the burgeoning fields of comics studies and superhero studies is a study of the portrayal of precisely the identity group for whom the genre was originally intended—adolescents. In this way, my project contributes to the field of comics studies by investigating one of the most enduring characters creators have used to reflect their primary readership within their texts. At the same time, my hope is that this project contributes to the field of adolescent studies by bringing a critical cultural focus to a heretofore understudied medium and genre specifically intended for adolescent consumption. Closely reading the portrayal of adolescents in comics and the “scripts” authors lay out for teens, this project proposes that adolescence is not an immutable life stage or a mere market demographic, but somewhere in between: a social construction which has roots in 25

preserving white hetero-patriarchy, and whose depictions in popular media can both reflect and occasionally challenge these roots.

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CHAPTER I. THE SECRET ORIGINS OF ADOLESCENCE

In 1980, writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez began a new long-running series for DC Comics called The New Teen Titans. The series relays the tales of a team of young superheroes, comprised of several former sidekicks, including Robin, as well as non-sidekick teens and a couple of new characters. Marked by their team name and the many social anxieties they , these heroes are almost comically adolescent, though the general tone of the series was meant to be dramatic. They struggle with romantic relationships and whether and when to engage in physical intimacy, they fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, and they feel pressured by their parental figures, though for much of the series there are very few adults around for comparison. In issue #20 alone, Robin confesses to feeling “like some stupid kid” next to Batman, struggles mightily with deciding whether to go to college or confess his love for the mysterious Raven, and even the issue’s is a young man trying desperately to make his aloof father proud.1 By 1980, when the series began, the adolescent was recognizable as its own identity, complete with various markers: self-consciousness, raging hormones, impulsivity, restlessness, and a rather fraught relationship with parents or parental figures. All of these traits are constant among Robin and the rest of the New Teen Titans, but how did these behaviors, thoughts, and feelings come to be so closely associated with adolescence?

In order for the adolescent figure of Robin to become one of the most recognizable

“teenage” characters in American literature, the concept of the teenager first had to be commonly understood. This project argues that portrayals of Robin reinforce particular scripts of American adolescence, scripts that in turn communicate an image of idealized maturity as heterosexual, white, and male, but before the teenage Robin could reinforce any particular beliefs about

1 Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, “Dear Mom and Dad,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #20 (New York: DC Comics, 1982).

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adolescence and adulthood, these beliefs had to be in place. This chapter discusses how those beliefs came to be—how idealized adulthood came to be defined by straight white masculinity, how the concept of adolescence helps to strengthen that definition, and, finally, how the introduction of comic books and the teen sidekick figure arrived at a pivotal moment to help reflect and reinforce these conceptual linkages.

This chapter frames the following chapters’ discussions of how adolescence intersects with other social identities in popular culture by clarifying what adolescence is and does in twentieth and twenty-first century American society. This chapter is laid out in a mostly chronological fashion, beginning in the late nineteenth century and progressing into the mid- twentieth, when the concept of the “teenager” crystallized in the mainstream of American culture and when the teen sidekick Robin was introduced. I feel it is important to note, however, that I do not mean to imply that the development of adolescence is in any way a “progress” narrative. I do not argue that our contemporary understanding of adolescence is any more accurate or true to some objective biological reality than the way adolescence was understood a century ago. In fact,

I argue that there is very little objective biological reality about American adolescence—it is a highly constructed, primarily social phenomenon, temporally and spatially conditional.

The “Deployment” of Adolescence

Throughout this project I will be working within Nancy Lesko’s framework of adolescence as a technology.2 Lesko follows Michel Foucault, who posited in The History of

Sexuality that the concept of sexuality was a technology: a set of interwoven social and political strategies which collectively sought to channel bodies and discourses into certain modes of

2 Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, 2nd Edition (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012).

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thinking and being.3 According to Foucault, the idea of “sexuality” was deployed over many decades, but primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through a variety of circuits, such as new regimes of hygiene or the concept of the medical case file. Foucault reads this deployment of sexuality as a means of solidifying bourgeois identity, caring for the middle- class body, and ensuring bourgeois descent in the form of children. He writes that the deployment of sexuality should be considered the “self-affirmation of one class … a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation.”4 Similarly, what we could describe as the

“deployment of adolescence” also sought to affirm a specific group identity—namely, that of adults. Just as one of the effects of the deployment of sexuality was a normalizing of specific modes of sexual behavior, the deployment of adolescence similarly affirmed a particular image of idealized maturity.

This normalization of our modern concept of maturity is reflected in scholarly conversations’ consistent and seemingly natural centering of adulthood. Within academic conversations about identity, adolescence appears as its own category, but adulthood is merely assumed in any conversation which does not clearly reference children or adolescents. Work on identity categories such as gender, race, and sexuality center adults without ever explicitly saying so. In other words, what adulthood is does not appear to be up for much debate. Young people are noteworthy, interesting, different, but, to borrow from Richard Dyer in his discussion of whiteness, adults are “just people.”5 Upon close inspection, though, the constructedness of adulthood becomes clear. The popularity in the late 2010s of using “adult” as a verb—as in “I can’ adult today” or “Adulting is hard”—attests to its performative nature and hints at specific

3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Vintage Books Edition, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1978]). 4 Foucault, 123. 5 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 2.

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behaviors connoting adulthood regardless of one’s chronological age. Despite this meme-able linguistic tic, adulthood is still largely considered a and state of being rather than a set of performances.

Although myriad cultures have clearly marked the transition to adulthood for centuries or millennia via a ceremony or celebration, most of these celebrations are mere moments in an individual’s life, as opposed to a conceptual life stage—think the one-night or one week affairs such as quinceñearas or the /bat mitzvah. These events symbolically mark an individual crossing a into maturity, but the early twentieth century deployment of adolescence transformed this threshold into a long and winding hallway. This hallway takes years to wend through, and it also requires individuals to meet certain expectations in order to obtain the responsibilities and privileges of maturity. The deployment of adolescence as more than a symbolic moment of transition from one state of being to another thus allowed control over what precisely “adulthood” meant and who could access it.

What this deployment affirmed was an image of adulthood that required traits already evident in those who held the most power, thus ensuring they would be the most likely to be perceived as mature in future . In other words, the concept of adolescence was defined and refined in such a way as to make adulthood not a guarantee—any individuals who did not adequately perform heterosexuality, whiteness, and maleness were in some way or another barred from fully adult status. As Ilana Nash succinctly describes, the “unnamed but implicit ‘self’” from whose point of view stories were told, policies were written, and life was lived, was (and continues to be) the straight, white, adult male.6 The following chapters will demonstrate how stories about various Robins reinforce the primacy of adult white men through

6 Ilana Nash, American : Teenage Girls in Twentieth Century Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2.

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the sidekick’s supporting role in relationship to Batman, who in many ways epitomizes idealized maturity. In this sense, these narratives continue the deployment of adolescence as a mechanism for maintaining the hegemonic dominance of people who look like Batman. The roots of the deployment of adolescence, though, must be traced all the way back to the nineteenth century and the formation of the “child.”

The Victorian Era and the Beginnings of Childhood

When Robin was first introduced in April 1940, he was billed in comics as the “Boy

Wonder”;7 in fact, it would take about thirty years of publishing stories about Robin before he was re-branded as the “Teen Wonder.”8 However, most sources indicate Robin was supposed to be around thirteen years old when he was first introduced—an age many today would no doubt consider to be a “teenager.” This linguistic alteration to Robin’s extended nickname is indicative of the ways in which our modern understanding of childhood (“boy”) preceded the concept of adolescence (“teen”). Robin’s introduction in 1940 as the “Teen Wonder” would have made little sense to readers—the word “teenager” was barely in usage and far from common, let alone the abbreviated version of the word. The child, on the other hand, had been a recognizable demographic for over half a century. Later understandings of adolescence as a life stage interposing childhood and adulthood, therefore, would not have come about had the child not first been named and described, a process which reached its in the nineteenth century.

Searching for the Child

Like adolescence, the “child” as twenty-first century Americans know it today did not always exist. In the mid-twentieth century, Philippe Ariès led the charge in arguing there had not always been a “child” in the contemporary sense. His 1960 Centuries of Childhood: A Social

7 Bob Kane and , “Robin: The Boy Wonder,” Detective Comics #38 (New York: DC Comics, 1940). 8 Robbins and , “Moon Struck,” Detective Comics #398 (New York: DC Comics, 1970).

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History of Family Life traces the formation of the modern family.9 Ariès began the study as a response to the bemoaning of the breakdown of the family in society, skeptical of the idea that the structure, lauded in the mid-century as the key to western success and happiness, was a fixed feature of human life. He found that the nuclear family structure was indeed a recent invention, and furthermore the child (as Ariès and his contemporaries knew it) was mysteriously absent from written and pictorial records.

A historian by trade, Ariès applied a methodology of visual and textual analysis to anatomize understandings of the family in European medieval and Enlightenment eras. He studied grave adornments, family portraiture, poetry, and funerary art, and found that up until the seventeenth century, there were very few “children” recognizable to us as such in extant sources.

Depictions of children appeared most often in medieval art as part of the “ages of life” or “ages of man” motif. They were a small piece of a larger cyclical or stepped portrayal of individuals at various chronological ages, and Ariès notes the consistent appearance of Death in these images as well. The purpose of these motifs was not necessarily to portray or capture an image of the child, but as a macabre reminder of ’ “dances of .”10 Ariès describes medieval paintings of little adults, strangely small but with mature musculature and faces. Beginning in the sixteenth century putti, or naked, cherubic figures, also grew popular. Overall, though, images of the child as it had come to be understood in the twentieth century were few and far between in pre-Victorian art. Ariès writes, “No doubt the discovery of childhood began in the thirteenth century, and its progress can be traced in the history of art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But the evidence of its development became more plentiful and significant from the

9 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1962). 10 Ariès, 24.

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end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth.”11 Here Ariès employs the language of “discovery,” as though our modern version of the child was always there merely waiting to be revealed and represented properly. While this linguistic slippage might work to cover over the constructedness of childhood, Centuries of Childhood nonetheless performs important work in demonstrating that regardless of whether modern understandings of childhood are “accurate” or

“true” and older ones were not, what childhood is depends largely on the time and location of the observer.

Literary scholar James Kincaid takes much of Ariès’ work as a springboard in his research on the child in Victorian Europe and America. Kincaid argues that the importance of

Ariès’ work lies not necessarily in its conclusion, but in its methods and process. He rather straightforwardly asserts that Ariès’ method of looking and reporting of not seeing ought to be taken at face value. Kincaid writes of Ariès, “If we take him to be saying that there simply is no child in the past, we trudge dusty and familiar roads to dreary positivist debates. If, on the other hand, we hear him more directly or simply, his arguments become productive: looking as closely as he can, he can spot nothing in the past that he would, personally speaking, call a child.”12 What, then, is a child and where can we find it?

Although Ariès occasionally employs the language of “discovery,” Kincaid rightly observes that his work really reveals the constructed nature of the child: “Ariès is doing the rarest kind of history, a history of the present, aiming at de-naturing ‘the child,’ exposing our own constructing apparatus … The effect of such a project is … to show that the child is the perceptual frame we have available to us for fitting in just about anything we choose—or

11 Ariès, 47. 12 James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 62.

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nothing. What the child is matters less than what we think it is and just why we think that way.”13

For Kincaid, Ariès’ work opens the door to thinking differently about the past and about young people’s social place. In his Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, Kincaid argues that our modern understanding of the child crystallized in the Victorian era and is defined primarily by our ascription of innocence to children. According to Kincaid, this central childhood characteristic was very much foisted onto them, not understood through more enlightened observation of them. During the colonial era in America, invading European settlers were influenced by Calvinist doctrine: children were presumed to be tiny containers of debauchery, “inherently sinful and sexual,” who must be brought to the light of heaven through proper supervision, instruction, and sacrament.14 However, during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, children became idealized as innocent and pure, utterly without , unknowing of sex, and closer to God than wicked adults. Furthermore, as Karen Sánchez-Eppler chronicles in Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth Century American Culture, dependence also became a key feature of childhood.15 Kincaid emphasizes that, regardless of motivation, the framing of children as innocent cast them as unique and different from adults, a rupture far deeper than that which separated the Ages of Man described by Ariès. Prior “ages” were often depicted as a gradually changing linear progression; the growing distance between children and adults in the nineteenth century, however, was a fundamental rift.

Race and Childhood

The rift that cast the child as wholly different from adults was accomplished by identifying children with innocence and purity above all else. Robin Bernstein aptly notes,

13 Kincaid, 62. 14 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4. 15 Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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however, that this innocence was not available to all children equally. This shift in the general understanding of children was driven in part by racial tension and notions of white supremacy:

“The doctrine of original sin receded, replaced by a doctrine of original innocence. This innocence was raced white.”16 From the beginning of the child, which is also the beginning of the adolescent, whiteness was thus situated as one of the keys to normative development.

Bernstein notes that in various forms of popular culture, black children were cast as unfeeling, impervious to pain, and wicked, very much unlike the tropes of pure, angelic white children that developed simultaneously. For example, Bernstein describes a nineteenth-century book entitled A Coon Alphabet in which each is accompanied by a short, supposedly humorous rhyme. At the end of each rhyme, a black child is subjected to some sort of physical violence, thus “naturaliz[ing] violence against African Americans” and making light of hurting black children.17 These differences, depicted as fundamental, allowed white Americans to ignore or brush off the inflicted on black children through slavery and segregation.

Furthermore, the innocence of white children connoted an “a state of holy ignorance,” including ignorance about the realities of racial inequality. It is thus that nineteenth century children, according to Bernstein, became carriers of racist ideology—they did not know it, of course, but

“the popular cultures of childhood … delivered, in fragmented and distorted forms, the images, practices, and ideologies of sentimentalism and minstrelsy well into the twentieth century.”18 Not only were black children imagined without innocence, the essential characteristic of childhood, but it was that very characteristic which provided cover for white society to perpetuate the racism of the antebellum period for decades after the .

16 Bernstein, 5. 17 Bernstein, 77. 18 Bernstein, 7.

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Bernstein also notes the peculiarity of associating black adults with children, as many nineteenth century Americans, including abolitionists, were wont to do when even actual black children could not be fully understood as children. Because black children were not seen as children, it certainly wouldn’t make logical sense for them to grow into adults, as expected of white children. Instead, it appears as though black children were considered too knowing to be perceived as innocent children, but black adults were portrayed as not knowing enough to be perceived as adults. Karen Sánchez-Eppler has argued that dependence, not innocence, was the key defining feature of childhood in the nineteenth century. However, the consequences of a state of dependence were similarly distorted for black Americans. The dependent nature of white children meant they required special protection and care, and they often served as a rhetorical tool in furthering progressive ideologies about social welfare. As with innocence, dependence connoting the need for protection was largely unavailable to black children—but dependence as a means of social control was forced onto black adults through slavery, Jim Crow legislation, and myriad other technologies. This twisted reversal provided cover for paternalistic treatment of black adults as well as psychological and physical torment of black youth, and Chapter Three will explore this phenomenon in greater detail. This nineteenth-century mobilization of life stages as a justification for maintaining fundamental separation between races foreshadows the role of adolescence in maintaining the whiteness of adulthood.

Missing Links: Fin-de-Siècle America and the Invention of Adolescence

By the turn of the twentieth century, Philippe Ariès’ child was fully ensconced in the public imagination. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler argues, this idealized child was defined by a state of dependence. Similarly, James Kincaid identifies innocence as the most prominent feature of childhood since the Victorian era. What appears in both scholars’ arguments is that the child was

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positioned as Other to the adult. This child-Other came to represent everything that adults are not: “this hollowing out of children by way of purifying them of any stains (or any substance) … makes them radically different, other.”19 Making children into “Others” reinforces the selfhood and normalcy of adults. Drawing upon Edward Said’s theorization of Orientalism, Ilana Nash describes how such “Others” provide “fantasies of difference that constitute the imagined identity of the oppressor’s culture.”20 These Others are a means by which an identity is crafted and defined; in their contrariness, blackness constitutes whiteness, homosexuality constitutes heterosexuality, femininity constitutes masculinity. Each identity categorized as “Other” comes with particular (stereotypical) traits which provide boundaries for the self; childhood innocence or dependence versus mature adult knowledge and independence represents the most important boundary between the two.

Yet another function of this radical difference, though, is the complication that if this idealized child-Other survives, it will someday become the adult. This complication reveals the otherness of childhood to be unique among cultural Others: most individuals who fall into groups cast as “Other” will retain the identity marker that others them throughout their lives. Children, however, are expected to grow into adults. This expectation, in which a “radically different”

Other will someday become the self, seemingly creates a paradox. How is this feat of identity acrobatics achieved? I contend that the development of adolescence was one solution to this paradox—it was framed as a buffer, a time of transition, a chrysalis phase when the child-Other can safely become the adult, but it was also distinct enough from adulthood to merit attention, protection, and supervision. The mechanisms for deploying adolescence included various sociological, educational, and medical models put forth to explain the “discovery” of this new

19 Kincaid, 175. 20 Nash, 4.

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identity around the turn of the twentieth century, models which continued to privilege whiteness and layered on privileges for heterosexuality and masculinity.

Recapitulation Theory: Seeding the Idealized Adult Identity

One of the first frameworks for addressing the transitionary nature of adolescence and properly introducing this new middle stage was recapitulation theory. Sociologists borrowed the idea from the biological concept of the same name, which proposes that embryos “recapitulate” a history of evolution in the womb, growing from tadpole-like creatures all the way to baby humans. The sociological co-optation of recapitulation theory was an outgrowth of fin-de-siècle

America’s fascination with evolution and evolution-as-metaphor. The idea of a “missing link” between ape-like creatures and humans was applied, if not in name then certainly in concept, to the burgeoning social category of adolescence. The recapitulation framework asserted that individual growth and development mirrored the evolutionary development of humankind.

Robert W. Rydell discusses the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a visual and visceral centerpiece of this brand of thinking.21 On the expo’s Midway Plaisance, visitors were privy to a “tour” of the world’s peoples from least to most “civilized.” The “childlike” non- white peoples were featured in displays organized in a progress-oriented fashion, from “savage”

Dahomeyans to “mild and inoffensive” Javanese and so on, with the German and Irish displays closest to the end: the fair’s gleaming, Anglo-centric, male-dominated White City (even the work of white women was situated in between the Midway and the White City, denoting their lower position on the hierarchy of humanity). Rydell writes, “The White City was a utopian construction built upon racist assumptions” in which white masculinity represented civilization, progress, and the logical conclusion of evolution—and, likewise, represented the logical

21 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876- 1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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conclusion of proper individual growth and development.22 Children were compared to ancient ape-like creatures and contemporary non-western “primitives;” adulthood was only achieved when one resembled a white, preferably wealthy, European male. Adolescence, then, represented a sort of “missing link,” the elusive creature which connected apes and humans—they were the means by which one became the other, by which something unrecognizable and wholly different became “us.” It was in adolescence, the “missing link” between un-civilized and civilized, that one would succeed or fail in making the figurative leap from Midway to White City. Embedded within recapitulation theory was thus a commitment to white supremacy and the denigration of non-white peoples by associating them with immaturity.

Race and racialization have, to an extent, always been linked with perceptions of maturity in the United States, largely through tropes like the tragic or the comical, shuffling, bumbling black minstrel performer. These characterizations rely on the “unknowingness” of the individual, just as innocence and unknowingness also characterized the nineteenth century child, in order to reinforce the connective tissue between whiteness and maturity. Of the transition from childlike innocence to mature knowing, Nancy Lesko writes, “adolescence was deemed a crucial divide between rational, autonomous, moral, white, bourgeois men and emotional, conforming, sentimental, or mythical others, namely primitives, animals, women, lower classes, and children.”23 Adolescence, from the very beginning of its modern definition, was thus an instrument of white supremacy as well as patriarchal dominance.

Dominant social and cultural institutions around the turn of the twentieth century mobilized adolescence to police sexuality and gender expression through the looming specter of precocity. Strict interpretations of recapitulation theory posited that even white male individuals

22 Rydell, 48. 23 Lesko, 29.

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must progress through a gradation of “less civilized” peoples prior to arriving at the or in the

White City, mimicking the stereotypical behaviors of those peoples on their way. However, progressing through these phases too quickly was considered problematic. Mature masculinity required retainment of a certain level of savagery—a connection to the wild, untamed, natural world which the ideally domestic(ated) woman did not maintain. If no such savagery at all remained by the time a young white boy reached the precipice of adulthood, that boy’s softness, frailty, femininity would prevent them from making the metaphorical leap to the White City.

Thus, young boys had to devote adequate time and energy to these rough, rugged experiences lest they skip over them and become too cultured, too domestic, too much a “sissy.” Such masculine domestication represented a form of degeneration, as would its counterbalance: too much savagery, closely associated with non-whites. Fear of precocity glorified heterosexuality and traditional masculinity while denigrating femininity and non-normative sexuality, framing the former as prerequisites of “proper” maturation and the latter as evidence of lingering immaturity.

The desire to preserve youthful innocence was run afoul by the inevitable growth and development of human children, but concerned reformers found a solution in the burgeoning concept of adolescence, a special time and place to work out this very conflict. In 1904 G.

Stanley Hall published Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology,

Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, a work whose ponderous title was matched by its voluminous pages.24 In this text, Hall offered the clearest, most thorough explanation of the adolescent to date. While at best many of his assertions were not empirically supported and at worst were outright racist, his work nonetheless altered scientific, educational,

24 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015011716779;view=1up;seq=9.

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and popular understandings of young people and many of his interpretations linger in our national imagination to this day (for instance, he applied the phrase “ and stress” to describe the adolescent psyche, a state of mind which likely sounds familiar to any parents who may be reading this dissertation).

Hall was not alone in his fascination with adolescence; in fact, so many social service workers and educators began to focus on adolescents (especially boys) in the early twentieth century that Joseph Kett has termed these professionals “the architects of adolescence.”25 James

Kincaid writes that in the early twentieth century there was a certain urgency to naming and explaining adolescence, as though the chasm between childhood and adulthood were real and threatening as opposed to a social construct. He observes the popularity in labeling the supposedly biological development stages in the early twentieth century, from Youth to

Childhood-Youth, to Infancy-Childhood-Youth, and so on. “Just as we were fearing,” he writes,

“experts were not slow to complicate the complications, introducing, among other things, overlapping categories,” all of which points to “a ‘natural’ phenomenon (the child and its near neighbors) in the process of being artificially constructed and then quickly rushed into action.”26

This passage also highlights the popularity of medical experts, educators, and the press discussing young life in distinct and ever-smaller stages, a trend which transformed into a second, and far longer-reaching, key theoretical framework in the deployment of adolescence: the lifespan development theory.

Lifespan Development Theories

Sigmund Freud’s 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality laid out different modes or “pleasures” of sexuality associated with different chronological ages, and with this model

25 Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 6. 26 Kincaid, 69.

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Freud launched a profusion of frameworks which drew discrete parallels between emotional or cognitive development and biological development.27 What I am calling here the lifespan development theory is a framework with which the vast majority of twenty-first century

Americans are familiar; it is a relative of recapitulation theory but more subtle in its racism and sexism. It is difficult to overstate the impact these theories have had on modern Americans’ understandings of ourselves. Any association of particular cognitive or emotional experiences with particular age groups recalls the lifespan development theory. Expecting specific struggles, points of view, or emotional milestones by certain ages likewise reveals investment in such frameworks. For instance, the idea of children being “gifted” or cognitively advanced, or the opposite, the now-discarded term “retarded,” demonstrates that there is a norm from which these children deviate—a norm rooted in stage-based development theories.

Beginning with Freud, other psychologists and social workers eagerly took up the stage- based model of lifespan development. Though these other works focused on different aspects of the self (the mind or conscience rather than sexuality, for instance) they all copied the general layout of beginning in infancy and progressing eventually to adulthood or maturity. Most of these theories posit that emotional and cognitive growth and development end abruptly once adulthood is reached. Each identifies a different marker of adulthood: for Freud, it was sexual maturity achieved in the genital stage and marked by heterosexual activity, which began during adolescence and lasted until death.28 Later twentieth century theorists such as Jean Piaget and

Lawrence Kohlberg similarly locate the vast majority of cognitive and emotional development in

27 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1905 (London: The Hogarth Press, Ltd., 1962). 28 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1905 (London: The Hogarth Press, Ltd., 1962).

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childhood and adolescence, with relatively little growth from young adulthood until death.29 Erik

Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is a notable exception; still, his stages are wildly disproportionate, concentrating five stages in roughly the first twenty years of life and then stretching out just three for the ostensible latter fifty-odd years of life.30 Erikson’s work, not published and popularized until 1950, will figure prominently in the final section of this chapter.

The effect of all of these lifespan development theories has been to focus narrowly and obsessively on youth, picking it apart meticulously and thus turning attention away from adulthood, masking adulthood’s status as a cultural phenomenon at all. Childhood and adolescence were and continue to be interesting, worthy of study, unknown, Other—adulthood, on the other hand, is simply the normal result of passage through the earlier stages. Yet even as these stage-based frameworks seemed to clarify discussions of children and adolescents, they also guided, molded, and limited those conversations. The norms they proposed reflected the existences of their identifiers and describers who were overwhelmingly straight, white, middle- to upper-class men, like Freud. Thus, they based expectations of age and maturity on images strikingly similar to the pattern laid out by recapitulationists, if not directly drawing such associations along racial lines. Their frameworks posit specific trajectories and goals, all of which connote “proper” or “improper” development, but all of which are also purely relative. In medical and educational literature, children of a certain age began to be compared to children of a similar age to see if they are developing “normally” or “successfully.” Yet what we consider to be normal or ideal childhood or adolescence are not expressions of any achievable reality, but rather a set of performances largely dictated by cultural expectations. These frameworks are the

29 Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child, 2nd edition, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). 30 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985 [1950]).

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progenitors of the “scripts” of adolescence which comic book writers would later take up with abandon to appeal to young readers in titles such as The New Teen Titans. The drafting of these scripts through discussion, study, and description in the form of lifespan development theories helped the previously amorphous “child” and “adolescent” become intelligible.

Age-Based Grouping and the Birth of the Youth Market

The clarification of adolescence was expedited by changes in American educational systems from mixed-age classrooms organized by knowledge and skill to class organization based on age. By the turn of the twentieth century, Howard Chudacoff writes, such grading

“made differences between age groups more significant than differences within age groups”

(emphasis mine).31 The re-oriented system largely holds into the twenty-first century as well: eight years of elementary school, followed by four years of high school (though in the latter half of the twentieth century some states and municipalities introduced middle schools and junior high schools, yet another institutional manifestation of the meticulous picking-apart of youthful life stages). Though the percentage of students attending all levels of school, especially secondary school, was still relatively low at the turn of the twentieth century, the impact of age- grading began to affect relationships between young people and contribute to the concept of a

“youth culture.” Prior to the early twentieth century, the vast majority of socializing took place within families, but “schools, clubs, and playgrounds removed young people from the age- integrated family setting and structured their lives according to peer associations.”32 Thus, not only were pediatricians and child psychologists comparing children of similar age to each other, but parents, teachers, and, importantly, producers of popular culture began to do the same. The eventual market demographic of the “youth” was seeded around the turn of the twentieth

31 Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 7. 32 Chudacoff, 7.

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century, an important economic subgroup which would make the eventual introduction and financial feasibility of superhero comic books possible.

Another essential cultural shift in the development of the “youth market” began with precisely the type of individual who was largely excluded from initial imaginings of adolescents: immigrant children. In Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of- the-Century America, Sarah E. Chinn writes that the lives of immigrant or first-generation

American adolescents were a far cry from those of already-“American” youths.33 As the typical middle-class Anglo-American adolescent was beginning to attend high school in larger numbers, teenage children of immigrants were working. Chinn analyzes the 1910s photography of Lewis

Hine, who was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to take photographs of young people at work in an effort to motivate child labor reform. While child labor reform largely succeeded, many teens were still allowed to work, albeit shorter hours. Chinn demonstrates that

Hine’s concern over child labor did not extend to young teenagers: his photographs depicted these individuals as happy and healthy in their work and as contributors to society, as opposed to mere cogs in a capitalist machine.

While the dependence of immigrant families on teenaged labor precluded these adolescents from a typical middle-class American adolescence, it was this independence from family in terms of space (being at work) and finances (what little earnings they were able to keep) that set the stage for the “youth market.” Chinn argues that these immigrant youths in fact influenced or “invented” the popular mid-twentieth century image of the teenager; socializing without adults present, spending their own money, and exhibiting a sharp generational distance from their parents were common among them by the 1910s, though middle-class Anglo-

33 Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

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American children would not take up such behaviors until the mid-century. Immigrant youth disrupted the still-forming concepts of childhood and adolescence in the cultural imaginary enough that both categories were re-thought and re-purposed as the twentieth century wore on— the separate scripts of immigrant and non-immigrant youths were eventually combined through a reorientation of racial beliefs, economic woes leading to increased high school attendance, and early popular culture portrayals of adolescents in film. The interwar years paved the way for the crystallization of modern adolescence in the mid-century.

Measuring Growth: Defining Adolescence in the Interwar Years

The melting together of immigrant and non-immigrant adolescents was driven by joint socialization between the two groups, made possible in large part due to changes in the perception of who was considered “white” during the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to the interwar years, whiteness was not in and of itself a unified category; instead, various “races” existed within the 1790 restriction of U.S. naturalization to “free white persons.” These races included such now-outdated terms as Teutonic, Celt, Nordic, and Slavic, among myriad others.

However, in Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race,

Matthew Frye Jacobson notes that several distinct forces worked together in the 1920s and 30s to ease or erase some of these distinctions.34 Measures like the 1924 National Origins Act

(commonly referred to as the Johnson Amendment) affirmed the American-ness of previous waves of immigrants from Northern European nations like Germany and Ireland, while serving to reduce the ostensible threat posed by (heavily Jewish, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox) immigrants from Eastern and Southern European localities and the Middle East by limiting the number of these immigrants admissible to the U.S. Additionally, the mass migration of African

34 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91.

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Americans fleeing Jim Crow laws and violence in the South made defining whiteness a more pressing concern for many urban Northerners. In this time period, the lesser divisions between members of the “white race” were ironed out, blurred, forgiven. However, Jolie A. Sheffer summarizes that this forgiveness was only made possible by reorienting and emphasizing larger racial divisions—“as ‘white’ became a more inclusive category, other racial lines grew more intractable.”35 Europeans of all “races” could be considered white at the expense of those who were clearly not white.

It was through this gradual re-definition of whiteness that children of European immigrants and native-born Anglo-American adolescents could begin to influence each other.

No longer perceived as quite so different, these youths began to attend school together, socialize together, and consume similar artifacts of popular culture. The clear aspects of teen-ness Chinn identifies in immigrant adolescents, such as intra-age group socialization, became aspects of teen-ness broadly defined in part because over time many of these immigrant families came to be perceived as “meltable” into the Anglo-Saxon “original stock” of the United States, rather than understood as racial others. The term “Caucasian” grew popular as it referenced a theoretical origin point of white Europeans in the Caucasus Mountains. According to Richard Dyer, this theory is a which “established a link between Europeans and a venerable culture known to pre-date Europe’s oldest civilization, ancient Greece.”36 It allowed for a “pure” origin of white people located not in some social construction of whiteness, but in a geographic and historical reality, something more foundational to which Americans could cling as migration and immigration seemingly threatened white dominance.

35 Jolie A. Sheffer, The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880- 1930 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 8. 36 Dyer, 21.

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While more people were ushered under the umbrella of “Caucasian” and white children of various origins began to socialize together, lifespan development theories were clarifying the image of “normative” adolescence and replacing recapitulation theory as the most popular means of understanding individual growth. However, despite the blurring of some racial divisions and the decreasing popularity of the overtly racial recapitulation theory, race was a determining factor in what constituted “normative” adolescence, as well as its opposite, “deviant” adolescence. Deviant adolescence manifested itself primarily in “street corner societies,” composed largely of non-white and lower-class children; some belonged to those Eastern

European families who would in time be considered white, but many were the children of black families fleeing the Jim Crow South and settling in urban centers in the North and West.37

The feminizing specter of precocity was also carried over from recapitulation theory, as the defining trait of these groups of “deviant” youths was their lack of supervision. Nancy Lesko writes that fears of adolescent degeneracy—that they would not be successful in becoming

“civilized” or “adult”—drove obsessive surveillance of children and teenagers. She summarizes the early twentieth century sense that youths must be supervised or else arresting their development: “laissez-faire approaches to youth were deemed likely to lead to moral anarchy, and the administrative gaze of teachers, parents, psychologists, play reformers, scouting leaders, and juvenile justice workers was everywhere cultivated.”38 These fears, coupled with economic crises of the 1930s, led to skyrocketing high school attendance, where sexual activity and other behaviors were closely monitored.

37 Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 25. 38 Lesko, 75.

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Surveilling Adolescents through Secondary Education

Despite its modern ubiquity, the public high school was not a common fixture of most adolescent life until the 1930s. Yet its role in shaping modern adolescence, providing space for teenagers to mingle and mix with other teenagers and guiding their energies into specific activities, cannot be overstated. Judith Sealander notes that “less than 7 percent of all seventeen- year-olds in the country were high school graduates in 1900, but by 1940, the number had increased to nearly fifty percent.”39 Though during much of the first two decades of the twentieth century the experience of adolescence varied widely based on immigration status, geographic location, and social class, towards a unifying concept of adolescence was already underway. Joseph Kett identifies the ouster of children and teens from the labor market as a driving force. Lewis Hine’s ultimately successful work for the NCLC helped to alter the role of youths in the workplace, prohibiting employment younger the age of 14 and limiting the number of hours that teens aged 14-16 were allowed to work. However, the Great Depression and resulting New Deal reforms restricted youth labor further, prioritizing adult males who were the heads of their households for the few jobs available at the time. Young men unable to work (and young women unable to work, restricted from working in male-dominated fields, or unable to marry due to the dearth of economically independent males) instead went to school: “Confronted by a declining demand for their labor, especially during the Depression, boys as well as girls prolonged their education.”40 Compulsory education laws paralleled these economic realities; in more and more states children and teens were required to stay in school longer.

Motivating these compulsory education laws, alongside the tightened labor market, were the concerns of social reformers, educators, and psychologists who were influenced by the work

39 Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 187. 40 Kett, 245.

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of Hall and others. Adolescence had become a site of struggle over civilization and the nation’s health, and schools provided means of surveilling and controlling teens, encouraging a form of slow and steady development, thereby avoiding the looming, feminizing specter of precocity.

Prior to the twentieth century, secondary school education had largely served university preparation and admission. However, Kett chronicles how early twentieth century social educators saw the potential of public high schools as a means of social formation, and the intellectual focus of secondary education was subsumed beneath the goals of “health, vocation, citizenship, and worthy use of leisure.”41 In turn, secondary school became less an incubator for university admission than an extension of elementary education, recalling the urgency with which twentieth century reformers sought to preserve youth and prevent precocity as much as possible. The high school’s growing resemblance to elementary schools had limits, though—the secondary school represented a new institutional and societal entity, as age-based grading meant elementary school was a place for children, while high school became a place for adolescents.

This shift in the purpose of secondary schools also encouraged families of girls to keep them in high school, though the landscape of girls’ education changed significantly in the early twentieth century. Since the focus of secondary education was no longer on intellectual preparation and university attendance, which were of little use to most middle-class American girls, and instead emphasized how to be a good citizen, distaff curricula emerged which encouraged high school attendance while promoting the separate-sphere mentality for boys and girls. This mentality was driven largely by the obsession with preventing femininity in boys and creating the differentiation between the sexes prescribed by recapitulationists.

In their study of coeducation in the United States, David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot describe the inextricability of adolescent girls’ education in “domestic science” and the project of

41 Kett, 235.

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linking maturity with heterosexuality, whiteness, and masculinity: “By making homemaking into a profession based on science, home economics would dignify the occupation, attract back those women who had fled the home for outside careers, and stem the drop in the birthrate of native- born [white] women.”42 These changes in curricula thus sought to return women to the privacy of the home, where they would be married to men and raise white children, and would not participate in mature, professional society. Additionally, “instruction in proper homemaking would help to ‘Americanize’ immigrant women and their families and thus hasten their adoption of correct standards.”43 These immigrants were, of course, those in the process of becoming

“white” as described above. In this manner, high schools entrenched and attempted to universalize a of adolescence and adulthood steeped in white, bourgeois, patriarchal values.

Standardized Testing: “Mental Age” as a Function of Class and Race

Another mechanism operating to promote these values through the high school, akin to the lifespan development theory in its influence on the fields of psychology and counseling, was the role of vocational guidance and its close relative, the aptitude test. Vocational guidance was founded in the early twentieth century by Frank Parsons, an activist who had spent much of his adult life working with immigrants and helping them find employment. Parsons envisioned an education system which not only offered traditional learning through reading, writing, and arithmetic, but which focused on “helping adolescents and adults identify their capabilities and choose jobs with reasonable expectations of reaching their goals.”44 The efforts of Parsons and other advocates of vocational guidance eventually altered the education landscape in the United

42 David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 217. 43 Tyack and Hansot, 271. 44 Edwin L. Herr, “Trends in Vocational Guidance,” Career Development Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2013): 278. doi: 10.1002/j.2161-10045.2013.00056.x.

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States: as more and more students began attending secondary school, the concept of vocational education and preparation for career (and not just university) grew popular. These measures in turn helped re-create secondary schools as a place not just for upper or middle-class adolescents, but for children and teens from working class families as well.

Like vocational guidance, intelligence and aptitude tests found a comfortable home in secondary schools after a long and storied history of sorting and ranking adults. These assessments found their way into high schools by the end of World War I, when it became “quite popular among educators as a means of ranking college applicants.”45 Binding together intelligence and age, early forms of these tests reported results as the “mental age” of the subject.

In The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter chronicles how intelligence testing claimed

“to measure innate intelligence, not simply years of education or immersion in a particular cultural milieu.”46 In spite of these claims, Painter demonstrates the undeniably racialized and culturally-biased results of these tests. Recalling the differentiation among various white races up until the 1940s, these early tests showed Anglo-Saxon whites scoring highest, various categories of white immigrants less high, and “[lumping] black men of all backgrounds into a single unit,”

“Negroes” scoring lowest.47 Likewise, Judith Sealander describes that even when schools shifted from testing “intelligence” to testing “ability,” a change she marks in the 1930s, those who scored the highest “continued to be white, native-born, and relatively privileged.”48 The results of these tests mirrored the Midway-to-White City path. Success on IQ and aptitude tests in the

1920s and 30s was closely correlated with being white and upper or middle-class, and this correlation has not changed in the intervening century. Reporting scores as “mental ages” tied

45 Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 285. 46 Painter, 279. 47 Painter, 286. 48 Sealander, 202.

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whiteness and middle- to upper-classness inextricably to maturity, and though this method of score-reporting has been abandoned, the lingering correlations mean standardized testing still serves as a means of reinforcing the linkages between whiteness and the normative process of maturation.

Adolescence Reaches Popular Culture

As adolescents began to attend high school in larger numbers and socialize amongst peer groups rather than in multi-generational family gatherings, producers of popular culture began to take an interest in American youth. In American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth

Century Popular Culture, Ilana Nash notes that the 1920s witnessed the first “typified” portrayals of adolescents in film. Prior to this decade, young people certainly appeared on screen, but as Nash describes, in these early films “youth often functioned more as an abstract concept than as a historical category; that is, there was no depiction of an age-specific, era-specific

‘youth culture’ in pre-1920s films.”49 This absence is logical, bearing in mind that a specific

“youth culture” was only just beginning to form. However, as such a distinct culture was cultivated by the “architects of adolescence,” it was quickly picked up and reflected in major motion pictures. At first, these depictions focused on older adolescents and college students. In the same vein as . Scott Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise (1920),50 these films portrayed wild youths with modern haircuts, new clothing styles, and a thirst for adventure colored by alcohol and heavy petting—generally known as “flappers” and their male counterparts, “sheiks”

(so named after the 1921 film The Sheik51). Nash connects this understanding of youth to the end of World War I and fears that an irreparably “warped” generation “might lead

49 Nash, 82. 50 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920). 51 The Sheik, directed by George Melford with performance by Rudolph Valentino (1921; Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002), DVD.

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the country straight to .”52 In this sense, she notes, youth culture was portrayed as “a source of anxiety and pleasure simultaneously, offering viewers the opportunity to consume provocative stories and images while allowing them also to feel superior to those they read about.”53

However, even this iteration of youth culture still barely approximated something recognizable as a “teenager.” In the 1930s, this figure began to cohere.

After a period of interest in somewhat older young adults in the form of flappers and sheiks, “the general 1920s focus on youth influenced a gradually expanding awareness of teens which began to blossom in the 1930s and became a full-blown cultural obsession over the following decades.”54 Focusing on a younger demographic group than depictions of dangerous flapper culture, 1930s utilized images of round-faced, shining, happy youths like

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to demonstrate a contrasting yet common perception of adolescents: they are the best hope for our future. Most paradigmatic of this latter form are the popular Andy Hardy films, starring the aforementioned Mickey Rooney. This franchise introduced a plucky, endearing adolescent and ran for sixteen films from 1937-1943. David

Eldridge notes that in both the U.S. and Great Britain, Rooney was “the number one office attraction” from 1939-1941.55 Eldridge argues that Andy Hardy films presented a specific image of America to British viewers, one that was young, energetic, and positive. Andy Hardy was also frequently billed both at home and in Britain as a typical American adolescent—white, male, middle-class, heterosexual, and clearly capable of making the leap from Midway to White City.

In many of these respects, Andy Hardy is also an important precursor to Dick Grayson/Robin,

52 Nash, 83. 53 Nash, 83. 54 Nash, 18. 55 David Eldridge, “Britain Finds Andy Hardy: British Cinema Audiences and the American Way of Life in the Second World War,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 31, no. 4 (2011): 501. doi: 10.1080/01439685.2011.620842.

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introduced just a few years after the first Andy Hardy film debuted. Both were white, baby-faced, curious, good-hearted, and gently governed by a bodily representation of moral and paternal authority: Judge Hardy, Andy’s father, and Batman. In this regard, both likewise demonstrate the proper way to “grow up”—namely, respectful of and aspiring to white male adulthood.

Coming into Focus: American Teenagers in the Mid-Century

Though 1930s media was saturated with images of the adolescent, most of the cultural products featuring adolescents were still targeted at a wider consuming audience. These works illustrate the growing consensus that adolescents were somehow different from both children and adults, without yet making the leap to catering to this new group. Andy Hardy films, and analogous films featuring female stars such as Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin, largely aimed to draw in a broad, multi-generational audience, but other media forms began advertising and selling specifically to this new social demographic—comic books among them.

As with the development of “adolescence,” the development of comic books as a medium can in fact be traced back to the late nineteenth century, starting with comic strips printed in and magazines. The popularity of early comic strips about children, such as the Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammer Kids, attest to the interest of the American reading public with young folks. (These early strips also reflect the implicit associations of immigrants with perpetual youthfulness, as both strips featured the humorous antics of non-Anglo-American children who never age, thus aiding in the perception of non-whiteness as a form of permanent youth.) Eventually many comic strips were collected into “funny books.” In time, original stories in comic form were also sold as booklets. Though a variety of genres were represented in these comic books, they were primarily geared towards children and adolescents. The introduction of

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Superman in 1938 launched what would become the most successful genre of comics, causing sales to increase exponentially, and firmly linking the medium with youthfulness.

Initially imagined as a serialized strip, and eventually sold their idea for Superman as a comic book instead.56 Superman was an immediate hit, and he spawned numerous copycat characters and dramatically changed the comic book publishing industry. The concept of the comic superhero touched a nerve with American youth. Thomas Hine, author and popular culture journalist, compares these comics to the established and well-known Andy Hardy movies: “The story the [superhero] comics told was similar to that of the Garland-Rooney musicals. It concerned people whose innate … were immense, yet unrecognized by the world at large.”57 By the late 1930s, American adolescents were frequently hailed as the best hope for the future, but the framing of adolescence as a time of preparing for adulthood, a time in which many are liable to go astray, created a sense of uncertainty. Would the youth succeed in becoming a contributing member of society? Superhero comics reflected the tension between what one is and what one hopes to be. Witnessing the bumbling, drab, or shallow alter egos suddenly transform into powerful, loved, purposeful superheroes gave young readers hope for their own transformation—once they navigated the supposedly difficult path of maturation imposed by educators, social reformers, and parents.

Recognizing the inarguable power of superhero comics to attract young readers, it was shortly after Superman’s introduction that superhero comics actually introduced a youthful character: Robin, sidekick to Batman. Batman was created in 1939 to capitalize on the instant success of Superman, and the character led to similar financial gains right away: “The same kids

56 Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 9. 57 Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999), 224.

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who were snatching up copies of ACTION and SUPERMAN were quick to add DETECTIVE

COMICS with Batman to their purchases, and the feature was off and running.”58 However, as comic artist and historian asserts, “an unrelentingly dark, mysterious Batman might fascinate in the short term, but was too limited for the long haul.”59 Importantly, Will Brooker also notes that Robin’s creators sought to create a point of identification for young readers— someone in the text who was like them.60 The desire to craft a character who would reflect some of the behaviors and experiences of American youth carries with it a telling implication: that there was indeed a set of behaviors and experiences common to youth upon which creators could draw. This implication is evidenced most powerfully by the publication ten years later of Erik

Erikson’s Childhood and Society.61

Erik Erikson and the Adolescent Identity

Though its publication lagged behind the introduction of Robin by a decade, Childhood and Society represents years of Erikson’s psychoanalytic work. It was immensely popular and provides the most accessible and concise description of mid-century Americans’ perceptions of adolescents. Furthermore, this work still influences understandings of individual development today; in Erikson’s model, we can thus locate an early and coherent description of what we could consider the “modern” American teenager. By the mid-century, lifespan development theories’ stage-based, supposedly objective observations reigned as the prominent means of thinking about individual growth. Crafting a model of individual development based on eight stages, in which each stage was governed by one major conflict, Erikson offered clear, objective goals for adolescents which neatly, if indirectly, addressed anxieties about the Cold War, suburbanization,

58 Bill Schelly, introduction to Batman in the Forties (New York: DC Comics, 2004), 5. 59 Schelly, 6. 60 Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (London: Continuum, 2000), 56. 61 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985 [1950]).

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and gender roles. Erikson named “identity formation” as the key task of adolescence, which he pegged at 12-18 years old. The Eriksonian teenager is engrossed determining which aspects of the self they have known up until adolescence while also adding to their self-concept by matching with or against peers. Only if a stable sense of self is established in the adolescent years can an individual move on to adulthood.

As with all lifespan development theories, Erikson’s model not only provides a means of understanding children and adolescents, but primes readers for specific understandings and expectations of them. In describing what is expected of adolescents and how identity is formed,

Erikson helps to construct an image of adolescence, even when he claims to simply be observing their behavior. For example, Erikson writes, “Young people can also be remarkably clannish, and cruel in their exclusion of all those who are ‘different’ … It is important to understand

(which does not mean condone or participate in) such intolerance as a defense against a sense of identity confusion.”62 Though he does not “condone or participate” in adolescent cruelty, he frames it as normal; though he does not elaborate on who might be considered “different,” we can assume that those most often excluded were those who did not conform to dominant hegemonic ideals. The relative straightforwardness of Erikson’s approach likewise belies the influence of its historical moment: prior to the mid-century, the process of identity formation he describes would have been very difficult for American adolescents to achieve. The sort of give- and-take described by Erikson in forming one’s identity requires interaction with peers, defined as those in the same age group. It wasn’t until around the time of Childhood and Society’s publication that a majority of teenagers were attending high school together, and Chudacoff’s work reveals that comparisons based on age only became paradigmatic in the early twentieth century.

62 Erikson, 262.

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In Erikson’s reliance on the high school environment for “proper” development, Leerom

Medovoi sees the continued reinforcement of a particular image of idealized adulthood. Medovoi writes that “in the emerging system of education, the adolescent … became central to norms of reproduction for the professional middle class.”63 Taking time for the proper formation of identity became a theoretical cover for the management of youth in accordance with hegemonic values and the maintenance of current social structures. The best odds of achieving the self- image described by Erikson as ideal required administration, supervision, and delaying adulthood. However, these opportunities were limited to those young people whose families did not need their income and who had access to secondary schools and their accompanying activities—the more sports, clubs, and opportunities to “self-define” within the strictures of bourgeois culture, the better. Thus, Medovoi claims, “‘adolescence’ served to pathologize the lives of working-class and immigrant youth, since their participation in ‘street corner societies’ only confirmed the neglect shown by lower-class families and communities toward these vital years of their children’s development.”64 These worrisome “street corner societies” were gangs of unsupervised adolescents intimately associated with immigrants, the poor, black youth, and homosexuality. In short, Erikson’s model reinforced the same idealized image of maturity that recapitulation theory and the Midway-to-White City path did in 1893—white, heterosexual, male, and preferably middle to upper class.

The ultimate goal of the Eriksonian adolescent was to “form their identity,” and this process required a certain level of rebellion, of trying on new aspects of an identity and rejecting older ones (think experimental hairstyles, listening to rock and roll, and professing disdain for older generations and their culture). Rebellious teenagers have since become as American as

63 Medovoi, 25. 64 Medovoi, 25.

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apple pie, but this rebellion is hardly as anti-establishment as it seems. In a time of rapid suburbanization and corporatization, and in need of a means of justifying excessive consumption,

Medovoi argues the rebellion inherent in Erikson’s adolescent provided an “out” for Americans who derided the conformity of the Soviet Union while they simultaneously celebrated an individual freedom defined largely by the ability to keep up with the Joneses—or, in other words, to conform. Medovoi writes, “The patent appeal of the Eriksonian adolescent’s

‘character’ is that she enacts the requisite dramas of rebellion prior to adulthood. Thus, if an adolescent exhibits a properly rebellious spirit before growing into a conforming suburbanite … she has effectively displayed the American self’s sovereignty without necessarily sacrificing the eventual conformity of the adult.”65 The adolescent rebel was thus sanctioned by Cold War containment culture as a safe mechanism for the maintenance of an American identity, and it was rapidly enshrined in popular culture.

Filmic portrayals of the adolescent rebel also reveal an investment in linking maturity with straight white masculinity. Both Thomas Doherty and Leerom Medovoi single out

Blackboard Jungle (1955) as a turning point in the history of adolescence on screen.66 Originally intended as “social problem film,” Medovoi characterizes it as “about the scourge of juvenile delinquency and the heroism required of teachers who would overcome it.”67 Portraying a delinquent group of high schoolers who are eventually tamed by a wise and patient (white male) teacher, Blackboard Jungle fed into anxieties about youth and crime. Film historian Thomas

Doherty writes that “Although its shock value has diminished with time, Blackboard

Jungle remains a harsh testimony to how wide the gulf between parents and teenagers had

65 Medovoi, 23. 66 Blackboard Jungle, directed by Richard Brooks (1955; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2005), DVD. 67 Medovoi, 137.

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become by the mid-1950s.”68 Similar films likewise relied on tense adult-youth relations and rock ‘’ roll soundtracks or melodrama to illustrate this gulf, including Rock Around the

Clock (1956) and, most famously, Rebel Without a Cause (1955).69 On the other hand, Ilana

Nash notes that mid-century portrayals of adolescent girls de-emphasized rebellion and promoted instead the hyperfeminization of women, especially young girls. She describes the phenomenon as a “nearly exclusive filmic portrayal of girls as harmless ingénues who protect patriarchal values,” and notes that the newly-accessible television echoed these portrayals.70 These portrayals served to support images of American masculinity unsettled by corporatization and suburbanization.

The Persistence of the Teen Sidekick

Though Nash and Doherty analyze differently-gendered popular culture artifacts, both analyses reveal an investment in a particular image of maturity—they tell stories of harmless, ultra-feminine girls in need of white adult male guidance or delinquent, violent boys also in need of white adult male guidance. On the surface, both highlight the importance of adults in the lives of teenagers, but upon closer inspection, they demonstrate the utility of adolescence in clearly defining what maturity is and looks like. These depictions of a distinct adolescent figure would not have been possible without the changes in understandings of race, from recapitulation theory’s blatant association of non-white people with youth to the lifespan development theory’s more subtle clarification of adulthood as heterosexual, white, and male. The creation of secondary schools as a special and important time and space for adolescence also made these depictions possible by providing an idealized and universal setting. Portrayals of teens in popular

68 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 58. 69 Rock Around the , directed by Fred F. Sears (1956; Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006) DVD; Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray (1955; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2010), DVD. 70 Nash, 173.

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culture simultaneously illustrate anxieties about adulthood, adolescence, and the nation, and offer suggestions for how to assuage these anxieties.

In time, cultural products focused on adolescents aimed at broad or primarily adult audiences, like Blackboard Jungle, were eclipsed by producers beginning to make films and television shows about teenagers for teenagers, and the emphasis on adults in adolescents’ lives in these products faded into the background. The American adolescent identity had crystallized, and by the 1980s it was routine to see stories about teenagers with little adult presence or involvement at all (The New Teen Titans included, as well as John Hughes films and television programs like Saved by the Bell71). Yet the persistence of comic books as a youth-oriented medium and the adult hero-adolescent sidekick relationship provides a lens to interpret the relationship between adolescents and adults throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. The sidekick-hero trope continued in force throughout the mid-century, even gaining some notable pairings, including Kid Flash (sidekick to The Flash; 1959) and (sidekick to ; 1960). 72

Robin and Batman likewise continued their adventures as the Dynamic Duo, offering a sustained avenue for analyzing the ways in which the teenage figure in popular culture continues to strengthen the conceptual linkages between maturity and straight white masculinity. Though this project’s Introduction noted that several characters have taken on the role of Robin, the figure introduced in 1940, Dick Grayson, has so far lasted the longest in his partnership with

Batman. This figure has also become a in cultural debates about superhero sexuality,

71 See, for example, The Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes (1985; New York: The Criterion Collection, 2018), Blu- Disc; Saved by the Bell, created by Sam Bobrick (1989-1992; : Shout! Factory, 2018), DVD. 72 John Broome and Carmine Infantino, “Meet Kid Flash!,” The Flash Volume 1 #110 (New York: DC Comics, 1959); Robert Bernstein and , “The Kid From !,” #269 (New York: DC Comics, 1960).

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offering a particularly deep well of portrayals in which to analyze the intersections of adolescent identity and sexuality, the subject of the following chapter.

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CHAPTER II. ROBIN, NIGHTWING, BATMAN: THE SHIFTING SEXUALITY OF DICK

GRAYSON

In a mid-nineteen nineties issue of the comic book Batman and Robin Adventures, the adolescent Robin, also known as Dick Grayson, is captured by the sultry .

He is tied up in her vines and under the influence of her love potion. She teases him with her arms around his neck and a leg around his hips: “You love me, don’t you, Robin? … You’d become my willing slave … just for the chance to kiss me again.” He eagerly responds in the affirmative and leans in for a kiss. “Teenagers,” she smirks, shoving him off balance and onto the ground. “You don’t start at the top floor with me, buster—you have to work your way up.”1

Entangled in Ivy’s vines are more than Robin’s limbs: wrapped up in this handful of panels are some key cultural assumptions about adolescent sexuality. As I review in Chapter

One, the deployment of adolescence in the early twentieth century provided a delimitation of adulthood and covered over the constructedness of maturity, which is reliant on other social identity categories, including whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. Adolescent sexuality, as this encounter between Robin and Poison Ivy reflects, typically at best approximates or dances around heterosexuality, but even as American attitudes toward adolescent sexuality have changed during the twentieth century, it remains difficult for teen sexuality to be coded as normatively heterosexual. Even Robin’s interest in sex here is portrayed as artificial—he is only interested in Ivy because of her pheromonal concoction. Sex is also depicted as dangerous for

Robin. By contrast, writers have portrayed Robin’s adult partner, Batman, as successful in heterosexual relationships throughout his 80-plus year history.2

1 , , and Rick Burchett, “Harley and Ivy and … Robin?,” Batman and Robin Adventures #8 (New York: DC Comics, 1996). 2 Bruce Wayne was depicted as engaged as early as 1939. , Bob Kane, and , “Batman versus the Part 1,” Detective Comics #31 (New York: DC Comics, 1939). 64

This chapter uses Dick Grayson/Robin as a case study to explore how notions of adolescent sexuality serve to shore up conceptual linkages between maturity and heterosexuality.

At stake in these analyses is a deeper understanding of the imbrications of heterosexuality and maturity, and how adult writers of adolescent popular media communicate scripts of sexual behavior and maturation to their audiences. Writers lean heavily on heterosexual activity and heteronormative relationships and parenting to signal Dick Grayson’s growth from adolescent to adult. These scripts serve to reify negative (or at best conflicting) cultural feelings toward adolescent sex and sexuality while also positing that maturity is restrictively defined by heterosexual activity.

I begin this chapter by laying out an argument for the interpretation of adolescent sexuality as always already understood as queer, providing a theoretical foundation for reading

Dick Grayson’s comic book maturation as a journey towards and marked by increasingly believable heterosexuality. The remainder of this chapter is organized into three key sections associated with Dick Grayson’s different identities: first, the youthful Robin, whose adolescence prevented creators from portraying him with anything but a strange or queer form of sexuality, lest he no longer read as adolescent or worse, read as deviant. Second, this chapter considers the transition writers crafted for Dick Grayson from Robin to the young adult hero Nightwing, who quickly became an icon of male heterosexuality—and who frequently found himself tied up by sexy villainesses with very different results than those described above.

Finally, this chapter analyzes Dick Grayson’s ascendance to the role of Batman, a representation of idealized maturity and patriarchal authority, and the ways in which creators continued to rely on indicators of heterosexual activity to mark this transition. These transformations are indicative of the ways in which sexuality and maturity are co-constructed. 65

Importantly, heterosexuality appears as a linchpin in writers’ ability to portray (and readers’ ability to perceive) Dick Grayson as fully mature. Indeed, I argue that this trait was in fact the key for him to transition from mere sidekick to independent hero; his whiteness and masculinity primed readers to imagine a someday-mature Dick Grayson, and once writers clearly signaled his maturity through heterosexual activity and heteronormative parenting, the role of both adult and hero were available to the character.

The Abnormality of Adolescent Sexuality

As Chapter One illustrates, adolescence developed to be a time of preparation for adulthood, the idealized version of which presumes whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity.

The Midway to White City path, which I discuss in detail in the previous chapter, provides a snapshot metaphor for these developments: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago positioned white male accomplishment, epitomized by the meta-architecture of the White City, as the pinnacle of civilization, with all other “races” displayed in a hierarchy leading up to it (on the stretch of land known as the Midway).3 Yet whiteness and masculinity alone were not enough to ensure one would make the leap from the Midway to the White City: as Richard Dyer asserts, “all concepts of race are always concepts of the body and also of heterosexuality,” since

“heterosexuality is the means of ensuring, but also the site of endangering, the reproduction” of race (among other hereditary traits).4 Whiteness, framed by early twentieth century social scientists as a pre-requisite for maturity, was inseparable from the heterosexuality which preserved and perpetuated said whiteness. Any threats to heterosexuality were also threats to whiteness, and if either trait were compromised, adulthood was also cast as out of .

3 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 4 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 20. 66

Idealized maturity thus demands heterosexuality, evidenced best by heterosexual reproduction and childrearing; as Jack Halberstam succinctly puts it, adulthood itself “rhymes with heterosexual parenting.”5 However, for heterosexual activity to be considered “normal” also requires maturity—that is to say, even if one does engage in heterosexual activity, but isn’t otherwise “adult enough,” then that heterosexual activity appears strange or not quite right, much like young Robin’s failure with Poison Ivy in the anecdote described above. In this case,

Robin’s inability to succeed in heterosexual activity is played for a laugh, and the punch line hinges on a societal understanding of teenage Robin being no for mature Ivy. Gayle

Rubin’s 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” offers a diagram showing how late twentieth century

Western societies perceived sexual activities, including (indirectly) this perceived strangeness of immature sexuality (Figure 2.1).6 More recently, Michael Warner has updated Rubin’s diagram into a streamlined T-chart organization (Table 2.2).7 Rubin and Warner lay out a dichotomy tracing American perceptions of certain sexual behaviors as “normal” (heterosexual, married, procreative, in private, vanilla/non-BDSM, etc.), and others as “abnormal” (homosexual, unmarried, non-procreative, in public, sado-masochistic, etc.). “Same generation” and “cross- generational” appear on the “normal” and “abnormal” sides, respectively, which might imply that sex between two fifteen-year-olds would land primarily in the “normal” set. However, the other descriptors all indicate that “same generation” also means “mature” (sex within marriage and in private, for instance, most often involves a collection of far more years than fifteen to accomplish).

5 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 119. 6 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), 279. 7 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 25-26. 67

Figure 2.1: Gayle Rubin’s “Charmed Circle” Diagram

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Good, Normal, Bad, Abnormal, Natural Unnatural Heterosexual Homosexual Married Unmarried Monogamous Promiscuous Procreative Nonprocreative Noncommercial Commercial In pairs Alone or in groups In a relationship Casual Same generation Cross-generational In private In public No pornography Pornography Bodies only With manufactured objects Vanilla Sadomasochistic

Table 2.2: Michael Warner’s Interpretation of Rubin’s Circle

In this sense, youthful sex is always abnormal, always unnatural, even when it meets other criteria describing “normal” sex. This always-already-abnormalness of youthful sexuality is evidenced still today by the pathologization of adolescent sex (in the United States, only 18 states require schools to teach contraceptive education, whereas 37 require information encouraging abstinence8) and the sensationalizing of irrefutably sexually active teens in myriad popular culture artifacts, such as MTV’s hit reality show “Teen Mom.”9 Despite the stars of this program having engaged in heterosexual, procreative, otherwise “normal” sex, they are framed as deviant and exotic for their sexual irresponsibility and excess—their youth makes their otherwise “normal” sexuality strange. Their youthful sexual activity is also an indicator of precocity, which, as Chapter One explains, is linked to fears of national degeneracy. Likely in an effort to avoid accusations of sensationalizing adolescent sex for their primarily young

8 “Sex and HIV Education,” Guttmacher Institute, last modified October 1, 2018, https://www.guttmacher.org/state- policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education 9 Teen Mom, produced by Morgan J. Freeman, Lauren Dolgen, Kenda Greenwood, Andrew Portnoy, Jessica Zalkind, Nick Predescu, Sara Cohen, and Hank Kaufman, aired 2009-2012 on MTV. 69

audiences, superhero comic book writers chose to avoid almost any indications of adolescent sexuality for the first few decades of the medium’s popularity.

However, a total lack or absence of sexuality in adolescents is similarly disquieting, reflecting what Kathryn Bond Stockton terms the child “queered by innocence.”10 In The Queer

Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Stockton argues that the ascription of innocence and lack of knowledge to children serves to make all children, to an extent, queer, strange, Other. Stockton argues that the forced innocence makes room for queerness in that delaying all sexuality means also delaying heterosexuality. Stockton writes, “despite our culture’s assuming every child’s straightness, the child can only be ‘not-yet-straight,’ since it, too, is not allowed to be sexual. The child who ‘will be’ straight is merely approaching while crucially delaying (in its own asynchronous fix) the official designation of straight sexuality, and therefore showing itself as estranged from what it would approach.”11 It is within this estrangement from straightness that queerness abides. In trying to avoid accusations of promoting precocity or otherwise glamorizing adolescent sex, comic book creators unwittingly made room for queer readings of their texts; by portraying teen characters such as Robin as not at all sexual, space for alternative interpretations opened up.

If we were thus to add absence or lack of sexual activity to Rubin’s categorizations, we might reorient Rubin and Warner’s diagrams into a spectrum (Figure 2.3). On this spectrum of sexual behaviors, the activities Rubin cites as “normal” would appear in the middle; absence or lack of sex and sexuality to its far left; and Rubin’s “unnatural” or deviant activities on the far right. Adolescents always appear on one end of the spectrum or the other. Teen sex is typically not procreative, nor married, and is often casual, and thus lands outside Rubin’s “charmed circle”

10 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 30. 11 Stockton, 7. 70

or on the right side of Warner’s table, but the utter absence of sexuality is a marker of (forced) innocent childhood and represents its own form of queerness. Both expressions of adolescent sexuality (too much or too little) help to highlight that maturity and “normal” heterosexuality go hand-in-hand and land squarely in the middle of the spectrum. The cases of Dick Grayson/Robin,

Dick Grayson/Nightwing, and Dick Grayson/Batman neatly illustrate how these roles appear in popular culture, as the remainder of this chapter will demonstrate.

Figure 2.3: Adding Absence of Sexuality to Rubin and Warner’s Diagrams

“The Sensational Character Find of 1940!”: Dick Grayson as Robin

Swinging into the pages of comics in 1940, Dick Grayson’s introduction and origin story are both featured in Detective Comics #38, “Robin: The Boy Wonder.”12 This issue, as well as ensuing storylines featuring Robin, all connect his youth to a form of queerness, primarily through innocence and absence of knowledge (in general and regarding sex specifically). Not only does the nickname “Boy Wonder” imply youthfulness, but the cover art of Robin’s debut issue makes his youthful contrast to Batman unmistakable (Figure 2.413). The cover shows

Batman standing erect wearing all dark colors—grey, black, cobalt blue. He seems to be attempting a smile, but it looks more like a grimace. The majority of Batman’s face is covered by a hooded mask attached to a black cape. In his right hand, he holds a large circus hoop with fabric or paper stretched over it, and jumping through the hoop is a smiling Robin. He is drawn

12 Bob Kane and Bill Finger, “Robin: The Boy Wonder,” Detective Comics #38 (New York: DC Comics, 1940). 13 Bob Kane and Bill Finger, “Robin: The Boy Wonder,” Detective Comics #38 (New York: DC Comics, 1940). 71

to be approximately half the size of Batman, and wears a brightly colored costume which leaves his and arms bare. He wears a small black eyemask, but most of his face remains visible.

His relative size, messy hair, and happy expression give the impression that Robin is very different from the large, composed, serious-faced, adult Batman.

Figure 2.4: Cover of Detective Comics #38

Dick Grayson is the son of acrobat/trapeze artist duo The Flying Graysons, employed by

Haly’s Circus, and already a skilled aerialist himself. When Mr. Haly is shaken down by Boss

Zucco’s mob, he refuses to purchase their “protection.” As a result, the mob rigs John and Mary

Grayson’s trapeze ropes to snap mid-performance, and young Dick watches his parents fall to their deaths. Mr. Haly is forced to make a deal with the mob to prevent further “accidents,” while

Dick attempts to go to the police. He is stopped in his tracks by Bruce Wayne, who witnessed the accident and is aware that Zucco owns the police. Bruce Wayne takes Grayson in as his ward and 72

eventually as his crime-fighting partner. Together they successfully take down Zucco and his mob, restoring order to the town and avenging the deaths of Dick’s parents.

Dick Grayson was introduced with a costumed identity somewhat separate from his real self already in place, one which already connoted a form of strangeness and fluidity: that of a circus performer. In discussing the bodies of aerialists, Peta Tait notes consistent challenging of hegemonic gender boundaries in early trapeze artistry: “male bodies in graceful flight displayed contradicting manliness and muscular females went completely against prevailing social patterns of bodily restraint.” 14 However, Tait continues, “by the twentieth century aerial performance had become associated with femininity in popular perception.”15 Unlike Batman, whose alter-ego of billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne exudes masculinity through a long family history of wealth and power in Gotham and his pick of the city’s bachelorettes, Robin was coded from the beginning as feminine, flexible, and nomadic. Dick Grayson’s colorful acrobat costume, collapsible home, and movable life all contrast sharply with the groundedness and seriousness of the Wayne family’s legacy and contribute to a reading of Grayson as already queer.

Though Dick Grayson/Robin’s introduction is already sufficiently riddled with signifiers of instability, his status after the death of his parents exacerbated the danger to his

“proper” maturation and further connected his youthfulness to homoeroticism and queerness.

Early in the twentieth century, homeless, orphaned, or otherwise unsupervised youths came to be viewed as dangerous. Adolescents fending for themselves denoted a form of precocity which was increasingly considered a sign of degeneracy. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl notes, this fear of precocity was a coded fear of sexual variance. She writes, “by raising the working age, raising the mandatory schooling age, protecting children from controversies, and making sure that they

14 Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. 15 Tait, 4. 73

had no sex education or knowledge of birth control, educators were hoping to create homogeneity where there was none.”16 This lengthy preparation meant that adolescents were protected and controlled, their growth closely monitored to ensure proper slow development.

Though eventual independence and vigor were ideal, such precocity in youth led to profligacy, promiscuity, and exploration of non-procreative sexuality. The term “streetwise” is rather informative here: it implies a form of wisdom or knowledge available to or children otherwise spending time on the streets, and it was precisely this fear of knowledge which connected early twentieth century anxieties surrounding hooliganism and sexual deviance.

Robin’s Innocence: The “Too Little” End of the Spectrum

In order to short-circuit fears of “streetwise-ness” in their character, writers had Dick

Grayson/Robin immediately rescued from orphanhood by Bruce Wayne, and worked hard to illustrate his innocence and lack of knowledge in his early storylines. Too much knowledge or experience could be indicators of precocity, which would threaten Robin’s “normal” development. In order to prevent such categorization of Dick Grayson/Robin, early authors penned the youth with wide-eyed curiosity and reverence of Batman’s own smarts. Though

Batman trusted Robin as his partner in crime-fighting, historian J. L. Bell writes that “Robin was just as important as someone Batman does not tell everything to. A thrilling adventure or puzzling mystery depends on readers not knowing just how things will turn out … Robin functions as the readers’ baffled but curious stand-in.”17 These moments typically play out similar to the panel in Batman #2 (1940), in which Robin asks “What’s your plan, Batman?”

Bruce responds with a very lengthy explanation of how he will capture, subdue, and transport the

16 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998): 336. 17 J. L. Bell, “Success in Stasis: Dick Grayson’s Thirty Years as Boy Wonder,” in Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing, and Batman, ed. Kristen L. Geaman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 11. 74

villainous Joker, where he will be treated by psychiatrists and hopefully “cured.”18 In all,

Batman’s response is a whopping 48 words in one speech bubble, all thanks to Robin’s initial four-word question.

Robin also gives Batman the opportunity to explain various scientific, historical, and mythological happenings. In 1947’s World’s Finest Comics #30, Batman and Robin are both trapped in a windowless room as carbon monoxide pours in. Batman asks Robin for some salt water as Robin cries, “I hope you know what you’re doing—’cause I don’t!” Robin somehow manages to find the salt water, and Batman uses blotting paper, telephone wire, “one old copper penny … and one new zinc-coated penny, of the type issued during the war,” and the salinized water to make a battery, to enliven the telephone wires, to send an SOS message.19 Similarly complicated situations occurred regularly, leaving readers to conclude that Robin knows very little, whereas Batman knows very much.

Dick Grayson/Robin’s innocence and unknowingness contributes to what Neil

Shyminsky considers his “alternative masculinity.” Shyminsky borrows the concept of alternative masculinity from Jack Halberstam, and argues that the alternative masculinity of young sidekicks serves “to obscure and diffuse … the anxiety that is endemic to the superhero’s identity and sexuality, allowing them to appear to be unproblematically hetero, masculine, and

‘real.’”20 Here, Shyminsky hints at the link between heterosexuality and maturity, and notes the sidekick’s role in reflecting its opposite: the relationship between queer sexuality and youth.

Importantly, Shyminsky also calls upon Stockton’s assertion of innocence as the source of youthful queerness in his assessment of the sidekick’s role: “Although ostensibly growing

18 Bob Kane and Bill Finger, “ Meets the ,” Batman #2 (New York: DC Comics, 1940). 19 Don Cameron and , “The Penny Plunderers!” World’s Finest Comics #30 (New York: DC Comics, 1947). 20 Neil Shyminsky. “‘Gay’ Sidekicks: Queer Anxiety and the Narrative Straightening of the Superhero,” Men and Masculinities 14, no. 3 (2011): 290. doi: 10.1177/1097184X10368787. 75

into full-fledged heterosexual and hero status, [sidekicks] are presently too weak, too innocent, and in need of a particular sort of guidance: at once both like and unlike the heteronormative hero” (emphasis mine).21 Accordingly, Robin absorbs any latent homoeroticism in Batman stories, clearing the way for Batman/Bruce Wayne to be perceived as fully heterosexual. In other words, if the sexuality of these two characters were to be mapped on the spectrum laid out above,

Batman’s would appear far more central than Robin’s.

Shyminsky also highlights Robin’s adolescent recklessness as a feminizing force, offering Batman the opportunity to assert his traditional heterosexual masculinity. In Batman #11

(1942), for instance, Robin is captured by a gaggle of in a sewer after chasing them alone, where he is held and almost drowned. Batman, of course, is able to rescue

Robin, but the text of the comic makes clear that Robin is an “impatient, foolhardy, young daredevil.”22 Again and again in Batman and Detective Comics of the Golden Age, authors describe Robin as “reckless,” “impulsive,” “impatient,” “impetuous,” or some variation thereof.

Writers of these comics thus contributed to and reinforced the image of the American teenager as one characterized by risk-taking. Like his innocence, Robin’s impulsivity helped code him as a youthful character, but it also resulted in Robin appearing as a “” on more than one occasion. As the introduction of this chapter illustrates, this feminization of Robin remains a recurring theme, as writers continue to communicate the conceptual linkages between youth and queerness through the character.

The Anti-Comics Crusade

While Shyminsky makes a retrospective argument that such reinforcement of young

Robin’s queerness freed Batman to be read as traditionally masculine, heterosexual, and mature,

21 Shyminsky, 291. 22 Bill Finger and Bob Kane, “The Joker’s Advertising Campaign,” Batman #11 (New York: DC Comics, 1942). 76

some anti-comics of the 1950s saw Robin instead as an object of affection for Batman, and the movement’s leaders swiftly condemned their relationship. The anti-comics crusade was an outgrowth of culture wars in which comic books became a scapegoat for anxiety about juvenile delinquency (of which homosexual behavior was one aspect) as the pendulum of

American beliefs about teenagers swung hard away from fresh-faced Andy Hardy types. Teens armed with spending money and free time spurred moral over juvenile delinquency, while films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) vividly portrayed the dangers of youth indulged or unsupervised.23

During a series of senate hearings on juvenile delinquency in 1954, comic books were identified as a catalyst of dangerous behavior, and their censorship was presented as an obvious solution to rid the nation of this scourge. By this time superhero comic books took up a significantly smaller share of newsstand real estate than they had shortly after Superman and

Batman’s introductions, but crime and , often accompanied by violent and gory images, had also become popular in the 1940s, with increasing publication late in the decade.24

While these narratives were considered particularly dangerous, superhero comics were by no means immune to criticism. The most famous critiques of superhero comics came from child psychologist and author . Wertham was highly critical of all genres of comic books, and while his views were progressive in terms of racial injustice, the same cannot be said of his stance on sexuality.25 His homophobic fervor was on full display in his critiques of superhero comics, Batman and Robin included.

23 Blackboard Jungle, directed by Richard Brooks (1955; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005), DVD; Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray (1955; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010), DVD. 24 Amy Kiste Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 36. 25 Wertham feared “jungle” comics too often portrayed non-white people as unintelligent and in need of rescue by a white person, and research he had conducted for a prior court case was even submitted as evidence in the landmark desegregation case Brown vs. Board of Education. Nyberg, 93. 77

In his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham identifies Batman and Robin as promoting homosexual desire in youths—a form of degeneracy and precursor to other delinquent behavior, according to Wertham. He describes Batman and Robin comics “like a wish of two homosexuals living together,” assuring readers that “only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventure of the mature ‘Batman’ and his young friend ‘Robin.’”26Andy Medhurst, who wittily embraces queer readings of Batman and

Robin in his “Batman, Deviance and Camp,” writes that Wertham was full of “anguished concern about the potential harm that Batman might do to vulnerable children.”27 Furthermore,

Medhurst states that “the child, for Wertham, seems an unusually innocent, blank slate waiting to be written on.”28 Yet it was not unusual at all for Wertham to assume the innocence and blank- ness of children. On the contrary, by the mid-twentieth century children had been conceptually hollowed out for decades, and their innocence was a key unspoken assumption of Wertham and other moral crusaders’ arguments. The anti-comics crusade was defined largely by fears that comics and other media were corrupting these inherently innocent youths, and such corruption would lead to delinquency and degeneracy—for what are children if not blank, empty, hollow, merely waiting to be filled?

Though contemporary comics scholars such as Bart Beaty have worked to reframe

Wertham’s place in collective memory, his name remains rather synonymous with the anti-

26 Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (London: Museum Press, 1955). Instructive regarding the level of fear inspired by homosexuality in the mid-century, Wertham seems more concerned with “homoeroticism” than child abuse, arguing that these stories inspired homosexuality but not that they might also normalize adult-youth sexual relationships. 27 Andy Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance and Camp,” in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, ed. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (London: Routledge, 1991), 150. 28 Medhurst, 150. 78

comics crusade of the mid-century.29 As Beaty and Nyberg both describe, Wertham is often misremembered as nothing but a homophobic fear-monger and hysterical critic of comic books, when in reality his critiques were far more nuanced and concerned with mass culture’s effects on children more broadly. Part of the reason for this misremembering, however, is that Wertham won few victories in his war against all mass culture aimed at children, but his testimony at the senate hearings on juvenile delinquency in 1954 did incite major publishing houses in the comics industry to begin heavily censoring their own products via the . The

Code’s seal of approval ensured grocers and newsstand operators that a comic’s content was acceptable for children, and thus it could be sold with little fear of parental retribution. Though crime and horror comics were the hardest hit by this censorship, superhero comics had to adjust some of their content as well.

Heteronormalizing Robin: Toeing the Line of “Too Much”

For writers whose titles featured Robin, the Code meant a forceful regime of attempted heteronormalization. I say “attempted” here because Robin serving as Batman’s teen sidekick precluded any consistent perception of him as performing heterosexuality. Were Robin to engage in sexual activity, his status as normatively adolescent would be compromised: he would read as either maturing, perhaps a little too quickly, or as deviant. Yet in an effort to ward off critiques similar to Wertham’s, comic creators forced Robin into a series of awkward “relationships” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1957’s Batman #107, for example, Robin finds himself entranced by the beautiful young figure skater Vera Lovely. They even go on a soda shop date, but Vera’s manager interferes before they can have a second date—worried about her public image, he tells each of them separately that the other broke the date. Even though the manager realizes the error of his ways and helps Dick and Vera “patch up their misunderstanding” by the

29 Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005). 79

end of the issue, Robin still tells Batman “From now on, I’m keeping my mind on criminals, not girls!”30 Here we see authors hint at Robin’s heterosexuality, while maintaining his distance from it in order to not imply precocity or that Dick Grayson was growing out of adolescence.

The introduction of Batgirl in 1961 saw Dick Grayson similarly reject romantic interest.

At the end of her first issue, Batgirl (also known as Betty Kane) expresses her excitement for the next adventure: “Oh I can hardly wait! And perhaps Robin and I can work on a case together too!

Well Robin—is it a date?” she asks, to which Robin, aghast, simply replies “Ulp!”31 Writers hinted at Robin’s heterosexuality in an attempt to ward off accusations of homosexuality, but because they worked within the confines of the always-already queer nature of adolescent sexuality, actual sexual activity involving Robin remained something they could not comfortably portray. As an adolescent character, heterosexual activity for Robin would not have made Robin appear more normal; it would have merely made his sexuality deviant in a different way by sending it from the “too little” to the “too much” end of the spectrum. In order for heterosexual activity to appear normal and heteronormal for Robin, writers would have had to age him, a tactic they eventually turned to in the 1970s.

Prior attempts to heteronormalize Robin had consisted of introducing female characters in order to hint at Robin’s heterosexuality and then quickly writing them off in order to maintain his youthful innocence. Beginning with 1969’s Batman #217, creators began to instead depict

Dick Grayson/Robin’s maturation and give him actual girlfriends, reinforcing the notion that maturity and heterosexuality go hand in hand, while youth will always connote a form of queerness. Individual development, which indicates the passage of time, is incredibly rare in comics; Umberto Eco describes their serialized monthly release as “aesthetically and

30 Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff, “Robin Falls in Love,” Batman #107 (New York: DC Comics, 1957). 31 Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff, “Bat-Girl!” Batman #139 (New York: DC Comics, 1961). 80

commercially deprived of the possibility of narrative development.”32 In order to prevent a sense of characters’ progression towards death, Eco notes that in Superman (and other superhero) stories, “the notion of time which ties one episode to another” breaks down, because “a confused notion of time is the only condition which makes the story credible.”33 In this sense, the serialized comic narrative itself represents an embrace of what Jack Halberstam terms “queer time,” or a general rejection of “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family.”34 It seems that DC Comics creators understood that defying comic books’ “queer time” nature, granting Robin more knowledge and experience, and embracing a notion of time connected to heterosexual reproduction was the key to affirming his heterosexuality. However, creators’ initial reticence in this endeavor is evident: for most of the 1970s, writers’ apparent unwillingness to commit to a truly adult Robin meant that these half-hearted attempts to straighten Robin out continued to be rather ineffective.

This temerity with which writers ventured into Dick Grayson’s maturation is clear in

1969’s Batman #217, in which he is depicted as leaving for college. His typical chipper attitude is on display as he consoles Bruce Wayne and Alfred: “Aw, c’mon fellas—we’re all grown up now! Stop acting like you’re attending my—funeral!” He hedges a bit when next asserting his maturity: “I’m a man now! ‘Least—that’s what my draft card says … Plus my acceptance at

Hudson University!”35 Writer thus imbues Dick Grayson with uncertainty about

32 Umberto Eco, “The Myth of the Superman,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 110. 33 Eco, 115, 116. 34 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 6. By the same token, the comic book’s embrace of non-linear or non-rational time is in fact a marketing tool, a means of maintaining sales of an already-beloved character. This rejection of traditional modes and perceptions of time is not born of resistance towards bourgeois/capitalistic chronological restrictions, but precisely to operate successfully within them. 35 Frank Robbins, Irv Norvick, and , “One Bullet Too Many!” Batman #217 (New York: DC Comics, 1969). 81

his maturity level—though he has attained some markers of adulthood, he is unsure whether or not he is truly a “man.”

In the early 1970s Robin was finally re-branded from “Boy Wonder” to “Teen Wonder,” though as a college freshman he had probably been a “teen” for several years. Efforts to make

Robin appear more mature in these comics relied on heterosexual relationships as an obvious marker of adulthood, but these efforts still fell relatively flat due to constant reminders of

Robin’s adolescence and the difficulty of perceiving adolescents as normatively heterosexual.

Robin was given a college sweetheart named Lori Elton who appeared in the titles Batman

Family and Detective Comics. In their detailed exploration of the Batman Family series,

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Cesar Alfonso Marino note that Lori was introduced as already being Robin’s girlfriend, with no real back story or even a meet-cute, which they argue

“indicated that the editors and writers were anxious to sexualize Grayson.”36 Things between

Robin and Lori don’t work out, and he later declares his love for , who is in this series significantly older than he is (she is an elected U.S. Congressperson, meaning she is at least 25 years old, whereas Robin is an 18- or 19-year old college freshman). Even in this heterosexually-charged conversation with Barbara, however, Robin again reveals a rather slippery grasp of maturity: he begins his proclamation of love with “I’m a big boy now and I have to say something you might not want to hear.”37 Barbara does not reciprocate Robin’s feelings, and the two costumed crimefighters go their separate ways, leaving Robin romantically single, professionally partner-less, and looking like not quite as big of a boy as he thought.

Writers appear to be struggling with granting Robin an aura of heteronormativity without

36 Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and César Alfonso Marino, “Outlining the Future Robin: The Seventies in the Batman Family,” in Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing, and Batman, ed. Kristen L. Geaman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015): n34, p. 39. 37 and , “The Man Who Melted !,” Batman Family #13 (New York: DC Comics, 1977). 82

committing to heterosexuality, as his lingering adolescence (“Teen Wonder”) implies sexual activity for him could read as deviant.

In comics of the 1970s Robin also battles a female villain who takes on the personalities of the daughters of Batman’s nemeses—Joker’s Daughter, Scarecrow’s Daughter, etc. Though

Batman’s liaisons with female villains like Catwoman and Poison Ivy have almost always had sexual undertones (or overtones, especially in the case of Ivy’s debut as a seductress in 196638),

Robin’s tangles with this villainous girl are not presented as a temptation for Robin and do little to amplify his heterosexuality. Instead, they serve to feminize him, just as his frequent capture and rescue had in earlier comics. These Daughters are not in any way major criminals or dangerous maniacs; they commit small crimes such as larceny, allowing Robin to display little more superheroism than an average beat cop. In the end, the villain is not even really a villain, but merely trying to catch Robin’s attention so she can become a hero herself. As Berns and

Marino write, these pairings “[do] not connect Robin with maturity but with inoffensiveness.”39

Antagonistic female characters such as only begin to provide sexual tension when Dick

Grayson is re-written as the adult Nightwing, a shift which began with Dick Grayson joining the

Teen Titans in 1980.

Nightwing: Dick Grayson Becomes a (Straight) Man

By 1980, Robin had been largely on his own for eleven real-time years in the comics, and in seeking to capitalize on the popularity of Marvel superhero teams such as the X-Men, DC

Comics enlisted Robin in a re-vamping of the all-adolescent superhero team The Teen Titans.

Written by Marv Wolfman and illustrated by George Pérez, The New Teen Titans comic followed the adventures of a youthful team of superheroes, all roughly 18-21 years old, some of

38 and Sheldon Moldoff, “Beware of—Poison Ivy!” Batman #181 (New York: DC Comics, 1966). 39 Pagnoni Berns and Marino, 35. 83

whom were former sidekicks, including Dick Grayson/Robin. This move would prove pivotal in

Dick Grayson’s maturation. Though The New Teen Titans echoed Batman Family in relying on heterosexual relationships as a signifier of adulthood, the 1980s title communicated this signification far more clearly by committing to aging Dick Grayson and illustrating a believable—and physical—heterosexual relationship.

Dick Grayson’s first canonical sexual relationship is with fellow Titan . Writer

Marv Wolfman perfectly aligns the trajectory of this relationship—and when sexual activity enters into it—with Dick Grayson’s separation from Batman, abandonment of his youthful Robin identity, and adoption of his mature alter-ego, Nightwing. The first issue of The New Teen

Titans, dated December 1980, introduced Starfire, and in the second issue Starfire and Robin share their first kiss. As it turns out, Starfire’s species acquires language via any form of physical contact, though she chooses mouth-to-mouth because she found Dick “really cute” and felt that the contact would be “more enjoyable this way.”40 Despite Starfire’s clear interest in

Dick Grayson/Robin, author Marv Wolfman maintained “will they/won’t they” romantic tension until 1982’s issue #26. Even then, Robin’s confession is less than convincing: “I know I love you,” Starfire tells him, to which Robin responds “I only think I may love you.”41 The slow burn of Robin and Starfire’s relationship recalls the gradual progression toward adulthood which had been sentimentalized since the early twentieth century, demonstrating Wolfman’s understanding of cultural expectations regarding adolescent sexuality even as he worked to portray a mature romantic relationship between the two.

40 Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, “The New Teen Titans!,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #1 (New York: DC Comics, 1980); Wolfman and Pérez, “Today…the Terminator!,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #2 (New York: DC Comics, 1980). 41 Wolfman and Pérez, “,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #26 (New York: DC Comics, 1982). 84

Writers of The New Teen Titans emphasized the romantic relationship between Dick

Grayson and Starfire as both catalyst for and evidence of his maturation. In issue #39, Dick proclaims, “I’m giving up being Robin.” When Starfire asks if he is leaving her, too, he describes his decision to give up being Robin as “the opposite” of leaving Starfire. Up until now, he claimed he still thought of himself as “swinging alongside the Batman, still his kid partner.” But, he assures his teammates, “I’m not the same kid.” He continues: “I simply can’t be Robin anymore. I have to become someone—an adult. Whoever Dick Grayson decides to be.”42 Later, as he takes off the last of his Robin costume, Starfire reaches out to assist, “Let me help, honey.”

Dick replies, “you already have. More than you know.” In this scene, Wolfman and Pérez intimately link Dick Grayson’s maturation and heterosexuality: the final jettisoning of his Robin identity becomes a moment of sexually-charged disrobing. It is Starfire who removes the last vestiges of Robin from Dick Grayson’s body, as he verbally notes the importance their relationship has had in his personal growth.

Within five real-time months of shedding his Robin identity, Wolfman and Pérez debuted

Dick Grayson as the adult hero Nightwing.43 In the issue following this debut, he is shown in bed with Starfire, the first mainstream comic book characters to be depicted as such.44 It is of note that Dick Grayson and Starfire are only depicted as sexually active after Dick Grayson becomes

Nightwing; as Robin, Dick Grayson was still connected to adolescent identity and its inherent estrangement from heterosexuality. DC Comics’ depiction of Dick Grayson as grown up thus relies on heterosexual activity, and this heterosexual activity is likewise admissible now that he has matured.

42 Wolfman and Pérez, “Crossroads,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #39 (New York: DC Comics, 1984). 43 Wolfman and Pérez, “The Judas Contract Book Three: There Shall Come a Titan!,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #44 (New York: DC Comics, 1984). 44 Wolfman and Pérez, “Shadows in the Dark!,” The New Teen Titans Volume 2 #1 (New York: DC Comics, 1984). 85

Replacement Robins and Nightwing’s Relative Maturity

Though Starfire and Robin’s relationship is the clearest indicator of Dick Grayson’s maturation, the introduction of a new Robin likewise shored up Grayson’s own access to maturity, much as his originally did for Batman. Dick Grayson is ultimately freed from serving as Batman’s support by Bruce Wayne’s adoption of a new Robin, to whom Dick Grayson gifts his old Robin costume once Starfire has stripped him of it. This new Robin, named Jason Todd, was the result of DC Comics editors “want[ing] Robin back,” according to Marv Wolfman.45

Unwilling to separate him from the Titans, Wolfman suggested DC Comics design a new character to partner with Batman, so they introduced Jason as a new young partner for Bruce

Wayne.46

Though Jason’s first origin story was a virtual copy of Dick Grayson’s, his more well- known and popular back story casts him as a streetwise hooligan, ripping off car parts to survive since his mother died of a drug overdose.47 Despite this origin story being published over forty years after Dick Grayson’s introduction, American anxiety over juvenile delinquency and kids living on the street ran just as hot as it did in 1940. Jason’s exposure to “street-wisdom” and precocity left a lasting hardness to Jason, who curses, smokes, and disobeys (and would much later be re-introduced as an antagonistic gun-loving adult character). Importantly, Jason’s rough- and-tumble nature and improper early development also helped emphasize Dick Grayson’s achievement of many markers of maturity: attending college, being in a serious relationship, abandoning his youthful identity. Though he was far from Jason’s primary caregiver, serving as

45 Marv Wolfman, afterword to Batman: A Death in the Family, Jim Starlin, Marv Wolfman, Jim Aparo, and George Pérez (New York: DC Comics, 2011), 145. 46 Marv Wolfman, afterword to Batman: A Death in the Family, Jim Starlin, Marv Wolfman, Jim Aparo, and George Pérez, ed. Robin Wildman (New York: DC Comics, 2011), 146. 47 , , and Dick Giordano, “Just Another Kid on Crime Alley,” Batman #409 (New York: DC Comics, 1987). 86

an additional mentor to the youth helped to position Dick Grayson alongside Batman, the avatar of idealized maturity.

Jason’s death and the subsequent storyline “A Lonely Place of Dying” deepen Dick

Grayson/Nightwing’s access to both heterosexuality and maturity. A 1988 call-in campaign gave readers the chance to decide Jason’s fate: fans could call one of two 1-900 numbers to cast a vote for Jason’s survival, or call the other to cast a vote for his death.48 As a result, Jason was brutally murdered by the Joker. Just a handful of issues later, another young boy was introduced: Tim

Drake, who has cleverly deduced the identities of Batman and both former Robins. In The New

Teen Titans #60 (1989), this character seeks Dick Grayson out when Batman’s grief over Jason’s death drives him to act violently.49 He believes “Robin” tempers Batman, softening his hard edges and reining in his internal darkness.

Tim first visits the apartment Dick Grayson shares with his paramour, Starfire. She answers the door in a short, low-cut bathrobe and tells Tim that Dick has left the Titans (and, ostensibly, her).50 She is of course also eager to find him and bring him back, and Tim turns out to be the key to reconnecting Dick and Starfire. Tim finds Dick Grayson at the old circus where he grew up and tells him, “It’s important. I need you. Batman needs you.”51 Dick Grayson is reluctant to return, having fallen out with Batman recently, but Tim eventually convinces Dick

Grayson to return to . However, he is dismayed when Dick goes out to help Batman in his new Nightwing costume: “No, not Nightwing, Dick, don’t you understand? Batman needs

Robin! Doesn’t anyone understand?” Against Tim’s protestations, Dick refuses to identify with

48 Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo, “A Death in the Family: Chapters Three and Four,” Batman #427 (New York: DC Comics, 1988). 49 Marv Wolfman, George Pérez, and Tom Grummett, “A Lonely Place of Dying Chapter Two: Roots,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #60 (New York: DC Comics, 1989). 50 Marv Wolfman, George Pérez, Jim Aparo, and Mike DeCarlo, “A Lonely Place of Dying Chapter One: Suspects,” Batman #440 (New York: DC Comics, 1989). 51 Marv Wolfman, George Pérez, and Tom Grummett, “A Lonely Place of Dying Chapter Two: Roots,” The New Teen Titans Volume 1 #60 (New York: DC Comics, 1989). 87

his adolescent self and insists on retaining his adult identity as Nightwing. Alfred, the trusted family butler, replies, “Perhaps, young man, perhaps Master Dick understands profoundly— perhaps that is why he brought you here.”52 With Alfred’s help (as well as his interpretation of

Dick’s implicit approval), Tim becomes the next Robin. In having Dick Grayson essentially name the next Robin, creators indicate he has attained a level of maturity far closer to that of

Batman’s own. Finally, by including Starfire and a visit to her and Dick’s shared apartment, writers highlight this heterosexual relationship as a crucial aspect of Dick Grayson/Nightwing’s mature identity.

Writers continued Dick Grayson/Nightwing and Starfire’s relationship for roughly ten real-time years, and the pair have been written on-again and off-again since that time. However,

Dick Grayson has been given plenty of opportunity to flex his heterosexuality even when he was not depicted in a relationship with Starfire. In his own title, launched in 1996, Nightwing has a brief fling with his building super, Bridget Clancy.53 These comics also hinted at a romantic past between Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon, which didn’t necessarily exist before and is therefore what comic readers would call a “retcon,” short for “retroactive change in .”

Later, Nightwing had a one-night stand with Huntress, and though he wished to pursue the relationship further, she did not reciprocate his feelings.54 In the 2000s, he fell into a somewhat abusive relationship featuring an infamous scene of non-consensual sex, in which a character called Tarantula forces herself onto an exhausted and mentally unstable Dick Grayson.55 DC

52 Marv Wolfman and Jim Aparo, “A Lonely Place of Dying Chapter Three: Parallel Lines,” Batman #441 (New York: DC Comics, 1989). 53 Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel, Nightwing Volume 1: A Knight in Bludhaven (New York: DC Comics, 1996). 54 Devin Grayson and , Nightwing/Huntress Volume 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1998). 55 Devin Grayson and , “Slow Burn,” Nightwing Volume 2 #93 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). This instance recalls Dick Grayson-as-Robin’s frequent feminizing capture and attempted seduction by villains like Poison Ivy, though certainly takes it to a more extreme level. Its author, Devin Grayson, likewise links Dick’s relationship with Tarantula to a sort of age regression, claiming he was “in sidekick mode” while attached to her. Through this admission, Dick Grayson’s feminization and youth are once again connected, preserving the masculine 88

Comics’ New 52 in 2011 brought Dick Grayson and the daughter of his parents’ killer,

Sonia Zucco, into a romantic relationship,56 while his side gig as a secret agent for the organization known as Spyral saw him flirt excessively with Huntress (again) and sleep with fellow agent Alia.57 Beginning in 2017, Nightwing has been depicted in a long-term relationship with villain-turned-superheroine Shawn Tsang.58 As if these relationships (and more) were not enough evidence that the Boy Wonder’s formerly absent sexuality is now fully present and accounted for, Dick Grayson/Nightwing was also listed the number one “Sexiest Male Comic

Book Characters” by popular fansite Comics Alliance.59 Most indicative of writers’ investment in Dick Grayson attaining idealized maturity, though, are his two stints as the Batman himself.

Progressing Toward Idealized Adulthood: Dick Grayson as Batman

Though Dick Grayson/Nightwing embodied maturity and heterosexuality through mentorship of younger figures and physical relationships with female characters, Batman remains the ultimate avatar of idealized maturity. In the so-called Bat-family of comics, Batman is the patriarch. However, Dick Grayson’s whiteness and masculinity indicated that he would eventually ascend to idealized maturity. Recall Neil Shyminsky’s assertion that Robin and other sidekicks were “ostensibly growing into full-fledged heterosexual and hero status.”60 The abandonment of Eco’s suspended time meant that this full-fledged status, epitomized by the figure of Batman, would be available to Dick Grayson once the key supporting trait of

heterosexuality of the adult Nightwing. Devin Grayson had planned to show Nightwing processing the assault in subsequent issues, but this effort was cut short by the editorial decision to launch War Games, a major which will be discussed in detail in Chapter Four. Kristen L. Geaman, “Grayson on Grayson,” in Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing and Batman, ed. Kristen L. Geaman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 305. 56 and , Nightwing Volume 3: Death of the Family. (New York: DC Comics, 2012). 57 , Tom King, and Mikel Janín, Grayson Volume 1: Agents of Spyral. (New York: DC Comics, 2014). 58 Tim Seeley and Javier Fernandez, Nightwing Volume 3: Nightwing Must Die! (Burbank: DC Comics, 2017). 59 Andrew Wheeler, “Comics Alliance Presents the 50 Sexiest Male Characters in Comics,” Comics Alliance, last modified February 14, 2013. http://comicsalliance.com/comics-sexiest-male-characters/. 60 Shyminsky, 291. 89

heterosexuality fell into place. In two separate instances of Bruce Wayne’s absence, writers cast

Dick as Batman to explore his approach toward idealized adulthood. What these two stories reveal is that full idealized maturity relies not only on heterosexual activity, but (as Rubin and

Warner also highlighted) heterosexual activity with parenthood in mind.

“Batman: Prodigal,” Sans Son

The first instance of Dick Grayson taking on the mantle of illustrates an as-yet incomplete maturation process for the original Robin. This storyline, Batman: Prodigal, ran in just twelve single issues from 1994-1995.61 As Bruce departs on a special project far away from

Gotham City, he tells Dick, “Take care of them … in my stead … I know you will.”62 It’s clear from this exchange and others that writers meant for Dick Grayson to act as a steward of the

Batman identity, trying it on, testing it out, but not fully claiming it for himself. Dick Grayson thinks to himself, “I’m the Batman, but the Batman is not me. Dick Grayson, Robin, Nightwing,

Batman—all the same, all different, all me … but not quite. Robin’s skin, shed long ago, is now worn by another—and being Batman is only temporary.”63 The authors here hint at the fact that

Dick Grayson is rather isolated since he has left the Teen Titans after he and Starfire broke up. In turn, the writers put Dick Grayson back in touch with some of his other allies, like Jim Gordon, though these characters do significantly less to shore up his heterosexuality than Starfire and the other Titans did.

61 Chuck Dixon, , , , and , Batman: Prodigal (New York: DC Comics, 1998). 62 Doug Moench and Mike Gustovich, “Prodigal: Robin and Batman,” Batman #512 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 63 Doug Moench and Ron Wagner, “Prodigal: One Night in the War Zone,” Batman #514 (New York: DC Comics, 1995). 90

Gotham City police officer-turned-Commissioner Jim Gordon was introduced in the same issue as Batman himself, even earlier than Robin.64 Though Gordon is generally depicted as unaware of Batman’s , he has nonetheless known and trusted Batman throughout their relationship, advocating for Batman even when the police force has periodically tried to arrest the . In Batman: Prodigal, Gordon immediately realizes that he is facing a new and different Batman; he “no longer knows the man in the costume,” and he struggles throughout to trust this figure.65 The comic’s creators show Jim Gordon, another avatar of mature heterosexual masculinity, rejecting Dick Grayson’s claim to the Batman identity. Writers had already given Dick Grayson many of the accoutrements of idealized adulthood by Prodigal’s release, but they withheld key evidence of maturity writers had granted to Bruce Wayne again and again: fatherhood.

Importantly, Dick Grayson does work with a Robin in Prodigal, teen genius Tim Drake, but this relationship is portrayed as far from fatherly. Unlike Dick Grayson, Tim Drake is not an orphan and is depicted as somewhat distant from Bruce Wayne throughout his tenure as Robin.

Writers gave Tim a complex personal life of his own: he lives in his own home with his father,

Jack, attends high school, and spends time with his girlfriend, Ariana Dzerchenko. By Tim’s introduction, writers had a lexicon of teenage behavior from which to draw, unlike when Dick

Grayson was introduced and the concept of the teenager was still nascent. They wisely mobilized the expected adolescent behaviors of parental conflict, hormonal urges, and identity formation to give Tim emotional depth and complexity, making him a relatable character with boundaries between his two selves. (Tim’s long-term relationship with his girlfriend, Ariana, also demonstrates that by the 1990s there was somewhat more room for adolescents to engage in

64 Bob Kane and Bill Finger, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate,” Detective Comics #27 (New York: DC Comics, 1939). 65 Alan Grant and Bret Blevins, “Prodigal: Two,” Batman: Shadow of the Bat #32 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 91

forms of intimacy without reading as deviant, though Tim is decidedly not sexually active.

Creators offer in Tim an updated estrangement from sex with which writers of the 1950s and 60s cast Dick Grayson: he can hold, kiss, and caress Ariana, but when she comes onto him in sexy lingerie, he confesses he is “not ready” and gently rebuffs her advances.66)

Though writers gave Bruce Wayne somewhat restricted opportunities to parent Tim, in

Batman: Prodigal Dick and Tim are presented with no connotations of parenthood at all. Instead, they are portrayed fraternally. They both jokingly refer to Bruce Wayne as “Dad,” implying their status as brothers, and they playfully bicker with each other about who will drive various Bat- vehicles. Dick retains his chipper and sunny personality enough that Tim even calls them “two

Robins playing Batman and Robin.”67 Detracting further from Dick Grayson’s ability to appear as a to Tim Drake is Tim’s actual father making several appearances in Prodigal.

Jack Drake takes his son to a tennis match, checks up on him while he studies, and asks if it’s “a girl or homework” that’s got Tim talking on the phone late one night.68 Dick Grayson plays at being the patriarch in Batman: Prodigal, but writers withheld full realization of the identity via an inability to read as mature enough to parent Tim, and in Tim’s positioning of Dick as his equal instead of his superior.

Batman Needs Robin: Dick Grayson’s Parenting of Damian Wayne

The second instance of Dick Grayson taking over as Batman deftly mobilizes parenthood to indicate Grayson’s achievement of idealized maturity and patriarch status. Jeffrey A. Brown explores the embrace of paternal authority in superhero comics as an important component of the hegemonic code they communicate and reproduce: “The long-standing rationale for sidekicks is

66 Chuck Dixon and Staz Johnson, “Nowhere Fast,” Robin Volume 4 #40 (New York: DC Comics, 1997). 67 Doug Moench and Mike Gustovich, “Prodigal: Robin and Batman,” Batman #512 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 68 Chuck Dixon, , and , “Prodigal: A Twice Told Tale,” Detective Comics #680 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 92

that they allow a point of identification for young readers, but more importantly they facilitate narratives that portray very specific ideas about right and wrong.”69 These ideas, Brown continues, are “tantamount to an acceptance of patriarchal authority, of the Law and the word of the Father.”70 Dick Grayson, the originator of the teen superhero sidekick, was the first to be written into this submissive position. His ascent to mature hero status and perception of him as the true mature authority and representation of the rule of Law would therefore not be complete until he became a father.

Unlike Prodigal, which did not need Grayson to truly be Batman, just to pretend for a while, Battle for the Cowl (2009) and Batman & Robin (2011) saw writers Tony S. Daniel and

Grant Morrison ostensibly grant durable Bat-status, and idealized adulthood with it, to Dick

Grayson.71 After the events of DC Comics’ , a major crossover which involved numerous comic titles and resulted in the loss of many heroes, Batman is dead.72 Though a later retcon would, of course, bring him back, for the time being there is no more Batman in Gotham

City. In his absence, crime skyrockets and false Bat-men sully the original’s legacy. Dick

Grayson/Nightwing has become the de facto foster parent of Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne’s arrogant, violent, biological son (Damian’s mother is alive, but she is a power-mad and thus not an ideal caretaker for the boy). Though Battle for the Cowl is on the surface a story about Dick Grayson disposing of pretenders and claiming the mantle of the Bat, it is also the story of him stepping into his role as father figure for Damian. Just as creators used Dick’s relationship with Starfire to signify his transition from the youthful Robin to the more mature

69 Jeffrey A. Brown, Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 149. 70 Brown, 149. 71 Tony S. Daniel, Battle for the Cowl (New York: DC Comics, 2009); Grant Morrison, , and Philip Tan, Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn (New York: DC Comics, 2011); Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart, and Andy Clarke, Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin (New York: DC Comics, 2011); Grant Morrison, , and , Batman & Robin: Batman & Robin Must Die! (New York: DC Comics, 2012). 72 Grant Morrison, J. G. Jones, and Doug Mahnke, Final Crisis (New York: DC Comics, 2009). 93

Nightwing in the 1980s, in the 2000s creators relied on Dick’s relationship with Damian to help him truly become Batman, the symbol of idealized adulthood and archetypal father figure. Both instances reflect the writers’ perpetuation of the cultural script of maturation, reinforcing that heterosexual parenting is a key marker of adulthood.

The first issue of the mini-series Battle for the Cowl sees the ten-year-old Damian steal the for a joyride with a rather well-developed teenage girl he has picked up. Damian is busted by cyber superhero Oracle, who encourages him to apologize to Nightwing. Damian hints at a parental relationship when he assures her that “he’ try to ground me either way.”73

After Dick/Nightwing and Damian (who has co-opted the identity of Robin against Bruce

Wayne’s wishes) take down some minor villains and Damian is severely injured, Dick realizes the importance of his guidance in Damian’s life: “Damian … this child … I could’ve gotten him killed tonight. I have a responsibility to him now.”74 Immediately following this admission, Dick accepts the Batman costume and steps into the identity; author Tony S. Daniel makes becoming

Batman, and the idealized maturity the cape and cowl represent, contingent on one’s ability to serve as a father figure. Although Damian is not, in fact, evidence of heterosexual reproduction on Dick Grayson’s part, their relationship does indicate generativity and a level of maturity only granted to heterosexual parents. Dick Grayson also formally grants the Robin identity to Damian; without Robin (as his pseudo-son), Dick wouldn’t really be Batman at all.

The next issue in continuity after the end of Battle for the Cowl begins Grant Morrison’s run entitled Batman & Robin. The cover of this issue introduces Dick and Damian as an updated version of the original Batman and Robin via visual callbacks to Detective Comics #38, emphasizing Dick’s newfound status as idealized adult. Writing of the cover design, author

73 Daniel, “Part One: A Hostile Takeover,” Battle for the Cowl (New York: DC Comics, 2009). 74 Daniel, “Part Two: Army of One,” Battle for the Cowl (New York: DC Comics, 2009). 94

Grant Morrison said “The image had to be simple and iconic—the modern equivalent of Batman holding up the ’s hoop on the cover of DETECTIVE COMICS #38—which introduced Robin as ‘The sensational character find of 1940!’”75 This new cover, featured on

Batman & Robin #1 (originally published as a single-issue in 2009), similarly shows Batman and

Robin in front of a plain background (Figure 2.576). Dick is positioned on the left, as he was as

Robin on Detective Comics #38, but he seems to casually embody his new identity as Batman, glancing down approvingly at Damian. Wearing a smirk rather than a genuine smile, Damian appears on the right, fist in hand and sporting a redesigned Robin costume.77

Figure 2.5: Cover of Batman & Robin #1

75 Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Philip Tan, “Sketchbook,” Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 76 Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, “Batman Reborn Part One: Domino Effect,” Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 77 Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, “Batman Reborn Part One: Domino Effect,” Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 95

Dick and Damian’s relationship is not without its difficulties, as to be expected of any parent-child relationship, though being Batman and Robin certainly brings unique challenges to the dynamics of this duo. Unlike the mostly-agreeable earlier Robins, Damian is defiant at every turn. Dick laments to Alfred, the Wayne family’s trusted butler, about his failure to get Damian to listen to him: “Get back here, Damian! That’s an order! … ‘That’s an order!’ I sounded so fake, like a kid trying to do Batman’s voice.”78 Alfred serves as the voice of reason cutting through Dick’s sense of failure: “Try to think of your Batman not as a memorial—you and I know he’d hate that—but as a performance. Think of Batman as a great role, like a Hamlet, or

Willie Loman … or even James Bond. And play it to suit your strengths.”79 Alfred thus joins another Butler (Judith) in addressing the overall performativity of social identities, in this case adulthood: being the symbol of idealized maturity, Batman, is just a series of expressions and choices which Dick can make, especially as he already embodies the requisite whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality.

Eventually, Dick earns Damian’s respect and their relationship begins to more closely resemble the original relationship between young Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne. Damian asks,

“If my father returns … we can’t be Batman and Robin anymore, can we?” signaling that at this point, Damian may indeed feel more like Dick’s son than Bruce’s.80 In his discussion of paternal authority in comics, Jeffrey A. Brown identifies Damian Wayne as a striking example of hero/father-sidekick/son relationships, noting “Though Damian is at first extremely violent, arrogant, and out of control … he gradually learns the value of crime-fighting and protecting

78 Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, “Batman Reborn Part Two: Circus of Strange,” Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 79 Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, “Batman Reborn Part Two: Circus of Strange,” Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 80 Grant Morrison and Andy Clarke, “Batman vs. Robin Part One: The Haunting of ,” Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin (New York: DC Comics 2011), 94. 96

lives under the tutelage of Batman.” 81 What Brown leaves out is that the Batman under whom

Damian first learns all of these lessons is not, in fact, Bruce Wayne, but Dick Grayson. It would appear the sidekick has truly become the hero.

Morrison smartly enlists Batman’s other allies to show support for Dick Grayson taking on the cape and cowl, reversing the ways in which other writers used these same characters in

Prodigal to undermine Dick’s status. He writes Police Commissioner Jim Gordon, who was intensely skeptical of Dick-as-Batman in Prodigal, telling Dick “Whatever happened these last few months—and I don’t want to know what happened—you can count on my support.”82 In fact, Gordon tells him that most of the Gotham City Police Department prefers this new Batman to the old one, though he cannot say the same for their collective feelings on the prickly new

Robin.

Teaming up with another ally, , in an issue of Batman & Robin, Morrison’s portrayal of Dick Grayson continues to emphasize the connectivity between maturity and heterosexuality. Dick hits on Batwoman in earnest: “I have something I should confess up front

… I have this thing for crimefighting redheads. If you want to do this again …”83 Batwoman was originally introduced in 1956’s Detective Comics #233 as a love interest for Bruce Wayne, and she was significantly older than Dick Grayson.84 Although newer comics portray Batwoman as only slightly older than Dick Grayson, his romantic interest in her (as opposed to the more youthful Batgirl) further confirms his ascension to idealized maturity and, collaterally, heterosexuality. (Though by Batman & Robin Batwoman had in other titles begun to be written

81 Brown, 150. 82 Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, “Batman Reborn Part Three: Mommy Made of Nails,” Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 83 Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart, “Blackest Knight Part Three: Broken,” Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 84 and Sheldon Moldoff, “The Batwoman,” Detective Comics #233 (New York: DC Comics, 1956). 97

as sexually attracted to women, she doesn’t shut Dick down too hard.) While Batman: Prodigal portrayed Dick Grayson and Tim Drake as contemporaries with a fraternal relationship, Batman

& Robin sees Dick claiming brotherhood with Bruce instead: “He was my brother, my best friend.”85 Though the age gaps between Bruce, Dick, and Tim are theoretically unchanged,

Morrison portrays Dick Grayson as conceptually and developmentally now closer to Batman than any of the Robins—he is Batman’s brother, now that he has a Robin to parent.

Dick Grayson’s second stint as Batman in comics represented a turning point in his maturation. In order to level him up to Nightwing in the 1980s, creators confirmed his heterosexuality in no uncertain terms, and his fostering of Damian in the early 2010s proved he was mature enough to parent, and thus mature enough to wear the mantle of idealized adulthood.

As of this writing, no author has depicted Dick Grayson as an actual father, but in 2017 Tim

Seeley penned an arc of Nightwing comics in which Dick’s girlfriend, Shawn Tsang, believed for a time that she might be pregnant.86 Tellingly, this same arc re-introduced Damian Wayne into

Nightwing’s orbit and features many visual reprisals of Morrison’s Batman & Robin run, connecting the potential for Dick Grayson’s biological fatherhood with his foster parenting of

Damian.

When Dick Grayson was himself the youthful Robin, creators struggled to portray him as someone who would someday be heterosexual without being precocious. They regularly failed in these endeavors, because adolescent sexuality always appears as too little or too much. Creators in the 1980s aged Dick Grayson and gave him a new adult identity, abetted by a canonical sexual relationship with Starfire (and many other women thereafter). The aggressively straight and overtly sexual Nightwing represented the beginning of Dick Grayson’s maturation and access to

85 Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart, “Blackest Knight Part Three: Broken,” Batman & Robin: Batman vs. Robin (New York: DC Comics, 2011). 86 Tim Seeley and Javier Fernandez, Nightwing Volume 3: Nightwing Must Die! (Burbank: DC Comics, 2017). 98

normative heterosexuality, but his ultimate achievement of idealized maturity and straightness came in the 2000s with his transformation into Batman and his pseudo-fatherhood of Damian

Wayne/Robin.

Importantly, this final transformation indicates the preparatory nature of both the sidekick and the adolescent, in the sense that the adolescent is preparing for adulthood and that the sidekick prepares to be an adult hero. Writers used Dick Grayson’s sexuality to signal completion of this preparation, tapping him to step into the role of Batman and father to a new young Robin. As the beginning of this chapter noted, though, heterosexuality is prized and idealized in maturity as a means of perpetuating systems of power and privilege tied to race.

What happens if a sidekick character does not and will not embody the social identities that make up idealized maturity? The following chapter considers a Robin character whose blackness complicates his perception as an adolescent, and interrogates the ways in which authors simultaneously perpetuate and challenge beliefs about black youth in twenty-first century

America. 99

CHAPTER III. THE SIDEKICK’S SIDEKICK: BATMAN, ROBIN, AND THE ERASURE OF

BLACK ADOLESCENCE

As I describe in Chapter Two, a recurring plot convention of Golden Age Batman and

Detective Comics was the first Robin, Dick Grayson, needing to be rescued by his partner

Batman. These storylines allowed Batman to appear strong, mature, and capable, while reminding readers of Robin’s own youthful recklessness and lack of skill. Though later Robins would be given increasing levels of independence, in 2015 author penned an arc in which a Robin found himself utterly abandoned by Batman. “Can’t keep waiting for Batman to swoop down and save the day,” this Robin, Duke Thomas, thinks to himself. “Another adult who bailed. Gotta do all the swooping myself.”1 He is on the run from his new foster family, into whose care he has been placed after his old foster father decided he wasn’t worth the effort.

Though Duke Thomas, like all previous Robins, is young, vulnerable, and in need of guidance, he differs from other Robins markedly in that he is black. Duke Thomas has an unprecedented level of independence from Batman, but writers of the character do not use this independence as a signal of Duke’s maturity; instead, they portray it as a consequence of the precarious status of black American adolescents.

Just as comic book creators projected common but sometimes-conflicting ideas about adolescent sexuality through Robin/Dick Grayson, I likewise read creators probing the intersections of race and adolescence in portrayals of Duke Thomas. In depicting Robin/Dick

Grayson, comic book authors communicated the script that maturity and heterosexuality co- construct each other: young Dick Grayson could not be portrayed as sexual in any way, lest he be read as deviant, precocious, or dangerous, but mature Dick Grayson was marked as an adult in

1 Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, “We Are Robin Part One,” We Are Robin Volume 1: The Vigilante Business (Burbank, DC Comics: 2016). 100

large part by his (frequent) engagement in heterosexual activity. Creators often implied, and twice realized, that Dick Grayson would become Batman once he had matured. The role of the superhero sidekick, like the role of the adolescent, is inherently preparatory—a “time of becoming” an adult/hero. However, the concept of adolescence was deployed as a means of delimiting access to idealized maturity—a means of maintaining the hegemonic dominance of white, straight males. Adolescence prepares only certain bodies, those that resemble Dick

Grayson’s, for idealized maturity. Up until the mid-2010s, all of Batman’s sidekicks embodied whiteness, but the introduction of the young black character Duke Thomas begs the question of how a character who will not achieve idealized maturity is handled when cast in the preparatory role of sidekick.

This chapter makes the case that through the comic storylines We Are Robin (2016) 2 and

Robin War (2016)3, as well as a handful of other titles featuring Duke Thomas, authors have used

Duke to bring diversity to Batman-family titles, allowing them to somewhat superficially address political issues such as juvenile gang activity, stop-and-frisk, police brutality, and white privilege. However, these creators ultimately strip Duke of agency and render him less a sidekick to Batman, with all the descendance and future heroism the role of teenage sidekick implies, and more a sidekick to Batman’s sidekicks. This chapter is also interested in how creators’ attempts to raise awareness of the ways black youth are pushed out of adolescence may in fact reify this exile by portraying Duke Thomas as merely a convenient reminder of the conceptual linkages between whiteness and the normative process of maturation. The portrayal of Duke Thomas

2 Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, We Are Robin Volume 1: The Vigilante Business (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016); Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, We Are Robin Volume 2: Jokers (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 3 Tom King et al., Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). Originally published as single issue comics in 2015 and 2016, throughout this chapter I am using the collected trade paperback, published in 2016. Issues within are cited as chapters within a book, per Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition guidelines. As there are over twenty five authors and artists represented in this work, I will be using the abbreviation “Tom King et al.” when citing Robin War as a whole. When citing individual issues within Robin War, I will note the specific author(s) and lead artist(s) of that issue. 101

reflects the construction of adolescence as a “time of becoming” for white youths—and that for black youths, being perceived as an adolescent is largely inaccessible.

A Robin of a Different Color

Though he was introduced in Scott Snyder’s Batman: Zero Year storyline (2013),4 the first story to star Duke Thomas and center his perspective was Lee Bermejo’s mini-series We Are

Robin.5 In this story, an attack on Gotham City has left Duke temporarily orphaned and Batman missing, presumed dead. In the aftermath, Duke teams up with a group of loosely connected

Gotham City teenagers who take on the title “We Are Robin” for themselves. Their goal is simple: keep the city and its residents safe. The teens communicate with each other using text messaging, and they are guided from time to time by a mysterious user called “The Nest,” but otherwise they have no central leadership. Wearing hoodies or motorcycle jackets and cargo pants or leggings instead of spandex superhero costumes, these teens patrol their neighborhoods in the absence of the real Batman (the only “Batman” in Gotham at the time this story takes place is the state-sanctioned Police Commissioner Jim Gordon in a robotic Bat-suit, largely unintended to combat low-level street crime). They have little to no technology for much of their story, relying instead on what teen mechanic Dax can scrape together or what The Nest occasionally provides.

In a departure from Robins past, these new Robins are primarily comprised of non-white and lower-class adolescents. Of the five We Are Robins with the most lines and appearances, only two are white. One of these white characters is depicted as working-class (the aforementioned mechanic), son of the street thug who murdered Bruce Wayne/Batman’s parents.

The other white Robin is the son of mobsters—wealthy, but trashy, as his mother’s gaudy

4 Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque, “Zero Year Secret City: Part One,” Batman Volume 2 #21 (New York: DC Comics, 2013). 5 Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, We Are Robin Volume 1: The Vigilante Business (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 102

clothing, “Jersey Shore” dialect, and choice of romantic companions exhibits. The other important We Are Robins include Riko, a shy Japanese-American girl; Izzy, a Puerto Rican girl who works nights at her family’s restaurant and whose brother is a King; and Duke.

Clearly the creators of We Are Robin sought to diversity the type of adolescent presented most often in comics; a featured review from appearing on the back of We Are Robin:

Volume 2 (2016) reads, “WE ARE ROBIN is a great example of how comics should bring more diversity into the mix.”6 These reviewers hint at the overbearing whiteness of comics, especially in regards to adolescent figures.

This reticence to portray black adolescent figures in comics becomes evident in glancing at the most popular examples. Though the superhero genre is over eighty years old, it wasn’t until 2018 that a black adolescent figure from comics was granted their own film: , central character of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.7 Like Duke Thomas, many of the most notable black adolescent characters in mainstream comics are merely re-cast version of sidekicks or heroes who were originally white: Miles Morales (Spider-Man),8 Riri Williams (Ironheart, a revamped Iron-Man),9 Elijah Bradley (Patriot, a revamped version of two white characters,

Patriot and Captain America),10 Jackson Hyde (Aqualad),11 and II (Kid Flash, to whom creators couldn’t even be bothered to give a new name when re-designing the original

Wally West).12 Portrayals of teenage superhero characters have been overwhelmingly white in

6 Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, We Are Robin Volume 2: Jokers (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 7 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed by Peter Ramsey, Robert Persichetti Jr., and Rodney Rothman (2018; Sony Pictures ). 8 and Sarah Pichelli, “Chapter Four: Spider-Man,” Ultimate Fallout (New York: Marvel Comics, 2011). 9 Brian Michael Bendis and , Jr., Invincible Volume 3 #9 (New York: Marvel Comics, 2016). 10 Allan Heinberg and , Young #1 (New York: Marvel Comics, 2005). 11 , , Ivan Reis, Ardan Syaf, Scott Clark, and Oclair Albert, #4 (New York: DC Comics, 2010). 12 Van Jensen, Robert Venditti, , and , The Flash Annual #3 (New York: DC Comics, 2014). 103

comics and other media, reflecting the belief that only white children need to undergo the preparation for adulthood that adolescence provides.

As I explore in detail in Chapter One, the adolescent and “the teenager” are social identity constructions which date back to the turn of the twentieth century. Educators, medical professionals, and early sociologists who focused on adolescence, typified by psychologist G.

Stanley Hall, crafted an image of adolescence as a “time of becoming” when one prepares to be an adult and a productive citizen. However, the meaning of “adult” was closely linked to white

Western masculinity, so adolescence was not really a time of becoming for those who would not achieve this “idealized” maturity—primarily non-white people, women, and queer people.

Members of marginalized groups of course still experience the years associated with adolescence, but the dominant (white) cultural, scientific, and legal institutions in twentieth century America have made the concept of adolescence un-attributable to black bodies. Instead, media portrayals and codified policies have worked to ensure actual black teenagers are either viewed as mature, dangerous threats or infantilized and subjected to heavy supervision. The creators of We Are Robin and Robin War succeed in reflecting both of these phenomena in the experiences of Duke Thomas. At the same time, some of their efforts to portray the ways Duke would realistically experience the world differently from the other Robins results in him being pushed to the margins of the Bat-family, left out of any lines of inheritance implied by a sidekick-hero relationship. While the independence of Duke’s ultimately non-sidekick identity could read as positive—a sort of self-determination and unwillingness to be merely a support to a white character—it also reflects the difficulty of “seeing” black teenagers as teenagers. In this way, authors inadvertently highlight the links between whiteness and the normative process of maturation, even as they make a concerted effort to center their story on a black adolescent. 104

Duke Thomas: Mature Menace?

In bringing “diversity into the mix,” We Are Robin author Lee Bermejo and Robin War author Tom King both call out the negative connotations associated with youth of color.13 These stories, published concurrently in what the comics industry terms a “crossover” in 2015 and

2016, reflect the ways non-white teens are often not viewed as “youth” at all. Rather than merely grant the mantle of Robin to someone like Duke, as though Gotham were a post-racial utopia,

Bermejo and King demonstrate how such a move would be complicated by cultural assumptions about black and brown teenagers—namely, that they are often perceived as less innocent, older, and therefore more dangerous than white teens.

Almost immediately after the group We Are Robin forms, they are criminalized. Gotham

City Council declares Robin activity illegal, and a two-page spread of images from Gotham television news shows angry citizens criticizing the movement: “They call themselves Robin after Batman’s partner, that child partner he has. He’s their role model. Obviously not a good one

… Gotham needs to say no! No to the Robins! No to masked teenagers!”14 A Gotham City councilwoman appears in the final frame, claiming that “City Council is looking into the matter.

We are reviewing all options in dealing with this Robin situation. Nothing is off the table.” 15

Author Tom King portrays the city of Gotham as afraid of these teens, comfortable with (if not preferring) violent means of restraining them. Earlier creators generally ignored the city’s interpretation of Robin, focusing instead on the relationship between Batman and his partner— but a singular, white Robin under the guidance and supervision of Batman represents an entirely different image of adolescence than a group of non-white, lower-class teens without adult

13 Tom King et al., Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 14 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 15 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 105

supervision. This story arc reflects the cultural assumption that adolescents are unremarkable, appropriate, and “normal” when they are white and under the close watch of an adult male, but are otherwise an inherent danger. King and artist Khary Randolph also make clear that these reactions are in fact over-reactions: they use many small, repetitive panels, giving the sense of an overwhelming response, and paste scowls on the faces of the movement’s critics as if to illustrate on the outside the ugliness of their internal biases.

This presumed danger of youths of color is connected to the underlying belief that youths of color are not, in fact, youths at all. As I note in Chapter One, James Kincaid and Karen

Sánchez-Eppler’s readings of nineteenth century children in American literature and culture determine that innocence and dependence came to be the defining characteristics of childhood.16

However, both scholars carefully point out that this package of traits, this definition of the child, only pertains to white children. Robin Bernstein chronicles the ways in which children’s material culture has been a particularly potent carrier for the transmission of the racist idea that black children are neither innocent nor dependent, and therefore not really children. In Racial

Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Bernstein locates a specific erasure of black childhood in the “insensate pickaninny” figure, which she describes as

“an imagined dehumanized black juvenile” who became “a staple of U.S. popular culture from advertising images … to children’s literature, animation, and film.”17 She chronicles examples of the figure on trading cards, in advertisements for household products such as paint, and as an enduring feature of live entertainment. The pickaninny, according to Bernstein, appeared as a child but without the characteristics which had been connected to white children—namely,

16 James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 17 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 16. 106

innocence and emotional sentimentality. She writes that “[because] pickaninnies were juvenile yet excluded from the exalted status of ‘child,’ they seemed not to matter.”18 Black children were not understood or depicted as children, and thus could not access the privileged protection that white children experience. While comics’ poor, orphaned, white Dick Grayson appeared deserving of the attention and care bestowed upon him by Bruce Wayne since 1940, Bermejo and King are quick to point out that residents of Gotham City would likely feel less sentimental or generous towards poor, orphaned, black Duke Thomas (and his compatriots).

Lee Bermejo shows Duke being reminded of his precarious status within the first few panels of We Are Robin. Duke is picked up by Gotham City police for fighting, though he didn’t start the fight and certainly didn’t look like he would be able to finish it. He is remanded to his foster family this time, but his caseworker informs him that he might not be so lucky next time he is picked up by the GCPD. “It’s going to take a miracle from me to keep you out of juvie,” she tells him.19 This exchange reflects the real-world truism that black youths’ interactions with law enforcement almost always lead to further involvement in the justice system. While

Bernstein’s work focuses on cultural history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, studies of legal and policy history illustrate that the idea of the “insensate pickaninny” has been functionally enshrined in the American criminal justice system with devastating results for black children and adolescents up through the present day.

In The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy & Juvenile Justice, Geoff . Ward explores the history of black youths’ interactions with the juvenile justice system. Ward’s work reveals that the American juvenile justice system has always been a circuit in the technology of shaping white adolescents into adults while preventing access to maturity for non-white youths:

18 Bernstein, 35. 19 Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, “We Are Robin Part One,” We Are Robin: The Vigilante Business (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 107

“The white-dominated parental state engaged for generations in racially selective citizen- and state-building initiatives through juvenile justice and practice.”20 In its earliest forms, the juvenile justice system relied on “houses of refuge” and truly espoused a liberal rehabilitative ideal—quite distinct from today’s more punitive juvenile justice system. Ward chronicles that in these early stages, “American juvenile justice routinely prioritized rehabilitative intervention in the lives of white children and youths,”21 while black children were far more often tried and punished as adults. In this early model of juvenile justice, “black youths were rendered unsalvageable and undeserving of citizen-building ambition.”22 He finds that in many ways the system has functioned since the 1970s in a “formally race-neutral scheme” which supposedly separates youths based on whether they are either “‘normal’ or malleable and less culpable,” or

“criminally responsible ‘serious’ delinquents.” Yet the scheme still manages to systematically classify “nonwhite and particularly black youths” as “undeserving, serious delinquents”23— echoing Bernstein’s “insensate pickaninny.” These classifications mean harsher sentences, criminal records, and a higher likelihood of future interactions with law enforcement.

Bermejo indeed used the interaction between Duke and his caseworker to foreshadow

Duke’s subsequent experiences with the GCPD, which reflect modern realities regarding discrimination in the “formally race-neutral” criminal justice system. This discrimination both reflects and is reinforced by the perception of black youths as mature, “criminally responsible” threats rather than innocent children or experimenting, risk-taking adolescents. At one point in Tom King’s Robin War, King uses Duke’s internal monologue to highlight the disparities in the criminal justice system: “One out of nine black men will be incarcerated between the ages of

20 Ward, Geoff K. The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy & Juvenile Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. 21 Ward, 3. 22 Ward, 10-11. 23 Ward, 14. 108

twenty and thirty-four,” he thinks to himself.24 Michelle Alexander succinctly summarizes that “youth of color are more likely to be arrested, detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to secure residential facilities than their white counterparts.”25 At every juncture in the modern criminal justice system, black youths are more likely than white youths to be punished and subjected to increased surveillance. The creators of Duke Thomas show that, although Robin has interacted off and on with the GCPD throughout the characters’ eighty-year history, these interactions would likely have a markedly different tone if and when that Robin is black.

Importantly, this difference in the way white versus black teenagers experience interactions with the criminal justice system is in part related to the perception of black youths as more mature, as a 2014 study led by Philip Atiba Goff illustrates. Goff and his team conclude that “Black boys can be misperceived as older than they actually are and prematurely perceived as responsible for their actions during a developmental period where their peers receive the beneficial assumption of childlike innocence.”26 The same study additionally suggested “that

Black children may be viewed as adults as soon as 13, with average age overestimations of Black children exceeding four and a half years in some cases.”27 Similarly, in a piece for popular online news outlet Vox, legal scholar Vesla Mae Weaver straightforwardly notes that “police and the general public do not see black kids as kids.”28 The authors of We Are Robin and Robin War

24 Lee Bermejo and , “Robin War Part Four: Jail Birds,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 25 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 118. 26 Philip Atiba Goff, Brooke Allison Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann Di Tomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106, no. 4 (2014), 540. www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-a0035663.pdf 27 Goff et al., 541. 28 Vesla Mae Weaver, “The Kavanaugh Hearings Show Who We Afford a Second Chance and Who We Don’t,” Vox, last modified September 28, 2018. https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/9/28/17913708/brett-kavanaugh- hearing-police-race-teens. 109

seem aware of these tendencies and work to refute them in the text. Duke clearly sees himself as a youth, but one who is perhaps asked a bit too much of by the adults in his life (“Gotta do all the swooping myself”29). At the same time, he feels that all of the adults around him are dismissive of his needs—he is desperate to find his parents (again, because he is in fact a teen who cannot actually take care of himself yet), but his social worker and the police keep telling him to wait and let them handle it. The authors thus carefully depict the double-bind black adolescents experience when they are not understood to be following normative patterns of maturation.

Crucially, Goff, Weaver, and others point out that assumptions of age carry with them expectations of behavior. If a young person is perceived to be much older than they are, then they are disallowed the behavioral latitudes afforded to those who are perceived as youthful or adolescent. Rather, they are often automatically perceived as threats even in the most mundane of situations. In Robin War, author Tom King draws on this phenomenon in Duke’s interaction with a Gotham City beat cop. In this instance, Duke walks along the street chatting on the phone with Riko, a fellow member of We Are Robin. A police cruiser pulls up alongside him, and a white officer demands that Duke tell him about the shoes Duke is wearing. Duke describes his shoes (“they have laces, a sole, stuff in between”) and what he uses them for (“walking. Never running. I don’t run … because running obviously means you’re doing something wrong”).30

Here, King smartly crafts this scene as direct response to and critique of stop-and-frisk policies and other unjust practices that target black youth. King’s Duke is clearly all too aware of the danger he faces when stopped by a police officer. His insistence on only walking, never running, implies this is not Duke’s first interaction with stop-and-frisk, hinting at the over-policing of

29 Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, “We Are Robin Part One,” We Are Robin: The Vigilante Business (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 30 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 110

black neighborhoods and young black males in particular. Despite Duke’s (mostly) polite responses to the officer’s questions, the officer slams Duke face-forward onto the cruiser and puts him under arrest for wearing shoes, since “red means Robin.”31 The comic creators thus reflect the reality chronicled by Goff and others in that this white officer seemingly targets Duke and considers him far more dangerous than we as readers know him to be.

Arrested Development: Duke Thomas and the Forced Dependence of Black Americans

While the GCPD officer who violently apprehends Duke appears to perceive him as a dangerous criminal, King also uses Duke’s interaction with the officer to highlight the other direction from which black youths are pushed out of adolescence—by framing them as incapable of actually attaining maturity.

Before he slams Duke face-first onto the cruiser, the GCPD officer yells at Duke to “put the phone down … keep your hands where I can see them … Now, boy!” Duke complies, but thinks to himself, “‘Boy?’ Well, guess we’re doing this now.”32 Here the white officer mobilizes descriptions of age to diminish Duke’s autonomy and self-authority, which Duke picks up on in his note of the officer’s use of the term “boy.” Activist and author Shaun King writes that

“throughout history, black men who were decades older than white men have been called ‘boy’ by them. It’s meant to belittle and dehumanize. It has deep roots stemming from slavery, all the way through Jim Crow, and, as we now see, into modern America.”33 The “deep roots” of infantilizing black adults to which Shaun King refers can be traced through social and political

31 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 32 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War, edited by Mark Doyle (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 33 Shaun King, “Bill Romanowski was Blatantly Racist Even Before He Called Cam Newton ‘Boy’ in Post-Super Bowl Tweet.” New York Daily News, last modified February8, 2016. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-bill-romanowski-calling-cam-newton-boy-racist-article- 1.2523980. 111

history, illustrating that perception of age has been weaponized to prohibit black adults’ access to the privileges of maturity (or even basic freedoms).

The infantilization of black individuals on the part of white Americans is older than the founding of the United States, as paternalistic views of “savages” and “Negroes” frequently provided cover for the subjugation of non-white people by Europeans and their descendants.

Thomas Jefferson drew such parallels in a letter to Edward Bancroft in 1789, writing “as far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.”34 Later, in an

1814 letter to Edward Coles, Jefferson wrote, “my opinion has ever been that, until more can be done for them, we should endeavor … to feed & clothe them well, protect them from ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them.”35 Jefferson thus identifies black people as dependent on white slaveowners and cites this dependence as the reason for slavery’s perpetuation.

In having the GCPD officer refer to Duke as “boy” while also treating him like a dangerous criminal offender, Tom King reflects these competing notions of black American adults as childish and dependent even as dependence and innocence are not ascribed to actual black children. This conflicting perception has been nurtured throughout the twentieth century in both political and popular culture, captured famously in the figure of . The Sambo character, a grown male figure who appeared in print culture, song, vaudeville, and later film and television, epitomized the shuffling, smiling, “childlike Negro.” Joseph Boskin describes Sambo

34 Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Bancroft, January 26, 1789. , Washington, DC. http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/119. 35 Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1372. 112

as “an overgrown child at heart.”36 He continues, “as children are given to impetuous play, humorous antics, docile energies, and uninhibited expressiveness, so too could one locate in

Sambo identical traits.”37 Historian George M. Fredrickson writes, “On the most obvious level, the Sambo was a direct rationalization of slavery. If slaves could be regarded as contented and naturally servile, their enslavement could more easily be justified.”38 This stereotype provided rhetorical ammunition for Lost Cause revisionism and further distanced black Americans from the normative process of maturation: whereas white children were expected to progress from innocent, dependent children to capable, contributing adults, black

Americans were often framed as going from hard, threatening adult-like figures to dependent, childish simpletons.

The connection between adult black Americans and childishness was not limited to popular culture; like the unfeeling pickaninny’s enshrinement in the juvenile justice system, an immature and incapable figure of black adulthood has been reflected in public policy and political rhetoric. However, unlike Sambo, this figure is typically framed as dependent on the state—an economic rather than social relationship—and is rooted in the stage-based lifespan development theories detailed in Chapter One. These theories, most notably sketched by Erik

Erikson in his 1950 Childhood and Society, crafted a Eurocentric ideal of maturation.39 Leaving one’s parents’ home, marrying a heterosexual partner, and creating a nuclear family headed by a man were all part of “proper” maturation, according to the most popular stage-based development theories. Deviations from these supposedly-universal patterns, such as preferences for multi-generational homes or matriarchal family structures, represented improper or arrested

36 Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise & Demise of an American (Oxford: , 1986), 13. 37 Boskin, 13. 38 George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 211. 39 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1985). 113

development, as opposed to equally valid cultural difference. The famous Moynihan report, officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), painted a rather dire picture of black families as headed by single mothers, dysfunctional for that reason among others, and in need of heavy state intervention.40 The image was certainly a far cry from the idealized mid-century nuclear family. The Moynihan report’s legacy still had traction twenty-odd years later, evidenced in President Ronald Reagan’s racially-coded descriptions of “welfare queens,” mythical figures who are simultaneously dependent on the system but savvy enough to exploit it.41

Mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects black Americans, also creates a twisted form of dependence—Michelle Alexander aptly terms mass incarceration a “system of control” in which the label of felon means one is prevented from self-sufficiency through restrictions on job and housing access upon release.42 Additionally, due to the system’s combination of denial of public services, denial of protection from employment discrimination, and the irrational structure of court and jail fees, “many people are thrown back in prison simply because they have been unable—with no place to live, and no decent job—to pay back thousands of dollars of prison-related fees, fines, and child support.”43 When those who have served their time are denied housing, food, and a job, the state’s rejection of their cries for help leads to a twisted entrapment in the criminal justice system—which is its own form of coerced dependence on the state. This coerced dependence, in which even those who don’t return to prison may have to “beg their grandmother for a place to sleep at night,”44 contributes to the infantilization of

40 United States. Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, D. C, 1965. 41 “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign.” New York Times, February 15, 1976. https://nyti.ms./2us4Xdx 42 Alexander, 154. 43 Alexander, 156. 44 Alexander, 162. 114

adult black Americans and misperceptions of them as immature or uninterested in self- sufficiency.

Though Duke shows displeasure at the GCPD officer’s slander of “boy” in Robin War,

Tom King reflects this paternalistic infantilization of black adults even more acutely through the character of Councilwoman Noctua. Councilwoman Noctua is a black elected official who is covertly behind the criminalization of all teens identifying with Robins or wearing Robin colors.

She is also the official who said “nothing” is off the table for restraining the We Are Robins on the Gotham City news. Her personal formidability and political aptitude, however, are undermined by her subservience to the ultra-rich, ultra-elite Court of Owls. The Owls are an ancient group of wealthy Gothamites who secretly run the entire city—and who are depicted as overwhelmingly white and wearing masks reminiscent of Klan hoods. She desires to join their ranks, and their response is motivated by classist and racist ideals: “Your father is unknown. Your mother was an immigrant streetwalker. What you ask is unprecedented.”45 They agree to allow her to join their Parliament if she fulfills her promise to deliver Dick Grayson, the original Robin, into their hands.46 They also make clear that her position on the city council and personal safety are entirely in their hands—even though Noctua is otherwise a capable, successful adult, the Owls ensure she is dependent on them for her existence.

While King’s Councilwoman Noctua is infantilized and stymied by the Court of Owls,

Lee Bermejo provides in the character Alfred an image of an elder white male who is confident and supportive of the We Are Robins. His guidance and nurturing of them recalls storylines often told about white adolescent characters. In We Are Robin Volume 2: Jokers, Bermejo confirms

45 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 46 Though the term “Parliament” is used in Batman comics primarily because it is the term for a grouping of owls, it also echoes British systems of governance and land ownership, lending a sense of linguistic gravitas to the “old money” power in Gotham City. 115

that Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s trusted butler, has been operating as “The Nest,” which occasionally directs the We Are Robins and provides them with some protective gear and transportation.47 He helps to train them, encourages them in their endeavors, and sees them as a potential force for good in their communities. Importantly, he also refrains from paternalism and fosters the teens’ independence. In short, Alfred views the scrappy We Are Robins as someday becoming contributing members of society and therefore worthy of his emotional and financial investment—just the sort redemptive guidance overwhelmingly reserved for white youths, as I discuss in Chapter One.

Bermejo clearly portrays Alfred’s approach to the We Are Robins as the right one: his investment of time and resources into them does indeed help keep the streets of Gotham safe, provides a positive outlet for the youths, and gives teens who may be otherwise disaffected a sense of ownership in their home communities. However, until the very last issue of the series none of youths ever see Alfred’s face nor learn his name. The teens assume it is an associate of the Bat who is helping them, but even when Alfred needs to meet Duke in person earlier in the series, he wears a disguise. Alfred’s support of the We Are Robin movement is striking in how different it is from the treatment the movement receives from every other adult with whom they come into contact—but its clandestine nature reveals Bermejo’s understanding that such acknowledgement of non-white adolescents as adolescents, preparing to become adults, is unfortunately still rare and unpopular.

Far more often it is the case that adolescence as an idea, a set of expected behaviors, a socially constructed identity, is un-attributable to black bodies. As black youth are often perceived as older than they truly are, actual black adults have often been portrayed in popular

47 Lee Bermejo and Jorge Corona, “The Hero Business,” We Are Robin Volume 2: Jokers (Burbank: DC Comics: 2016). 116

culture as childish or infantile. Further, various mechanisms in the real world have forced a disproportionate number of black adults into a sort of dependence on the state; this coerced dependence is then used as evidence for their childishness, which is reified in popular culture, and the cycle continues. These conflicting notions both contribute to the invisibility of black adolescents, in that their bodies are visible but the dominant white gaze does not attribute

“adolescence” to those bodies. Instead, the perception that non-white bodies are unable to access the normative process of maturation reinforces the conceptual linkages between whiteness and that process. In telling the tale of Duke Thomas, the creators of Robin War smartly and directly contrast his story and point of view with that of the original white Robins. These interactions provide specific windows through which to view the differences between common perceptions of white adolescents versus black adolescents.

The Robin War’s Two Fronts

King’s title, Robin War, carries two meanings: first, there is a “War on Robins,” launched by the Gotham City council immediately following the formation and media sensationalizing of the We Are Robin group. King portrays the people of Gotham as fearing the We Are Robins, as though these teens are mature, dangerous threats. He also demonstrates the ways in which black and brown youth are restrictively supervised and administered by adults—not with the goal of helping them develop into functioning adults, but with the goal of controlling them. Second, there is a war amongst Robins, which pits the white male scions of billionaire Bruce Wayne

(Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and Damian Wayne) against the lower-class and non- white Robins of We Are Robin. Both iterations of the “war” reflect ways in which youth of color, specifically black youth, are doubly marginalized; it is in this latter “war” readers can clearly see the privileges enjoyed by white youth, stark against the backdrop of non-white 117

youths’ many disadvantages. Though the authors of We Are Robin and Robin War mostly succeed in centering a black youth’s story and raising awareness of how systemic racism functions to push black teens out of their own adolescence, these efforts begin to break down when Duke is up against the legacy of Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne. It appears the creators were willing to diversify their comic only to an extent—Duke is still subservient to these white characters, still holds a weaker claim to the title of Robin, and, though both Damian and Dick exhibit racial bias against Duke, they come out in the same position they started in, while Duke is funneled into a less important, less prestigious role.

Although all of the other previous Robins are markedly white, Damian Wayne carries an additional standard of whiteness and the potential to attain idealized maturity by being the biological son of Bruce Wayne. There is a sense of continuation embedded in Damian’s DNA: he is the future image of Batman’s mature white masculinity, the descendant which ensures the preservation of whiteness.48 Damian is adamant about his difference from the poor, non-white

We Are Robins. He connects his difference from the We Are Robins to maturity level. He refers to the We Are Robins as “children,” telling Jim Gordon (wearing his -Batman suit), “I am doing your work. I am trying to get these children to stop.”49 He tells the GCPD, “I’m not a child.

I’m not them!”50 King depicts Damian wielding his privilege, though eventually Damian, too, is arrested.

48 At the same time, tracing Damian’s lineage through his estranged mother, Talia Al-Ghul, reveals uncertainty as to Damian’s racial identity. The Al-Ghuls have been variously depicted in decades of Batman comics as central Asian, Middle Eastern, or Himalayan, and are an example of the orientalizing trope of the mystical Asian. Yet, their appearance has primarily and consistently read as white, with very light skin and brown or grey hair. Damian is thus potentially a product of miscegenation, but it would appear most writers prefer to simply portray him as white, looking like a clone of a young Bruce Wayne with bright blue eyes and very pale skin. 49 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 50 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alain Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Gunaldo, and Walden Wong, “Robin War Part One: With the Greatest of Ease,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 118

While jailed, Duke appeals to the others to stay calm and not escalate tensions with the

GCPD, and Damian calls him a coward. Damian appears confident in his belief that he should not and will not be punished for his actions. Through his contrasting portrayals of Duke and

Damian, King reflects that not only are black youth like Duke targeted by police, but also that white youth are benevolently ignored by authorities. These adolescents experience what Vesla

Mae Weaver has termed “a kind of super freedom—the rational expectation of no adjudication even when they [white youths] commit serious, violent, assaultive behavior.”51 Damian’s slander of “coward” directed at Duke indicates he does not recognize his own privilege, which, though consistent with Damian’s character as rather selfish and defiant, appears as a form of racial violence and trivialization of Duke’s experience. Damian is not the only white Robin famous for thumbing his nose at the law, either: in Robin War, King draws on a long history of white Robins going un-punished for dangerous behavior.

During the mid- to late-1980s, DC Comics introduced Jason Todd, a teenage character with a drug-addicted mother and absent father who was turning to a life of street crime and social antagonism.52 However, this character refracted the specter of urban squalor described by

Moynihan and condemned by the Reagan administration through a key sympathizing trait: whiteness. Jason Todd was taken in by Bruce Wayne and trained as the second Robin, though their relationship was not without strife. Jason’s criminal history him, but again and again Bruce Wayne and the Gotham Police Department gave him the benefit of the doubt. In

Batman #424 (1987), writers strongly imply that Jason murdered a suspected serial rapist by

51 Vesla Mae Weaver, “The Kavanaugh Hearings Show Who We Afford a Second Chance and Who We Don’t,” Vox, last modified September 28, 2018. https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/9/28/17913708/brett-kavanaugh- hearing-police-race-teens. 52 Max Allan Collins, Ross Andru, and Dick Giorano, “Just Another Kid on Crime Alley,” Batman #409 (New York: DC Comics, 1987). 119

pushing him off a balcony and claiming “he slipped.”53 When Jason returned in 2005 as the gun- toting anti-hero Red Hood, writer depicted him as a literal criminal and murderer, but he remains a sympathetic and popular character.54 Jason’s role in Robin War also calls up his past: in hoping to work with rather than against the We Are Robins, Jason’s training regimen involves them learning to steal the wheels off cars.55 Whereas the solipsistic law- breaking of white Robins—to say nothing of Batman—has been portrayed as a character flaw at worst, Bermejo and King demonstrate that for a non-white character, such attitudes and actions take on different meanings. Jason murders and steals, Damian assaults the police (and in other storylines has also killed criminals), while Duke Thomas is violently arrested for the crime of wearing red shoes.

The creators of Robin War juxtapose Duke and Damian to reflect how the behavioral latitudes of adolescence favor white teens and how the frequent misperception of black youths as mature endangers them. They likewise juxtapose Duke and Dick Grayson to illuminate the ways in which paternalistic attitudes towards black youths diminish them and put them at risk of over- administration and strict surveillance. Like Damian, the character Dick Grayson carries with him connotations of white racial preservation. Although he is not the biological son of Bruce Wayne, he was named Batman’s successor and inheritor of the Wayne legacy on more than one occasion.

As I describe in detail in Chapter Two, Dick is also a pseudo-parent of Damian Wayne. In this manner, he represents a link in the chain between Bruce and Damian. Chapter Two also carefully chronicles Dick Grayson’s maturation; he has been depicted in comics as fully grown and matured since the 1980s. Dick’s whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality mark him as an

53 Jim Starlin and Mark Bright, “The Diplomat’s Son,” Batman #424 (New York: DC Comics, 1987). 54 Judd Winick and Doug Mahnke, Batman: Under the Red Hood (New York: DC Comics, 2011). Originally published in single issues from 2005-2006. 55 Tom King, Tim Seeley, and Mikel Janín, “Robin War Part Two: The Originals,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 120

idealized adult. However, rather than treat Duke Thomas with the sort of care and guidance he provided for Damian, Robin War sees Dick Grayson lie to Duke and perceive him as one who will never achieve true Robin-hood.

In the same issue of Robin War in which Jason’s criminal tendencies resurface, Dick

Grayson takes Duke Thomas under his wing due to the leadership potential Duke shows. It is thus that Duke Thomas finds himself on a rooftop, watching all of his We Are Robin friends get arrested by the Gotham City Police Department while Dick narrates what had been is plan all along: “I control the arrests, make sure they’re safe. Then I put my best men in there with them, make sure they’re all safe. And all ready to break out, when I figure this out.”56 In this exchange,

King depicts Dick Grayson as a purveyor of paternalistic racism, believing that he is doing the right thing by forcing the We Are Robins into state supervision, despite his earlier promise to train and help them. Dick Grayson has also orchestrated the arrest of the other original Robins, but refers to them as his “best men,” secure in the knowledge that these (white male) Robins will be able to free the (non-white and/or female) others when he has determined the time is right.

Duke Thomas is understandably frustrated; as Dick Grayson prepares to leap off the rooftop, leaving Duke to his own arrest, Duke shouts “You—you manipulated all of us! Just to put us away! Tuck us in safe, like we were all your damn kids!”57 Though the comics’ creators do not go so far as to have Duke point out Dick’s implicit racial bias, the moment still succeeds in critiquing the infantilization of non-white people as Duke connects Dick’s actions to his unwillingness to attribute maturity and capability to Duke and the We Are Robins.

56 Tom King, Tim Seeley, and Mikel Janín, “Robin War Part Two: The Originals,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 57 Tom King, Tim Seeley, and Mikel Janín, “Robin War Part Two: The Originals,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 121

Though many generic conventions of superhero comics are fantastical, the story of Duke

Thomas reflects harsh realities regarding race and adolescence. Duke Thomas simply cannot follow the same path as Dick, Damian, and the other white Robins who are in preparation for idealized adulthood. Duke’s blackness means that adolescence is not attributable to him by the wider (and whiter) community. He will be presumed to be much older and more dangerous than he truly is, or he will be deemed too immature and in need of surveillance and supervision. In no scenario is the role of adolescent sidekick fully available to him—indeed, his star turn ends with him declaring, “I’m not Robin,” surrendering the title to Damian Wayne.58 Damian, for his part, had abandoned the title to join the evil Court of Owls. Originally after Dick Grayson, the Owls agreed to accept Damian as their new assassin instead when Dick refused. Despite Damian’s willingness to sell out his compatriots (and the entire city of Gotham), Duke relinquishes the title of Robin to appease Damian and coax him back to the side of good.

In the war amongst the Robins, author Tom King portrays a clear winner: the white descendants of Bruce Wayne, the inheritors of his name, his legacy, his privilege. King succeeds in critiquing the unequal treatment black youths face at the hands of law enforcement and illustrates the frustration of black youth at their infantilization rather eloquently (for a comic book at least). Yet at the end of the story, King has Duke surrender his claim to the Robin identity to save all of the others—it is a heroic act, no doubt, but one which only reifies Duke’s exile from any inheritance of power or privilege he may have obtained by serving as a partner to

Batman. Though Duke may appear more heroic, and it is likely King did not intend to subsume

Duke in this manner, the effect is the same: a black character sacrifices his identity to preserve

58 Tom King, Khary Randolph, Alvaro Martinez, Raul Fernandez, Carmine Di Giandomenico, , Scott McDaniel, and Andy Owens, “Robin War Part Six: The Daring Young Man,” Robin War (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 122

that of the white characters, recalling another racist trope in the expectation that black characters will be self-sacrificing and do anything to help their white friends or mentors.

Bermejo and King’s portrayals of Duke Thomas consistently and quietly challenge the ways in which popular media often ignores black adolescents: they tell stories from Duke’s perspective, center his internal monologue as the primary , and call out many of the dangers black youth face due to white institutions’ and individuals’ unwillingness to see them as following normative patterns of individual development. Yet in subsuming Duke Thomas’s story into one that turns out to have been about Dick and Damian all along, the creators rhetorically perform the centering of white adolescent experience endemic in media, contributing to the seeming absence of black adolescence in contemporary culture. The creators of We Are Robin and Robin War position Duke as the central character, but in the end, they undermine his ability to be Batman’s trusted partner and take his place in the line of succession. In this manner, We

Are Robin and Robin War demonstrate the ways in which adolescence is largely un-attributable to black youth, with the default image of the adolescent as glaringly white. The role of teen sidekick is unavailable to Duke Thomas because the role of teen is unavailable to Duke Thomas.

Though one could theoretically argue that this effort was meant to highlight the ways in which black adolescents’ stories are co-opted by the white (adult) gaze, authors Scott Snyder and

Tom King’s subsequent denial of the official sidekick role to Duke in Batman comics reveals a lingering reticence to acknowledge black youth’s potential to achieve idealized maturity. What

Duke Thomas is allowed and does achieve is a sort of tertiary position—a sidekick to the sidekicks, doubly marginalized by his age and race, signaling the original Robins’ ability to someday become idealized adults through his own inability to do so. This storyline plays out after the events of Robin War through Duke’s re-established relationship with Batman. 123

After Robin War: A Signal in the Batcave

Perhaps the most obvious indicator of difference between Duke Thomas and the original

Robins is their personal relationships with Batman/Bruce Wayne. As noted above, for most of

Duke’s story, he is in foster care (his parents are not confirmed dead, but have been missing for a long time). Bruce Wayne is aware of Duke’s situation, and though he has no memory of being

Batman, he still interacts with Duke regularly through his volunteer work at a community center.

Yet, unlike with all other Robins who would have otherwise found themselves in foster care, author Scott Snyder does not depict Bruce Wayne taking Duke Thomas in, at least not right away.59 Dick Grayson became Bruce Wayne’s ward the night of his parents’ murder;60 Jason

Todd, though Batman at first arranged for him to stay in a group home, found himself at Wayne

Manor by the end of his second issue;61 and Bruce Wayne offered to adopt Tim Drake shortly after his father’s death, telling Tim “I do know that I could never replace your real father, but

I’d try” to be a good parent.62

Only after several years and dozens of appearances in a variety of titles is Duke Thomas taken in by Bruce Wayne—and even then it is framed as a job offer from Wayne, not the caring, fatherly relationship previous Robins enjoyed.63 It’s unclear if the authors simply wanted to build dramatic tension or were actively resisting the normal pattern of Batman-Robin relationships, but the optics of the decades-long narrative read as though Bruce Wayne was very interested in adopting young white orphans and significantly less eager to adopt a young black orphan.

59 Scott Snyder, , Danny Miki, and FCO Plascencia, Batman: Superheavy (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 60 Bob Kane and Bill Finger, “Robin: The Boy Wonder,” Detective Comics #38 (New York: DC Comics, 1940). 61 Max Allan Collins and Jim Aparo, “Just Another Kid from Crime Alley,” Batman #409 (New York: DC Comics, 1987). 62 and , “Face the Face: Conclusion,” Batman #654 (New York: DC Comics, 2006). 63 Scott Snyder, Tom King, and Mikel Janín, “Batman: Rebirth,” Batman: Rebirth #1 (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 124

Ultimately, writers Scott Snyder and Tom King insist on Batman not naming Duke

Thomas his next Robin in 2017’s Batman: Rebirth. Instead, when Duke asks Batman if he will be the next official Robin, Batman demurs: “I’m not training you to be Robin. I’m trying … something new,” he tells Duke.64 Batman does not make it clear why he believes something different is in order, but he presents Duke, whose hero name eventually becomes The Signal, with a new and decidedly non-Robin-esque costume. Likely referencing the “Bat-Signal,” a floodlight used to call Batman to the Gotham Police Department’s aid, the new nickname implies

Duke’s service to Batman. The nickname coupled with the shape and cut of Duke’s new jacket unfortunately also recalls the outstretched arm of lawn jockeys “signaling” guests where to go, reinforcing the subservient nature of his role (Figure 3.165). This effect was likely unintended, but it does demonstrate the clumsiness with which the nearly all-white staffs at major comics publishing houses still handle characters of color.

64 Scott Snyder, Tom King, and Mikel Janín, “Batman: Rebirth,” Batman: Rebirth #1 (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 65 Scott Snyder, Tom King, and Mikel Janín, “Batman: Rebirth,” Batman: Rebirth #1 (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 125

Figure 3.1: Duke Thomas’s “Signal” Costume

The relegation of Duke Thomas to not-quite sidekick status neatly epitomizes the ways in which black adolescence is largely un-seeable in American culture. The invisibility of black adolescence—meaning that black bodies are visible but adolescence is un-attributable to those bodies—is one piece of how black individuals are exiled from normative patterns of development. Understanding this exile and the ways in which age is constructed is critical: it creates the conditions under which black children and teens are perceived as mature, dangerous threats and subsequently over-policed in schools and communities. The depiction of Duke

Thomas in several comic storylines of the 2010s raises awareness of this phenomenon in centering Duke’s perspective, but ultimately undermines its own potential by shifting agency and power back to white adolescents and relegating Duke to a non-sidekick, but still clearly subservient, role.

Despite his prohibition from the role of Robin, Scott Snyder and Declan Shalvey penned an arc showing Duke Thomas undergoing the same training as all of the previous Robins. 126

Batman tells Duke this training, the Cursed Wheel, is “a condensed version of all my training, all my years abroad.”66 Duke is at this point actively resisting becoming Batman’s sidekick because he worries Batman only took him in because he “feels guilty,” but Batman tells him this program is “not the training to be a sidekick. It’s the training that comes next. Every ally who’s trained with me has gone through it.”67 Yet of all the names of allies Batman mentions who have undergone this training, the only other character to have not officially been Robin is another youth who fell outside of white masculinity—Barbara Gordon, also known as Batgirl.

Barbara has been a recurring character in Bat-titles since her introduction in 1961, but she has never been a sidekick to Batman. Like Duke Thomas, Barbara Gordon will never fit the bill of idealized adulthood due to her femininity; the inherently preparatory role of sidekick would thus have been an awkward fit at best. However, two female characters have indeed been named

Robin, Carrie Kelley and Stephanie Brown, though each served as Batman’s partner for only a handful of issues. The following chapter explores these characters’ brief careers as Robin and how writers have used young female sidekicks to communicate specific, and arguably dangerous, ideas about adolescent femininity to primarily young male audiences.

66 Scott Snyder and Declan Shalvey, “The Cursed Wheel Part One,” All-Star Batman Volume 1: My Own Worst Enemy (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 67 Scott Snyder and Declan Shalvey, “The Cursed Wheel Part One,” All-Star Batman Volume 1: My Own Worst Enemy (Burbank: DC Comics, 2016). 127

CHAPTER IV. GIRLS WONDER: YOUNG FEMALE ROBINS IN THE MODERN AGE OF

COMICS

Thus far this project has closely read the ways in which adolescence intersects with sexuality (Chapter Two) and race (Chapter Three) in the teen sidekick figure Robin. Various

Robins in Batman’s history have helped to shore up the Dark Knight’s heterosexuality and whiteness—key traits that indicate his idealized maturity. The case of Dick Grayson/Robin illustrates the lingering queerness of adolescence imposed by the cultural conception of total innocence and lack of sexuality in children; further, his transition from Robin to Nightwing saw writers decisively and durably link Grayson’s maturation to heterosexual activity. With his heterosexuality vividly on display, Dick Grayson was able to achieve idealized maturity and even serve as Batman himself. For Duke Thomas, the first and only black Robin, idealized maturity was cast as out of reach. Writers simultaneously highlighted the precarious existence of black American adolescents and, regrettably, sublimated it into a story that was really about white teens all along. Creators ultimately rescinded the preparatory role of sidekick from Duke, relegating him to an ’s position in the so-called Bat-family.

Two other characters, Carrie Kelley and Stephanie Brown, were likewise introduced as

Robin and almost immediately removed from the role. Unlike Duke, both of these characters are white, and thus it is not their race but their femininity which them from normative patterns of individual development and proscribes them from the role of someday-idealized adult. Female

Robins, I argue, were never meant to be read as “heroes in training” or as the heir apparent to

Batman’s crusade. Instead, they have functioned to reify the “right-ness” of their adult male partner, and to depict fantasies of patriarchal control in which idealized maturity and masculinity are linked through the requisition or punishment of teen girls’ bodies. This reification happens in 128

two key ways. First, the case of Carrie Kelley in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight series presents the adolescent girl as the perfect foil to the adult male, as a cipher able to fulfill whatever diegetic need arises for Batman. She is a “thing” Batman has acquired: a soldier, weapon, damsel in distress, daughter, lover—and in her transmutability, she makes the adult male Batman appear firm, material, and real. Second, through the character Stephanie Brown, creators enact a vicious morality play of what happens to adolescent girls who do not function as perfect foils, who challenge patriarchal order and move “out of their lane.” Stephanie’s characterization as independent and headstrong coupled with her violent, sexualized torture sends the message that adolescent girls who buck the traditional expectation of deference to male authority ought to be punished. This chapter will closely read the main story arcs of Carrie Kelley and Stephanie

Brown, first framing their introductions within the important context of the so-called Modern

Age of comics, and then detailing the ways in which writers used these characters to shore up

Batman’s maturity, masculinity, and “right-ness” by diminishing, objectifying, or disposing of them.

Youth and Femininity: A Lasting Partnership

As I argue in Chapter One, the deployment of adolescence sought to affirm the identity of

“adult.” The idealized adult, characterized by heterosexuality, whiteness, and masculinity, is defined by its adherence to these traits and opposition to anything “Other.” James Kincaid writes that the child itself exists as an “Other” to the adult self, made different by its lack of knowledge and its innocence.1 Similarly, within a patriarchal society, women are positioned as “Others,” perhaps not as blank of slates as children but certainly more impressionable than their male counterparts. For example, in the United States of America, states debated women’s rights to property ownership and management well into the twentieth century, and it wasn’t until 1920

1 James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992). 129

that women gained the right to vote in federal elections. Women continue to be discouraged from certain kinds of work through both policy and cultural norms. These prohibitions from public life represent a form of infantilization, further establishing the connection between youth and femininity. In her book Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, Susan J.

Douglas identifies mass media as a common purveyor of this view of women: analyzing film and television of her youthful years in the mid-century, she sees repetitive images of women as

“pliant, cute, sexually available, thin … and deferential to men.”2 Furthermore, she notes that most retrospectives of this time period’s mass culture laud male figures as “serious, lasting, and authentic,” “thoughtful, dedicated rebels,” and “the ones who made history,” while women

“appear as mindless, out-of-control bimbos … Idiots, hysterics, dumbos—empty vessels”

(emphasis mine).3 The empty, innocent child and the empty, deferential woman are combined in the figure of the female adolescent—doubly “Other,” doubly marginalized, identifiable by their difference from the idealized adult male.

The figure of Robin, when he initially emerged, was thus of course a boy: Batman couldn’t rightly train a young girl to be a detective or a crimefighter, let alone his potential replacement.

Though this first Robin, introduced in 1940, somewhat predates the “serious” and “thoughtful” men of Douglas’s pop culture diet, he was nonetheless prime for being understood as a future contributor to society. Female characters, on the rare occasions they did appear in early issues of

Batman and Detective Comics, were presented as love interests for Batman or—especially after the 1950s uproar over potential homoeroticism between the Dynamic Duo—rather awkward attempts at love interests for Robin. Even as the women’s rights and feminist movements picked up steam in the 1960s and 1970s, comics continued to eschew a female partner for Batman.

2 Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are (New York: Random House, 1994), 9. 3 Douglas, 5. 130

Female superheroes in general were and continue to be few and far between, and those that do exist are often belittled or hypersexualized (or both simultaneously). Consider the diminutive suffix “–girl” frequently tacked onto the nicknames of heroic adult females: Batgirl (Barbara

Gordon), (Shiera Hall, who in 1981 did change her name to ), Bulletgirl

(Susan Barr, wife of Bulletman), the ’s Elasti-Girl (Rita Farr) and Disney’s version of the same character, Elastigirl of “The Incredibles” (Helen Parr). For comparison, very few male superheroes are named “–boy,” and those who are typically present as actual young characters: (Connor Kent), Boy (Garfield Logan), and Klarion the Witch Boy

(no alter ego). Carolyn Cocca writes that in the few instances “when female comic characters were made central and made powerful, their power was counterbalanced with exaggerated sexualization, priming the reader to associate female-ness with being a sex object.”4 Made smaller or younger by their name or turned into an object by their appearance, female characters have generally not been granted much value. Even Wonder Woman had to join the Justice

Society as a secretary, and was depicted as “honored” by the offer.5

Writers have thus been extremely reluctant to assign a female Robin to Batman, but the brief instances we are able to analyze provide valuable insight into the ways in which adolescence and femininity have intersected in comics. This intersection has supported an image of idealized maturity which is tied inextricably to masculinity. The teen girl, Ilana Nash writes in

American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture, is “a liminal figure who combines two identities that incite pleasure and anxiety in the adult male … discourses surrounding teenage girls reaffirm the ‘rightful’ primacy of adult males in the organization of

4 Carolyn Cocca, Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 221. 5 Gardner Fox, Jack Burnley, and Sheldon Moldoff, “Justice Society of America: Shanghaied Into Space,” All-Star Comics #13 (New York: DC Comics, 1942). 131

American culture.”6 In short, stories featuring teen girls actually rely on adolescent girls to restore patriarchal order and bring psychic relief to their audiences. By the 1980s and throughout the Modern Age of comics, the constriction of the comic reading demographic to teenage and young adult men meant the demand for this relief and restoration of order was particularly sharp.

Stories of girl Robins neatly fulfill this expectation. Though there have only been two, these girl

Robins indeed exist primarily as mechanisms for the restoration of proper, male-dominated order, and their stints as Robin neatly bookend the Modern Age.

The Place of Girlhood in the Modern Age of Comics

In order to responsibly analyze the portrayal of adolescent girls as sidekick figures in

Batman comics, it is important to first understand the broader sub-cultural context within which these characters were introduced. The Modern Age of comics, roughly defined as the mid-1980s through the early 2010s, is marked by sharp departures in themes, images, and characterizations from all mainstream superhero comics written before and the majority which have been written since. Collectively, these departures amount to a refutation of anything “juvenile” or

“adolescent” about comics. This section will provide background on the sub-cultural milieu within which both Carrie Kelley and Stephanie Brown were written, a milieu laser-focused on pleasing a narrow audience due to coalescing economic and social factors.

As I discuss in Chapter Two, the comic book industry had been forced into self-censorship in the 1950s after accusations that comics were contributing to juvenile delinquency. The resultant Comics Code Authority put forth strict standards within which creators had to write and draw, or else their comic might not receive Code approval. Most grocers and newsstand operators would not sell a comic without Code approval, so comics became even more closely

6 Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth Century Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3. 132

associated with youth due to the absence of any adult themes, including sex, drug use, and overt violence. Though comic creators managed to find transformative means of storytelling within the code by slipping through cracks where possible and inventing when the old left them no outlet, many comic book writers and scholars look back upon this time period with frustration and embarrassment. Comic book author Alan Moore, in his introduction to The Dark Knight

Returns, writes that by the 1980s audiences had gained a newfound “sophistication,” requiring updated and less childish heroes. He continues,

The fields of cinema and literature have to some extent been able to tackle the problem in a

mature and intelligent fashion … The field of comic books, seen since its inception as a

juvenile medium in which any interjection of adult themes and subject matter are likely to

be met with howls of outrage and the threat or actuality of censorship, has not been so

fortunate. Whereas in novels and movies we have been presented with such concepts as the

anti-hero or the classical hero reinterpreted in a contemporary manner, comic books have

largely had to plod along with the same old muscle-bound oafs spouting the same old

muscle-bound platitudes while attempting to dismember each other.7

Comic book author Grant Morrison likewise describes the pre-Modern Age superhero comic as

“moribund,” a “dry husk,” and lacking “relevance and vitality.”8 Scholar Joseph Witek similarly sees the limitation of comics to a strictly youth medium via the Code as “quell[ing] the vitality of comics.”9 That which is juvenile (and, collaterally, feminine) is bad, all these voices and others seem to say, or at best indicates a sort of unrealized potential.

7 Alan Moore, introduction to The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 8 Grant Morrison, Supergods (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011). 9 Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, , and (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 49. 133

This “potential” finally came to its realization in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns

(1986), and its association of maturity with masculinity was rather crudely pointed out by Miller himself in an introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of the book, released in 2016: “DARK

KNIGHT has been so successful, publishers have realized they have to publish this kind of stuff without putting a condom on it.”10 Here Miller, in choice terms, connects the success of The

Dark Knight Returns to a hyper-masculine expression of penetration without protection. The allegory of sex without a condom surely implies a more pleasurable experience for the primarily male audience of The Dark Knight Returns, indicating that Miller saw an audience of males and sought to both express his own masculinity and appease his audience with this “unsheathed” version of the Batman.

This broad assumption of a male audience on Miller’s part is not without merit—in fact, it is rather spot on. By 1986, and the introduction of Carrie Kelley as Robin, several factors contributed to an almost exclusively adolescent and young adult male audience (though there was certainly still a small but significant population of female readers, who will be discussed in this chapter’s conclusion). Part of a wider backlash against the gains of Second Wave feminism, the comic book industry grew more insular and attentive to its male readers throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Terrence Wandtke notes that, partly in an effort to compete with the increasing popularity of video games amongst young people, “publishers worked feverishly to maintain their current audience as they grew older with superhero stories that were darker and more complex.”11 This constriction of the market was abetted by the economically-driven shift to direct market sales. Comic books were formerly sold at groceries and newsstands which could return unsold issues, but in the 1970s major producers cut deals with small independent shops, in

10 Frank Miller, introduction to The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 11 Terrence Wandtke, The Meaning of Superhero Comic Books (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). 134

which the shops could order issues at a steep discount, but would not be able to return them.12

These shops, typically owned by male fans, enabled social gate-keeping and other mechanisms of exclusion, constricting readership further and further as the direct market came to account for the vast majority of comic book sales by the 1980s. Carolyn Cocca notes that “the growth of the direct market intersected with the broader conservative backlash against the gains of the Second

Wave of feminism, civil rights movements, and gay rights movements. Most mainstream superhero comics began to display very particular and very binary representations of gender: hypermuscular men and hypersexualized women.”13 Any investigation of female characters in the Modern Age of comics requires the understanding that these texts were not intended for young women; instead, they sought to appeal to young male audiences with stories of masculine power, intelligence, and athleticism.

Thus, an analysis of teen girls in comics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century represents a departure from more established aspects of girlhood studies. The field of girls’ studies originated with academic foci on messages communicated to young female consumers, and is indebted in no small part to Angela McRobbie’s 1978 study of Britain’s Jackie

Magazine.14 McRobbie’s study was a powerful example of girlhood studies, in which she analyzed Jackie for its role in communicating a particular ideology and ideal way of being a

“teen girl” to its adolescent female readers. Since that time, the field of girlhood studies has expanded to studies of film, television, and other mass media texts, including the works of

Douglas and Nash already cited herein. However, most of these objects of inquiry which communicate ideas about teen girls are meant either for teen girls (as is the case with

12 For a more detailed and straightforward discussion of the transition to direct market sales, see and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture (New York: Continuum: 2009). 13 Cocca, 11. 14 Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just 17 (London: Palgrave, 1990). 135

McRobbie’s work) or for a relatively broad audience (such as the narrative cycles of Nash’s book and the mass-media texts of Douglas’s).

A study of teen girls in comics of the 1980s-2000s, on the other hand, needs to be considered with its intended audience of young men in mind. Rather than communicate an ideal way of being a “teen girl” to real-life teen girls, or even a large audience including teen girls, soon-to-be teen girls, and former teen girls, the characters and narratives in superhero stories of the Modern Age communicated the idea of “teen girls” primarily to adolescent and young adult males. In the narratives studied here, adolescent girl Robins are presented as mechanisms for the restoration or maintenance of patriarchal order. They are either supportive of patriarchal control, or punished by male characters and male authors for their threatening of it. Much is at stake in understanding the ways adolescence and femininity intersect in texts aimed at their male peers— just as the story of Duke Thomas in Chapter Three primarily reifies confusing interpretations of black adolescence, reading the girl Robins of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century reifies perception of girls as corollaries, crutches, or cautionary asides to the real story, which seemingly belongs to the men.

The Amazing Transforming Carrie Kelley

The Dark Knight Returns (1986), as evidenced by author Frank Miller’s rather crude condom comment, is focused in large part on what it means to “be a man.” The Dark Knight

Returns is about an aging hero reclaiming his virile masculinity, a reclamation which is achieved in part through his relationship with teen girl sidekick Carrie Kelley. Robin has always, to some extent, existed to shore up aspects of Batman’s own maturity, but in The Dark Knight Returns

Robin is less of a character than a utility belt. Miller casts Carrie Kelley in the role of competent 136

soldier, helpless child, damsel in distress, and grieving, servile wife; she is a convenient solution to whatever the unchanging Batman’s needs are at a given point in the story.

Carrie is part of a long tradition of teen girls in popular culture fashioned as “a non-person constructed as a foil for adult men, the people around whose needs and desires a patriarchal society caters to.”15 Because Carrie Kelley is in fact nothing, she can be anything and everything to Batman (and Miller), in a way that a male Robin never could, at least not without directly undermining Batman’s heterosexuality and traditional masculinity. To the contrary, the amorphousness of Carrie’s young female characterization serves to reify the conceptual linkages between maturity and straight masculinity. Though Miller’s work has long been celebrated as

“quality” literature and an example of comics as a legitimate art form, closely examining his treatment of Carrie Kelley reveals that for all Miller’s innovations, he did little to challenge the second-class status of female characters in superhero comics or portrayals of teen girls in media more broadly.

Carrie Kelley makes her debut in the first book of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns

(TDKR).16 Long hailed as a virtual savior of the flagging comics industry, TDKR remains one of the earliest and strongest examples of the “mature” superhero comic. Covered in press and critiqued in scholarship as a “graphic novel,”17 TDKR is often described as a “realistic” take on Batman. Miller’s Gotham City resembles in many ways any major American city of the

1980s: it is crowded, dirty, crime-ridden, governed by President Ronald Reagan, and saturated

15 Nash, 3. 16 Carrie Kelley’s last name is also spelled “Kelly” in one instance in Book III of The Dark Knight Returns. Various scholars have utilized both spellings; I choose here to rely on the first mention of Carrie’s last name in the text and include the additional “e.” Though not mentioned in TDKR, Miller writes in his sequel The Dark Knight Strikes Again that Carrie’s full name is “Caroline Keene Kelley,” perhaps a reference to girl detective Nancy Drew, whose myriad authors wrote under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. 17 For a well-sourced summary of the reception of TDKR upon its release in 1985-1986, see Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001): 267. 137

by television news. “Batman” hasn’t been seen in ten years, Bruce Wayne whiles away his days drinking alone in Wayne Manor, and Alfred tut-tuts to himself as he refills Master Bruce’s tumbler. A combination of factors, including a government crackdown on superhero activity and the death of Batman’s second Robin, Jason Todd,18 led to Batman’s retirement, but Bruce Wayne is unsatisfied. He takes up the mantle of the Bat again to crush a gang of slice-and-dicers known as the Mutants, but in so doing awakens the Joker from a catatonic state at the Home for the Emotionally Troubled and attracts the ire of President Reagan, who dispatches Superman to coax (or force) Batman back to retirement. Batman also picks up a new Robin along the way,

Carrie Kelley, a thirteen-year-old girl with neglectful parents who tracks down Batman herself and takes up his cause. The story ends with Batman finally killing the Joker and faking his own death in a fight with Superman, only to be dug up after his funeral by Carrie Kelley and begin training an army of former Mutants to serve him in his solipsistic quest to “right” the world.

Miller’s Misogyny

Before examining the fungibility of Carrie Kelley and the ways Miller transforms her into whatever tool Batman needs, it is crucial to understand that TDKR’s focus on Batman “being a man” is achieved in large part through the denigration of female characters. Carrie herself appears rather androgynous, which seems to save her from some of Miller’s worst slights. As

Nathan G. Tipton observes, “Miller first illustrates Carrie as a tomboyish teenager whose only overt signs of gender are her name and, in a more stereotypic vein, the way she carries her books flat against her chest.”19 She is white; has short, -style orange hair; wears jeans and

18 Though Jason Todd would become the first Robin to die “on the job,” this death was not written into continuity until 1988’s Batman #427. Even then, it was dictated by a call-in campaign, a gimmick meant to gin up enthusiasm for the title, but one whose outcome may have led to Jason Todd’s survival. Miller seems to have predicted the character’s death two years in advance. Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo, “A Death in the Family: Chapters Three and Four,” Batman #427 (New York: DC Comics, 1988). 19 Nathan G. Tipton, “Gender Trouble: Frank Miller’s Revision of Robin in the Batman: Dark Knight Series,” The Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 2 (2008): 330. 138

sweatshirts when not dressed as Robin; and sports square, green-tinted glasses (Figure 4.120).

Throughout TDKR, she is mistaken by Gotham City civilians and police for “the Boy Wonder” several times.

Figure 4.1: Batman and Robin/Carrie Kelley in TDKR

Miller thus frames a young girl who is masculinized or boyish as at least aiming for the proper target, and reading the other female and feminized characters of TDKR reveals that Miller does not associate femininity with much good. Miller’s Joker is undeniably feminized: the villain frequently dons lipstick (his own signature , of course), refers to Batman as “darling,” and arranges their final showdown in the carnival’s Tunnel of Love. 21 Catwoman (aka Selina

Kyle), a former foil, love interest, and near match for Batman in every way, appears only a few times in The Dark Knight Returns. First, her voice is heard in a message left on Bruce’s

20 Frank Miller, “Book II: The Dark Knight Triumphant,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 21 Later portrayals of the Joker would push this characterization further, including a notable representation of the Joker in a dress and heels in Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s : A Serious House on Serious Earth (New York: DC Comics, 1989). According to that book’s original script, Morrison wanted the Joker in full Madonna costume, but this racier version did not make it into the final draft. 139

answering machine informing him she is “lonely,” and later she is a victim of the Joker’s: he sexually assaults her, beats her, dresses her up like Wonder Woman, and leaves her hog-tied for

Bruce to find. Despite her apparent business acumen (Miller’s Kyle is now the proprietor of an escort service), this version of Selina Kyle seems far less independent and clever than she had been written in the past. Newly-appointed police commissioner Ellen Yindel is likewise portrayed as an ill-prepared and ineffectual “diversity hire.”

Finally, Miller’s depiction of Superman highlights the obsessive hyper-masculinity of the text and its denigration of anything deemed feminine. Superman is positioned in TDKR as a government lackey, having signed away his freedom to President Ronald Reagan in order to continue helping people under the radar (and occasionally doing the President’s bidding).

Miller’s Batman interprets Superman’s surrender of control to the government as feminizing, and in case Superman’s emasculation was unclear, an iconic image of Superman from TDKR portrays him looking remarkably like a Disney princess: sparklingly clean in a crisp white shirt, surrounded by flowers, butterflies, and sunlight—a sharp contrast in color and tone to nearly every other page in the text.22 The final fight of The Dark Knight Returns is between these two heroes, and finds Miller (through Batman) framing knowledge, reality, and a life worth living as the sole provenance of men: punching Superman after weakening him with a sonic blast, Batman asserts “—It’s way past time you learned—what it means—to be a man—.”23 What it means to be a man, it would appear, is physical domination and control. Collectively, these infantilizing, diminished images of femininity communicate that only masculinity is right and mature.

In light of Miller’s apparent distaste for anything feminine in his Batman story, readers may rightly ask why he has given Batman a female sidekick at all, even as she is somewhat de-

22 Frank Miller, “Book III: Hunt the Dark Knight,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 23 Frank Miller, “Book IV: The Dark Knight Falls,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 140

feminized. Considering what Ilana Nash refers to as “the sexiness of emptiness,”24 it would appear Miller intuited the utility of a doubly-marginalized teen girl in making Batman appear masculine, heterosexual, and not quite yet off the deep end. Nash carefully traces the ways in which teen girls in popular culture have largely functioned as a near-perfect foil for the presumed avatars and architects of society and culture, adult men. She writes that throughout the twentieth century, “traditions in Western culture construct both children and women as exotic and erotic

Others. The discourses surrounding these populations often function by establishing a precondition of emptiness … a lack of the qualities by which the dominant culture defines itself.

That emptiness renders the subject of discussion less of a full person than are members of the dominant population.”25 Teen girls are thus emptied twice over, inviting all manner of penetration and inroads for mechanisms of patriarchal control. Batman’s exhibition of this form of control is exactly what Miller is after—speaking of his time writing TDKR, Miller notes, “I was very, very angry, just watching Clint Eastwood movies back to back, getting absolutely paranoid. I figured if Batman was a grown-up, he’d take care of things.”26 Carrie makes Batman appear “grown-up” by representing the doubly-empty Other to the full, solid adult. However,

Batman had always, up until TDKR, been partnered with a teen boy. Miller nods to this history, as he nods to all of Batman’s history, but makes clear he does not see such relationships fitting into his hyper-masculine portrayal.

When Robin/Dick Grayson was first introduced in 1940, creator Bob Kane saw the character as a means of humanizing Batman—in this sense, Dick Grayson was merely a tool to shape perception of Batman as well, but in seeking to make the caped crusader more relatable,

Grayson himself was written as gentle and humanistic. As I trace in Chapter Two, it was also

24 Nash, 19. 25 Nash, 19. 26 Miller, introduction to The Dark Knight Strikes Again. 141

presumed that someday, a character such as Dick Grayson will also be an adult male, benefiting from patriarchal structures that diminish and exoticize teen girls. Miller’s Batman hasn’t spoken to Dick Grayson “for seven years,” acknowledging some sort of falling out between the two;27 more likely, Miller preferred not to countenance a potential challenge to the white, heterosexual, masculine primacy of his Batman. Miller’s Batman has also witnessed the death of his second

Robin, Jason Todd, who at the time of TDKR’s release was very much alive and well in continuity. It would seem Miller was deeply invested in creating a new character, despite his mission to synthesize all of Batman’s history and his primary use of well-established and recognizable characters. Carrie Kelley’s emptiness and transmutability provide Batman/Bruce

Wayne with a similar sense of generativity as Dick and Jason did, but through her adolescent girlhood, she is further able to appear as whatever character type Miller needs her to be.

Carrie Kelley as Smart Sidekick

Though Miller’s Robin is amoebic and constantly transforming, some of the roles Carrie

Kelley occupies complicate the aforementioned misogyny of TDKR. Carrie Kelley is afforded an unusual amount of agency compared to the villainous, sidelined, or incompetent feminized characters. Even compared to previous Robins, Dick Grayson and Jason Todd, Carrie appears decisive and active. For example, she purchases her own Robin costume and tracks down

Batman herself, saving him from near-defeat at the hands of the Mutant gang leader. It is implied that Carrie has largely fended for herself for some time: she has two parents, but they are never pictured and their off-panel discussions seem to center on trying to remember their favorite acid trips and making sure neither one monopolizes the bong (“Hey … didn’t we have a kid?”28).

Carrie has also taught herself to work with computers, a skill she puts to use when

27 Frank Miller, “Book I: The Dark Knight Returns,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 28 Frank Miller, “Book II: The Dark Knight Triumphant,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 142

Miller/Batman needs her to act as a competent sidekick. When attempting to prevent a Joker attack at a television studio, Bruce Wayne tells her “This is strictly an observation mission for you, Robin. You will stay in the copter. You are not to touch the controls … Computers. You wouldn’t understand.” “Figure I wouldn’t,” Carrie replies, which in her slang means she believes she absolutely would understand.29 Batman tells her that if she disobeys him, she will be fired.

Of course, Carrie does disobey Batman and ends up saving both of their lives from the Gotham

City Police Department, who are mobilized against Batman since the retirement of his longtime collaborator, former commissioner Jim Gordon. Through her sass and cleverness, she is thus positioned as both a good sidekick and an occasionally disobedient child, but one whose actions ultimately prove to have been the right decisions. In this sense, she resembles the more forthright ingénues of 1930s films, “plucky little urchins” who may break a few rules, but only to help support the men in their lives, typically their fathers.30

As I discuss at length in Chapter Two, a key function of Robin is to make Batman appear mature enough to parent a child, to provide a sense of generativity and future-focus. In many ways, Carrie Kelley serves this purpose in TDKR. She describes Batman to a local news station as “a man—about—twelve feet tall.”31 Carrie’s words and eager face are superimposed on a full- page splash of Batman, who fills the entire frame, leaping down onto a villain’s car and thinking to himself “This should be agony. I should be a mass of aching muscle … and, were I an older man, I surely would … but I’m a man of thirty —of twenty again.” Through this image and

Batman’s internal monologue, Miller shows us how Carrie sees Batman—young, virile, manly, twelve feet tall. She is filled with childlike wonder at his presence, and in this way serves to re-

29 Frank Miller, “Book III: Hunt the Dark Knight,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 30 Nash, 82. 31 Frank Miller, “Book I: The Dark Knight Returns,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 143

masculinize and re-sexualize the aging Bruce Wayne and show readers how Miller wants us to see Batman. It is through Carrie that “Batman” is able to fully make his return.

Throughout TDKR, Miller writes Bruce Wayne hearing “Batman” as a voice in his own head, as though Batman were a dissociated persona inhabiting Bruce Wayne’s mind, itching to get out and express himself. Bruce thinks to himself, “he laughs at me, curses me. Calls me a … Brings me here when the night is long and my will is weak. He struggles relentlessly, hatefully, to be free.”32 The Batman persona is stronger, meaner, more aggressive, but Bruce

Wayne made a promise to Robin not to let Batman take over again: “I will not let him. I gave my word. For Jason. Never. Never again.”33 Robin/Jason buried Batman, but Robin/Carrie digs him up both figuratively (they meet on Bruce Wayne’s first night out as Batman again), and literally (at the end of the book after he has faked his own death). We can read “Batman’s” release as particularly abetted by a female Robin’s presence. Robin/Carrie unburies the “real man” in Bruce by amplifying the voice of monstrous, aggressive figure of Batman and quieting the aging, emasculated billionaire. If we as readers understand Batman’s return as heroic and necessary, which seems to be the reading Miller intended, then Carrie has done all of Gotham a service by bringing him back.

From Child to Lover: Carrie’s Heterosexualization of Batman

Importantly, it is not only through Carrie’s youth that this unburying is made possible, but also her femininity. Carrie is able to restore Batman to his masculine, heterosexual self in large part because of her own nascent female sexuality. Carrie is often portrayed as supporting Batman in a physical and emotional position akin to that of a grieving romantic partner. When she first returns with Batman to the Batcave after a brutal fight with the Mutant leader, she sits near the

32 Frank Miller, “Book I: The Dark Knight Returns,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 33 Frank Miller, “Book I: The Dark Knight Returns,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 144

hospital bed, “a young girl waiting with anxiety to discover if her hero will live, she is placed in the role of concerned wife or lover,” as comics scholar Geoff Klock observes.34 Later, at Bruce

Wayne’s funeral, Carrie is drawn wearing traditional widow’s garb (the most feminine clothing she wears throughout the entire book), complete with black birdcage veil, black hat, and black gloves. Abetted by the liminality of adolescence, Carrie is portrayed as both an awestruck child and a mature, possibly romantic partner to Batman. She is in fact neither of these relations to

Batman, but the malleability of her character’s appearance and multiple positions she is able to fill reflect the emptiness with which cultural producers imbue young girls.

Along this line, Nathan G. Tipton sees Miller mobilize Carrie Kelley to disrupt potential homoeroticism in TDKR, working to heterosexualize Batman and allowing Miller to nod to

Batman history without embracing it. In this case, Carrie helps indirectly address the charges of homoeroticism endured by the Batman since at least the publication of Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent.35 According to Tipton, Miller inserts femininity when the scales threaten to tip toward homosexual readings of Batman/Bruce Wayne. For example, he characterizes Selina

Kyle’s voice on Bruce’s answering machine as “disruptive and transformative,” altering an all- male space and state of mind to accommodate heterosexual desire. Tipton continues, “Indeed,

Miller suggests, women are able to break the always problematic male bond through a simple expression of female heteroerotic desire and, thus, reveal the ‘real man’ lurking underneath. Put more simply, all Bruce/Batman really needs is a ‘real woman’ to turn him away from the worrisome imprimatur of homosexuality.”36 However, Tipton also notes that Selina Kyle is ultimately not the “right woman for the job,” and turns his analysis to Carrie as the female who

34 Geoff Klock, “The Revisionary Superhero Narrative,” in The Superhero Reader, ed. Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester (Jackson: University Mississippi, 2013): 121. 35 Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (London: Museum Press, 1955). 36 Tipton, 329. 145

“remains.”37 Before turning back to Carrie, however, it is worthwhile to question why exactly

Selina Kyle is not fit to disrupt homoerotic tension for most of TDKR, and why Carrie functions better in this regard.

After her telephone message in Book One, Selina doesn’t return until Book Four, this time visibly—and she appears mightily worse for wear. No longer the sexy, fit cat burglar of her youth, Selina is portrayed as old, fat, chain-smoking, and tired. Miller implies that a woman who has seen the world and been a victim of it, a woman of Bruce’s age—Bruce, who retains his muscle mass and his chiseled jaw, who feels like “a man of thirty—of twenty again,” cannot be an adequate support for his reclamation of masculinity. Carrie, on the other hand, sees Bruce

Wayne exactly as he wants to be seen: big, powerful, adult, and in control. Her youth makes her far more available to being “penetrated” by masculine ideals than the grown Selina.

Tipton argues that, having discarded Selina as a potential feminine foil, Miller calls up

Carrie at key moments in the text when a reader could ostensibly detect homoerotic tension, as is the case during the fight with the Mutant leader, which involves several frames of the two men rolling around in a mud pit. Tipton writes, “Simply put, Carrie is Miller’s connection to heteronormativity, and her appearances begin to coincide more and more frequently within scenes of overt homoeroticism. Thus she is able to distract from and disrupt scenarios that threaten to ‘cross the line’ into homoeroticism.”38 It is Carrie who reveals the “‘real man’ lurking underneath” Bruce’s façade. It is Robin who helps to define Batman, as it always has been since

Dick Grayson’s introduction in 1940.

Sometimes the malleability of Carrie results in her appearing as a clever and capable sidekick, but the ways in which Miller calls her up to heterosexualize Batman in a way a male

37 Tipton, 329. 38 Tipton, 331. 146

Robin never could indicates that Miller is more interested in her for her “emptiness” than the power of such a character to challenge regressive portrayals of women in mainstream superhero comics. It is Carrie’s transmutability and the openness to penetration represented by the doubly-

Othered teen girl that make her useful to Batman (and to Miller), allowing him to assert his masculinity and have it appear fixed and solid in comparison. This apparent utility of an adolescent female Robin begs the question as to why a young female Robin didn’t . Miller himself reveals the answer in his follow-up to TDKR, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002): because unlike traditional male sidekicks, who often eventually take up the mantle of their partners (Dick Grayson becomes Batman;39 Wally West becomes The Flash;40 Barnes becomes Captain America;41 etc.), when adolescent girls age, especially adolescent girls designed and written by adult men, they often become mere sexual objects, wholly unfit for independent heroism. If any lingering suspicions remain that Miller was constructing a positive or even nuanced representation of a female sidekick in TDKR, one who could someday become a hero in her own right, his over-the-top sexualization and objectification of Carrie in The Dark

Knight Strikes Again dispels any doubt about the place of young women in Miller’s world—that is, to affirm and assure the primacy of adult men.

Catgirl and the Limits of Girl Robin-Hood

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, first published in 2002 and referred to colloquially as DK2, harbors even more misogynistic themes and images than The Dark Knight

Returns, and it transforms Carrie Kelley yet again, this time to a sexual object as the re-

39 Chuck Dixon, Alan Grant, Doug Moench, Bret Blevins, and Romeo Tanghal, Batman: Prodigal (New York: DC Comics, 1998); Tony S. Daniel, Battle for the Cowl (New York: DC Comics, 2009). 40 Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, “Final Crisis,” Crisis on Infinite Earths Volume 1 #12 (New York: DC Comics, 1986). 41 and Steven Epting, “The Burden of Dreams (Part 4),” Captain America #34 (New York: Marvel Comics, 2008). 147

christened Catgirl. The new nickname goes unexplained, though an exchange in Book Two of the series implies Carrie chose the moniker for herself (Batman refers to her as Robin, to which she replies “It’s Catgirl, get a clue.”42). Catgirl, unlike Robin, is coded as extremely feminine and hyper-sexualized. She is drawn wearing a suit that may as well be body paint and a small, eye-framing mask—Carrie seems to have ditched her square tinted glasses in favor of showing off her skill in applying liquid eyeliner. She is introduced in “parts”: first, her full, parted lips fill three entire frames and a whole page. At the bottom of the adjacent page readers finally see all but Carrie’s lower legs and feet—but she is pictured in a modified version of what is known in the comics world as a “broke back” pose (Figure 4.243). This pose, endemic in Modern Age comics of the 1990s and 2000s, draws women as “unnaturally twisted and arched to display all of their curves in the front and back simultaneously.”44 A woman’s back would have to be literally broken to appear in this way, hence the name. Immediately after this image, the next panel portrays a close-up of both the curve of her backside and a neat “v” where her legs meet in the front. The very round, very pronounced halves of her backside make no fewer than twelve appearances in the following nine pages, culminating with her confessing, “Gross. I swallowed.”45 She is referring to accidentally ingesting the entirety of Ray Palmer, a superhero also known as the , who had shrunk down to bite-sized in order to break out of his prison, but the connotation is clear: Miller is making a reference to the sixteen-year-old Carrie giving oral sex.

42 Frank Miller, “Book Two,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 43 Frank Miller, “Book One,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 44 Cocca, 12. 45 Frank Miller, “Book One,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 148

Figure 4.2: Carrie Kelley’s Introduction in DK2

The dramatic alterations to Carrie’s character rely on her adolescent femininity and its connotations of emptiness, amorphousness, and penetrability; however, in some ways, this exponential increase in Robin’s visible sexualization follows in the tradition of Dick Grayson, the first and longest-running partner to Batman. As I detail in Chapter Two, comic book creators transformed Dick Grayson into the idealized adult hero Nightwing in part through his romantic, physical relationship with alien princess Starfire. Once Dick Grayson’s mature heterosexuality was ensured, idealized adulthood and lone hero status became available to him. Nightwing, in the hands of several creators, has gone on to defeat many foes, up with many women, and sell many comics. Like Marv Wolfman, Chuck Dixon, and Grant Morrison, all of whom wrote

Dick Grayson and associated his maturity with his heterosexuality, Frank Miller mobilizes Carrie

Kelley’s sexuality to indicate her maturation. 149

However, as Frank Miller endows Carrie Kelley with more years of experience and burgeoning sexuality, she actually becomes less independent and more emotionally fragile—as well as more objectified and, in many ways, less mature. Her transformation and transformability here do not indicate movement towards adulthood, as Dick Grayson’s transition to Nightwing did. Instead, it is merely another example of the empty, penetrable Carrie fulfilling a need for the static and solid Batman and Miller.

Several moments in the text refute the potential interpretation that Carrie’s sexualization is a by-product of her achievement of maturity. Late in Book One of DK2, she huddles behind the

Batmobile, crying after disciplining a member of the Batboys (reformed Mutant gang members now in the service of Batman). She is their leader, but her power is undermined by her seeming inability to handle it: she cries alone, “lets herself feel it,” according to Batman’s internal monologue. He rests his hand on her shuddering shoulder and intones, “Good girl. Good soldier.”46 Despite her obvious and intense discomfort with her recent interactions, Batman praises her for it. Her childish need for Batman’s approval is illustrated even more distinctly after a mission to intimidate the villainous , when Carrie flies the Bat-copter and thinks to herself, “I squeeze tight on the steering mechanism so he won’t see my hands shake. I didn’t screw up. Not once.”47 She is fearful and unsettled, but puts her own feelings aside in order to live up to her interpretation of Batman’s expectations. Both Carrie’s thoughts and behaviors hint at increased dependence on, love of, and fear of Batman. In this sense, the occasionally disobedient child has been replaced by an obedient one, the grieving wife or lover now a co- dependent one.

46 Frank Miller, “Book One,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 47 Frank Miller, “Book Two,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 150

Robin War Redux, or the “Fridging” of Carrie Kelley

Though many authors have used sexual activity to signal Dick Grayson’s achievement of maturity, Miller’s interpretation of Dick Grayson post-Robin differs dramatically from those canonical representations. It also provides further evidence that Carrie’s adolescent femininity is what makes her such a useful partner to Batman by re-casting her yet again, this time as a damsel in distress. Miller’s Dick Grayson has been absent for some time, and upon his return to

Batman’s life in The Dark Knight Strikes Again he has become a crazed assassin, having undergone gene therapy in order to alter his appearance at will. Much like Carrie Kelley, Dick

Grayson can now appear as anything, anyone; he has undertaken violent and villainous means to achieve the sort of transmutability that makes Carrie so valuable. What he most wants to be, it appears, is Batman’s partner, the Boy Wonder: Dick Grayson still wears his Robin costume from his childhood, and it would seem his “default” appearance is that of his young adolescent self (though if Miller’s timeline is consistent for all characters, Dick Grayson would be around forty years old).

Throughout most of DK2, Evil Dick Grayson tracks and kills any and every former member of the he can get his hands on, but he is most interested in murdering Carrie

Kelley, who had taken his place as Robin and remains the most important relationship in

Batman’s life. Carrie Kelley is abducted by this volatile and cruel Dick Grayson, tortured and beaten. “He loves you,” the first Robin tells the last, “The daughter he never had. So pretty.

Sweet sixteen. I’m going to skin you alive.”48 Grayson also makes it clear to Batman that he is harming Carrie purely to upset their shared mentor: “I’ll rip your heart out and shove it down your throat, Bruce. And you’ll thank me for it, after you see what I do to your little piece of

48 Frank Miller, “Book Three,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 151

jailbait here.”49 Hinting at the many roles Carrie is able to fill in Batman’s life, Evil Dick

Grayson refers to her as both Batman’s “daughter” and his “piece of jailbait.” The many small panels depicting Carrie’s torture recall the “” phenomenon, a term coined by writer . In classic “fridging,” a female character is violently harmed or sexually assaulted merely to further a male hero’s storyline.50 Here, Carrie Kelley’s abuse not only motivates Batman to action, it also provides a comment on Miller’s interpretation of homosexuality as grotesque and immature, indirectly reinforcing the normalcy of Batman and

Carrie’s sometimes-heteroerotic relationship.

Miller takes the accusations of homoerotic subtext from 1940s and 50s Batman and Robin stories and crafts a version of Dick Grayson who was completely in love with and subservient to

Batman, but whose love was unrequited and may have led to his firing from the role of Robin.

“I loved you!,” Grayson tells him, “I would have done anything for you!” Batman replies, “So what? You were useless.”51 Unlike Carrie, who is quite useful in many ways, Batman could find no utilitarian purpose for Grayson, and so he was let go. In this unhappy , Miller’s

Batman cruelly reminds Grayson of his “unsuitability” for the role of Robin: “I fired your sorry butt. For incompetence. For cowardice. You couldn’t cut the mustard … And did you bawl like a baby or what? … You were always pathetic.”52 Batman taunts him with lovers’ nicknames, like “peach” and “plum,” sharply contrasting the sincerity with which he refers to Carrie as “darling” and “dear” throughout The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Dick Grayson’s obsessive

49 Frank Miller, “Book Three,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 50 Gail Simone, “Women in Refrigerators.” March 1999, accessed 2 February, 2019. https://www.lby3.com/wir/. Simone envisioned the site as a place to list instances of “superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator.” The name “Women in Refrigerators” is a reference to a storyline in which the girlfriend of / is murdered, cut to pieces, and stuffed in a refrigerator for Rayner to find. Her death motivates him to seek revenge on her killer, but otherwise has little impact on the story or Rayner’s personal life. , Steve Carr, Derec Aucoin, , “Forced Entry,” Green Lantern Volume 3 #54 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 51 Frank Miller, “Book Three,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 52 Frank Miller, “Book Three,” The Dark Knight Strikes Again (New York: DC Comics, 2002). 152

love for and dependence on Batman are painted as “pathetic” and “baby”-ish; Miller’s hyper- masculine Batman cannot have had any part in such a relationship, so this retcon (comic industry slang for retroactive change in continuity) casts Grayson as a spurned potential lover, whose unmet homosexual desire has stunted his development and turned him into a super-villain.

Whereas for Carrie Kelley dependence on Batman and a highly sexualized (if not actually sexual) relationship with him appears ideal, for Dick Grayson it is portrayed as monstrous. As opposed to Carrie Kelley, whose empty adolescent femininity and hollow identity Miller portrays as desirable for Batman/Bruce Wayne, the homosexual implications of Dick Grayson’s love for the patriarch is a threat to his traditional masculinity and is thus rendered intolerable.

Yet this interaction between both Robins once again reinforces the idealized image of adulthood as straight and male. Batman’s rescue of Carrie provides him with the opportunity to restore patriarchal control over her female body, which needs saving, and over Dick Grayson’s homosexual body, which he ultimately destroys. Even in Carrie’s failure to fight Grayson, her inability to “cut the mustard” as it were, she is still incredibly useful to Batman as a damsel in distress, allowing him to assert his own capability and heroism. The diegetic and symbolic use of teen girls’ bodies under as a means of reinforcing straight male dominance returns to the fore in the story of Stephanie Brown’s stint as Robin.

Stephanie Brown Spoils the Fun

Carrie Kelley’s story reflects the notion that adolescent girls are useful when they are malleable objects, shoring up the firmness and materiality of masculine adults, but the demise of

Stephanie Brown reifies the cultural belief that independent action on the part of teen girls is immature and misguided at best and disastrous at worst, thus indirectly supporting the idealized maturity and “right-ness” of adult men. Unlike Carrie, Stephanie is not cast as a 153

convenient and flexible foil for Batman; instead, she is written as a challenge to his authority, and then punished severely for her intrusions. This section closely reads the characterization of

Stephanie Brown in issues of Detective Comics and Robin of the 1990s and her story arc in the run-up to and including the DC Comics crossover event War Games. These readings explore

Stephanie’s consistent defiance of patriarchal order and the ways in which the dominant male creative teams make an example of her through her torture and death.

Daddy Issues

Stephanie Brown is portrayed from the get-go as largely defined by the impact of male characters on her life, including Robin, Batman, and her father. Stephanie’s first appearance is in

Detective Comics #647, in which Batman and Robin/Tim Drake begin tracking a villain called

Cluemaster, who recently escaped from prison and claims to no longer rely on his old gambit of leaving “clues” to his crimes. However, the GCPD are receiving clues nonetheless, related to a large heist and his gang are planning. Readers see that he and his new gang are being spied on by a hooded figure dressed in purple with a full navy blue mask and gloves. Later, readers are introduced to a pretty blonde girl seated at a kitchen table, placing pieces of a photograph in an envelope with gloved fingers, leading readers to believe she is the spy and the one sending messages to the GCPD. Her mother inquiries as to her school attendance and homework, indicating her youth. Their home is in utter disrepair, walls peeling, dishes piled up in the sink, and her mother wears a bathrobe and lank hair in the middle of the day. Her mother appears to be addicted to some prescription drug. The young girl and hooded spy is Stephanie

Brown, the daughter of Cluemaster, Arthur Brown. Stephanie is angry at her father for being a 154

criminal and for abandoning his family when he went to prison, and she is now determined to

“spoil” all of his plans, going by the masked moniker Spoiler.53

Stephanie resembles the second Robin, Jason Todd, in that she is the daughter of a criminal father and a drug-addicted mother. Also like Jason, Stephanie challenges Batman’s authority more regularly than most other Robins. When Robin/Tim Drake brings her to Batman so she can tell him everything she’s overheard through her spying, Stephanie says she desperately wants to stop her father, to get “payback” for all he has put her through. However, Batman forbids her from coming with them and stopping the heist, telling her “This is more than some private vendetta you have against your father,” and that people could get hurt. “Say what?,” Stephanie reacts, “I’m going to get my payback and there’s no way you can stop me.” Batman replies, “I’m not arguing with you about this and I’m not negotiating. If you truly want your father caught, then you’ll do as I say.”54 Unlike Jason, then, whom Batman treated kindly and patiently,

Stephanie’s experience of Batman as a father-figure is that of a strict, over-protective paternal authority figure. He is consistently cold and distant towards her. This pattern of Batman speaking harshly to and about Stephanie continues; a full real-time decade later and under completely different authorship, Batman still refers to her as “a foolish and reckless young woman who doesn’t know when to quit.”55 In the interim he has attempted to train her, only to decide she isn’t worth the trouble and give up.

In Stephanie’s second appearance, a three-issue arc in the Robin title, she again resurfaces only after her father escapes from prison in order to oppose him. Robin’s internal monologue

53 Chuck Dixon and , “Inquiring Minds,” Detective Comics #647 (New York: DC Comics, 1992); Chuck Dixon and Tom Lyle, “Let the Puzzlement Fit the Crime,” Detective Comics #648 (New York: DC Comics, 1992). 54 Chuck Dixon and Tom Lyle, “Malled,” Detective Comics #649 (New York: DC Comics, 1992). 55 Andersen Gabrych and , “,” Detective Comics #790 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 155

questions, “Where the Cluemaster goes, can the Spoiler be far behind?”56 The final issue in the arc sees Spoiler coming around to the idea of being a vigilante more regularly—but only to pursue her romantic interest in Tim, to go from directly challenging one man in her life to aggressively chasing another. “I guess this means you go back to being a civilian, right?” he asks after they see Cluemaster arrested. “Maybe not. I mean, not if I can see you again,” Stephanie replies. Despite Tim having kissed Spoiler moments before, he mumbles a non-committal reply and vanishes, pinning precocity and sexual desire largely on Stephanie. This exchange, and the appearance of keen interest in sex on Stephanie’s part when Tim bails, foreshadows Stephanie’s forthright sexual activities in her later appearances.57

Sex and Stephanie Brown: Spoiler Spoiled

Stephanie’s adolescent female challenge of patriarchal authority comes not only through her commitment to locking up her father or arguing with her father-figure Batman, but also through her precocity and sexuality. Stephanie is not depicted as particularly intelligent or a good detective, indirectly reminding readers of how smart both Tim and Batman are, and is generally unremarkable—except for her conventional Western beauty. Stephanie is drawn to be hyper- feminine and attractive. She is shapely, with long blonde hair, large breasts, and full lips, fitting neatly into what Laura Mulvey famously termed the tradition of women connoting “to-be- looked-at-ness,” “coded for strong visual and erotic impact.”58 She is rather immediately and consistently sexualized within the images and storylines of the comics. In the second issue of

Detective Comics featuring Spoiler, Robin leaps from a tree onto the back of her moped, wrapping his legs and arms around her from behind. Shortly thereafter, Spoiler is depicted thinking about Robin in a romantic way, musing to herself, “Wonder if he’s seeing anyone?

56 Chuck Dixon and Tom Grummett, “Clueless,” Robin Volume 4 #3 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 57 Chuck Dixon and Tom Grummett, “Last Gasps,” Robin Volume 4 #5 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 58 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 19. 156

What kind of girl would be Robin’s type?”59 Eventually they begin a capes-with-benefits sort of relationship, in which Tim Drake plans to continue seeing his girlfriend, Ariana, but as Robin he acts on his physical attraction to Spoiler—all the while continuing to keep his real name and identity a secret from Stephanie, made easier by her established lack of intelligence and detective skills.60

Though the differences between Stephanie Brown and early Carrie Kelley are , they share their framing as empty and awaiting male action, awaiting some form of “penetration.” For

Carrie, this appears as responsiveness to Batman’s needs, following his orders, and waging his war without challenging him. For Stephanie, her “penetration” is much more literal. She reveals that an associate of her father’s attempted to rape her when she was a child, and she thinks her father may have killed her abuser after she told him about the incident.61 At sixteen she is sexually active and becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, Dean.62 This activity separates her from all other Robins past, in that no adolescent sidekick to Batman had ever been depicted as sexually active. In fact, one storyline featuring Tim Drake shows his girlfriend expressing interest in having sex with him, which he strongly resists.63 Likewise, Dick Grayson was portrayed as able to stave off the attention of alluring female characters, saving him from precocity and preserving his innocence until precisely the right time. Stephanie’s pregnancy thus marks her as lacking self-control; the visual of her growing belly in these issues is a manifestation of her foolishness. Her abandonment by Dean shows readers the folly of her waywardness, a potential punishment that teen girls who have sex can expect to receive.

59 Chuck Dixon and Tom Grummett, “Last Gasps,” Robin Volume 4 #5 (New York: DC Comics, 1994). 60 Chuck Dixon and Staz Johnson, “Love Stinks,” Robin Volume 4 #56 (New York: DC Comics, 1998). Tim has a guilty conscience about this arrangement and considers breaking up with Ariana, but she actually breaks up with Tim before it can last for very long. 61 Jon Lewis and Pete Woods, “Dating for the Clueless,” Robin Volume 4 #111 (New York: DC Comics, 2003). 62 Chuck Dixon and Staz Johnson, “Date Night,” Robin Volume 4 #57 (New York: DC Comics, 1998). 63 Chuck Dixon and Staz Johnson, “Nowhere Fast,” Robin Volume 4 #40 (New York: DC Comics, 1997). 157

The characterization of Stephanie’s pregnancy aligns with Jeffrey Brown’s analysis of superheroine pregnancies and maternal versus paternal authority in superhero comics.64 Brown argues the ungainly, leaky, “penetrated” bodies of pregnant superheroines indicate a failure to maintain boundaries and a lack of self-control, both pivotal in the superhero fantasy. When Tim arrives to take Stephanie to “baby class,” Stephanie appears disheveled, in oversized sweatpants and a t-shirt, leaning casually in her doorway, already large and apparently uncomfortable.65 Tim is portrayed as the savior of Stephanie’s pregnancy, helping her prepare for the baby, taking her to Lamaze classes, and providing her with the emotional support her own mother is incapable of providing. In this way, Stephanie’s pregnancy treads familiar paths of comic books rejecting the maternal in favor of the paternal, and diminishing the heroic-ness of Stephanie due to her

“penetrated” body while emphasizing the heroic-ness of Tim in his stepping up to care for her and the baby. Brown writes that the “rejection of the maternal in superhero comic books contributes to a greater emphasis on the stability of fatherhood and by extension reaffirms the cultural and legal conceptions of paternal authority.”66 Most often, Brown notes, this paternity is figurative rather than literal, and can be read clearly in sidekick-hero partnerships, wherein adult heroes foster and mentor youthful sidekicks. However, Tim/Robin acting as a father to

Stephanie’s unborn child places the sidekick in the parenting role, emphasizing his own ability to someday be viewed as an idealized adult with paternal authority, similar to Dick Grayson’s assumption of foster fatherhood for Damian Wayne discussed in Chapter Two.

Though Stephanie’s pregnancy aligns with typical depictions of maternity in women superheroes, a common trope of teen pregnancies in broader popular culture raises the specter of

64 Jeffrey A. Brown, Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015). 65 Chuck Dixon and Staz Johnson, “The Ugly Truth,” Robin Volume 4 #60 (New York: DC Comics, 1999). 66 Jeffrey A. Brown, Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), 137. 158

a wasted life, in which a young woman with academic, artistic, athletic, or other potential is forced to give it up to be a mom, or else they are emotionally destroyed by terminating the pregnancy or giving the baby up for adoption.67 To the writers’ credit, Stephanie’s pregnancy and the baby she gives up for adoption do not come to define her young life in the years following that storyline, but between her childhood abuse, pregnancy by a deadbeat boyfriend, and consuming hatred of her father, writers do not depict her as much more than a target of male-inflicted trauma for the sake of moving the story along.

Indeed, aside from her hyper-feminine appearance and obvious sexuality, Stephanie’s second-most remarkable trait seems to be her ability to be serve as a plot mover for Robin/Tim

Drake by being “fridged,” or harmed in some way by scummy men in order to further the story of a non-scummy man. She was and held hostage by a gang of robbers and nearly killed in Robin #15, and kidnapped again in Robin #43, this time specifically as a lure for Tim

Drake.68 Stephanie’s rescue in the end of each instance by Robin/Tim Drake affirms his future access to idealized maturity, while diminishing her own capability.

These moments reinforce the idea that Stephanie is less important as a character in her own right than as a figure who moves the plot for Tim Drake. Tim represents a break from former

Robin figures in that his personal life is fully realized and portrayed within the texts, enough so that he was the first Robin to be given his own title. Much of the dramatic tension in Tim Drake stories comes from this double life, and Stephanie’s presence in his life is a deep well of precisely that sort of tension. She throws off the delicate balance Tim has struck between his two

67 See for example television’s Gilmore Girls: The Complete Series, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, 2007) DVD ; Billie Letts’ novel Where the Heart Is (London: Sceptre, 1995); or even Ben Folds Five’s hit song “,” written by Ben Folds and Darren Jesse, recorded October 1996, Epic Records, Whatever and Ever Amen, 1997, CD. 68 Chuck Dixon and Tom Grummett, “Looking for Clues,” Robin Volume 4 #15 (New York: DC Comics, 1995); Chuck Dixon and Staz Johnson, “The Quarry,” Robin Volume 4 #44 (New York: DC Comics, 1997). 159

lives, creating stories and conflicts that help to sustain a monthly . Similar to the ways in which writers used Duke Thomas to further storylines of Dick Grayson and Damian

Wayne in the 2010s, as I describe in Chapter Three, Stephanie served as a key catalyst for Tim’s growth in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, DC Comics seems to have concluded that Stephanie’s utility in this regard had run its course, but through her time as Robin and its immediate aftermath they nonetheless found ways to deliver again the message that adult men are the real and proper source of order and control.

Stephanie Brown, Girl Wonder?

In discussing Stephanie Brown’s stint as Robin, it is crucial to understand at the outset that the role was never meant to be permanent. Though Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake have all gone on to become independent adult heroes in their own right after serving as Robin, when they were first written to fill the role the authors and editors did not have a specific end in sight for them.69 Their time as Robin and what came after developed organically over several years of storytelling by multiple writers and constant negotiation with fans and editors. For

Stephanie Brown, this was never the intent. Her time as Robin was much hyped, with an extremely flashy first cover showing her diving through the night in a re-designed Robin costume (complete with red headband for her flowing blonde hair), but according to Batgirl writer , all of this was artifice: at a panel presentation for the Writers and Readers Fest in 2011, Horrocks said, “The whole way through it was planned purely as a trick to play on the readers, that we would fool them into thinking that the big event was that

Stephanie Brown would become Robin but we knew all along it was a temporary thing, and she

69 The fourth male Robin, Damian Wayne, is still serving in the role as of this project’s writing. Carrie Kelley is excluded from this discussion due to her not being written “in continuity,” or as part of a serialized monthly title. Miller’s Dark Knight was always meant to stand alone and tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end. 160

was then going to die at the end of this crossover story.”70 In this same panel presentation,

Horrocks expressed shame and regret about the way Stephanie’s story unfolded, but the bottom line remains the same—the writers putting her in a Robin costume was nothing but a sexy diversion. Her challenge of Batman’s authority to name the next Robin and her consistent disobedience of patriarchal order are brutally punished, illustrating that even if adolescent girls do not serve as near-perfect foils for adult male characters, they can still be useful through being made an example.

When Stephanie takes up the role of Robin, Tim Drake has retired from being Robin at the behest of his father, who found out about Tim’s extracurricular activity and forbade it. Not wanting to destroy his relationship with his father, Tim hangs up his cape and attempts to live a normal life. He visits Stephanie as she works out at a local track, where he finds her running in booty shorts and a crop top. She sprints over to him and kisses him in a full-page splash simultaneously passionate and ridiculous, surrounded by childish pink hearts and little stars.

From the start in this arc, Stephanie is portrayed as immature and childlike, despite having carried and delivered a baby herself. Stephanie tells Tim she is still acting as Spoiler, though she has also been strongly discouraged from vigilante activism by Batman, so she patrols during the day instead of at night. One afternoon, she witnesses Tim and another girl kissing. Of course, it was the girl who kissed Tim, and he politely explains to this other girl that he is in a relationship, but this context is lost on Stephanie, who has fled the scene in rage. She is already formulating a

70 , “Inside the DC Writers’ Meeting that Killed Stephanie Brown,” 15 July, 2011. https://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/07/15/%E2%80%9Csome-kind-of-gang-war-in-gotham%E2%80%9D-and- %E2%80%9Cspoiler-was-gonna-die%E2%80%9D/. 161

plan to get back at Tim, which she believes will impress Batman at the same time as a bonus: namely, become Robin.71

This “plan” involves Stephanie forcing herself into the role of Robin, directly challenging

Batman’s orders to refrain from vigilantism. Stephanie breaks into the Batcave wearing a homemade costume—complete with the ever-practical crop top—and insists Batman train her as the new Robin. Surprisingly, Batman agrees, and Stephanie exclaims, “This is so totally COOL!” while leaping into the , her crop top revealing skin almost all the way up to her massively- drawn chest. Alfred reminds Bruce of his former concerns about Spoiler; “I did everything I could to make her quit. She wouldn’t,” is all the answer Alfred gets from him. “But sir,” the butler continues, “promise me one thing. This isn’t some scheme to lure Tim back, is it?”

Batman does not respond, leaving readers to conclude that it very well may be just such a scheme.72 It would seem Stephanie has become Robin to attract Tim’s attention, and Batman only allows her to do it because he sees her as a tool to get the real Robin back. She is a pawn for

Batman to get Tim back just as she is a pawn for DC Comics to hype their upcoming event. In this way, even Stephanie’s defiance of Batman is used as a means to further his designs. Even in asserting her own self-determination, Stephanie’s desires are manipulated into serving Batman’s patriarchal order.

By Robin #128, after appearing as Robin in just 5 issues across the DC Comics universe in three months’ time, Stephanie Brown is fired. She has been subject to haranguing (disguised as “training”) from Batman in which he constantly compares her to former male Robins and finds her wanting. She disobeys an order from Batman, leaving the Bat-copter to rescue him

71 and , “A Life More Ordinary,” Robin Volume 4 #126 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 72 Bill Willingham and Damion Scott, “A Life More Ordinary,” Robin Volume 4 #126 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 162

from a fight he was losing to an assassin called . Though Stephanie insists that she was just trying to help, Batman summarily dismisses her: “I gave you a fair shot. You didn’t measure up, but there’s no shame in that. And Stephanie? Let this be the end to all of it. From now on, I don’t expect to see Spoiler out there either.”73 Batman’s demand that she refrain all vigilantism in the future implies that he did allow her to be Robin as a ruse—if not to get Tim back, then perhaps to finally show Stephanie just how unfit he thinks she is for the job.

War Games: To the Victor the Spoiler

Stephanie’s next story arc after being fired from the role of Robin illustrates the danger for adolescent girls who step out of their lane and defy the primacy of adult men. Stephanie has stolen one of Batman’s “war games,” scenario plans for if and when things really go south, and then she puts it into play in hopes of getting Batman (and Tim) to take her back by showing them she can manage it herself: “I still don’t accept why Batman fired me, I still haven’t given up on proving myself to him,” she thinks to herself.74 However, she is unable to intervene in the opening act of the scenario plan and ignites a gang war involving every crime family and neighborhood in Gotham City, and Batman is framed as the only one truly able to clean up the mess. This storyline juxtaposes the wild, emotional, reactionary girl ex-Robin with the methodical, thoughtful, and ultimately successful Batman. Stephanie’s feminine defiance is turned into a means of highlighting the “right-ness” of the idealized adult male, Batman.

Stephanie is on the run throughout most of War Games, doing her level best to minimize the she has wrought. However, she is depicted as incompetent and incapable of solving the problem, which only Batman knows how to handle. If Carrie Kelley’s fridging was a means for Frank Miller to spur Batman into reckoning with and defeating a demon from his past,

73 Bill Willingham and Damion Scott, “Fired!,” Robin Volume 4 #128 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 74 Devin Grayson and Ramon Bachs, “War Games, Prelude: No Help,” The Batman 12 Cent Adventure Volume 1 #1 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 163

Stephanie Brown’s frames her as the demon finally meeting her well-deserved reckoning. As described above, Carrie is a perfect complement to Batman—everything he needs her to be throughout TDKR and DK2. She is an innocent. Stephanie, on the other hand, was rarely what

Batman needed her to be and was far from innocent, in the sense that she is guilty of starting the crime war and that she was formerly spoiled by sex and pregnancy. She insisted on taking on roles she was strongly discouraged from taking, leaving the house when she was told to stay home, and, like Evil Dick Grayson of DK2, obsessively sought both Batman and Robin’s attention. Stephanie Brown is captured and tortured by , a witty but vicious villain seeking to leverage the crime war to his own advantage. He ostensibly wants information from

Stephanie, but the foundation of his belief that she knows something is flimsy, his reasoning for torturing her is ill-defined, and Stephanie’s resultant death at the end of the arc does little to move either Batman or Tim Drake in any meaningful plot direction. But if a typical fridging happens to spur men to action and Stephanie’s does not, we can safely conclude this punishment is actually more about Stephanie than any other character. Rather than merely communicating that girls are disposable, it communicates to readers that teen girls who defy the patriarchal order are deserving of their punishment, that this is the result of feminine insolence.

Stephanie is tortured because she is an adolescent girl who refused to stay in her lane, and

Black Mask’s abuse specifically mobilizes her gender and age. Though the Modern Age of comics is known for gendered exploitation and violence, writers play up Spoiler’s adolescent identity to charge her ordeal with even more lopsided power dynamics. Referring to Stephanie several times as “little girl,” Black Mask brings her to an abandoned building and strings her up by the wrists; pencillers use this and other poses throughout the torture scenes to highlight her 164

perky chest and long legs (Figure 4.375). Black Mask’s torment of her is riddled with sexual innuendo and comments on her appearance. Black Mask grows frustrated with the lack of useful information Stephanie is able to give: “I mean, you’re pretty as a peach, but not exactly one of

Batman’s smarter minions, are you? Maybe he used you for other, more obvious advantages, eh?

Keep up the morale? Keep the troops happy?”76 Though Black Mask is merely provoking

Stephanie, he is not too far off: these lines recall Spoiler’s introductory arcs in the 1990s when she is consistently portrayed as unintelligent but beautiful—her “use” to Batman and Robin being the way she makes Robin feel both smart and aroused.

Figure 4.3: Stephanie Brown’s Torture

While Black Mask is away consolidating his power, Stephanie manages to break her own wrist and escape, but she is hurt too badly to get far. When her captor returns, he again takes up the sexual nature of their “relationship,” asking as he searches for her if she “crawled to find a

75 Bill Willingham and Thomas Derenick, “War Games, Act 3 Part 4: Too Many ,” Robin Volume 4 #131 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 76 Bill Willingham and Jon Proctor, “War Games, Act 2 Part 5: The Only Light in Gotham,” Robin Volume 4 #130 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 165

more attentive suitor” and suggesting she “[gets] off on the pain.”77 Each visual return to Spoiler and Black Mask shows her more and more damaged—bleeding from her mouth and multiple cuts on her body, crying throughout, and eventually shot by Black Mask. Stephanie’s torture lasts for two full issues of Robin, and her death in the hospital appears in another two issues.78

She served as Robin for just three issues of the title. Her ultimate punishment thus lasts about as long as her biggest transgression—disobeying the expectations of adolescent girlhood by not deferring to the adult male in her life. Interestingly, Stephanie’s torture occurs primarily in the

Robin title, as though specifically portraying it as a result of Stephanie’s attempted usurpation of the role. Readers of Robin who did not pick up the other titles of the War Games series were thus taken directly from Stephanie’s insistence on becoming Robin, to her firing, to her torture.

Like Duke Thomas, the first (and so far, only) black Robin, who willingly surrenders the title to Damian Wayne, writers admit through Stephanie that their gambit was just that—a gambit, never intended to truly diversify the Robin roster in any meaningful way. As Stephanie approaches death in the hospital, she tells Batman “You were so right to me. I’m such an idiot.”79 Having a busty blonde girl on the cover of a few issues of Robin and selling her as the

“Girl Wonder” was a marketing ploy at best, and at worst, a harsh reminder of adolescent girls’ proper place in the world—doing what they are told by adult men, staying home and out of public affairs. A teenage girl cannot occupy the role of future idealized adult hero, because their future does not allow access to idealized maturity. Instead, the adolescent girl is constructed as a convenient foil to adult men, a bit softer and more impressionable than adult women, and less

77 Bill Willingham and Thomas Derenick, “War Games, Act 3 Part 4: Too Many Ghosts,” Robin Volume 4 #131 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 78 A.J. Lieberman and Al Barrionuevo, “War Games Act 3, Part 5: Flight Risk,” Batman: Gotham Knights #57 (New York: DC Comics, 2004); Bill Willingham and Kinsun, “War Games Act 3 Part 8: No Going Back,” Batman #633 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 79 Bill Willingham and Kinsun, “War Games Act 3 Part 8: No Going Back,” Batman #633 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 166

worthy of actual investment of time and energy than adolescent boys. Writing Stephanie to admit that she was never right for the role also appears to be an effort on the part of creators to absolve themselves and their star hero of their treatment of the character. If Stephanie is the one who ultimately decides she wasn’t meant to be Robin, then the whole sordid affair becomes her fault, and not the fault of Batman or a reflection of the writers’ and readers’ desires to see her diminished, bound, and beaten.

Though some of the authors involved in War Games portray Stephanie/Spoiler as somewhat deserving of her punishments, having her acknowledge she was never a good crimefighter and should have stayed out of things, at least two of them have since expressed discomfort with the way the story played out. Dylan Horrocks, who was writing Batgirl during

War Games, admits that both he and Nightwing author Devin Grayson were opposed to the directives from DC Comics editors. Horrocks said, “It was one of the most depressing weeks of my life, because we basically spent the whole week in this horrible office planning how to kill this poor teenage girl.”80 The rest of the team “planned this big long torture scene;” Horrocks said he “[didn’t] want to really have anything to do with that,” and so chose not to include any images of Stephanie’s torture in his corresponding issues of Batgirl.81 According to Horrocks,

Devin Grayson also voiced concern that the only heroes who die in War Games are a young girl and a black man, noting that characters like these are routinely harmed or killed. As Carolyn

Cocca describes in her analysis of superwomen, comics “are part of real life, in that they are an institution in our world … through which ideas about gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability,

80 Rich Johnston, “Inside the DC Writers’ Meeting that Killed Stephanie Brown,” Bleeding Cool 15 July, 2011. https://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/07/15/%E2%80%9Csome-kind-of-gang-war-in-gotham%E2%80%9D-and- %E2%80%9Cspoiler-was-gonna-die%E2%80%9D/. 81 Ibid. 167

and power circulate.”82 These authors seem to have understood the power that Stephanie’s story had to reinforce or disavow aspects of the dominant ideology, and were ultimately uncomfortable with the messages it sent.

Girl (Robins), Interrupted

The question of whether or not Batman ever really wanted Stephanie to be Robin haunts her tenure in the role and until her death, but what the writers really seem to be questioning is whether they and their audience ever truly wanted a girl Robin. After her death, producers made it clear that they did not see her claim as legitimate, at least not in the way that male Robins had

“really” been Robin. They also seem to have assumed most of their audience was likewise not invested in a girl Robin, based on their response to feedback from the small but vocal contingent of fans who did feel “slapped in the face” by Stephanie’s treatment.83

These fans organized and protested around the apparent erasure of Stephanie’s stint as

Robin in DC Comics continuity. In TDKR, Frank Miller predicts the death of Robin/Jason Todd, showing a glass case with a Robin costume inside it in the Batcave as a memorial. This visual theme was picked up after Jason’s death in continuity and has been a permanent fixture of the

Batcave, in some form or another, for decades. However, after Stephanie’s death, no such memorial was made. Female fans created an online group called Project Girl Wonder and conducted letter-writing campaigns requesting a memorial case for Stephanie’s costume, but DC

Comics continued to eschew any recognition of Stephanie’s time as Robin.84 In fact, one of the

War Games authors who later took over the Batgirl title painfully dismissed the claims of these marginalized fans: Andersen Gabrych wrote a storyline in which a decaying Stephanie Brown

82 Cocca, 7. 83 Jennifer K. Stuller, Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology (London: I.. Tauris, 2010), 143. 84 Stuller, 143. 168

appears to an unconscious Batgirl/Cassandra Cain and says, “I screwed up. I paid the price.

Simple.”85 This acknowledgement places the blame for Stephanie’s torture on Stephanie herself, recalling common misconceptions of women’s experiences of abuse and sexual assault in which they are held responsible for the behavior of others. These responses from DC Comics demonstrate that their dismissal of young female characters is mirrored by a dismissal of young females in real life. Young female fans clamored for attention and for recognition, but the producers’ responses, from lackluster ambivalence to outright victim-blaming, indicate a determination to maintain patriarchal control even stronger than the desire to sell comics to a historically under-tapped market.

A sort of détente was reached between fans and producers, and Stephanie Brown eventually made a triumphant and popular return in 2009—this time not as Robin, but as

Batgirl.86 Though Batgirl has never been a true sidekick to Batman, she has hovered around the periphery of the Batcave since her introduction in comics as Betty Kane in 1961 and Yvonne

Craig’s famous television portrayal of Barbara Gordon on the 1960s Batman series.87 In addition to Betty Kane and Barbara Gordon, Cassandra Cain, Stephanie Brown, and even Carrie Kelley have also filled the role of Batgirl in comics.88 Unlike the inherently youthful sidekick role of

Robin, many of the women who have been Batgirl were adults. In having girls age into the role of Batgirl, as was the case with former Robins Stephanie Brown and Carrie Kelley, comic book producers send the message that this role, the diminutive “–girl,” is where female Robins are relegated when their youth begins to expire. As is the case with the black sidekick Duke Thomas,

85 Andersen Gabrych and Alé Garza, “The Hood Part 3: Dead Weight,” Batgirl Volume 1 #62 (New York: DC Comics, 2005). 86 Bryan . Miller and , “Batgirl Rising: Point of New Origin, Part One,” Batgirl Volume 3 #1 (New York: DC Comics, 2009). 87 Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff, “Bat-Girl!” Batman #139. (New York: DC Comics, 1961). 88 In Frank Miller’s third book in the Dark Knight series, The Dark Knight III: The Master Race, Carrie Kelley has shed her Catgirl identity and become an iteration of Batgirl. Frank Miller, , , and Janson, The Dark Knight III: The Master Race (Burbank: DC Comics, 2017). 169

sidelined as tertiary character The Signal, these female Robins-turned- are arguably not-

Robins. Their femininity places them outside the line of succession to the cape and cowl, and unable to achieve maturity, later forced into a never-ending “–girl”hood where they can continue the cultural work of reaffirming the conceptual linkages between maturity and masculinity for both characters and writers. 170

CONCLUSION

In Will Brooker’s seminal book about Batman, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural

Icon, Brooker offers a five-sentence, minimalist explanation of who Batman is, including “He is often helped by his sidekick, Robin.”1 Brooker then takes each key element of Batman’s identity and explores it in further detail, but something rather strange happens in his discussion of the sentence above. The first sub-section of the book ostensibly devoted to Robin becomes focused instead on changes to Batman’s moral code. Brooker details Batman’s shift from moral ambiguity to a stricter sense of right and wrong and his commitment to never taking a life. While this shift is no doubt important and did occur simultaneously with Robin’s introduction, it induces a sort of thematic whiplash in readers who assumed the paragraphs within would be about Batman’s trusty sidekick. Instead, Brooker barely glances at Robin, despite the character’s ubiquity and near-constant presence in Batman stories. But to take a longer look, to shift the focus of comics analysis to the most enduring in-text representation of the medium’s primary readership, is to see that Robin was and continues to be far more than a motivation for Batman to give up gun-slinging—writers have long relied on Robin as an arena for the working out of various pressing anxieties about gender, race, and sexuality.

In this dissertation, I provide the beginnings of a critical analysis of the narrative trope of the superhero sidekick, arguing that this figure represents an important avenue for the dissemination of ideas about American adolescence and its counterpart, adulthood. Focusing on the character Robin, who has been “played” by several young characters in comics since 1940, I offer close readings of narrative adolescence intersecting with various identities in a medium and genre largely intended for an adolescent audience. These analyses reveal that the teen sidekick, over the past eighty years, has been portrayed in such a way as to affirm relationships between

1 Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (London: Continuum, 2000). 171

maturity and certain other social identities. Writers rely on heterosexuality to signal Dick

Grayson’s progression from young Robin, to young adult Nightwing, and finally to fully mature

Batman, neatly illustrating that heterosexuality and adulthood are to a large extent mutually reliant. Duke Thomas’s relegation to non-sidekick role and sublimation under the stories of white youths reflects the ways in which black American youth are exiled from the normative process of maturation. The stories of Carrie Kelley and Stephanie Brown highlight that the main use of adolescent female characters, even in the twenty-first century, is in projecting fantasies of patriarchal dominance. Even as American beliefs about and perceptions of sexuality, race relations, and gender dynamics have changed dramatically since the first Robin’s introduction, creators scripted the teen sidekick to perform the same cultural work throughout the decades: reinforce an image of maturity that is inextricable from white heterosexual masculinity.

Though Robin is easily the most famous teen sidekick, and one of the most under-studied characters in comics studies by nearly any measure, creators have mobilized other sidekicks to communicate similar messages about adolescence and adulthood since the mid-century. In particular , sidekick to the Green , provides a clear analogue to Robin. The first

Speedy, also known as , was introduced alongside Oliver Queen/ in

1941’s #73,2 but the most famous story of Roy Harper took place in 1971’s

“Snowbirds Don’t Fly.”3 Here, Speedy has become addicted to , which he shoots up in the company of several non-white teens in a seedy part of town. This story recalls the “street corner societies” of the early twentieth century, which reformers claimed were populated by (non- white) ne’er-do-wells just waiting to waylay respectable white boys from their path to idealized

2 and , “Green Arrow: Case of the Namesake Murders,” More Fun Comics #73 (New York: DC Comics, 1941). 3 Dennis O’Neil and , “Snowbirds Don’t Fly,” Green Arrow Volume 2 #85 (New York: DC Comics, 1971). 172

adulthood. Green Arrow rescues Speedy from what is framed as certain death (the second title in the arc is called “They Say It’ll Kill Me, But They Won’t Say When!” and the cover proclaims

“More Deadly than the Atom Bomb!”4), and, like Dick Grayson, Speedy eventually grows up and becomes his own mature, adult hero, .

The second teen to take on the mantle of Speedy, Mia Dearden, was portrayed as even more in need of proper (white male) guidance. Mia was first introduced in 2001, though she would not officially be named Speedy until 2005. Her back story highlights in particular the queerness of adolescent sexuality, but unlike Dick Grayson, whose youthful queerness manifested through an uncanny absence of sexuality, Mia presents an overabundance of sexuality and precocity—even more so than Stephanie Brown. We first meet fifteen-year-old Mia on a “job” at a party, where she is contracted to please a city councilman with a teen girl fetish. When the Green Arrow breaks up the party, he exhorts Mia to “not grow up before [she has] to,” echoing the prohibitions against adolescent precocity and sexuality. Throughout Oliver and Mia’s relationship, he is consistently framed as a redeemer, showing Mia what “normal” looks like through his simulation of heteronormative family life with his girlfriend, Dinah Lance. Though

Mia had clearly engaged in heterosexual activity with her boyfriend and clients, this behavior reads as doubly strange due to her youth and its (sometimes) commercial nature.

The Green Arrow storyline “City Walls” reinforces the flipside of the queerness of adolescent sexuality: the bond between heterosexuality and maturity. Oliver reveals to Mia that he recently cheated on his girlfriend, Dinah. He connects the very bravery which makes him a hero to his inability to remain faithful: “It’s the same instinct that has me running into burning buildings, shooting arrows at guys who shoot guns … It seems to be the same instinct that has

4 Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, “They Say It’ll Kill Me … But They Won’t Say When!,” Green Arrow Volume 2 #86 (New York: DC Comics, 1971). 173

me hopping into be bed with any woman who will accept my company.”5 Oliver’s promiscuity is thus part of what makes him a hero and emphasizes his traditional heterosexual masculinity.

However, Mia’s promiscuity is framed as a liability due to her femininity and youth: in the following story arc, Mia tests positive for HIV. Oliver appears ignorant of Mia’s sexual history, asking “How … how did this happen …?” Mia responds sarcastically at first, then angrily:

“Ollie, I was living on the streets since I was eleven, and I survived by hooking. There’s not a lot of safe sex in prostitution. I either got it from sex … or maybe from the drugs.” Mia explains that she and the other girls shot methamphetamines to stay awake longer and keep rapes to a minimum.6 Unlike Oliver’s promiscuity, which writer Judd Winick connects to the instincts that make him a hero, Mia’s history of forced promiscuity is further punished and made queer by her contraction of HIV. Mia’s admission of drug use also mirrors behavior undertaken by the first Speedy, Roy Harper, who is by this time the grown hero Arsenal. Despite both Arsenal and

Green Arrow having engaged in risky behaviors similar to Mia, neither of them are punished the same way she is. Like the case of Stephanie Brown I explore in detail in Chapter 4, this storyline highlights that young female sexuality threatens patriarchal control of girls’ bodies, so it appears deserving of the worst punishment.

Though the stories of Speedy/Roy Harper, Speedy/Mia Dearden, and the various Robins explored in this project are separated by decades, all of them manage to affirm the “rightness” of their adult hero partners, who, despite changes to the social identities of the teens, remain straight, white, and male. But what happens when the adolescent sidekick is portrayed without acknowledgement of their adult partner? The adolescent sidekick, Robin in particular, has

5 Judd Winick and , “City Walls Part Two: What’s Green and Yellow and Red All Over?” Green Arrow Volume 3 #35 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 6 Judd Winick and Phil Hester, “New Blood Part Four: In Custody,” Green Arrow Volume 3 #43 (New York: DC Comics, 2004). 174

become the subject of significant popular interest in the twenty-first century, especially beyond comic books, even as academia continues to overlook the figure. We can observe the changing perceptions of Robin-sans-Batman amongst the broader public most clearly in the mid-aughts television program Teen Titans.

Resurrecting the spirit of Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s The New Teen Titans, the

Cartoon Network’s critically acclaimed Teen Titans (2003-2006) captured a wide and avid fan base.7 The show combined villain-of-the-week fights with romantic tension, friendship drama, and slapstick humor, presenting sensitive characters with real affection for each other, led by a white male Robin (no alter-ego; all the characters on Teen Titans live as their hero identity at all times). This Robin was completely independent of Batman, who did not appear once in the five seasons of the program. Show creator Glen Murakami has said he wanted to “really set

Robin apart from Batman,” offering creators the opportunity to flesh out Robin’s identity without the label of sidekick and to show him in relation only to other adolescent characters.8 In this way, like Wolfman and Pérez’s series did for comics, Teen Titans differed from many televisual portrayals of DC Comics superheroes, which up until this time had most often focused on adult heroes (the WB’s , centered on a high school-aged just discovering his powers, is a notable exception9). Its themes and protagonists thus better situate the program in the lineage of Beverly Hills 90210, , and The OC than other superhero- oriented shows.10 Teen Titans represented adolescent figures outside of their adult

7 Teen Titans, created by Glen Murakami (2003-2006; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2008), DVD. 8 Bill Walko, “Drawing Inspiration: An Interview with Glen Murakami,” TitansTower 30 June, 2012. http://www.titanstower.com/drawing-inspiration/. 9 Smallville, created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (2001-2011; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2011), DVD. 10 Beverly Hills 90120, created by Darren Starr (1990-2000; Los Angeles: Paramount Home Media Distribution, 2013), DVD; Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by (1997-2003; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2010), DVD; The OC, created by Josh Schwartz (2005-2007; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2007), DVD. 175

partners and team members, whose ability to name them or shame them made the teen figure always already subordinate.

In fact, the only adults portrayed in Teen Titans are villains. Though many of the team’s adversaries are of a similar age to our heroes, a significant portion of their worst enemies are grown men. Two of these, Slade Wilson and (who is technically a demon, but still definitely male), are enabled in their power by patriarchal control of adolescent female characters: Slade Wilson brainwashes a young girl called and forces her to infiltrate the

Titans,11 while Trigon is a world-destroyer who needs his Titan daughter Raven to open a portal for him so he can conquer Earth.12 In both storylines, creators show adolescents in defiance of the adult male social order, and both are overlaid with imagery hinting at sexual exploitation of teen girls by adult fathers or father-figures. Though not all Titans are former sidekicks, these forceful rejections of adult male influence in the characters’ lives represent a sharp departure from previous portrayals of teen sidekicks such as Robin as beholden to and in constant negotiation with their adult partners. Even Wolfman’s The New Teen Titans saw Robin stifled by

Batman from time to time, but the television show elides their relationship entirely.

Significantly, the program also reached an incredibly broad audience; for many viewers, this more independent iteration of Robin was the first they consumed with any regularity, and interest in this version of the character and his adolescent compatriots has remained high. Teen

Titans launched another animated spin-off series, Teen Titans Go!, which in turn launched a full- length feature film released in summer 2018, and a live-action series simply named Titans

11 Alex Soto, dir., “Betrayal,” Teen Titans: The Complete Second Season (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2008), DVD. 12 Ben Jones, dir., “The End – Part 3,” Teen Titans: The Complete Fourth Season (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2008), DVD. 176

debuted on DC’s streaming service in fall 2018.13 This latter program has aged some of the team, including Robin, to young adulthood and is already green-lit for a second season. Though Teen

Titans Go! brings Batman back into the fold, often showing Robin working very hard to please his former mentor, the first episode of the live-action Titans sees Robin proclaim, “Fuck

Batman” to a gang of villains after walloping them on his own. This moment was also featured in the program’s first trailer, evidence that the creators felt Robin’s declaration of independence would draw viewers.

Titans also diversifies the Titans, featuring an Asian-American actor playing the character

Beast Boy and a black woman playing Robin’s romantic interest, Starfire.14 Yet again, the adolescent characters and stories appear more flexible in their social identities than solo adult heroes, who still remain straight white men in all television adaptations to date. In this fashion,

Titans plays to the digitally-native and diverse fan base drawn by the 2000s : in their independence from older heroes and somewhat more diverse castings, these adolescent and young adult heroes reflect fan demands for more and better representation, facilitated in large part by 2.0. As Carolyn Cocca notes, digital distribution of comics is changing the superhero audience, and as a result, “more creators and more fans, some of whom are older fans who want to share the medium with their children, have pushed for the inclusion of more character diversity in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability.”15 Such diversity

13 Teen Titans Go!, created by Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath (2013-present, ); Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, directed by Peter Rida Michail and Aaron Horvath (2018; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2018), DVD; Titans, created by Akiva Goldsman, Geoff Johns, and (2018-present, DC Universe). 14 This racial diversity is undermined slightly by the fact that in the comics, and Starfire are portrayed with bright green and bright orange skin, respectively. Neither of them are quite human. However, they were still coded largely as white and have been voiced by white actors in nearly all previous television and film representations of the characters. Brandon Soo Hoo’s delightful vocal work in Justice League vs. Teen Titans and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract are the only exceptions. Justice League vs. Teen Titans, directed by Sam Liu (2016; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2016), DVD; Teen Titans: The Judas Contract, directed by Sam Liu (2017; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2017), DVD. 15 Carolyn Cocca, Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 216. 177

helps viewers envision heroes of the future with far less homogeneity, offering hope that idealized adulthood may become less rigid and more accommodating of bodies that do not fit traditional hegemonic ideals of leadership and heroism.

However, sometimes even the most admirable efforts at increasing the diversity of superhero sidekicks make at best stuttering steps towards dismantling the conceptual attachments between maturity and straight white masculinity. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the stories of Duke

Thomas, the most recently-published works analyzed in this dissertation, intentionally center the perspective of a young black teenager and, in the case of Bermejo’s We Are Robin, surround him with others like himself. However, concurrent and subsequent titles featuring Duke, like Tom

King’s Robin War and Batman: Rebirth, subsume his story into one that was really about young white men all along and distance him from Batman, avatar of idealized maturity, in a tangible way. Likewise, onetime girl Robin Carrie Kelley was finally given a role in a serialized title in

2013, but in this series she has never been Robin, does not have any super-human abilities, and is portrayed more as a partying coed rather than with any sort of heroic inclinations or ideals.16 Her turn as Robin is thus still limited to abetting Frank Miller’s projections of hypermasculine anxiety in his Dark Knight series.

For the most part, creators have drafted Robin with specific “scripts” of adolescence that solidify the idea that maturity looks like straight, white, and male. These scripts reflect those first written in the early twentieth century, when the adolescent was “discovered” —or, more accurately, constructed. Portrayals of Robin perpetuate the hegemonic social order in which certain bodies have more and better access to the privileges of adulthood by reinforcing the connotations of youth and immaturity baked into modern beliefs about queerness, non-whiteness, and femininity. At the same time, recent comics scholarship has focused almost exclusively on

16 Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason, “Denial,” Batman and Robin Volume 2 #19 (New York: DC Comics, 2013). 178

portrayals of adults, leaving these adolescent “scripts” unread and un-interrogated. Even

Brooker’s otherwise thorough analysis of Batman falls into the trap of overlooking the sidekick, though he identifies it is a quintessential ingredient of the typical superhero narrative and of the

Batman mythos in particular. Brooker’s elision of any real analysis of the latter half of “Batman and …” reinforces the notion that even as Batman becomes important and worthy of study,

Robin remains significantly less so. Scholars have engaged in a tactic of justification similar to comic creators of the 1980s, in which the adolescent roots of superhero comics were publicly shunned by creators seeking to legitimize their field by focusing instead on stories for and about adults.

Yet I contend that portrayals of Robin have helped to communicate and reinforce ideas about adolescence and maturity that have real effects. In conjunction with other forms of teen media, comics present young (and occasionally not-so-young) readers with a sort of casual education about their current and future places in the world, about the way adolescents are and ought to be, and about the type of people to whom we give the most trust, respect, and honor.

Too often this latter group is portrayed with a very specific and very limited set of common traits, making it hard to imagine anyone who doesn’t embody these traits with the same gravitas and natural heroism. The adolescent sidekick figure, epitomized by Robin, was always meant to serve as a point of identification for youthful readers. What identification with characters like

Dick Grayson, Duke Thomas, Carrie Kelley, or Stephanie Brown teaches American teenagers about themselves is not a question to be taken lightly; rather, it is one which deserves meaningful and ongoing critique. After all, our sidekicks of today are our heroes of tomorrow.

179

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