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Ouhri 1

Sidekicks Grow Sideways: Movement in a Static Medium

Jasmina Ouhri Honors Thesis, Spring 2012 Director: Kenneth Kidd Reader: Terry Harpold

Figure 1. From All-Star and the Boy Wonder (2008) by and Jim Lee. © DC . Batman and

Dick in the cave after Dick’s parents are murdered.

“From its earliest days, the modern comic has grappled with the problem of showing

motion in a medium,” Scott McCloud writes in (110). In the panel

shown above (Fig. 1), artist Jim Lee uses what McCloud calls multiple images of a figure to

convey movement: Robin-to-be vaults backward to stand in front of Batman,

leaving behind transparent images of himself that show the path of motion he has taken.

Although this technique may be used to depict any character’s motion, artists most often use to

show acrobatic movements like those used by Batman’s Robins. Taking a cue from this Ouhri 2 technique’s depiction of multiple images of Robin integrated into a series, my paper will examine the role of the child in narratives, more specifically that of the Robin characters in the DC Comics universe. While the final figure in this progression of images is opaque, indicating permanence or unchangeability, the images leading up to it are transparent and -like, indicating when and where the figure was still in motion, still capable of change. The child Robin occupies a similar conceptual space of potential for the adult

Batman. I will argue that the child Robins, experiencing traumas similar to the one that catalyzes

Bruce Wayne’s transformation into a , represent past versions of Batman, versions that can escape the adult ’s bleak fate. The long-established dichotomy between Robin and

Batman—young and old, cheerful and grim, bright and dark—emphasizes this potential. The child sidekick as an afterimage left behind by the opaque figure of the hero signifies not only the child the adult hero was but the child the hero might have been but did not become.

This paper will use Kathryn Bond Stockton’s concept of “sideways growth” to inspect expansions of narrative and possibility enabled by the differences that separate child sidekick from adult hero. Cultivating character traits and hero identities separate from those of the adult hero, the child sidekick provides a “” for his or her adult counterpart. The parallel Earths of DC’s play a similar role, allowing writers to explore the “what ifs” of canonical , which is bound by certain rules and limitations. Batman cannot be a vampire within monthly comic continuity, for example, as he becomes in the 1991

Batman and Dracula: Red , nor can the members of the be evil, as they are in 1964’s “Crisis on Earth-Three!”

Much as the multiple images of a moving figure are forced to converge in the final opaque figure, however, these alternate narratives have been repeatedly pared away to fit DC’s Ouhri 3 linear continuity. DC’s 2011 “New 52” , for example, restarted fifty-two of the publisher’s comic book series at Issue #1, eliminating numerous titles and characters and modifying those that remained—in several cases, the reboot revisited and substantially revised the characters’ backstories.1 Unlike those of many of these characters, the backstories of Batman and his Robins have remained largely intact, a singularity which may be due to the unique role the Robins play not only for Batman but for readers. In Boy and Wonders: Robin in Cultural Context, Mary

Borsellino traces various appropriations of the character in popular culture, noting that Robin’s numerous, and often contradictory, incarnations allow the character to appeal to both mainstream and marginalized audiences. Robin, then, may remain relevant and present—if multiple and inconstant—as a result of his ability to change.

Robin as Child

Batman’s Robin was the first sidekick to grace superhero comic books. Influenced by

Dick Tracy’s Junior, Robin debuted in Batman’s #38 in 1940, almost exactly a year after Batman’s in the same title. Although the details of Robin’s —and the child characters serving as Robin—have changed multiple times since the character’s creation, the sidekick’s stark contrast with Batman has remained constant. He (or she) provides youth and naiveté to Batman’s age and experience, cheer to his grimness, and bright yellow, , and green to Batman’s black and gray. Early Batman writer

1 Within the Batfamily, for example, ’s removes from the wheelchair she has occupied since the shot and paralyzed her in ’s 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke. Although The Killing Joke remains part of continuity, it is thus far unclear whether Barbara’s years as Oracle or Cassandra and Stephanie Brown’s runs as Batgirl following Barbara’s paralysis also remain canonical. Meanwhile, The stars rather than , who became the series’ title character in 1986. The reboot also separates several very long-established couples, including Barry and and ’s and , both of whom were married in pre-New 52 continuity but are shown in their New 52 incarnations as mere acquaintances.

Ouhri 4

writes that Robin’s youth and inexperience

“enrich[ed] the dialogue, [providing] someone

Batman could talk to” (Batman Archives, Vol. 3).

Prior to Robin’s appearance, writers resorted to

having Batman narrate his own actions to the

reader via thought bubbles or speaking aloud to

himself (Fig. 2)—not exactly stealthy behavior

for a crime fighter. As a younger character still

learning the ropes of crime fighting, however,

Robin provides a better justification within the story for

Batman’s explanations of his actions aloud for the reader’s benefit.

The young sidekick’s arrival also expanded Detective Comics’ readership. In “Robin:

Innocent Bystander,” Jack Black points out that like Superman and Batman, while exciting, were adults, which may have made their adventures less appealing to child readers.

“[I]f kids could see someone their own age having exciting adventures alongside the hero,”

Black writes, “the stories would prove to be more interesting for them” (122). The strategy of using a child sidekick to younger audiences caught on: and , for example, appeared alongside and Green , respectively, in 1941, providing characters in those heroes’ series with whom child readers could identify and thus feel invested in the stories’ action. Child readers are not the only ones who identify with the child sidekick, however. The adult superhero does as well, and nowhere is this more evident than in Batman’s relationship with his first Robin, the circus acrobat Dick Grayson. Ouhri 5

As a young boy, famously witnesses the of his parents, Thomas and

Martha Wayne, when a mugger shoots them. Years later, Bruce attends a circus performance at which two circus acrobats fall to their deaths from sabotaged equipment as their son, Dick, watches.2 Bruce watches Dick watch his parents die, becoming a spectator to the repetition of his own trauma. The other child characters that later take on the Robin mantle are similarly connected to childhood traumas resembling Bruce’s formative moment: Batman finds the second

Robin, soon-to-be-orphaned , in the alley where Thomas and Martha were murdered, while the third Robin, , grows up as the only son of a wealthy family not unlike the Waynes and loses both of his parents to .

Black reads Bruce’s assumption of the

Batmantle as less an attempt to protect Gotham than an attempt to protect his own childhood self; by preventing others from suffering the violence he witnessed, he can rewrite his own trauma. His adoption and training of the Robins derives from the same motive. The Robins’ significance to narrative and to Bruce himself lies in how Bruce may be able to alter the trajectories of their lives from that of his own. While neither Bruce nor Batman can protect Dick from losing his parents as Bruce did, Bruce gives Dick a closure that is missing in many versions of his origin myth: the apprehension of his parents’ murderer. Dick’s story thus attains a stability that Bruce’s story, even continued into his superhero adulthood, lacks. Black identifies (Fig. 3), Dick’s

2 The manner of the Graysons’ death varies somewhat; in Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (2008), for example, the man contracted to kill them shoots them during their performance rather than sabotaging their equipment. Ouhri 6 playful adult hero persona, as of Batman’s success in rewriting his own trauma through

Dick’s version of the origin myth: “Batman had seen Dick Grayson’s Robin as a reflection of himself, and so was able to, in effect, change his own history. Dick didn’t become as dark as

Bruce had” (123).

Beginning, by way of original trauma, as a version of Bruce but deviating from Bruce’s path to become a hero different from Batman, Dick exhibits a development not unlike the

“sideways growth” identified by Stockton in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the

Twentieth Century. Stockton formulates the concept in relation to queer children in fiction but extends it to all children, attributing it to the delay within which children are contained: the defined period of childhood that in late modernity is held clearly apart from the open-ended period of adulthood. Clarifying what it means to grow sideways instead of up, Stockton writes that children’s “supposed gradual growth, their suggested unfolding…has been relentlessly figured as vertical movement upward (hence, ‘growing up’) toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness,” but because of “their propensity for growing astray inside the delay that defines who they “are”…[c]hildren grow sideways instead of up” (4, 6).

Like the child not allowed to advance to adulthood, the sidekick is rarely permitted to age, instead inhabiting a delay that is as good as permanent. As points out in his discussion of superhero narratives, although Dick finally reached his early twenties in the 1970s, he and his teammates on the Teen have not aged since then, and Tim Drake (Robin III) has been a teenager since 1989 (213).

The child sidekick must grow laterally instead of up, becoming Nightwing or instead of Batman because for the child sidekick, growing up would mean becoming the adult hero. And Bruce Wayne’s Batman, one of the anchors of the DC universe, cannot be replaced. Ouhri 7

Every replacement of DC’s Big Three characters thus far—four different “Supermen” who fill the gap left by Superman after his “death” in 1992; Jean-Paul Valley, who substitutes for Batman in 1993’s Knightfall arc after Bane breaks Bruce’s back; and Queen Hippolyta, who assumes

Princess ’s role in 1997—has been temporary. Even the beloved Dick

Grayson’s stint as Batman following 2009’s Battle for the Cowl was ended with The New 52 reboot despite fans’ warm reception of the Boy Wonder in Batman’s role.3 Alteration is permitted for a time, but again, just as the multiple images of a motion arc must end with a single opaque figure, in the end Batman must always be Bruce Wayne, Superman must be Clark Kent, etc.

These adult characters, then, also exist within a delay. For example, while Dick Grayson has not aged much more than ten years since 1940, Bruce Wayne has aged even less since his own debut, never quite advancing to middle age.4 At least one reason for this “delay” seems obvious: As of February 2012, more than half of DC readers were between 13 and 34 years old, almost certainly more interested in younger and more physically capable characters than aged ones like the battle suit-donning senior citizen that Bruce Wayne becomes in ’s 1996 mini-series Kingdom Come set decades in the future (Pantozzi). While aging fans might enjoy seeing their hero facing challenges similar to their own (and living vicariously through him and his battle suit), DC’s focus has historically been not on maintaining their existing fan base but on attracting new and/or young readers to it, ensuring their company’s actual continuity by creating new of readers. Attempts to narrow DC’s multiverse to a single universe more

3 In Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Can Teach Us About Being Human, writes that his cheery, playful Batman II (Dick Grayson) in Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn, “went so well that many readers were actually disappointed when Bruce Wayne came back to reclaim his cape” (391). After the first issue of The New 52 Batman and Robin in which Bruce and his son Damian hold the title roles, online forums lit up with wishes for Dick’s Batman to return. 4 The infamous exception to this rule is the 55-year-old Bruce Wayne in Frank Miller’s Batman: (1986). Ouhri 8 accessible to new fans have derived at least partly from this motive, as has DC Nation, a block of shows, short features, and inside looks at the DC universe that began airing on this year.

Placing one’s hopes for survival into children is hardly a new idea, in comics or literature in . Waid, for example. uses it in Kingdom Come. After the showdown between the aged

“traditional” DC heroes and new, younger and more careless vigilantes who wish to wrest the torch from them, Superman and Wonder Woman reveal they are expecting. Their baby represents the preservation and passing on of not only Superman and Wonder Woman’s values and powers but Batman’s as well, for he plans to the child. This instance is one of the few in which DC superheroes procreate. (For all the virility signified by comic book superheroes’ straining muscles, the characters rarely, if ever, seem to have children.) Superman has no biological ; the original is Wonder Woman’s sister, not daughter;

Aquaman’s only son is killed as a child, etc.5 fathers a son, but he does not appear in the comics until 1994, fifty-odd years after Green Arrow’s debut. Similarly, Batman eventually has a biological son but not until Mike W. Barr’s 1987 graphic novel Batman: Son of the Demon, after which the child disappears largely from comics until his incorporation in Grant

Morrison’s recent Batman run (2006-2008).

Instead, the sidekick occupies the role of child for the adult hero as both his heir and his ward, assisting in the battle against crime but always under the adult hero’s protection. The ward sidekick permits the adult hero to act as a parent without growing older: Batman may acquire a twelve-year-old Robin and act as a father to him without having to age the twelve years that

5 Both Kingdom Come and Miller’s 2001 Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, in which Superman and Wonder Woman also conceive a child, take place outside DC continuity, suggesting that casting the iconic characters as parents may be slightly more (and maybe only) acceptable in works that are not considered “officially” part of the DC storyline. Ouhri 9 conceiving and raising a biological child to the same age would require. Furthermore, the ward sidekick permits the adult hero to, effectively, raise a child without committing to a character of the opposite sex and without showing the vulnerability such a commitment might be taken to signify. Although Batman actually goes so far as to become married to the character Talia al

Ghul when she becomes pregnant in Son of the Demon, this commitment is not maintained. Like

Bruce Wayne’s replacement by another character as Batman, it is only temporary, as evidenced first by the fact that Son of the Demon initially took place as a “what if” story outside continuity and second by the fact that its writer is careful to dissolve the relationship before the graphic novel’s end: Talia claims to have suffered a miscarriage, allowing Bruce to dissolve their marriage and return to Gotham.

Robin as Son

Groomed as the adult hero’s heir, the sidekick functions to eventually replace the adult hero and as such can be viewed as a potential threat. This threat is magnified when the child sidekick is the hero’s biological child, rather than his ward. Grant Morrison explores this danger in Batman: Batman and Son (2007), revealing that Bruce and Talia’s son, Damian, is actually alive. Damian’s appearance is the beginning of the end for Bruce: Batman and Son kicks off the

Batman arc that culminates in Bruce’s death and his subsequent replacement as Batman by Dick

Grayson, who then makes Damian his Robin. 6 Morrison repeatedly links the figure of Damian to tropes of death and replacement. In one of Bruce’s dreams, for example, he appears alongside a

Batman impersonator who “look[s] like Bane…as if he was designed to trigger [Bruce’s] worst fears” (Fig. 4)—recall that Bane is the villain responsible for breaking Batman’s back in

6 In truth, Bruce is only thought to be dead after the events of 2008-9’s —’s Sanction actually throws him back in time. Ouhri 10

Knightfall, paralyzing Bruce and forcing him to turn to

Jean-Paul Valley to replace him as Batman (Batman and

Son). By showing Damian with the Bane-like imposter,

Morrison associates the child with Bruce’s loss of Batman.

Then, in Batman Issue #666, Morrison jumps into the future

to show the grown-up Damian as Gotham’s new Batman.

Grim and donning a trench coat over his , Damian

has sold his soul to the devil in order to protect Gotham,

toxic and on the verge of apocalypse as epidemics,

terrorism, and unnaturally drastic climate changes devastate

the rest of the planet. But the immortality Damian ensures for himself and for Gotham spells mortality for his father’s legacy: There will be no more

Batmen after Damian. Whereas the ward Robins veer onto their own paths, constructing hero identities distinct from Batman’s, this Damian strictly observes his father’s dark example, undergoing none of the lateral growth that would lead him to a hero identity independent of

Batman’s, such as Dick’s Nightwing or Tim’s Red Robin personas. Morrison’s coupling of

Damian’s close adherence to his father’s example with the terminus of the Batman legacy is suggestive of the superhero narrative’s dependence on a sidekick’s sideways growth: Robin’s differences from Batman contribute to the narrative’s ability to advance without truly ending.

However, Damian is himself a “sideways” story, one converged into DC’s linear continuity. Recall that Son of the Demon was initially conceived as a “what if” story that took place outside continuity.7 By incorporating Damian into his run on Batman, Morrison

7 These “what if” deviations from continuity, which include DC’s Elseworlds imprint, permit writers to explore potential storylines that the system of continuity cannot contain. Ouhri 11 retroactively brings Son of the Demon within . Barr’s graphic novel is only one example of a work that takes place outside of continuity but influences the in-continuity narrative. Another is the Batman TV series starring West and that aired from 1966 to 1968. Will

Brooker explores the cross-appropriation of the show and continuity (i.e., the comic books) in Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural , but of more interest to us here is the TV show’s popularity and influence, such that writers actively attempted to avoid emulating, or even to erase, its bright, self-consciously pop version of Batman. Miller’s painfully grim Batman: The

Dark Knight Returns (1986), equally somber Batman: Year One (1987), and his assertion that

“Batman was never funny,” are obvious examples of this rejection of the TV Batman.

Dennis O’Neil’s work on Detective Comics in the seventies, in direct response to the show, had an equal impact on the subsequent development of Batman. Discussing O’Neil’s run on the series, Michael Marano writes that O’Neil “re-invent[ed] Batman by amputating the overly popish and ridiculous trappings that had smothered the character in the wake of the

[show]” (69). This re-invention included setting Batman’s sights on global intrigues instead of local bank robbers and pitting him against international terrorists like Ra’s al Ghul instead of petty Gotham criminals like Louis the Lilac (and his associates Arbutus and Dogwood). Even

O’Neil’s addition of al Ghul’s daughter, Talia—the same Talia who later gives birth to

Damian—may have been an attempt to “restore” Batman from the campy reputation of the sixties show, for, as Andy Medhurst writes in “Batman, Deviance, and Camp,” “given the long associations of camp with the homosexual male subculture, Batman was a particular gift on the grounds of his relationship with Robin” (30).8 In this context, one can view Damian as having

8 Interesting to consider here is that, unlike numerous adaptations of Batman to the screen ( and ’s films, the various in the and 2000s, and ’s films), Robin is present for the entirety of the show’s run, rather than appearing only in later seasons or or not appearing at Ouhri 12 possibly derived, however indirectly, from not one but two out-of-continuity works, the second being the TV show that may have led to Bruce’s relationship with Talia.

The exhibition Morrison includes in Batman and Son may allude to that influence. It is part of a charity gala Bruce is attending before Talia crashes it to present Damian to Bruce, and it features huge, comic-book style paintings like the one of a woman’s and a speech bubble (“OUCH!”) that is visible behind Batman as he punches a man bat (Fig. 5). Such paintings were part of the Pop Art movement, as Bill Walko explains in “POW!: Batman’s

Visual Punch.” Pop artists like and used comic book characters, including Batman and , as well as “comic book sound effects and lettering as art, blown up on giant canvases” (Wolk 99). Walko traces the influence these works had on the Batman TV show, which producer pitched as “a live-action Pop

Art camp adventure” (101). With its bold colors, animated opening sequence, and “Biff! Zok! Pow!” graphics, the show become a piece of Pop Art itself, and

Morrison’s allusion to it in Batman and Son reminds the reader that the show belongs to, and is even a generative part of, the Batman oeuvre despite numerous writers’ attempts to ignore or efface it.

This restorative intertextuality is characteristic of Morrison’s work. He performs a similar incorporation of abjected material in Batman R.I.P. (2008), which uses several of the science-

all. One could argue that the characters in the sixties show are not “Batman and Robin” but “BatmanandRobin,” a package deal. Ouhri 13 fiction-themed Batman stories from the fifties and sixties, which were often dismissed by fans and scholars for their credulity-straining encounters and bodily transformations. (And were actually removed from DC continuity by 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, as I will discuss shortly.) These stories are set alongside visual references to the ultra-grim Batman of Miller’s

The Dark Knight Returns and Year One. Morrison’s combinations of these two ostensibly contrasting sources treats each as equally valid and equally generative for new Batman stories, suggesting that one does not need, or deserve, to displace the other.

Instead, Morrison performs careful contortions of the Batman story within its already- defined parameters so as to create new stories, a technique known as . Also used as a verb (“to retcon”), this alteration of narratives “requires the reader to engage in a double-think in which they appreciate new twists on old stories while at the same time accepting that this is the new truth as to how things have always been” (Borsellino 18). To understand this concept, consider Morrison’s use of a character named Dr. Hurt in Batman R.I.P. (2008). The character appeared in 1963’s Batman #156 as a doctor involved in a NASA experiment in which

Batman underwent a simulation of the isolation an astronaut would experience in space. At that time, the character was unnamed and was probably barely noticed by readers. Morrison, however, retcons the character for R.I.P., revealing that (though the reader did not know it), the doctor was actually a villain plotting against Batman, and the NASA experiment was designed to give him access to Batman’s mind. Like the transparent figures in motion leading to an opaque final figure with which I began this essay, the unnamed doctor is the opaque figure, already existing and unchangeable, and Morrison reaches into the undefined figures behind it for the retcon of Dr. Hurt, expanding the character without substantially changing it.9

9 Morrison also retcons Damian’s character, not only in incorporating the character’s back story into continuity but in the manner of Damian’s conception. While Barr’s Son of the Demon shows a normal (and consensual) Ouhri 14

Retcons like that of Dr. Hurt reflect how the writers of superhero comic books are limited in a way other writers are not. Constrained by what has been written by writers who came before them and by the structure of delayed or even frozen development in which the heroes’ narratives must take place, writers like Morrison work within a space not unlike that occupied by the child unable to advance to adulthood. The space is cramped, almost womb-like, in that only slight movements and relatively small developmental advances can be made within it, as when

Morrison twists a nameless character from a 1963 issue of Batman into a leading villain in his own work. Retroactive continuity permits these small revisions of what has already been written, but DC writers used to have something that allowed a far wider range of motion: the multiverse.

Robin as Parallel Earth

There are several versions of the multiverse to consider, but the earliest one of interest here arose in the early sixties during what is recognized as comics’ Silver Age. Prior to this, characters like as the original and Jay Garrick as the original Flash— as well as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, of course—presided over .

But the U.S. congressional hearings on comic books and ’s Seduction of the

Innocent in the fifties drove many comics series out of publication, including those starring

Green Lantern and . While these heroes were revived in the Silver Age, their alter ego often were not: Garrick, for example, was replaced by Barry Allen in the new Flash series that

conception, Morrison tells a different story in Batman and Son: Batman accuses Talia of drugging and seducing him—“I remember being drugged senseless and refusing to cooperate in some depraved eugenics experiment”—and Damian is shown as having been “genetically perfected and grown in an artificial womb” instead of having gestated normally. Depicting Damian as a creature grown in the artificial womb (Fig. 7) may remove some of the reader’s sense of his humanity and, consequently, of the legitimacy of his status as a son. Jealous of Robin’s position as his father’s partner, Damian beats Robin nearly to death, telling Batman, “He’s not your real son, I am!” (Batman and Son). Yet Morrison’s tweaking of his origin story such that Damian, while Bruce’s biological offspring, is not a child Bruce chooses to have (as one could argue he does the other Robins), implies that no is any more or less “real” than the others, just as no interpretation of Batman is any more or less valid than the others. Ouhri 15 debuted in 1956. This new series only alluded to its Golden Age predecessor by referring to

Garrick’s Flash as a comic book character Allen loved as a child and after whom Allen names himself when he gains his super speed. In 1961, however, The Flash of Two Worlds reincorporated the Golden Age hero into the storyline: Allen finds himself on an Earth in a parallel universe in which Garrick actually exists, although he retired from his superhero career years earlier (Fig. 6).10 Together, Garrick and Allen a crime, after which Garrick resumes

crime fighting and Allen returns to his earth. But their

interaction set the stage for annual crossovers between the

two universes and their characters—and for the DC

multiverse.

Two parallel Earths became three, and then more, until

there were dozens of parallel Earths in DC’s narratives. Earth-

Three, for example, was home to an inverted version of Earth-

One in which superheroes like Batman and Superman were

the super villains and Ultraman, while on Earth-172,

Batman and Superman grew up as brothers when the Kents

adopted Bruce Wayne after his parents’ deaths (JLA #29,

1964; WF # 172, 1967). Later, the multiverse would even include characters and storylines from

DC’s Elseworlds titles like 1989’s Victorian-set Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, which were originally published among the “what if” stories mentioned previously, produced with the intention of telling stories that took place outside of continuity. In this sense, these parallel

Earths permit the kind of narrative flexibility embodied by the child sidekick, exploring what could have been and could be for the adult hero. While Dick Grayson represents Bruce Wayne as

10 This Earth would later be known as “Earth-Two.” Ouhri 16 he could have been with for his parents, Earth-Three depicts Batman as he could have been had he turned to villainy rather than vigilantism.

Unlike the child , however, the parallel Earth narratives were not trapped within a period of delay, nor were they destined to replace the continuity from which they departed.

Instead they were free to grow forwards as well as sideways because their events and characters did not have to be reconciled with those of the other Earths’—at least in theory. Consider the

2011 animated series , which takes place on Earth-16 and features two principal characters created specifically for the show, not taken from continuity (the archer and

Kaldur’ahm as a new ), as well as a Batman and Superman who are, respectively, far more nurturing and cold than their counterparts in continuity. Setting narratives on different

“Earths” allowed writers to create these new and alternate versions of characters—characters that may even then feed new stories into continuity, as in the case of Kaldur’ahm’s Aqualad inspiring a new Aqualad character in DC’s storyline. Thus the multiverse liberated superhero narratives from imprisonment within the same cramped space occupied by sidekicks who must eventually become the adult hero—at least in theory.

In practice, however, the narratives of the multiverse have proven to be just as constrained as those associated with the sidekicks, for since the creation of the multiverse, DC has carried out not one but several initiatives to pare its narratives back down to one universe and continuity.

The first of these initiatives was 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. After The Flash of Two

Worlds, DC’s writers zoomed into super-speed with the idea of multiple Earths, creating new universes and writing annual crossovers to set in them. Brooker points out that these stories created a “mess of narrative parallel universes” that were difficult for even dedicated readers to Ouhri 17 follow (Hero 34). To start fresh—and draw new readers who would not have to struggle their way through the multiple universes—DC released Crisis, a year-long, twelve-part series that created

a single, easy-to-follow continuity…by combining all the possible earths

into one and killing off all the characters who did not fit. The stories

which had occurred ‘pre-Crisis’ were therefore made unofficial, outside

continuity, and would never be referred to again. (Hero 34)

These pre- stories included the ridiculed sci-fi Batman issues of the fifties and sixties that featured Batman in “outlandish confrontations with monsters [and] spacemen” (Supergods,

Morrison 77).11 Unlike Morrison adjusting the stories to make them fit his interpretation— treating them as drug-induced hallucinations, for example—Crisis removed them altogether in order to make the heroes fit what Brooker calls “the more ‘serious,’ ‘adult’ ethos of the mid-

1980s” (Hero 34). The removal of characters and narratives that did not fit DC’s new of its characters, and the of those that did into a single narrative rather than permitting the continuation of parallel Earths and narratives, was a simplification carried out to appeal to new and/or young audiences, as an attempt to ensure the continuation of DC’s comics.

In post-Crisis continuity, the parallel Earths and characters from the multiverse were to be treated as things that had never existed, yet references to them began to float to the surface, perhaps most famously in 1990’s #24, written—unsurprisingly—by Morrison, eventually undermining the “no such thing as pre-Crisis” rule.12 Several more attempts by DC to

11 Morrison provides a delightful description of Batman’s adventures during that period: “a rainbow Batman, a Zebra Batman, a Creature from Dimension that resembled a one-eyed testicle on stalk-like … “The Jungle Batman,” “ Batman,” (“YES, ROBIN. I’VE BECOME A HUMAN FISH”), “The Valley of Giant Bees” (“ROBIN! HE’S BEEN CAPTURED AND MADE A IN THE COURT OF THE !”), and “Batman Becomes Bat-Baby” ” (Supergods 79). 12 Morrison brings back the Psycho Pirate, “the only character in the DC Universe who remembers the multiverse that existed before the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths” (Creekmur 129). Ouhri 18 simplify its narratives once more have been similarly overturned, with the most recent being

2011’s “The New 52.” This reboot reduced DC’s number of running titles to fifty-two, all of which were restarted at Issue #1 in 2011. Like Crisis, it removed and modified characters: Wally

West, for example, who was the title character of from 1986 onward, is not present in The New 52; the new is set early in Superman’s superhero career, showing slight differences in the development of his sun-derived powers and depicting him as more of an than the big blue Boy Scout to which today’s audiences may be accustomed. While heroes like Superman and the Flash have also been removed from their romantic commitments— both married pre-reboot, Superman and Flash are now only in the beginning stages of their acquaintances with Lois Lane and Iris West, respectively—the set of characters fondly known to fans as Family has undergone comparatively few changes.

More specifically, the Robins remain essentially the same despite the New 52’s compressed timeline, in which the main superhero characters have only been around for about five years (Gustines and Kepler). When news of The New 52 first emerged, fans of later, younger Robins like Damian and Tim Drake lit up forum boards online in panic that their characters would be cut from continuity because of this compression. But DC has kept all but one of the Robins and their backstories in continuity, crunching them into Bruce’s five years as

Batman so that their runs as Robin lasted about as long as summer internships (Gustines and

Kepler).13 Even Dick Grayson’s recent stint as Batman and Damian’s as his Robin is kept in continuity, incorporated into the new Nightwing series. The Robins’ roles actually even expand in The New 52, with each Robin receiving what can effectively be seen as his own title: Dick

13 Stephanie Brown, who became Robin after Tim, has yet to appear in the New 52. Her is likely complicated by the fact that, pre-reboot, she had graduated from Robin to Batgirl, and the reboot restored the Batgirl title to former Batgirl Barbara Gordon as though it had never belonged to anyone else. For more on Stephanie’s status and treatment as a female Robin, see Borsellino’s highly informative Boy and Girl Wonders: Robin in Cultural Context. Ouhri 19

Grayson’s Nightwing, Jason Todd’s and the

Outlaws (Fig. 7), Tim Drake’s , and Damian’s

Batman and Robin. Thus, while other characters’ stories have been removed, reshaped, or repurposed to converge into the New 52’s linear continuity, those of the Robins have defied complete convergence. Which begs the : What makes the Robins special?

Robin as [Anything You Want]

While other sidekick titles have belonged to more than one character—three children, for example, have been , while two have been Speedy—none have pertained to as many children as Robin (Fig. 8).14 The numerous and highly different children who have occupied the Robin role underline the morphability of the identity: Robin can be male like Damian, female like Stephanie; brainy like Tim or brawny like Jason; cheerful like Dick or grumpy like Damian. Furthermore, Robin can become nearly anything via sideways growth: the

Robins have become Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, Batgirl, Catgirl, and even in addition to eventually becoming Batman. Practically a floating signifier, Robin and the character(s) it refers to have a mobility of meaning that has led to its appropriation by numerous, often opposing, demographics, as Borsellino discusses in Boy and Girl Wonders: Robin in

Cultural Context.

14 Wally West, , and Iris West have been Kid Flash, while and Mia Dearden have served as Speedy. Ouhri 20

Borsellino traces numerous uses of the character

in popular culture, paying special attention to its

appropriation by marginalized fans. Much as Robin

initially served in Batman comics as a character with

which children might identify, the meanings Robin has

accumulated from the camp TV show and from two

female characters’ assumption of the role have given

queer and female fans a character with whom to

identify. Alluding to fan fiction and fan art depicting

Robin in homosexual romances and to organized write-

in protests to DC after the female Robin Stephanie was

killed, Borsellino writes that these fans’ “investment in

Robin, and refusal to relinquish the feelings of connection and ownership they feel towards the character, have shaped the way Robin has grown and changed” (11).15 This investment,

Borsellino suggests, contributes to the character’s survival; she points out that other such interpretations of the character have led, for example, to ’ parodic version of

Batman and Robin, Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy, which then became the namesake for the rock band Fallout Boy, and so on, creating a spreading of allusions that, whether fond or acerbic, keep Robin present and relevant in contemporary popular culture.

Perhaps the most interesting example of Robin-appropriation Borsellino presents is that of rapper Eminem. Assuming the identity of “Rap BoyTM” for his “Without Me” music video,

15 Calling these fans “guerilla creators,” Borsellino further identifies them with their beloved Robin, who is him/herself identified with the vigilante Robin Hood (16). Ouhri 21

Eminem dons a Robin costume (Fig. 9).16 The video uses countless tropes from the Batman comic books, not the least of which are caption boxes with lines like, “RAPBOYTM BOUNDS

INTO THE RAPMOBILETM READY TO

THWART EVIL.” Eminem presents Robin as a , soldier, and laughing all rolled into one, assuming each of these roles himself by dressing in the character’s costume (Borsellino 75). However, Eminem’s appropriation of the character and comic book form for the video are complicated by his history of homophobic lyrics and the video’s allusions to the camp Batman TV show: “Without Me” features a “na na na na” chorus taken from the TV show’s theme song, and its video uses the same famous sound effect graphics (Borsellino 76). And yet, as Cynthia Fuchs observes, this two-sided, self-contradictory appropriation of the character embodies Robin’s lability better than the official character, now limited by DC “lest the established brand be tarnished,” currently does or can (Borsellino 85). Again we see how the numerous and often contradicting meanings of the

Robin character have allowed it to survive, spread to and accepted by queer and homophobic audiences, and boys, hip-hop fans and comic book readers, etc. By being one thing and also its opposite, Robin survives and thrives.

Now we can apply another of Stockton’s concepts to Robin. She writes that metaphors

“are something growing sideways. They “grow” meanings…by putting people and things rather oddly beside themselves” (91). What could be more odd than putting a grinning child in a yellow cape and leg-baring green “short pants” (as Dick’s friend Speedy calls them) next to the black-

16 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVkUvmDQ3HY Ouhri 22 clad Bat-man? Robin not only grows meanings for itself, as I have explored above, but functions as a vehicle for multiple meanings of Batman: Batman as traumatized child, Batman as father, etc. Perhaps the most interesting of these meanings is that of the hero as would-be villain.

Consider the animated children’s movie : Return of the Joker (2000). Set in 2039 when Bruce Wayne is no longer Batman, and the Joker, thought to be dead, has returned to terrorize Gotham, the film uses flashbacks to reveal that when Bruce was still Batman, the

Joker kidnapped Robin (Tim Drake) and used Joker venom and electroshock therapy to break

Tim into “Joker Jr.” (Fig. 10). We find that the resurrected Joker in 2039 is actually the grown- up Tim: Although Batman rescued him, the Joker left behind a that allows him to take

over Tim’s body in the future,

submerging the former Boy

Wonder’s mind and personality with

his own. One could argue that the

Joker does little to Tim that Batman

has not already done: taken in an orphaned child, shaped him in his image, and exposed him to the traumatic influences of

Gotham’s underworld. Here, then, Tim serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the hero’s formal similarity to the villain.

Tim’s predecessor, Jason Todd, plays a similar role. In 1988’s Batman: A Death in the

Family, Jason dies after the Joker beats him with a crowbar, locks him in a warehouse, and blows it up (Fig. 11). Writers depict this tragedy as one of Batman’s biggest failures, placing Jason’s costume in a memorial case in the Bat cave as a reminder of Jason’s death. But in 2005, Judd

Winick’s Under the Hood resurrects Jason, bringing him back to life with one of Ra’s al Ghul’s Ouhri 23

Lazarus Pits and returning him to Gotham without Batman’s knowledge. Jason now uses the name “Red Hood,” the alias that the Joker used for his activities before becoming the Joker. As Red Hood, Jason continues the vigilantism he practiced as Robin with one difference: Now, he does not hesitate to kill the criminals he apprehends. He criticizes Batman for not killing the Joker, asserting that Batman’s capture rather than murder of the Joker allows him to continue hurting innocent people the way he hurt Jason.

Jason’s conviction that criminals should be killed so that they cannot repeat their crimes derives from his death at the Joker’s hands; as such, the Joker becomes as much Jason’s adult counterpart as Batman. Jason’s assumption of the Joker’s old name reflects that influence.

Furthermore, with Jason’s adoption of it, “Red Hood,” like “Robin,” encompasses divergent meanings. Originally used by a villain, it is then assumed by an (Jason), and now a hero,

Jason’s role in Red Hood and the Outlaws. The name’s connotations are effaced, modified, and opened up as new characters and series assume it.

The Red Hood first appears in Detective Comics #168 in 1951, but not until Alan

Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke in 1988 is the object’s role in the Joker’s past fully fleshed out. Moore makes the hood a used by a set of robbers for their (unsuspecting) accomplices on jobs; the police, eyes caught by the red hood, pursue the accomplice while the robbers escape.

In The Killing Joke, an unnamed man who will become the Joker is that unsuspecting Ouhri 24 accomplice, desperate to make money to support his pregnant wife. All he gets, however, is a

“bad day”: His wife dies, the robbers force him to help them anyway, Batman swoops down on him during the robbery, and the man falls into the vat of chemicals that create the green-haired, white-skinned Joker we know today. Moore tells this story through flashbacks intercut with the

Joker’s most recent crime: shooting and paralyzing Barbara Gordon and mentally torturing her father, Commissioner Gordon, to show that even the upstanding commissioner can be driven to insanity by a bad day, just as the Joker was. He fails; Gordon’s sanity remains intact. But when

Batman goes to apprehend him, Moore shows Batman offering to help rehabilitate the Joker and, then, when the Joker tells him a joke, beginning to laugh with him. This moment of companionship between the Joker and Batman reminds the reader that Batman, too, has suffered a single day “that bent [his] life out of shape”—the day his parents died. Jason, then, has adopted a name charged with the implication that villain and hero may not be so different after all, a concept he himself embodies in becoming exactly what he fights: a murderer.

For the reader who is aware of it, Jason’s death at the Joker’s hands casts an uneasy shadow over every subsequently published Joker-Robin interaction in the DC universe. This is true for narratives that take place within continuity, as in Morrison’s Batman & Robin: Batman

& Robin Must Die, which blatantly alludes to A Death in the Family by showing Damian (as

Robin) take a crowbar to the Joker in an interrogation room (Fig. 12). also extends to -continuity narratives, such as the animated series Young Justice, in which the Joker pursues Robin—here, Dick Grayson—with a knife, growling that he “always wanted to carve this bird” (“Revelations”). Although YJ’s Robin is Dick, not Jason, the knowledgeable viewer fears for him because he or she knows Jason’s fate; they fear that Jason’s fate could become

Dick’s. They fear a convergence of the two narratives. Ouhri 25

Author Geoff Klock, discussing Alan Moore’s

revisionary superhero narrative (1986),

focuses on a scene in which the stranded narrator,

having buried his dead shipmates, later unearths their

bloated corpses to use as a float for a raft. Klock reads

the repurposed dead bodies as a metaphor for old

comic book literature, which the narrator, representing

the revisionary writer, “finds a way to utilize, to

hijack…rather than toss another body, its own, on the

” (70). Recall Morrison’s use of material from

earlier Batman narratives, using them to move

sideways within the cramped space permitted to

narratives within DC continuity. In works like the

Young Justice episode, ones that feature the Joker and Robin, Jason’s death is the raft upon which writers float readers to an amplified experience of the text. Here, regardless of which parallel Earth or continuity in which the work takes place, the reader’s familiarity with the intertext of what has happened to Jason contributes to an anticipation of what could happen. This possibility permits contact between narratives never meant to meet, as when the events of

Starlin’s canonical A Death in the Family impacts the viewer’s experience of Justice, which takes place on Earth-16, outside of continuity.

Ouhri 26

Robin as Batman

Robin’s role as a vehicle for potential Batmans is complicated by the character’s associations with suspension, which Borsellino explores in Boy and Girl Wonders. The first

Robin, of course, grows up a circus acrobat, but Borsellino concentrates on Robin more specifically as an aerialist. Robin, she writes, “is constantly depicted on posters, comic-book and

DVD covers, and comic panels, in the moment of swinging from one unseen foothold to another, caught mid-” (15). Citing Helen Stoddart, who writes that suspension removes the aerialist

“from any temporal continuum,” separating itself from a past and not yet bound to a definite future, Borsellino explores how Robin’s suspension signifies potential rather than progress (15).

We have seen how the Robins embody this potential, deviating from their adult mentors’ path and taking on identities of their own—Nightwing, Red Hood, Batgirl, etc.—in an illustration of

Stockton’s sideways growth.

But Stockton proposes an interpretation in which suspension represents the opposite of possibility: Rather than a potential to move anywhere, it is a prison of “going nowhere” (108). In

Stockton’s example, a trapeze artist so embodies her occupation that “it is hard to distinguish metaphor from physical description (“something of the bar was in her wrists”)…she becomes the vehicle to her tenor” (107). Returning to the analogy of the transparent figures of the sidekick that ultimately lead to the opaque figure of the adult hero—whose past they represent—we can apply Stockton’s interpretation to the Robins. As seen with both Dick and Damian in Morrison’s works, and even (much more briefly) with Jason and Tim in Battle for the Cowl (2009), Robin becomes Batman and thus has always contained Batman, always been Batman, a vehicle transporting himself to himself: going nowhere. Ouhri 27

Examining the acrobat rather than the aerialist in Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930, Carolyn Steedman narrows her focus to the child acrobat. Describing the intense and often painful training that adults (often parents) put these children through so that they could achieve the flexibility required for their movement, Steedman calls them “highly resonant figure[s] for the idea of childhood shaped and forced by an adult hand” (111). Certainly, the child sidekick’s fate is shaped by that of the adult hero. Tim’s parents, for example, do not die until after he becomes Robin, and their deaths give Batman an(other) opportunity to rewrite his own childhood trauma: Comforting Tim beside Mr. Drake’s corpse and “reliving his darkest moment…[Batman] becomes what he had set out to be those many years before—a of himself” (Fig. 13) (Black 125).

Jason’s death may also have something to do with the Robins’ ties to Batman’s fate. Medhurst proposes that

“Jason dies at the Joker’s hands because he becomes involved in a search for his own origins” (33). An since before he became Robin, Jason discovers at the beginning of A Death in the Family that the woman he called mother did not give birth to him; his biological mother is in Ethiopia, where he goes in search of her.

Jason’s potential recovery of what Batman can never regain—his parents—moves him too far off of Batman’s beaten path. Batman cannot move backward in time to give his childhood self a protective parent. A Jason who has a mother cannot be incorporated back into the child-self Ouhri 28 afterimages Batman leaves behind. Instead, like the parallel narratives too different from continuity to be funneled back into it during Crisis, Jason is eliminated.

Here we encounter effects of a seeming paradox that is fundamental to the child-self logic of the mentor and sidekick: Although the Robins cannot become too different from Batman, a contrast between them must remain enforced. One must be bright, the other dark; one younger, the other older; one playful, the other grim. This contrast provides the gap in which Robin hangs suspended and the space within which sideways growth can take place. This gap is how Batman rewrites his trauma, protecting the brightly clad Robins so that they do not become “tough, dark adult[s]” like him (Borsellino 87). The need to preserve this gap may explain DC’s (and readers’) interest in keeping the sidekicks from growing up, thereby delaying them at the same age for decades at a time. In this sense, the preservation of the Robins’ potential requires imprisonment:

“enclos[ing], even entomb[ing]” them in childhood (Stockton 108). Brooker notes that “part of

Robin’s narrative function…is to be kidnapped and rescued;” fans and villains alike often laughingly call him the Boy Hostage because of how often he suffers this fate (Unmasked 134).

This tendency, however, may reflect DC’s need to imprison the sidekick in another sense, within the delay of childhood; recall that for the Robins, growing up means becoming Batman. That would mean replacing a character that DC cannot replace: Bruce Wayne.

Yet it is by this same immobilization of the sidekick that Batman maintains his ability to read himself into his child sidekick. As the Robins age, they become less useful to Batman as his mutable near-double. They ossify into identities—as Nightwing, as the Red Hood, as Batgirl, etc.—that Batman can no longer shape to fit to his story arc. For the Robins, growing up also means becoming a character who is not Batman. By remaining in childhood, rather than maturing into new adult identities, the Robin characters remain accessible to Batman, permitting Ouhri 29 him to re-enact his trauma through them. By immobilizing the sidekick, the sidekick’s flexibility in the storyworld is preserved. Robin is Batman precisely by being who, or what, Batman is not, or was not. The child sidekick’s difference from the adult hero permits exploration of the adult hero not as he is but as he could have been, much as the parallel universes of DC’s multiverse permit exploration of story threads that canonical continuity cannot contain. The role of the sidekick, then, is this: Just as the use of multiple, overlapping images provides a way for comic book artists to show motion or change in a static medium, child sidekicks provide a way for comic book writers to describe change and development—without coming to rest—in a genre that is otherwise frozen in a permanent delay.

Ouhri 30

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