Robin Comes Gay in New Batman Comic, Joining DC’s LGBTQ Characters

Tim Drake is the Robin who is no longer really sure how to be Robin, but in this week’s Batman: Urban Legends, has discovered at least one thing. A nice guy asked him out and Tim said yes.

That makes him the first new LGBTQ member of Batman’s immediate family in 15 years, since Batwoman herself.

Batman: Urban Legends is one of the new DC anthology series. In each issue, multiple creative teams share an episode of various ongoing stories starring characters under the Gotham City umbrella. On various topics, writer Meghan Fitzmartin (DC Superhero Girls, Future State: Robin Eternal) and artist Belén Ortega (Sensational Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel) have produced “Sum of Our Parts,” a story in which Tim Drake tries to defeat a mysterious new villain who captured his old friend Bernard.

In “Sum of Our Parts,” Tim struggles with uncertainty in a way that has become the core of his character over the past decade. He feels like he doesn’t know what he wants, until Bernard, unaware that Robin and Tim are the same person, wistfully refers to their interrupted dinner as a “date,” and Tim has “a lightbulb moment.”

At the end of this episode in the story, Bernard invites Tim out on a royal date, and Tim happily accepts.

“When Dave [Wielgosz] (my editor of Batman: Urban Legends) came over to do another Tim story, he was excited, “Fitzmartin told Polygon via email. “We talked about where Tim Drake has been and where he was at the time and we came to the conclusion that it had to be a story about identity and discovery. What was next for Boy Wonder? ”

She says she spent days thinking it over before sending an email to say “Look, I don’t know if this is something that can happen, but this is the story, because it’s the only story that can be.”

Even after getting the go-ahead, Fitzmartin says it took him a while to absorb the idea that he was going to create an introductory story for Robin, and a very established version of Robin. “I sat flat on the floor of my apartment for two solid minutes in bliss as I sank. In the end, this would not have happened without champions in DC, like Dave and James Tynion IV, and I hope it is as meaningful to others as it has been to me. “

Kate Kane is the most prominent canonically queer member of the extended Bat family. She made her debut as Batwoman in 2006 on the company’s one-year weekly television-style series. 52, and it immediately garnered shocking headlines, even though it eventually had a rather minor role. Gotham City has slowly become a much stranger place since its introduction, but mostly with villains and supporting characters. The Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy subtext was finally allowed to be text in the early 2010s. Before (almost) marrying Batman, Catwoman briefly had a girlfriend. Midnighter became a recurring supporting character in the Nightwing stories. Police detectives Renee Montoya and Maggie Sawyer and the young vigilante Bluebird / Harper Row were in and out of continuity.

At the same time, Tim Drake was struggling to find a new publishing niche in Batman stories. From its inception in 1989 to the late 2000s, Tim’s place was easy to explain. Dick Grayson was the original Robin. Jason Todd was the Robin who died. And Tim was the youngest Robin, Batman’s partner. More independent than Dick and more empathetic than Jason, Tim just It was Robin for two decades of readers, as well as the huge audience of Batman: The Animated Series.

That changed with the introduction of Damian Wayne in 2006, created by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert, who immediately took Tim’s place as Robin. DC is no longer “the youngest Robin” or Batman’s main partner, but seems to be struggling to find Tim’s new niche. 2009 saw him adopt the Red Robin identity, you know, like the hamburger chain? – The 2011 New 52 reboot attempted a drastic revamp of its origin story, but the 2016 Rebirth re-release restored the original. More recently, on the pages of Young Justice, Tim said he was going to start using the codename “Drake” instead of Red Robin … but it seems like the changes to Infinite Frontier have included forgetting that that happened and just calling him robin again.

After 15 years of change, Tim’s clearest niche is that he is the Robin who does not quite know where he fits in the Bat family, a character who constantly puts himself in the position of questioning his own identity, but who has never found a lasting resolution. That alone might be enough to make him a point of identification for queer fans. But Tim has a long history of being read as not completely straight thanks to fans’ affection for pairing him up with his fellow Teen Titan (and easily queer character) Connor Kent, the Superboy of the 1990s.

“The great thing about working with an established IP,” Fitzmartin told Polygon, “is that there are so many character story decisions that have already been made for you (often by people much smarter than you). [“Sum of Our Parts”] It happened because that’s how Tim is. I love this character very much, and when I reread everything I could to do Robin justice, it became clear that this is the story Tim needed to tell. ”

And for those who want to update various fan-wikis and lists, Fitzmartin says Tim has yet to tag himself, nor does this story delegitimize his decades-long relationship with fellow teenage superhero Stephanie Brown. /Revelation.

“I wanted to pay tribute to the fact that sexuality is a journey,” Fitzmartin told Polygon. “To be clear, his feelings for Stephanie have been / are 100% real, as are his feelings for Bernard. However, Tim is still figuring out himself. I don’t think I have the language for everything … yet. ”