I like Robin. He was one of my favorite characters when I was a kid and still, today, I love reading Robin comics. I personally think they could make Robin work in the Christopher Nolan universe very, very well. But there’s this preposterous internet backlash against the idea for some reason.
I’d been warming up to writing something in defense of Robin, but then I read that Jeph Loeb already did over at the MTV blog…
“It’s all about building the relationship between Bruce and Dick. Dick hates Bruce. He doesn’t understand why it is that he needs to do this and Bruce doesn’t understand why he’s doing it either because he’s not a parent. He doesn’t know how to be a parent,” Loeb said. “And together, they make each other better people. So that for me would be the next step.”
But for all the fans already crying out in horror just at the thought of it, Loeb isn’t actually talking so much about Robin as he is about Dick Grayson. In fact, the best Robin story might not actually have “Robin” at all.
“I wouldn’t let him become Robin until the third act, if that. I think that’s the other problem when you tell that story is that there’s this rush to put him in a costume by the end of the first 20 minutes and in that case I think it’s a disaster,” Loeb said. “So if you look at ‘Dark Victory’ Tim and I went nine out of twelve chapters before you even started to talk about putting him in a costume and he doesn’t put the costume on until the last chapter of that book.”
I don’t think I could have said it better.
And I don’t care what anybody says, if they did Robin in the style of Dark Victory, they would be doing it right and it would kick piles and piles of asses.