Review: BATMAN AND ROBIN #0

BATMAN AND ROBIN #0
Written by Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Pat Gleason
Release Date: September 12, 2012

Batman and Robin is the best Batman title that you’re not reading,1 and #0 is a triumph. From the beginning, Peter J. Tomasi has had his finger on the insecurity and, well, ten-year-old-ness that informs Damian Wayne’s arrogant exterior. Tomasi’s Damian is a boy who has always been told he was great but never loved, trying to live up to his mother and father’s impossible standards, and trying to overcome his own impatience and bloodlust to prove himself a hero. Pat Gleason’s art is an uncanny mix of violence and quiet, creating a world of small, sudden and often fatal gestures. The combat scenes are explosive, but Gleason is just as good at capturing the way that Damian (and Alfred) drop their guard just a bit when then think that no one is looking. (Bruce, of course, never drops his guard.)

Batman and Robin #0 focuses on Damian and his training while in the care of his mother, Talia al Ghul. It culminates with. . . but that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Just go buy it already, and be assured that there’s plenty of violence, ninjas, in-family fighting, and even a two-handed submachine gun burst in the middle of an airdrop. (Is Rob Liefeld taking notes? This is how it’s done.) There’s even a bit of undeniable cuteness. (You just know that Talia is saving the photo to embarrass Damian with when he brings home his first girlfriend. Who will then probably be garroted.)

Damian’s insecurity is not unreasonable. There are a wealth of Robins in current DC continuity, and Damian isn’t wrong to feel himself a bit on the outside.2 If Damian fit in, he just would’t be Damian.

In fact, Damian’s inability to fit can be extended to the New 52 as a whole. In an extraordinarily compressed timeline, where Batman’s seven decade career has been compressed into just five years, in the middle of a month devoted to sorting out the fine details of a great deal of that abridged history, Damian is an outlier. He’s now the eleven-year-old son of a Batman who has only been Batman for six years. In contrast to the ultra-specific captions of the other zero issues — “five years ago,” “four years ago,” even Batman and Robin’s own opening “a year and a half ago” — the page showing Damian’s artificial gestation receives only an enigmatic “Before. . .” We comic geeks are ourselves a bit like Batman, with an obsessive drive to track and categorize, to sort things out, to create an ordered world. And then Damian shows up, decapitates our timeline and shoves a grenade in its mouth.

It’s entirely possible that Damian is a continuity bomb, a virus Grant Morrison slipped into the DC universe. He rebuilds the world around himself, and probably will never quite fit. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to watch the whole thing.

Verdict: 9.0/10

1. Batman and Robin is the sixth-best selling Batman title, below both Detective Comics and Batman: The Dark Knight, both of which are getting or have just gotten new creative teams, but both of which have been mostly atrocious in their first year. Batman and Robin’s sales figures have been consistently in the top twenty among all comics, so it’s actually doing pretty well, but with slightly more than half the sales of Batman, there are a lot of Bat-fans who aren’t picking up copies, and should.

2. See, for example, the backup story in this week’s Batman #0, which looks back on the pre-Robin days of Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake, and even includes a pre-Batgirl Barbara Gordon. The whole family is included, except of course, for Damian.

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