1. Freud & Byck (1974); Thornton (1983).
2. Freud (1940).
3. Erikson (1959); Freud & Jung (1974); Horney (1939).
4. Jung, Henderson, von Franz, Jaffé, & Jacobi (1964).
5. Freud (1899/1965), 390.
6. Detective Comics #574 (1987).
7. Batman: Year One (1987).
8. Secret Origins trade paperback (1989).
9. Wertham (1954/2004), 190.
10. Freud (1909).
11. Jung (1913).
12. Freud (1899/1965), 299.
13. Freud (1936).
14. Freud (1899/1965), 299.
15. American Psychiatric Association (2000).
16. Vaillant (1977).
17. Secret Origins trade paperback (1989), 7.
18. For example, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Kingdom Come (1996), Batman #300 (1978).
19. For example, the multiply-doomed Earth-51 in Countdown to Final Crisis #14 (2008).
20. Jung (1971).
21. Jung (1949/1961), 166, 178.
22. Robin #128 (2004).
23. Detective Comics #38 (1940).
24. Jung (1964).
25. Jung (1919).
26. Jung (1936).
27. Kane & Andrae (1989), 41.
28. Jung (1942/1968), 265.
29. DC Super Stars #17 (1977).
30. Campbell, Cousineau, & Brown (1990).
31. Campbell (1949).
32. Coogan (2006), 122.
Case File 9–1: Two-Face
1. Batman: Year One (1987).
2. Batman: The Long Halloween (1997).
3. Detective Comics #66, 4.
4. Rotter (1966).
5. Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) in Batman Forever (1995 motion picture).
6. Batman Forever.
7. Batman #651–654 (2006).
8. Nightwing #147–150.
9. Mersky (1992).
aKeep in mind that these are Freudians’ concepts, not universally recognized throughout psychology even though I can’t reasonably insert “according to Freud” into every sentence.
bIn Oedipus Rex, the character did not yet know they were his parents, but in Greek tragedy, the intent behind your sins does not matter. The gods will get you for them anyway.
cJung spelled it Electra instead of the more traditional Elektra.
dEven the inconsistent accounts that depict Joe Chill’s death show him slain by other criminals: Batman #47 (1948), Batman: Year Two (1987), Batman Begins (2008 motion picture).
eArtist Jerry Robinson during our 2009 San Diego Comic-Con panel (“Is the Joker a Psychopath? You Decide!”): “Bill and Bob and myself, we … decided deliberately not to explain it, not to write an origin. We thought that would detract from the whole aura, the mystery of the Joker—where did he come from, how did he get that way? No, we did not explain that, quite deliberately. The origin story was written by a subsequent writer many years later.”
10
The Kids
Why Robin?
“Young men with a mind for revenge don’t need encouragement.They need guidance.”
—Alfred (Michael Gough), Batman Forever (1995)
Why does Batman work with a partner—and why is his crime-fighting partner a kid? Batman never sets out to recruit any partner. The partners each want to work with him. Each has been a youngster who already possesses the skills to combat or commit crimes, along with a personal grievance against evildoers. Each Robin picks Batman, not the other way around, with one notable exception that Batman would come to consider his greatest failure.
Robin Begins
“I had always thought Robin was a real pain-in-the-ass, but I now realize what a brilliant creation it was, because it really does give a human context to Batman’s character.”
—Frank Miller on including a Robin in the apocryphal The Dark Knight Returns (Comics Interview, 1986)
The question of “Why Robin?” is at least as important outside the fiction as within it. Why did the grown men writing those early comic books add a child to the stories and why did readers accept the addition? A character’s narrative function, its storytelling purpose, is a psychological function. Not only does the act of telling stories have both therapeutic1 and harmful2 potential for both storyteller and audience depending on the circumstances and nature of the story told, but the storyteller crafts the stories and characters to suit the audience’s psychological processes, including motivations, emotions, and cognitive abilities.3 Narrative intent and success depend on the storyteller’s theory of mind, his or her personal theory regarding other people’s mental activity. Your personal theory of mind involves attributing mental states, including thoughts, feelings, motives, knowledge, and perception, to oneself, others, and even fictional characters.4 Creating a fictional character (therefore constructing an imaginary psyche) and crafting a story to evoke specific reactions from living, nonfictional readers will depend—whether intuitively or intentionally—on your metacognition, what you know and think about how cognitive processes like knowing and thinking work.5
The original answer to “Why Robin?” is that Bill Finger quickly tired of writing Batman’s thought balloons. He wanted Batman to talk. Whenever he works alone, Batman is silent and more violent. Short on candid interactions with others, he can seem as distant to readers as he does to the criminals he intimidates. The alternative, revealing all his thoughts and feelings through thought balloons, can expose the mystery man too much. A partner provides the balance to reveal his nature as needed while still maintaining his mystique. Finger recounted, “Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob. As I said, Batman was a combination of Fairbanks and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn’t have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found as I went along, Batman needed a Watson to talk to.”6
Bob Kane thought the partner should be a boy to whom their readers could relate. Finger agreed. Identification, connecting one’s own identity to someone else’s by perceiving shared characteristics, makes us feel bonded to others—even those we don’t personally know, including celebrities and fictional characters.7 With that goal in mind, artist Jerry Robinson (who helped Kane design the partner’s costume) suggested they name the boy after Robin Hood so that readers would associate this new character with both a popular hero and real boys.8 “Robin was more human,” Robinson recalled, “a real boy’s name, rather than one that implied some powers.”9 So in April 1940, Batman’s twelfth month of publication, he became a surrogate papa.
Dick Grayson
In Detective Comics #38, to intimidate a circus owner into paying protection money, gangsters tamper with trapeze ropes so they’ll break during acrobats John and Mary Grayson’s “death-defying” triple spin. The Flying Graysons plunge to their deaths before the collective eyes of their son, Dick, and that night’s entire audience, which happens to include Bruce Wayne. When Dick wants to go to the police with what he knows about the gangsters, Batman warns him that a mobster called Boss Zucco runs the town. “If you told what you knew, you’d be dead in an hour.” Batman plans to hide the boy, but then he thinks back to his own origin.
Batman: My parents too were killed by a criminal. That’s why I’ve devoted my life to exterminate them.
Dick: Then I want to also! Take me with you—please!
Narrative: The Batman is reluctant but the troubled face of the boy moves him deeply.
Batman: Well, I guess you and I were both victims of a similar trouble. All right. I’ll make you my aid [sic]. But I warn you, I lead a perilous life!
Dick: I’m not afraid.10
In an image reminiscent of one readers saw when they learned Batman’s origin just five months earlier, the new boy swears an oath to “fight against crime and corruption and never to swerve from the path of righteousness!” Training progresses quickly for the boy, who has been doing acrobatics since he was four years old, wi
th Bruce acknowledging that Dick “could probably teach me a thing or two,” and soon they take Boss Zucco to jail. The Graysons swiftly receive the justice that the Waynes never got. Their son will not grow up forever aching to avenge them. In fact, he cheerfully ends his first adventure by declaring, “I can hardly wait till we go on our next case. I bet it’ll be a corker!”
Where the pulps that originally shaped Batman’s stories had been “grim, lacking in humor,” Finger noted that Robin, with his ebullient smile and bright red, yellow, and green costume, altered the comic’s look and mood. “The dialogue was easy, fluid, and flowing. It brightened up the strip and added characterization to the main figure of Batman.”11 Kane had not intended to change the tone of the book, nor had they introduced Robin in order to humanize Batman. Rather, these consequences evolved naturally.
Sales double, Batman starts smiling, and oh, the sidekicks! Apprentice crime-fighters pop up all over the place. Captain America gets Bucky fighting Nazis by his side; the Human Torch finds Toro; Sandman, Sandy; Green Arrow, Speedy; Mr. Scarlet, Pinky; Aquaman, Aqualad; and so on. Superheroes get busy endangering children left and right. The most successful of these spunky orphan characters have adventures apart from their mentors. Robin enjoys many solo adventures12 and the competition’s Bucky and Toro lead the Young Allies.13 Whether in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Goonies, Spy Kids, Our Gang shorts, or a whole host of modern YA fiction, we more readily suspend disbelief and accept fictional youngsters having adventures when the kids venture off on their own. Adults get in the way, for both readers and young protagonists. This would become increasingly important over the upcoming decades as comic book readership grew older.
Through the 1950s, the sidekicks appear less frequently, whether because superhero comics in general had lost some of their popularity or because psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent with its insinuations about Batman and Robin’s lifestyle raised questions of pedophilia in readers’ minds regarding all these superheroes and their young wards (see Case File 10–2: Dr. Fredric Wertham). The major comic book companies start separating the sidekicks from their mentors. In the 1960s, Marvel Comics kills off Bucky14 and Toro15 while DC emancipates its minors and makes them start growing up. Robin the Boy Wonder becomes the Teen Wonder, leading the Teen Titans as a whole team of sidekicks operating independently of their mentors.16 These kids age. The Titans “seemed to be about thirteen years old when they formed their superteam in 1965, and by 1970 they seem to be about eighteen—they interacted with college kids as equals—a match of narrative and chronological time.”17 Through the 1960s, in an era of disillusionment, time progresses for characters at both DC and Marvel. In a climate of American assassinations and conflict in Vietnam, the superchildren grow up with the audience.
The readership’s average age kept going up and comics matured with them. The “rather illogical tradition of adult superheroes taking on teenage sidekicks, often with no powers, in the dangerous fight against the very powerful forces of evil”18 grew harder to accept. Illogical circumstances unquestioned by preschool children in the preoperational stage of cognitive development, those too young to consider others’ viewpoints and perform more logical mental operations, wouldn’t cut it, and even the simple logic and deduction accepted by elementary school–age children in the concrete operational stage grew shaky. An aging audience meant that in addition to wanting more mature subject matter and more sophisticated storytelling, adolescent and older readers utilizing the systematic reasoning of the formal operational stage19 might reevaluate previously accepted story elements and decide, “That’s just stupid.” With the newness of formal operations upon them and without the perspective of more years, adolescents can have difficulty looking past a “stupid” obstacle.
In 1969, with the campy Batman TV series now canceled, writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams brought the comic book Batman back to his darker roots. DC ships Dick Grayson off to college.20 Robin continues to fight crime but on his own, with Batgirl, or as the Teen Titans’ leader into the 1980s until the young man walks away from his Robin identity,21 taking on a new masked persona to operate under the name Nightwing.22 During those Teen Wonder years, while Batman often operates on his own in the pages of Batman and Detective Comics, Alfred grows in importance and evolves, in the Batcave and at Bruce’s home, into Batman’s Watson even though he doesn’t go out prowling the night by Batman’s side and trade quips in combat. Denny and other writers had to write a lot of thought bubbles. Readers got to enjoy more interactive dialogue over in Batman’s team-up series The Brave and the Bold until it ended in 1983, the year for big changes in the Bat-titles.
As Nightwing, Dick Grayson is a strong and popular character, fighting crime without the burden of Batman’s darkness—in many ways, Bruce Wayne’s hopes fulfilled.
Jason Todd #1
With The Brave and the Bold team-ups having ended and Dick Grayson having outgrown his sidekick role, the narrative needs that had inspired Robin’s original creation resurfaced and “the disadvantages of having Batman operate without a sidekick to talk to became apparent again.”23 Enter Jason Todd.24 Mandated by DC executives to make the new kid “a carbon copy of Dick Grayson,”25 writer Gerry Conway and artist Don Newton introduced Jason as yet another boy whose acrobat parents get killed by criminals. Through his circus connections, Dick—not Bruce—first meets Jason and his parents before the deaths. The first Batman ever sees of this new kid is when a grieving Jason in Robin-like costume jumps out to attack his parents’ killer. Batman “experiences a surge of déjà vu: The caped figure crashing into the unconscious Killer Croc could be another boy, from long ago—”26 Where Dick reminded Batman of young Bruce Wayne, Jason reminds Batman of young Dick Grayson.
That was Jason version #1, commonly known as “pre-Crisis Jason Todd.” Associating this character so strongly with Dick Grayson for the readers by making Jason identify with Dick within the fiction allowed for a relatively smooth transition from the first Robin to the second—too smooth for dramatic purposes, some of the storytellers came to decide.
Seeing the second Robin for the first time strikes Batman at his core. © DC Comics.
Replacement Robin Rebooted: Jason Todd #2
1986 changed DC superheroes. Crisis on Infinite Earths collapsed DC’s rich Multiverse, all of its parallel universes and alternate futures, into a single universe, one merged timeline with new character histories. Outside that new universe’s official canon, DC published arguably the most influential deconstructions of superheroes with Watchmen, which explored how brutal and unpleasant superheroes’ lives would be in general, and The Dark Knight Returns, a “possible future” tale that changed how readers looked at Batman in particular. These gritty alternate reality tales’ respective authors, Alan Moore and Frank Miller, each decried one repercussion of their own work: Darkness spread through superhero comics.27 Satire shaped the source.
It was in this climate that The Road to Perdition author Max Allan Collins wrote Jason Todd’s post-Crisis origin.28 Out went the happy-go-lucky circus kid. In his place, this new history delivers a cigarette-smoking street urchin in the process of boosting the Batmobile’s tires the first time Batman meets him.
Readers disliked this new Jason Todd. Dick Grayson pre-Crisis chooses his own time to give up the mantle of Robin and take on a more mature role. He passes the Robin torch to his successor by introducing Jason #1 into Batman’s life and, when the time comes for Jason to take over as Batman’s official partner, gives Jason a Robin costume and encourages him to assume the name.29 Post-Crisis, Batman unceremoniously fires an injured Dick Grayson and forbids him from using the Robin name. Readers considered this new version of the story and Jason Todd’s nature to be an insult to Dick Grayson in every way. No longer identified with the first Robin as his anointed successor, this second Robin instead becomes his usurper. Discovering the readers’ dislike of new Jason, the writers played to it, making Jason progressively bratt
ier over the next year.
Readers voted to kill Jason Todd.30 Although a slight majority of individual respondents apparently voted to spare this Boy Wonder, it seems that some enthusiastic voters—whether driven by sheer hatred of the character or by the feeling of power over determining the outcome—repeatedly voted, “Off with his head.”31 Maintaining someone else’s status quo might not foster a feeling of power the way forcing a change can.32 People like to see that they matter, that they exert real influence on the world outside themselves—those high in need for power (NPow) especially so33 (see Case File 6–1: Bane). The second issue in DC Comics’ Batman story “A Death in the Family” ended with Jason possibly dying in an explosion. A vote via 900 numbers determined the outcome, and two weeks later, the world learned Robin was dead. Much of the public, generally unaware that the comics had a new Robin, thought the original had died. Numerous news reports and even the documentary Batmania: From Comics to Screen erroneously reported Dick Grayson dead. Bob Kane hated the stunt. The Dark Knight Returns author Frank Miller expressed utter disgust: “An actual toll-free number where fans can call in to put the axe to a little boy’s head…. To me, the whole killing of Robin thing was probably the ugliest thing I’ve seen in comics, and the most cynical.”34
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 23
