Cover to ROBIN #127.
© DC Comics

Mania Grade: B
Issue: 127
Authors: Bill Willingham, Damion Scott, Robert Campenella
Publisher: DC Comics
Price: $2.25

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ROBIN #127

It's official: Bill Willingham injects the same sort of energy into ROBIN as he does into FABLES and thus made this into a book worth reading. He also manages to do two surprising things by giving the Batman a quirky sense of humor that actually works, and he makes us - well, me - like two characters I'd always felt bordered on the thoroughly unlikable: Tim and Stephanie. Mind you, Stephanie's still as precocious here as she was when she was dressing in that dumb Spoiler costumer and calling herself by that dumb Spoiler name - I know she's got a very strong following among fans, but I just can't see it...sorry! - but she's far, far more interesting in the Robin suit than she ever was in that other role. Her interactions with the Bat take on that same "interesting protective-but-stern father working with competent-but-young daughter relationship" quality that the relationship between the future Batman and the "first" female Robin has in THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS - perhaps it's a gender difference, but I haven't noticed this quality in his relationship with a Robin since Dick Grayson, not even with Tim.

And speaking of Tim, Willingham makes it impossible not to feel for this guy: he's had the best gig a guy can have, one which has changed him as a person in the best possible way the scene in which he defuses a schoolyard confrontation with words alone should be required reading for anyone else who ever writes his character and now it's been taken over by someone he was once close to. Willingham's handling of the uneasy relations between the two makes this subplot even more interesting than the main plot involving Scarab hunting down and killing potential Robins.

It's not a flawless issue, despite all that's good. Willingham introduces the urban myth that Batman has a set of orphanages he takes his Robins from, but then he has Tim say that Batman is considered just as much an urban myth, and that no one knows if the Bat even exists. Guess they've not been watching TV or reading the papers whenever the JLA save the world in some spectacularly public way, then. What an odd thing to say! But the other flaw, sadly, is the artwork, which is just a tad too frenetic and over stylized for this story. It works well for the action sequences when one can figure out the pattern of the layout, that is but it doesn't work quite so well for the quieter scenes. There's one page set in the Batcave that takes the reader a few tries to work out because the layout conflicts with the positioning of the dialogue balloons, forcing them to be read out of proper sequence. And then there's the convention of putting the Bat-symbol on everything, including a water bottle and Stephanie's pink workout shirt. Ugh.

Set these things aside, though, and you have one of the most compelling stories told in these pages in a very, very long time. I'd always wondered exactly what justified giving Robin his own book when DC is hardly hard up for Bat-titles. Willingham has provided that justification.