Review: Tim Drake: Robin Vol. 2: A Case of Chaos trade paperback (DC Comics)

Meghan Fitzmartin’s Tim Drake: Robin Vol. 2: A Case of Chaos ties a bow on the writer’s Bat-saga; it seemed unfortunate DC was collecting the Batman: Urban Legends beginning from way back here with the end, but it also turns out surprisingly relevant. Tim’s boyfriend Bernard Dowd particularly shines in this volume; though Fitzmartin doesn’t seem to have an ongoing work with DC, hopefully whomever picks up Tim next will write Bernard just as strongly.

The book is far from flawless. As with Fitzmartin’s previous DC volumes, characters say or do things that fall apart with little scrutiny; there’s an emotional beat in the end that felt particularly unearned. But this is also a book where Tim Drake inspires Batman to defuse a situation with a hug, where canonically a lot of people profess to care about Robin Tim Drake when, for a period of time, he seemed like an also-ran in DC’s eyes. It may not last — Tim’s not the “Robin” in Batman and Robin, after all, nor any upcoming movies — but it’s nice to have a Tim Drake fandom resurgence, if only for a moment.

[Review contains spoilers]

In my review of Tim Drake: Robin Vol. 1: Murder at the Marina, I praised the emphasis on secret identities. Though obviously not the way to have a healthy relationship, I appreciated that Tim was hiding his superheroics from Bernard when so many other titles have let the double-life aspect of superhero comics go by the wayside. We learn in Chaos that Bernard does know Tim’s secret, only Tim doesn’t know that Bernard knows. Arguably Fitzmartin had me fooled, though I’d like to say that with the whole “here come hide out on the boat of my boyfriend who is totally not you in disguise” scene, it did kind of occur to me maybe there were some hijinks happening.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

I have noted how in Tom Taylor’s Superman: Son of Kal-El title, Jon Kent’s romantic life seems exceptionally hunky-dory, and here too (contrary to online speculation) neither Bernard nor his parents turned out to be super-villains. I do imagine there’s some impetus at DC, not wholly incorrect, that at the point in which some of their highest profile character properties are exploring their sexualities, those explorations should be, romantically, fairly angst-free.

The flip side, however, is that in Fitzmartin’s first introduction of Bernard, again collected anachronistically here, she had him joining a pain cult (so, intentionally submitting himself to pain) and then nearly killed in sacrifice — and then, in Marina, we heard little about it. It seemed as though Fitzmartin needed Bernard in distress such for Robin to save him as part of the meet-cute, but that the implications of such didn’t follow along.

So, I appreciated the first main issue’s focus on Bernard, and the revelation that he’s been rejected by his parents due to his sexuality, and then that the subsequent three issues deal with the return of the “Chaos Monsters” who kidnapped him originally. Through this, we now understand that Bernard essentially starting dating Tim at the same time he’d joined up with the pain cult largely with the purpose of ending his own life. That’s a complication that in the “real world” we might say isn’t the healthiest way to begin a relationship, but I’m glad that Fitzmartin didn’t just sweep it all under the rug, and that she nods to the mental health struggles unfortunately too common among queer youth who aren’t embraced by their communities.

That Bernard could hold his own in a fight alongside Robin was also a strange part of Fitzmartin’s original “Sum of Our Parts” story, but here it’s given a bit of basis. Not that Bernard whaling on a punching bag is really an explanation, but we again see him fighting the Chaos Monster cult and, moreover, figuring out how to get Batman’s attention to go save Robin. There’s parallels here to how Tim sussed out Batman’s identity and confronted him in the first place; I wouldn’t favor Bernard taking a costume and joining an already-overfull Bat-troupe, but there’s something fun (as David Talaski’s variant cover suggests) about Bernard as Watson to Tim’s Sherlock.

What’s good here, however, is tempered by a creative team that seems to be still working out the kinks. Early in “Sum,” Superboy Conner Kent says to Tim, “You know, I think I heard from you more when I was dead,” which I know is supposed to mean he doesn’t hear from Tim much, but on second thought is kind of nonsense. There’s an entirely confusing sequence written by Fitzmartin and drawn by Belen Ortega (whose work I like overall) in which out-of-costume Tim goes up on a roof, then he’s suddenly in his costume, then the cult members arrive and he’s out of costume again. I think there’s a subtle “mask fading” effect that’s supposed to suggest Tim being in costume was all in his head, but that’s very clumsily conveyed to the reader.

Too, take the fight between Robin, Nightwing, and Tusk in Fitzmartin’s “Carol of Bats,” where there’s a lot of talk about windows and architecture, but none of it coalesces in a cogent explanation how Robin safely blows up a building. In the main story, Bernard makes a reference to puns when Robin is the last one to speak, but I think Fitzmartin means villain Firefly’s use of the phrase “wet blanket” — except there’s nothing in the scene to make that a pun unless the art’s wrong. The villain Phobia is also there, supposedly making people see “their greatest fears come true,” except no one in the restaurant seems frightened so much as just mad at one another.

There’s a reference in “Carol of Bats” to the idea that Jack Drake, Tim’s late father, “worshipped” Batman. It’s been a while, but I just don’t recall that.¹ I chalked it up to a gaffe on Fitzmartin’s part, but weirdly, right at the end of this book, it’s as if the narrative suddenly remembers the Drakes. Tim thinks about how his father “would know” what to do with the choices in front of him “if he were here” no sooner than he’s confronted with a hallucination of Jack; the cultists chide Tim for imagining Jack instead of Bruce when … that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing?

And then at the book’s climax, Tim affirms, “I never wanted to be Batman. I never wanted to be Robin. All I wanted to be in life … was my dad.” Again, given that Jack has barely been mentioned throughout the book, this seems sudden — something that sounds good but doesn’t make sense on the page (nor could the reader tell you why Tim admires his father so much). As someone who was there for it all — Janet Drake’s death, Jack Drake in 100-something issues of Robin, through to his death Identity Crisis — all of this seems cheap to me, the story taking easy shortcuts to emotion without doing the work to back it up.

On the whole, though I wouldn’t blame you for saying otherwise, I liked Tim Drake: Robin Vol. 2: A Case of Chaos, and I like this idea of Robin, Sparrow, and Bernard as a waterfront Gotham “Scooby gang.” I’m not optimistic some other writer will pick that up, but I think there’s a gem of something workable here.

[Includes original and variant covers]

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1. I do recall, circa Bill Willingham’s Robin: Unmasked, Jack not being Batman’s biggest fan!  ↩︎

Rating 2.25