Mike Gold: Death of an Obnoxious Rugrat
According to the hubbub, today is the day Robin dies.
Sigh. If I had to choose between becoming Robin and playing drums for Spinal Tap, I’d join a convent.
The Robin in question – and there’s been a hell of a lot of them – is the little brat who was the issue of Bat(Bruce Wayne)man and Talia al Ghul, a concept I never, ever bought. Subtlety named Damien, the li’l bastard finally came onto his own in the recent, tedious, overwrought, and too-damn-long “Death of the Family” event.
His obnoxious demeanor isn’t reason I detest(ed) his character. I do not condone his birth.
Batman – Bruce Wayne no longer exists – is the poster boy for obsessive-compulsive. All the Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Lexapro combined can’t help this sucker, and yet somehow we have come to perceive his behavior as noble. If we refused to sell guns to the mentally unstable, Master Bruce wouldn’t make it to his next fox hunt.
He sublimates everything into being Batman. Everything. If it doesn’t play a role in his work, he doesn’t have patience for it. This is clear, and as consistent over the past several decades as anything ever is in the DCU. More so. In fact, much more so.
Therefore, I simply do not believe Batman would ever have sex with Talia. But if he did, it wouldn’t result in Li’l Damien. It would result in the return of the Comics Code Authority.
It might even prompt the resurrection Dr. Fredric Wertham. Check out my colleague Denny O’Neil’s ComicMix column tomorrow.
I suspect there’s already a betting pool on how long Damien stays dead. If history is any guide, there will be still another Robin (I’m guessing a female, but that’s just a guess) and, sometime after that, we will endure another multipart pseudo-event that will result in the brat’s resurrection. And we don’t simply have the experience of Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake (Was he ever killed? I get confused.) We have Damien’s resurrection-happy grandpappy, who has been revived more times than Kenny McCormick.
What goes around comes around. Killing a Robin – or anybody else in the DC Universe – is as original as a bag of potato chips. “Bet you can’t kill just one.” Resurrecting the dead is even less original. It’s boring.
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
I like Damian if only in the sense that he’s something that Grant Morrison created and has used for a greater overall story. I’ve been reading Morrison’s batman since they started coming out (Marc and I flipped a coin on who would get Morrison’s Batman and who would get Dini’s detective comics) and I like that a kid who started out as a near crazed, murdering psychopath has matured and changed over the course of his time with Bruce.
I don’t think everything Bruce does is solely to further his work as Batman. Morrison in fact addresses that in his early issues which is why Bruce is at first decieved by Jezabel Jet. I’ve already read most of the spoilers just to make my life easier but I’m still looking forward to what comes today. I hope Damien’s story stay completed here if for no other reason so that more writers do the same thing- create new characters for new stories instead of just going back to the same well.
I never liked Damien and the reasons are complicated. I mean, I usually like Grant Morrison, and I certainly respect him, but one of Grant’s pet themes is inter-generational conflict, and he’s always been very much on the side of “youth”, usually for no other reason but that it’s youth. It’s one of my pet peeves against him.
Consider. There is ZENITH. There is Jack Frost from THE INVISIBLES. In X-MEN he made much of how out of touch Magneto and Xavier supposedly had become. In JLA the theme appears indirectly, in interviews about how much Grant prefered Wally, Kyle, and Connor, and how he disliked the “creepy old guys” like Hal and Ollie. It’s in Grant’s feud with Alan Moore. And this kind of attitude is taken up to eleven with Damien Wayne.
Damien embodies this attitude. It’s what defines his character.
We’re supposed to like him because he is young and the future and insufferable about it. That Grant noticed how much the character was loathed and made him progressively more sympathetic is what is called the author’s saving throw (for the RPG crowd out there). It doesn’t strike me as planned from the beginning.
Now, we all go through that. When we’re teens, we have the need to symbolically destroy the preceding generation. Most of us grow out of it at some point in our adulthoods. But some people carry the attitude forever.
And it was a kind of attitude that made sense in the 60s and 70s when Grant grew up. Old vs. Young was a big thing back then, when the old generation and the new had such different values that they might have come from different planets, and the old values were morally bankrupt. But today that doesn’t hold true, things aren’t as simple.
Lord, I’m not conservative by any means, and I’m ready to like stories about young characters in conflict with stuffy old values. But give me a reason to sympathize with the youngsters more than just “old is creepy”. There is an amorality to that… that admiration of the surface coolness of youth, that I find very disturbing.
I haven’t seen much of the little twit, but i’m all for this.
To paraphrase a button feom the ST:TNG days: “Damien must die. Painlessly if necessary.”
Another Robin dead?
Been there, done that.
I agree with Mindy. Been there, seen that. But the trend of killing off characters and then bringing them back smacks to me of soap opera — bad soap opera. The deaths in comics don’t man anything any more because, as you pointed out Mike, we simply start counting down the days until they return. Been there, seen that with all the characters killed off. No more shock value in their deaths, no more surprise at their return.