DC Comics’ gay Robin reveal in Batman comics was far overdue

Robin discovered that he was having a crush upon a boy in 2021. It was a sweet story, delivered without a drop of fanfare from DC Comics — a story that gave me, a queer reader and enormous fan of Robin, the singularly euphoric experience of seeing queer subtext actually and unexpectedly become text. But before I could enjoy it, my online discourse-poisoned brain handed me an urgent assignment, and I figuratively sat down at a school desk to do my “Representation Calculus” homework.

Marginalized fans know all about Representation Calculus: Is this “good” representation, or the kind of thin stereotype the majority has learned to tolerate? What is the risk in this capitalist venture? ActuallyIs it assuming? This is a person you have heard or seen before. Is this the “The”? ValueDo you agree with this gesture?

It’s possible to create a convincing proof that Tim Drake came out as gay. The strong headline “Robin just had a queer awakening” obscures the hard fact of “The second-most obscure of the five characters who have at one time been Robin just had a queer awakening.”

But there’s another way to make the case for Tim’s queerness as a net positive. No, not because of what Tim Drake can do for queer representation in media, but because of what queer representation can do… for Tim Drake.

Tim Drake is who?

Image: Tom Grummett, Scott Hanna/DC Comics

Actually, it’s entirely possible that you have. Tim, with some background from Jason Todd, was Robin of The New Batman AdventuresThe gently redesigned continuation of Batman: The Animated Series. He got that billing because he was kind of a big deal in the comics, for kind of a long time — it’s just that that long time was a long time ago.

Tim was the Robin’s first solo Robin title. It ran nearly 200 issues and ran until 2009, when it ended. That’s an unheard-of number for a character in the modern era — or at least one who has never appeared in live-action film.

Tim was Robin between 1989 and 2009. Dick Grayson was the original Robin. He had become Nightwing, a superhero who led the hugely popular New Teen Titans series. Jason Todd was the second Robin. He had suffered a horrible fate because he wasn’t popular with readers. Tim was the sweet spot between them: different enough in character and origin from Nightwing to meet a new era of fans, but with enough qualities in common to perform Robin’s vital role as Batman’s emotional foil. Although Stephanie Brown was honored with the modern version of the suit, it was only an editorial feint.

Grant Morrison, however, changed all that. attacked took the reins of DC’s core Gotham series, BatmanThis was the origin story of Batman, as well as the Batman mythos. By 2009, the writer had been cultivating the origin story of Damian Wayne — the grandchild of Ra’s al Ghul and the son Batman never knew he had — for three years, through various miniseries and crossovers. Following Bruce’s apparent murder in 2009’s Final Crisis event (he’d actually become lost in time; don’t worry about it), Nightwing took up his costume as the Batman of Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Batman and RobinDamian is Robin.

Fly home

This was not only the third time that Robin was given for good, but it was also the first time Robin was granted to someone new. Jason Todd’s creation was prompted by Nightwing’s increasing popularity as leader of the Teen Titans rather than Batman’s partner. Tim was created to fill the space left by Jason’s murder. Nightwing had fledged with Jason Todd, and Tim was forced to flee the nest. Tim moved from nest to nest, but never found one that worked in all the years.

Immediately after Damian took his costume, Tim adopted a new look and started calling himself Red Robin, a name with some history in DC lore but that is also… well, also the trademarked name of a chain restaurant. The New 52 reboot gave him a completely revamped origin story that lasted only six years before James “Tim Drake megafan” Tynion IV’s Detective Comics rolled it back to his old one — in a series where Tim’s internal struggle was all about how being Red Robin fit into his personal identity. The pages of 2019 are at Young Justice, Tim changed up his costume considerably and announced that his new superhero name was just “Drake,” a move that thankfully never made it out of the pages of Young Justice.

Image: Brian Michael Bendis, John Timms/DC Comics

Tim is always included when the Robins team up, and when he’s a writer’s favorite or associated with a team — he has become a character who gets invited to parties but never throws his own. With every reappearance, creators have tried to address the elephant in the room: Tim has never developed a strong editorial identity other than Robin, Batman’s partner.

Dick Grayson was the Robin Who Came first and later became Nightwing. Jason Todd, the Robin Who Perished, is back again as the Red Hood. Stephanie Brown is The Robin Who Is a Girl. Damian is the Robin Who Is Batman’s Son. Tim… Tim was only ever just Robin. Except he isn’t. Damian, as Robin has been since 2009.

The cumulative effect and accident of a decade spent experimenting with Tim Drake’s persona could have a profound irony. It has given him a distinguishing niche: Tim is the Robin Who Doesn’t Know Who He Is.

And that’s queer-coding, baby!

Image Credit: Geoff Johns, Francis Manapul/DC Comics

Now, to be fair, years before Damian happened along, queer fans had looked at Tim Drake — the nerdy, empathetic kid who became Robin because he romanticized the Batman and Robin partnership and seemed more emotionally invested in his friendship with Superboy than any of his on-again-off-again girlfriends — and said “He’s one of ours.” Tim’s decade-long crisis of identity is really just ink over pencil lines.

And he’s not alone in this sort of editorial coming-out story, joining the ranks of characters like Iceman, Wonder Woman, Kitty Pryde, and Mystique. There are many queer heroes who were accidentally or purposely coded to be superheroes, but have not been canonically brought out of hiding because of homophobia. “Refreshing” is too mild a word to describe a creator looking at a queer-coded character who needed something to distinguish him from his straight cohorts, and actually getting to make him queer.

Wait, I hear your comments! Tim now is The Robin Who Is Gay. Susana, quer people are so much more than queerness. That’s bad representation!

It’s a salient argument, and I’ve given it a lot of thought, leading to one conclusion: I don’t care. For one thing, Tim Drake isn’t a person, he’s a series of creative decisions dating back to 1989. Kate Kane, a Jewish Army vet and a Jewish woman with a different motivation to Bruce Wayne, is another. That hasn’t stopped anyone from reducing her down to “Lesbian Batman” and it never will. (Also, “Lesbian Batman” is objectively awesome.)

Tim is able to tell his story through a queer realization. This solves Tim’s editorial problems and allows him to explore new storytelling possibilities. Chip Zdarsky shared this information with me when I reached him regarding his forthcoming run. Batman, for which he picked Tim — not Damian, Dick, or Jason — as the Dark Knight’s featured partner.

Image: Jorge Jiménez/DC Comics

Among other things, the writer said via email, “Bruce also is worried about Tim and the rest of the bat-family, all struggling to find that balance between fighting crime and their personal lives. Tim being queer and more comfortable with who he is shows that there’s a stronger path to happiness for him in life.”

And, if I may be purely cynical for a moment, Tim’s queerness also gives future DC Comics editorial an imperative reason to keep him in the spotlight. Is it possible that the queer Robin doesn’t appear in comics? It’s not a very good look. From the purely mercantile standpoint of a person who just wants to read more Tim Drake stories, it’s fantastic that this once central, now little-known character can be boosted alongside DC’s other queer superheroes with his inclusion in DC’s 2022 Pride anthology, his Pride one-shot special that collected his coming out story with new material, and in Tim Drake: Robin, his first solo ongoing series since 2011, to be written by Meghan Fitzmartin and drawn by Belén Ortega, the creative team who walked him out of the closet in the first place.

‘The second-most obscure Robin just had a queer awakening’

Image by Travis Moore/DC Comics

What they don’t tell you in Representation Calculus 101 is that Representation Calculus sucks actually! There’s no such thing as perfect representation. We have a word for expecting a single character or creator to shoulder all the weight of normalizing the underrepresented: It’s tokenism. In the utopian future we’re all striving for, it will actually be Great when someone introduces a Black Spider-Man, a lesbian Batwoman, a female Thor, GNC member of the Flash family, or a trans ally of Supergirl and there are no press releases written about it, no articles, no breathless headlines — because it’ll be as normal as “Dog Bites Man.”

Tim Drake’s story speaks to what advocates for diversity can forget and homophobes would rather ignore: There are legitimate reasons to give a long-standing straight character a coming-out story beyond “more diversity is more.” Or to put it in painfully obvious terms: Change and diversity are storytelling tools, and refusing to use them is nothing but a self-imposed disadvantage.