Adam Beechen on Taking on Tim Drake

Several weeks back, the Nerdist Writers podcast had a discussion about the challenge in comic-book scripting of taking over an ongoing magazine. One of the regulars, Adam Beechen, spoke about his two experiences with that challenge, which both happen to have involved Tim Drake as Robin.

One was Robin itself at the “One Year Later” break after DC’s Infinite Crisis, issues #148-166. As Beechen says, he wasn’t picking up right after the previous scripter; the company had established an excuse for changing things, dropping threads, reworking the situation.

The second magazine was Teen Titans a short time later, with a transitional period of co-scripting with that volume’s founding writer Geoff Johns, issues #44-49. (Beechen briefly mentions his work launching a Batman Beyond comic and doesn’t mention his Batgirl miniseries.)

Along the way, Beechen, who came from the field of television animation, made a few notable observations:

• DC’s only editorial mandate for Robin was that the first villain had to be Cassandra Cain, then Batgirl. That remains a very unpopular decision with her fans, for which Beechen is sometimes blamed. (I discussed the possible thinking behind DC’s mandate here.)
• Beechen studied his predecessor Bill Willingham’s issues of Robin and tried unsuccessfully to contact him, and he read Chuck Dixon’s earliest issues, available in paperback. But he apparently didn’t check the bulk of Dixon’s run (nor the intervening stretch by Pete Wood).
• Beechen didn’t study Batgirl. His comments implicitly acknowledge one result, the fan criticism of how he handled the question of Cassandra Cain’s difficulties with language.
• Beechen came away with the idea that no one had explored Tim’s life as a teenager. Actually, that was the focus of most of Dixon’s issues. One result, it seems to me, is that after the initial storyline Beechen’s issues don’t really stand out. The small moments that are memorable, however, involve Tim’s relationship with Bruce Wayne.

As for Teen Titans, Beechen voices the usual complaints of a comics writer without the clout of Johns or Grant Morrison: sudden editorial changes, company-wide crossovers, having to cut a plotline short.

The Sensational Character Find of 1965

This being the first of April, it seems appropriate to discuss the Titans’ resident jokester and comic relief: Gar Logan, known alternatively as Beast Boy and Changeling. But mainly how he fits alongside Dick Grayson as Robin/Nightwing. This shows the flexibility (or perhaps the tribulations) inherent in a superhero who’s a supporting character.

Writer Arnold Drake introduced Beast Boy in the Doom Patrol comics of the late 1960s: a green teen (probably inspired by Dean Stockwell’s role in The Boy with Green Hair) who could take the shape of any animal. Beast Boy was a kid sidekick, but not a junior version of any member of the Doom Patrol. At first he wasn’t even a member of the team, but eventually one of those heroes adopted him.

When that magazine was canceled and Drake killed off his creations, young Gar survived as an orphan. After he appeared in some Teen Titans issues of the 1960s and ’70s, Marv Wolfman and George Pérez brought him into their New Teen Titans magazine in 1980 as the team’s gag man. He was one of the five main characters to make the leap to the Teen Titans TV cartoon in 2003.

As a character, Beast Boy has always worked best as part of an ensemble. In 1999 Geoff Johns and Ben Raab wrote a short miniseries with him as the main character, but notably it also featured Dick Grayson and other old teammates. Logan’s most memorable moments in comics have come in the various Titans series, and at the top of that list is “The Judas Contract,” in which Logan fell in love with a cute new Titan named Terra who turned out to be much more trouble than he’d dreamed.

In recent years, DC Comics has moved sharply away from the concept of a single “continuity” or history codifying all forms of its mythology. The Teen Titans of the cartoon aren’t the same as the team in Wolfman and Pérez’s New Teen Titans, or those of their New Teen Titans: Games, or the hybrid team now appearing in the Young Justice cartoon, or the parody versions in Tiny Titans.

The origins, personalities, and powers of DC’s main characters—Superman, Batman and Robin, Green Lantern, etc.—don’t change greatly from one continuity to another, but relationships among them can vary and the histories of secondary characters can change greatly. (The company also treats Wonder Woman as a main character, but her underpinnings do change as creators struggle to figure out what she best represents.)

As a secondary character, Gar Logan is therefore often in flux. New Teen Titans and its offshoots established him as a lovelorn wise guy, a bit younger than his teammates, who submerges his losses and neediness behind jokes.

But in the Young Justice cartoon, Dick Grayson as Robin is the group’s nerdy little wise guy. He’s the youngest of the group and deeply into computers and word games. So what space does that leave for Beast Boy?

In an episode broadcast last month, Young Justice showed us Garfield Logan as an eight-year-old living in Africa with no special powers. He gets a blood transfusion from the hero Miss Martian, a green-skinned shapeshifter. Frankly, that sets up a better explanation of why little Gar might grow up to be a green-skinned shapeshifter than the mysterious disease-and-cure interaction established in Doom Patrol decades ago. But for now that continuity still doesn’t have a Beast Boy.

In Tiny Titans, Robin is the put-upon central figure infatuated with a red-haired girl, and the whole comic is comic relief. So what space does that leave for Beast Boy?

Creators Art Baltazar and Franco re-established his crush on Terra as a more demonstrative one-sided relationship than Robin’s crushes—which is to say that Terra throws rocks at him. Otherwise, however, that comics’ Beast Boy seems more worldly than Robin. And in the magazine’s final issue, he actually comes up a winner.

The Tiny Titans versions of all six of the other New Teen Titans regulars look on happily from the center of this panel.

Finally, where’s Beast Boy in DC Comics’ new main continuity? He’s been changed to a red shapeshifter, more consistent with another animal-based hero. His debut in May will reveal more about that character’s name and history. Rather than part of the revamped Teen Titans, this Beast Boy’s in a related group.

In sum, Beast Boy is going in all directions, as dictated by the storytelling needs of whatever ensemble he’s assigned to.

Weekly Robin Extra: World Arena Tour

Having brought Bruce Wayne back from the dead time, DC Comics had to come up with a new way to exploit explore the company’s currently most popular character. So the company came up with…Batman on Ice! Except with no ice!

Batman Live is what the biz calls an “arena show,” built around athletic stunts and special effects. I didn’t pay much attention to this news until I learned that it’s not actually Batman’s story. It’s Robin’s.

The Newcastle Evening Chronicle interviewed DC’s Chief Creative Officer, Geoff Johns, and he explained:

“Batman’s origin comes out of the death of his parents. That is horrifying but compelling and even though it is 70 years old, it resonates in a very modern way.

“We want to bring out a whole other level to Batman by looking at Robin’s journey from a circus performer to an orphan after his parents are killed, to a superhero.

“Batman lost his parents, but he can cope with his pain and owns it.

“Then he sees this boy and it reopens all those wounds.

“Robin’s journey very much brings up Bruce Wayne’s journey.

“He’s a little bit harder – he can take it and own it, all this pain, and then there’s this other kid all this happens to.

“It opens up all these wounds and makes him even more angry.

“He’s doing a lot of projection on Robin for what he went through. He doesn’t really understand this, how to relate to this boy.

“I think very much that Robin brings out a whole new level to Batman.

“I actually think it is more about Bruce Wayne and Batman than almost any story.”

The show is scheduled to open in Manchester on 20 July 2011, and move on to cavernous spaces in Newcastle, Glasgow, Sheffield, Birmingham, London, Liverpool, Nottingham, Dublin, and Belfast. In 2012, if all goes well, a version will come to North America. Tickets for the UK-Ireland tour go on sale tomorrow.

The Robins’ Recurring Problem of the Future

The last weekly Robin discussed how the glimpses of the future in Grant Morrison’s Batman scripts show life in Gotham City getting more grim and ruthless, despite Dick Grayson being a relatively friendly Batman.

Of course, that’s only one possible future, but it’s still cause for worry—which is, after all, what superhero comics are designed to make us do in the middle of a story.

But I think the quality of life in the future has particular importance for the character of Robin, especially as embodied by the two longest-tenured Teen Wonders, Dick Grayson and Tim Drake. As Fabian Nicieza, currently scripting Red Robin, has explained:

The concept of Robin defines the nature of the legacy in the DCU and with that, implies hope for the future…

Put another way, if Robin inherits a lousy future, the DC Universe at large has a lot of pain to look forward to as well.

One example of this pattern appeared in the Titans magazines of the early 1990s. In an one-off annual, Marv Wolfman introduced a possible future in which the world will turn evil, and Dick Grayson/Nightwing will be the only familiar hero still fighting. This Nightwing will lack his friends, his lover, his mentor. He’ll be an outlaw against an oppressive state. And because so many comics readers identify with Dick Grayson, that future feels especially bad.

But it can get even worse. How? If Dick Grayson himself will get worse. That’s where Wolfman went next, after DC asked him to expand on that storyline. The second-tier Team Titans magazine showed that future Nightwing turning evil. He will take a new name: Deathwing. And in case that won’t be evil enough, he will also adopt an edged weapon, long straggly hair, and a costume that exposes his nipple rings.

Deathwing comes back to the present and helps to break up the familiar Dick Grayson’s wedding to his longtime girlfriend Koriand’r. Eventually that whole unsuccessful storyline imploded, and that future was mercifully canceled. DC declared that Deathwing wasn’t actually Dick Grayson at all, and shuffled the character off to bureaucratic oblivion. Some people still wonder where he’s gone.

But the short, unhappy career of Deathwing had served its purpose of telling readers how awful that alternate future would be, how glad we should feel that it won’t come to pass. Because if one of the beloved Robins will turn evil, the whole DC Universe is messed up.

Other writers have gone to the same well. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-02) was a sequel to his beloved but out-of-continuity The Dark Knight Returns. As far as I can tell, Miller set out to mess up the DC Universe as much as possible. So the sequel tells us that the first story’s new Robin, Carrie Kelley, will give up that identity and go around in a catsuit. Superman and Wonder Woman will have aerial sex. Many other heroes will become dejected or depowered.

At the end, Miller had only one place to go, only one more card to play: make Dick Grayson evil. I suppose that’s a SPOILER, but this whole tale has the sour taste of spoiled milk from the start.

In the early 2000s, Geoff Johns wrote a story about the Teen Titans group that included Tim Drake meeting their possible future selves. Embittered by their losses, those young heroes will become ruthless tyrants, oppressing villains and the western US as a whole.

And the leader of that future team? It will be Tim, taking the mantle of the late Batman—but as a murderous, gun-toting vigilante. Later, Sean McKeever wrote a follow-on to this “Titans Tomorrow” storyline. Both tales gain their power from the notion of a corrupted Robin, and the young Tim has to prevent that future from happening. Because if Robin doesn’t grow up well, there’s no hope for the rest of us.

The most recent example of this pattern is the current Batman Beyond limited series, set in the future and inspired by the past TV cartoon. This story, scripted by Adam Beechen, has just shown that its villain Hush is Dick Grayson, who will—wait for it—become evil! (Or will he? This is a six-part story, and it’s only up to issue #4. There’s no way the series’s big reveal and final twist happens only two-thirds of the way through.) On the plus side, once a DC storyline shows a future Dick Grayson (or Tim Drake) as evil, there’s nowhere further down we can go.