Robin

11 years ago - Damian Wayne is born in the League of Assassins citadel, the son of Talia Al Ghul and Bruce Wayne. His grandfather Ra's Al Ghul does not believe that he should be trained because his father rejected the offer to become his heir, but his mother still gets him the best training available.

7 years ago - 4-year-old Damian Wayne survives an assassination attempt from Nyssa Al Ghul. He is moved by Talia Al Ghul from the League of Assassins Citadel to one of it's castles, where his training continues in earnest.

4 years ago - 7-year-old Damian Wayne is trained briefly by Merlyn.

now - 11-year-old Damian Wayne escapes from the League of Assassins castle when it is raided by Tim Drake during his search for Bruce Wayne. He steals a Robin uniform, claiming the title for himself. When the Joker returns to Gotham and tries to prove that Batwing is an imposter, Damian stops him and beats him with a crowbar.

Damian is a pretty divisive character. I was absolutely against the whole idea of him as a concept in the beginning, but was won over with time. I know folks who still don't like him and want Tim Drake back in the role, even though the comics were clearly setting him up to grow out of it before Damian even arrived.

Ultimately, we included Damian because our core principal has always been 'Does it make DC better'. Often, even if a character is themselves a lot of fun, they just don't really contribute to DC as a whole. Well, Damian is absolutely the opposite of that. Love him or hate him, there's no denying that DC is WAY more interesting with him in it.

Damian Wayne's Comic History

Damian Wayne's first appearance, technically, is in the 1987 graphic novel Batman: Son of the Demon by Mike Barr, the creator of the Outsiders and the maxi-series Camelot 3000. It's a weird series that reads a lot like a seventies-era spy thriller that features Batman agreeing to ally himself with Ra's Al Ghul, becoming his second in command, and marrying Talia, who spends much of the series pregnant with his child. It's canon status has always been debatable, especially considering that in that particular era DC was very comfortable with the idea of 'elseworld' stories; comics being published with cool concepts that were simply outside of continuity. Still, it was never explicitly stated that it WASN'T cannon, and the book ended with a shot of a chubby little baby that was clearly the child of Batman and Talia.

Fast-forward to Batman #655 in 2006, the very first issue of Grant Morrison's legendary run on the Batman books. We know now that Grant's whole plan was to take all the weirdest parts of Batman's history and treat it all as cannon, dragging it all into daylight and force it to make sense, and they announced those intentions in the boldest way, by making that "is it cannon or not" child suddenly FULLY cannon, arriving in the Batcave and announcing that he's the new Robin.

Ooooohh, did we all hate that. Tim Drake was still Robin at the time and everyone loved him, and suddenly this new kid was literally trying to usurp him. He was the absolute opposite of everything that made Tim a great Robin, he wasn't heroic, he wasn't a team player, he wasn't thoughtful. This kid was a PROBLEM. He was a violent, arrogant little jerk, lethally dangerous from being trained his whole life by all the greatest assassins in the world, and who's very first reaction to every problem was murder. In the hands of almost any other writer, he would have been an absolute nightmare and we would all have been happy when he was gone.

Grant, however, knew what they were doing. We were SUPPOSED to hate Damian, because all that conflict was fuel for fun, off-the-wall drama. All that friction, when written well, was wildly entertaining. When Bruce 'died' during the Final Crisis (also written by Morrison), and Dick Grayson became the new Batman, we got a brilliant new dynamic duo relationship in a completely unique Batman and Robin series that absolutely everyone should read. It's unlike any other Batman series there's ever been, and a huge part of what made that book so amazing was watching this incredibly dynamic character grow and actually earn his place. Then, when Bruce inevitably returned, we got ANOTHER new dynamic as Batman worked alongside his biological son, and Damian slowly realized that he actually had lots to learn from him. It was a wildly new concept for what Robin IS and for a lot of readers he's always going to feel wrong, but when it's done well, Damian is a slick evolution in the mythology of Batman.

Our Damian Wayne Story

When we started this project, we were still all in the "who does this kid even think he is" camp, but just like most people we eventually realized just how exciting this sort of shake-up can be. We wanted to bring him into our continuity, but needed to handle his introduction delicately because we don't want to do a lot with him yet. For us, it's more about getting him in place for upcoming stories, rather than using him a lot now.

So what specifically do we need from him? Within our current timeline, he's basically just lived his whole life in the care of the League of Assassin, being trained from birth as the perfect assassin. In comic continuity there's actually been quite a lot written about the intrigue within the League, and Damian's role within it, and we might flesh that out a little more down the line, but for now it's enough to just show that he's there.

We actually made one pretty big change to his story, and that's that he is actively choosing to escape the League and go with Tim Drake, rather than being taken by his mother to live with his father. I understand that the conflict between Damian and Tim was meant to be exciting, but since we're not the once actually writing these stories, just laying out their direction, it just works better for us to understand that Damian's motivations actually align with his adopted family from the beginning

Damian & the Titans

Damian has actually been around for almost twenty years now, and the bulk of his appearances are actually happening in the pages of the 2016 Teen Titans series that was built around him. The best Teen Titans teams have always been built around giving the current Robin his own supporting cast, and it's kind of worth pointing out that the well-loved Robins, Tim & Dick, had successful Titans teams built around them, while Jason never had one. Food for thought.

We absolutely want Damian to have his own Titans team in the future, but the comics made a pretty core error in the way they set up drama; they always, irrevocably, built it around Damian isolating himself from his teammates. I get that instinct; I've played enough dungeons & dragons to understand the appeal of the dangerous loner, but the point of this book needs to be to build and explore relationships as a way to explore the characters themselves. The actual book started with Damian kidnapping his future teammates, and while they all TRIED to get him to open up, he just never did. We're designing a future team specifically meant to open up Damian, and we'll get into those relationships in their pages.

Damian's Costume

There were a lot of little details to Damian's Robin costume that made it his own from the very beginning, and I like all of them. I'm writing this in early 2021, as DCs "New Frontier" imprint is gearing up. Damian is about to star in a new book and has just been given a new costume. I obviously can't predict the future, but I can say what I like about it now.

Of all the Robins, Damian is actually the one that I feel is the most likely to maintain the Robin mantle and evolve it into something. There are versions of the old Earth-2 Dick Grayson who stayed Robin into adulthood, and of course there's the Red Robin character from Kingdom Come that they've been trying forever to force onto Tim, but really they've all needed to evolve into something new. There has been a future version of Damian-as-Batman for practically as long as he's existed, but it's always seemed to me like Damian might finally be the character that makes an adult Robin actually work, and this costume feels like it might be the first step toward that?

Obviously, this is all speculation. I'm interested to see what happens, though.

Robin's Future

This is an interesting post to write, because this character is ENTIRELY about the future. Very soon, the current Teen Titans are going to have an encounter with Prometheus, and it's basically going to evolve the team into something new as they return to the name Young Justice. This will mean that, for a time anyway, there won't be a group called the Teen Titans.

We don't want the New Titans to happen because Damian just decides he wants a team and forces them to follow him. There needs to be an inciting event, something that draws that group together, and Damian needs to be just as much a part of that group as everyone else. Once they decide that they work together well, however, they should decide to build something together, and it will be Damian, the only member who can literally go straight to Nightwing himself, who earns them the right to take on the name.

Related Characters

Talon