I'm Starting A Collection

I think there’s a good distinction to be made about the main batboys and murder

Dick: Has killed, could kill again under horrible circumstances, would never want to kill again

Jason: Has killed, could kill under his normal moral code, will definitely be killing again

Tim: Has killed, couldn’t kill again without a major break, doesn’t want to kill again and is willing to kill himself before he does that

Damian: Has killed, couldn’t kill again if people (cough cough DC) respected his growth, and never wants to kill again outside the rare fantasy for especially horrible people

Like all ideas for media this is subjective but I think pretty accurate to these characters as I’ve read up on them and as I understand their characters

Batfam AU where Jason never dies, so Tim doesn't join the family the standard way. Instead, he continues pouring most of his time and energy into his photography, eventually becoming known as a popular photographer for events and all that. So now, picture this: Tim gets hired to be a photographer for a Wayne gala. Obviously, he's ecstatic, because he can take pictures of Batman, Robin and Nightwing and be in their presence for a whole night. Since Tim is so naturally talented in stealth and taking pictures unnoticed, the second one of the fam realises this they're like: this kid is good. Tim manages to go unnoticed by all 3 of them (all bat-trained, one literally batman) multiple times during the night, and even when he is noticed, he disappears before they can manage to get a good look at him; to the sheer amazement of Dick and Jason.

Jason, (very discreetly putting snacks in his suit pocket): i know you're under the table, kid.

Tim: don't mind me, Mr. Todd-Wayne, sir, just taking a few pictures

Jason: right... Jason's fine, and what pictures were you taking from under the table?!

Tim, showing him perfectly good shots of him: these.

Jason: how did you get that. it looks like you took it from the rafters

Tim, nodding: I did.

Jason, glancing at the ceiling: ...what?

Tim, gone:

Jason: no fucking way.

Dick, hearing a very, very faint camera shutter from behind him:

Dick, turning around and finding no one there: what the actual...

Dick, getting the feeling of being watched and whirling around to find Tim staring at him from across the room: ... huh.

Jason, pulling Dick aside: you see that kid too, right?!

Dick, nodding: the camera kid, yeah?

Jason: who is that.

Dick: he's one of the hired photographers, apparently. one of the best in his field, despite his age.

Jason: he's good. like, really good. snuck up on me 4 times already, the little bastard.

Dick: you too? i swear he's constantly watching. it's creepy how well he can sneak past both of us.

Jason:

Dick:

Jason: you don't think...

Dick: no. B would've told us.

Jason:

Dick:

Dick: did he get another kid and not tell us somehow

Bruce: what do you mean another kid?

Jason: you heard us. did you adopt another kid and not tell us?!

Bruce: no?? how would I even?? ... what's this about?

Dick: one of the photographers has managed to sneak up on both me and Jay multiple times already

Bruce: what.

Jason: he also can't be more than like. 15 or 16. so forgive us for assuming you took another one in.

Bruce: do you know his name?

Dick:

Jason:

Bruce: really?

Dick: in our defence, he's very hard to catch. i wouldn't be surprised if he's snuck up on you, too.

[camera shutter noise]

All of them, whipping their heads toward the sound only to find nothing but air:

Tim, smiling from the other side of the room:

Jason: do you see what we mean?!

Cue an entire night of shenanigans where it's just Dick, Jason and Bruce trying to catch Tim and learn about him. Upon finding out who he is and where he lives, Dick immediately asks to keep him as an honorary member of the family. Jason is hesitant at first but at some point Tim calls Bruce Batman instead of Mr. Wayne on accident and Jason laughs so hard he's basically won over. Bruce can do nothing but watch as Tim proceeds to come over almost every night for sleepovers and is coddled by both of his sons. And he can't deny, the kid's investigation and stealth skills are top tier. By the time Dick and Jason both start referring to Tim as 'their younger brother' Bruce has just accepted his fate.

Their friendship is legitimately everything to me

More Lantern!Bats shenanigans

Blue Lantern Duke: *jumps off a building to dodge an attack*

Blue Lantern Duke: *creates a grapple construct made of pure hope*

Villain of the week: "such a fickle and fragile thing, Imma cut his line with my evil sword of power..."

Villain, after shattering his sword and all the bones in his wrist on the line: what the fuck

*****

Bludhaven Goon #1 (BG1): Dude, run! Nightwing's powered have tripled over night!

Bludhaven Goon #2 (BG2): Oh no, what happened? Did something happen in Gotham? Someone gone after Robin?

BG1: I don't know, but we need to- wait what is he doing

BG1: he's straight up glowing I-

BG2: he's lighting up the nightsky-

BG2: ohmygod we're gonna die

Meanwhile Red Lantern! Dick, ranting to Wally on the comms: yeah so Cass took all the hot water while showering then told me to 'deal with it', someone kept hiding pig whoopee cushions that go "oink" in my seats and I can't figure out who, Jasont told everybody my most embarrassing Nightwing debut stories with photographed evidence, Damian tried to kidnap Bitewing thrice and Tim skipped out to go to a party using a stratagem so needlessly elaborate it looked like Jason had designed it, and we all thought someone had kidnapped him! But no, yeah, the visit went well, manor's fine. You know how it is, siblings...

*****

Rose: Hey Jason, how the fuck did you bag Kyle Rayner?

Star Sapphire Jason, whisper-shouting: I don't know what the fuck is going on, he popped in with yellow roses and offered to teach me how to make constructs, don't talk so loud I'm afraid that'll make him realise.

Referrencing these posts:

Viper: Skull has the weirdest knowledge and skill set I have ever seen. Like, watch this.

Viper: HEY SKULL?

Skull, across the room: YEA?

Viper: why does antifreeze taste shit?

[skull wanders over while speaking]

Skull: ethelyne-glycol is a chemical compound toxic to the human body, and it’s used in antifreeze. Since it tastes sweet, people kept killing their spouses by mixing it with jello, so they eventually added something else to make it gross.

Viper: ok, what’s the most interesting place you know of?

Skull: uhhh, well, glacial Lake Agassiz existed a long LONG time ago, and it was essentially created by a glacier damming a river, and every so often it would create these MASSIVE floods when the ice lifted.

Viper: ok, how many times did humans domesticate cats?

Skull: actually they domesticated themselves at least three times.

Viper: alright. Who is the current president of the United States?

Skull, cheerfully: no clue!

[viper looks directly into the camera, gestures at skull, then walks away]

Fanon has people thinking that being replaced by Tim is the main thing that Jason is mad at Bruce about when that’s like #5 on the list and honestly I think he released all of his replacement related angst after he beat Tim’s ass, like he’s thinking about that anymore. Let’s all remember that Jason was ready to blow up the Batmobile before he even knew about Tim’s existence

i feel like playing kon-el-themed eleven truths and a lie again!!!

If you ever have the time/interest, would you break down the canon surrounding Stephanie’s economic circumstances/home life? It seems like a lot of people have chosen to take it a specific way so I’d love to see your reasoning

Sure. Thanks for asking, it's honestly a fun topic.

Y’know it’s funny—I actually happen to own something that I think most people, even most Steph fans, haven’t seen: Steph’s first appearance. Not her Robin first appearance, her Detective Comics first appearance, her actual introduction. I happened to pick them up by accident at a con a few years ago because they’re also some of Tim’s first cover appearances. 

Other people might disagree with me on this, but I like to go back to the characters’ origins whenever I can to find the baseline of what they were originally intended to be and try to bring later interpretations in line with that. I like to think of retcons as new revelations, new plot twists in an ongoing story, and not a way to reset aspects of the past just to fit your story. It works especially well for this because Steph’s socio-economic status doesn’t actually change, there’s just kind of a game of telephone that happens across the decades that leads people to misunderstand. 

One thing worth noting in these early issues is just how much Steph, a 16-year-old girl, has at her disposal before she ever even glimpses Batman and Robin. Literally the first shot we ever see of the Spoiler is this: 

And because I am, in fact, that kind of nerd, I have gone in a couple of times and dug out old era-appropriate electronics magazines to figure out what that piece of equipment would cost you in 1992. Baseline for a parabolic microphone is $600, and that price is for much larger, more delicate pieces of equipment meant to be used for like, outdoor nature shoots, which wouldn’t be able to hear through glass. Steph probably dropped $1,000 on that microphone alone. 

Remember also that her costume is homemade—she doesn’t have any other way of getting it. She’s also shown using some pretty elaborate climbing and painting gear, with no indication that they were stolen or borrowed or anything, and you can see that she’s got a pretty well-stocked utility belt there.

Again, for some reason people tend to forget or overlook this but, right up until she demanded Bruce make her Robin, Steph operated as Spoiler with zero Bat support. She got some hand-to-hand training from Cass late in the game and tagged along on some of Tim’s assignments, but was otherwise being actively discouraged from vigilantism for most of her career. She made her own costume, bought her own equipment, and maintained her own motorcycle, all without the financial support of either Batman or her parents. 

So right off the bat we know she’s a teenage girl with a not-insignificant amount of personal disposable income, the only hinted source of which is the implication she works a part-time job somewhere—which I don’t think is ever brought up again when she reappears in Robin. 

We all know minimum wage went further in 1992 than it does now, but it didn’t go that much further. So it’s reasonable to assume that Steph has access to at least some money from her parents to support her vigilante habit, whether that’s in the form of an allowance, gifts that she carefully manages between Christmas and birthdays, or money that she’s able to just, take from Crystal without her noticing. 

But this page is more important to our current interests because it’s also when we see Steph’s neighborhood for the first time. We’re told here that Steph and her mother (who is called Mrs. Agnes Bellinger in this comic, although it’s possible she was using a fake name to visit her ex in prison) live in what is described as “115 South Holden Street, in Manchester.” 

Now keep in mind, the Gotham City map can be extremely fluid and tends to change depending on the needs of the story. But there have been attempts to map it, and “Manchester” has never been on any of those maps, so we have to do some extrapolation. At the very least, we can tell the neighborhood is clearly not in the city, given the very deliberate angle there in the first panel to show that they’re well away from the crowded downtown Gotham skyline.

This implies that Manchester is intended to be one of the mainland suburbs that feeds the island city of Gotham, similar to Bristol Township where the Wayne and Drake Manors are located. It’s not nearly as nice a neighborhood as Bristol—note the fenced-in front lawns, the broken shutters on the neighboring houses, and the vaguely racist lawn ornament on the Brown’s property—but it’s also not some rundown slum. People aren’t afraid to let kids play in their front yards or leave their garage doors standing open. And you'll note those aren't trailers, either, they're decently-sized suburban homes.

Also worth noting: Crystal seems to keep this house perfectly fine on her own as a single mother. Arthur doesn’t live with them; when he’s shown having residences it tends to be apartments in the city by himself, and it’s not like he could support them from prison or with his ill-gotten criminal gains. And yet, we don’t see Steph or Crystal worrying at all about bills or mortgages or anything like that throughout any of their appearances. We see the interior of their house on several occasions and, while it’s often messy, it’s not in disrepair or neglect.

This is a constant portrayal throughout all of Steph's appearances, from Robin through even her run as Batgirl. So, with that in mind, where does the idea that Steph is poor come from? Well, I’ve got a couple of theories.

One is the usual comics fandom problem: canon is huge, nobody can keep up with all of it, and some people go out of their way to be assholes about it, so misinformation gets spread like wildfire, in no small part because Steph is a character that a lot of people use as a self-insert and therefore she must be the misunderstood underdog in all things.

But on the more-interesting-to-talk-about front… I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Steph’s first big storyline was her pregnancy. Yeah? Like, it’s the first story involving her that really started getting critical attention. Whether it deserves that attention is more open to debate—personally, since reading Icon & Rocket for the first time, I’ve come to view it as Dixon pulling the comic book equivalent of white guys repackaging black music and watering it down—but the important thing right now is that it’s the first time people would’ve been specifically reading the Robin comics for Stephanie Brown. And in those comics, Steph’s house is shown as visibly run-down, covered in cracks and disrepair.

Thing is, there’s a context that people miss if you’re reading for the baby storyline and nothing else: this storyline plays out over the last days of “Aftershock” and early months of “No Man’s Land,” the storyline where Gotham is racked by a destructive earthquake that nearly levels the city and is abandoned by the federal government.

Again, we get the reinforced confirmation that Steph’s house isn’t actually in Gotham because it’s not destroyed in the quake—the neighborhood is damaged and briefly evacuated due to a gas line rupture in the immediate aftermath, but once that’s cleared up they’re free to return home, and their suburb is not part of the federal government's evacuation. Nearly every building in Gotham is shown with similar damage during this time, including Drake Manor. 

This storyline also plays into, I think, the stereotypes that people jump on when it comes to Steph’s socioeconomic status. Like I’ve mentioned before: Arthur is a criminal, Crystal is a drug addict, and Steph is a teen mom. Therefore, they must be poor, right? Because good middle class families supposedly don’t have those kinds of problems.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s an inaccurate stereotype that ignores reality: plenty of drug addicts, criminals and teen moms live in the suburbs. And the Browns’ specific circumstances are distinctly atypical of the stereotype—Arthur’s not some down-on-his-luck thief pushed to crime by economic hardship, he’s an arrogant former gameshow host who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and resents the world for not handing him the success he feels entitled to. Crystal’s not some crack addict, she’s a working nurse who used to get her doctor friends to write her scripts for prescription painkillers. And Steph is just a teenage girl who slept with a boy and got pregnant, with the costs of prenatal care and/or childrearing never seeming to be a factor in her decision to bring the child to term and give it up for adoption. 

I could go on but that’s pretty much the long and short of it: Steph is simply not shown as being poor in the comics. Ever. She’s not rich, she does clearly rely on her fists much more than any gadgets or fancy gear and lives with her mother rather than moving out on her own for college, but she’s also never shown worrying about student loans and can apparently pay for all her classes with some government assistance and a part-time job alone.

People just assume that she’s poor because they’re misinformed, or they’re projecting, or they’ve got biases they haven’t examined, or they need her to be an underdog to justify their argument against one of the other characters, or they really want her to be buddy-buds with Jason for some reason. 

Or, y’know, they just don’t want to acknowledge that they’re rooting for a middle-class white girl from the suburbs who commutes into the inner city to pick fights for fun. 

I think we're all ready for Tim Drake to move on from the Robin codename and costume and take on a new identity just like he had right before New 52. However, while I liked the costume... the name? Red Robin? It wasn't the best. Certainly better than other names that have been suggested for him (looking at you... Drake) but it still didn't give him his own identity, you know? Red is Jason's color, and he's still clutching tight to the Robin mantle. Hell, even the costume he wore was originally worn by Jason during the Countdown series before Final Crisis.

I want him to have his own name. His own costume. His own color.

And then I saw Juni Ba's interpretation of the Red Robin suit and... it hit me -

Condor.

The wings, the curved shape of the helmet looking like a beak... it would be so easy to translate this design into a new costume for Tim. Especially since it looks like a condor more than a Robin. Especially since the symbol he wore while Red Robin never 'looked' like a Robin.

And yes there are questions -

Isn't there already a hero named Condor? Yes. Two heroes and a villain. However we haven't heard much about them in recent comics. Black Condor, to my knowledge, currently only exists on Earth X as there's yet to be a Freedom Fighters team on the main DC Earth even after Heavy Metal. The other Condor was last seen during the New 52 run of Birds of Prey. And the villain Condor exists as a Hawk parallel who, let's be honest, we will most likely never see again.

Why Condor? Aren't there other names, similar names, you could use? Yes, these similar names exist, but it wouldn't sound right or be feasible in the current comics universe. Hawk? Already exists, Hank Hall. Vulture? Villain name. Raptor? Already taken by a Nightwing Rogue. Falcon? Hero for Marvel.

The only name I could also see other than Condor is Eagle, which would also be a great nod to Alfred Pennyworth, but the symbolism of Eagle is also too wrapped up with the government that it would muddle the messaging and vigilante brand.

Condor, however, makes perfect sense.

And you wouldn't have to tweak the costume much! My only thing would be to change the color from red... to green.

Green is currently an unclaimed color amongst the Bat Family and I think Tim would rock it. We've seen him leaning on the color green more and more as Robin, ironic as his most famous costume is when he ditched green all together after Superboy's death. Him choosing green, reclaiming green, would show him fully stepping out from the shadows to be his own hero.

Tl; dr Tim Drake should take on a new codename, Condor, wear a suit similar to Juni Ba's design, but green.

y'all ever reach the end of google