Tim Drake Robin - Blog Posts

Tim when he was looking for Bruce:

ceo tim you will always be famous to me

So, when Jason was living his Red Hood life and stalking Tim to an intense degree, I want to imagine him running into a little problem. He finds something that Tim has been keeping secret from the other Bats.

Tim livestreams his W&W campaigns with his civilian friends.

It's mostly done for Ives when he's at the hospital; the steam is easier for his friend to watch and communicate his turns while he's sick. Tim plays both his and Ives' characters at once.

And the thing is...

Jason fucking loves a story.

And after so long watching the streams for stalking purposes, he's reluctantly invested in this one.

He'll definitely beat the shit out of the new Robin soon! It's part of his plan! He needs to prove he's better than this little twerp.

But first he needs to know how the romantic subplot between Tim's orc Artificer and that blond kid's half-elf Paladin is going to turn out.

Okay, hear me out. I know it's not canon that Jason drugged the other Titans during the Titans Tower Incident; he electrocuted two of them and then drugged the third.

But we're playing in the au's like bitch whatever, DC retcons and rewrites at the slightest provocation and we are here for stories, right?

And a lot of Titan's Tower au's have Red Hood drugging more people than in canon. And every time it happens there's an absolutely terrible little voice in the back of my head going, "Jason is so lucky that no one he drugged was hiding a substance abuse issue like Roy did. Jason is so lucky that none of these teenagers-to-young-adults who are incredibly physically active and who have so many traumas took some physician-prescribed, completely legal pain medications or anxiety pills or muscle relaxants. He is so lucky that any daily upkeep medication didn't cause a catastrophic drug interaction with the unknown. Heck, Jason is so lucky that whatever drugs he used were perfectly tailored to each individual's body mass and species."

I'm not saying I want a fic where Jason accidentally makes a young hero OD, but I think it would be interesting and darkly funny if Tim made him think he might have.

"You drugged everyone? Wait, even (X)?! What did you use, did you check to see if they took their benzos before you drugged them? (Y) Is allergic to propofol, was that part of the stuff you used?"

"Look, you can have the fight you want, just let me make you none of my friends are choking on their own vomit first."

Do you ever forget you have superpowers? Kon does often.

It’s still a sweet gesture.

You have no idea the demons I fought to not turn this little comic angsty. I might still do it, I haven’t decided yet.

When you’re trying to have a self deprecating moment but your brother acquaintance won’t let you.

sorry for not being as active recently college is kicking my ass.

Damian is 3 seconds away from being crushed under the weight of his siblings.

We are once again entering headcannon alley where everything I say goes. So basically Tim has never really been good at receiving or giving compliments to people, instead he usually just ends up listing attributes or characteristics that person has (wether it’s good or bad he’ll just point it out and in his mind it counts as a compliment.). His understanding is that to be seen is to be loved, so most of his ‘compliments’ are him calling out repeated traits or actions. For example, a compliment he might give to Jason, or maybe Damian, would be “You have a short temper.” Or “ You often solve problems with violence.”

he’s not trying to call people out or anything, he just genuinely thinks it’s a compliment to pick up on other peoples patterns and let them know that he’s noticed them.

Another compliment he might give is something extremely straightforward and obvious like “You have Blue eyes.”

anyways hope you enjoyed my little rant and my little art work! Thank you all so much for all of the love!

If I had a nickel for every time I drew Tim insisting that Jason is a good person I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s sad that it’s happened twice.

anyways have some de-aged Tim angst

Gee, thanks DC! You Just Turned Bruce Into An Irredeemable Ass.

So, at the end of Gotham War Bruce has officially lost everything. Alfred is still dead, Selina is "presumed dead" and Bruce is both financially and morally broke. Why, you may ask, is Bruce so much worse off this time? Let me count the ways.

He preformed a psychic lobotomy on Jason

The "it's for your own good" excuse only makes the mental rape undertaken by Jason's own father that much more heinous.

Just when you think Bruce can't sink any lower he does. When Dick recognizes that Bruce has lost it, he attempts to use a failsafe disconnect that Bruce himself built into the system. How does Nightwing get thanked for that? Well that brings us to number two on the list.

Batman attacks up his eldest son for doing what he's supposed to do when Batman has gone rouge.

Bruce beats him up because nothing proves you are in control of your sanity like hitting your children. While Dick is holding back, Bruce does no such thing. He hits Nightwing hard enough to send him flying. It could have gotten even worse if Tim hadn't shown up.

Tim arrives and attempts to talk some sense into Batman.

Tim tries to talk Bruce down. It doesn't go well. When Robin is trying to help, as he always does, Batman uses the attempt to reason with him to put the smack down on his son. Bruce could have killed Tim but apparently feels no remorse or guilt.

If there was any teeny tiny little doubt that Bruce will not win the Father of The Year award in 2023 it died a horrible screaming death when Batman abandons his children to potential arrest. Yes, he left a batarang for Dick and Tim but any glimer of possible hope associated with that action was instantly extinguished by Damian's reaction to Batman's callous betrayal.

Bruce abandons Damian.

Look at Dami; he's devastated. Since he came into Bruce's life, Damian has struggled with feelings that he can never earn his father's love and respect. Well, that negative self-image was reinforced in way that may never be repairable. Bruce just utterly destroyed a 13 year old child because of his inability to feel any kind of empathy.

And how does this all end? The best part is that Bruce takes all of his parental responsibilities and dumps them onto Dick.

Thank you Chip Zdarsky and Trini Howard. You've taken Batman from being an edgy anti-hero and made him into a callous monster. Part of me hopes that Bruce never comes back because he doesn't deserve his family.

The only positive aspect in this convoluted mess is that Damian and Tim will be far better off with Dick than with Bruce. Yes, Tim is mostly independent but he still needs guidance (particularly since Tim's first instinct is to try and save Bruce). Damian is essentially Dick's son emotionally anyway so this might help to sustain the positive character growth we've seen in him as of late.

The point of this rant is to wonder what on earth DC thinks they're doing. This story arc has been pure character destruction as far as Bruce is concerned. It's bad storytelling too; rushed, frenetic and massively disappointing.

Hasn't the popularity of Good Dad Bruce in Wayne Family Adventures proved that fans are tired of Bruce being a dark depressed and brooding edge lord? We all accept that Batman is a character with deeeeep issues who is in desperate need of therapy. I, however, draw the line at Bruce being an abusive a**hole.

In years to come when fans wonder when Batman jumped the shark, this is the plot line they'll point to.

this is my first tim doodle.. worth it

Something something idk how to draw Tim something something pick the one that looks better plssss

Y'know how batman said his name was batman when bound by the Lasso of truth, possibly due to his disassociation from the Bruce Wayne persona and possibly due to self imposed brainwashing? Well once the rest of the batfamily finds out about it, specifically Tim Drake, he asks both Wonder Girls (Cassie and Donna) to borrow the Lasso. Kon-el Superboy is there as well as Tim's control group. so after explaining his plan to everyone involved, he explains that he is testing to see if it was possible to trick himself into tricking the Lasso of truth.

Jason Todd unwittingly walks into the room ( they are at the manor under the guide of planning a celebration) as they are testing and suggests to Tim to, instead of redefining the rules of the Lasso, redefine what constitutes as an appropriate answer to questions. As such, whenever Jason Todd gets Lasso'd and asked questions, he speaks in broken Russian to throw people off. Damian just speaks Arabic to inconvenience them. When tim looks confused about why jason is lassod enough to need to know this, jason explains that this is why he got the best at game night with the league. Everyone gets a moment of understanding over this revelation.

Tim, who was never told about game night, is more confused than ever, but takes the advice to heart and uses it as an excuse to learn and use Klingon.

The only batfamily members to be consistently allowed into game night are Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, because Bruce doesn't actually play, and Grayson doesn't go all out.jason stoped getting invites after dying,and only returns as Dick's plus one occasionally. Tim was never invited because it was unanimously decided he would win.

Tim is hurt by this

dropping more timkon on your feed today!

i so often avoid colour and just focus on inking but so much of my work looks unfinished without it, sigh, so i am working on it -.-

me rn:

HES SO CUTE HOW DID I DO THIS HDHDHHDBD smol little bean

the only good thing to come out of Gotham knights is that Robin costume that’s it 💀

oh also Bruce in any form, he’s rrly pretty bdbdb

Bernard Dowd and the Art of Recontextualization

I'm what you might call a "fake Batman fan" - that is, I've only watched most of the Batman animated series', all of the live action movies, most of the animated ones, played some of the video games... so, you know, probably thousands of hours of my life in Batman related media. But not the comics! Fake fan!

Frankly, I find the comics medium the way DC and Marvel do it to be really hard to follow. There's the fact that you can't really follow an individual solo character without them getting caught up in massive crossover events that ruin their arc and pacing, there's the soap-opera-iness that encourages cheap and revolving conflicts inherent to the longform monthly release schedule, the writer roulette, and there's also just that going back to try and thread a particular continuity or character is an exercise in frustration. Oh and the retcons. Everyone hates those. They've (basically) never been good. Don't remember this part it will never come up aga

But, you know, despite this - or maybe because of this - comics is a breeding ground for ideas. Because of the quick turnaround and the demand for novel conflicts, comics just churn out idea after idea. Good ideas, bad ideas, doesn't matter. Get it to print. Retcon it later if we write ourselves into a corner. Comics are often soooooo first draft coded. This is why I personally prefer adaptations - they often reimagine ideas and retcon them into new narratives where they can serve a more coherent plot. But what happens when a character is picked up for a second draft ... without actually contradicting the earlier material? While enriching the earlier material, even?

(SPOILERS for Tim Drake: Robin and uh... 20 year old comics under the cut!)

So, uh, quick disclaimer - because I have very little overall knowledge of DC's Comics continuity, there may be more interesting examples of times that what I'm going to point out was done. But I love Bernard and from a writer's POV I'm impressed with the way they did it so we're talking about Bernard lmao

The Beginning (Robin 1993) - Reading comics from the 2000s hurts in a way I can't describe

Okay so I heard Tim Drake is dating a guy now? (Penny Sonic voice) Whoa he's bisexual I didn't know that! I'm sure people on the internet are being very normal about this. Cool let's find out more about his new bf. I like starting from the beginning... so like yeah hold on while I crack open the Robin comic and take down what this guy's deal is.

😬

So basically the TL;DR of Bernard in his original appearances is that he seems to be an attempt to introduce some normal stakes teen drama into Tim's life. He has all the Funny Guy Friend Classics - he's got an inflated sense of his proficiency at pulling girls, he's inexplicably drawn towards the protagonist (who is cooler than him), he wants to date the most popular girl in school, and he wants to get down with older women!

This might just be me but while I was going through this I thought like, he almost reads a little uncanny, like he's been filtered through a Disney Teen Special. In practice he mostly serves to introduce Tim to the Real Plot, Darla Aquista, and be one of his ties to civilian life, which is, like, fine. He's ultimately just a background character and he's so unimportant that he only has one appearance after their school gets shot up(!!!), which is, again, to be more of an accessory to the Darla plot.

After this display of "wow this guy's kind of lowkey insane for offering to his resurrected bestie supervillainess to be her manager actually", he's dropped forever. Comics! We're not gonna unpack that.

The Sequel (Batman: Urban Legends) - We're Gonna Unpack That

Until almost two decades later when he calls Tim up for a date. And while I'm trying to skim over a lot to get to the point here and I don't really know the FULL context, it is notable that Tim is in the middle of an identity crisis / the cusp of adulthood when this happens (I think he just lost a spleen or something. That sucks dude). It's pretty implicit that part of the reason he's going to see Bernard is because he's someone familiar in a time when he's facing a lot of new and scary stuff.

And at first blush, he really does seem like the same dude. The familiar arm over the shoulder, the banter, it's all very casual and similar to the ribbing from high school -

- and I guess nothing has happened to Bernard in the interim haha he's just the funny friend guy right?

I really like the way they did this. I'm just unambiguously going to praise how good this is if you just came off the 2000s stuff. Comics have kind of breakneck pacing by nature but they really manage to condense down and then pull off a neat sleight of hand over the course of like four pages here. They re-establish Bernard as a silly guy and then wham you with the fact that yeah actually we ARE gonna unpack that. Fuck you Tim Drake life is ever changing and nothing stays the same

So the TL;DR on the rest of the Urban Legends storyline is that stuff like, HAPPENED to this guy while our focus was elsewhere. He learned martial arts, presumably so that he wouldn't be so helpless in the next school shooting level event, he got into a pain cult, he's just Not Doing Well. We find out, reading between the lines, that calling Tim on a date was probably one of his last attempts to reach out to someone when the cult stuff was getting really bad.

I've heard people complain that Bernard is uninteresting or not a character or entirely focused on his relationship with Tim, and I think that criticism is really weird considering that his entire re-debut focuses on the point that he's been having his own life and making his own (often wild) decisions - ones that really changed the course of his life - while Tim was gone. And it's also notable that this story is about how the fact that he's his own person and has changed and has made the nerve-wracking decision to take action and call Tim inspires Tim himself to take a leap and fling himself into the uncertain waters of young adulthood.

Me when I have my bi awakening and call to get out of a rut simultaneously because Cute Insane Guy Inspired Me. iconic

So that's how Bernard has changed. But that's not recontextualization, that's just the writers taking a guy and making him do another, cooler thing. Well hold the fuck on because we're not goddamn done.

What did he mean by th-

The Recontextualizerrrrr (Tim Drake: Robin) - Bernard is the funniest person in Gotham City. I'll not be taking constructive criticism on this

Tim Drake: Robin is the followup to the Urban Legends story and Tim is the main character fr. Obviously. but Bernard is also a major character. Later, he even gets to be a POV character. But they don't do that for several issues, instead treating us to his shenanigans from Tim's point of view as he solves a bizarre serial murder case and like, they're cute! And neither of them are normal in the slightest. I love that for them.

Again, TL;DR, there are a lot of interactions where Bernard talks to Tim both in and out of costume, but we don't get to see his POV until they go out to a restaurant and meet Bernard's parents there by accident and Tim has to run off to do Robin stuff. And like... a lot of stuff happens in this one bois. Whammy after whammy

We're suddenly introduced explicitly to a lot that was only implied or just completely unavailable before. Bernard's parents are ragingly homophobic. Probably were never great even before that. He suffers from depression. All that is a lot to. wait. hold on a second

he knows?????

HE KNOWS????

Okay so if you stop at this point and reread the entire run so far you find out that Bernard is in fact the biggest troll in the entire universe. This is the moment that cemented him as my favourite, by the way. Like I had a feeling that he knew and I was just laughing my ass off when my suspicions were confirmed.

But this is really interesting on top of that because Bernard has been revealed to be, at this point, a guy who you should look deeper than the surface to understand. Someone who masks his true self and whose true motivations you can only uncover if you're really looking past the facade. Even with Tim, he sort of offers Tim and Robin half the story each, taking advantage of Robin's "distance" to give out information he wants Tim to think about but that he's reluctant to talk about frankly while at the same time almost daring Tim to open up about his identity.

Absolutely most normal way to tell your bf about your cult trauma. You'll always be famous to me Bernard Dowd

This is a really neat trick by the writers. It makes Bernard a multifaceted character who got to quietly develop while we were mostly focused on Tim, and there's some clever clever foreshadowing they set up in this run to achieve this. If it were just this, I would call it good writing.

But it actually goes one level deeper than that and becomes something really really special. because as we all know, Bernard was not conceived to be this way, he was a one-off guy who was kind of annoying and he was essentially retconned to be, like. Gay? Have depth? Be funny? All of those things?

The Seamless Retcon (Robin 1993 Again) - We took your guy and we gave him gay subtext and it worked astoundingly well

This is not a new observation btw, I've seen a ton of posts to this effect. But oh my god. Some of these panels really hit different with the new Bernard lore. Like holy fuck just read this back to back

There are tons of moments like this. There's SO MUCH that the revelation that Bernard is queer adds to his initially extremely underwhelming tenure in the Robin comics. A reread almost begs the question of what Bernard must have been thinking at any given moment! BRO YOU SAID YOU WANTED TO FUCK HIS STEPMOM. That's completely believable as a next-level closeting move and goes from kind of annoying to turbofunny.

Like yeah of course he's acting like a douche. His father is a status-chasing asshole and he's five racks deep in the closet. Of course he gravitates towards Tim - his gaydar is pinging and he thinks Tim is cute. And it's also pinging that Tim is like. You know

None of this would hit as hard if the writers had not set up Bernard as someone who masks so much. They worked it in that character trait to mean that you could always glean information deeper than the surface from his top level interactions.

Because of this, Bernard is really fucking interesting and he's a good character and he's one that gets better on reread. Like I said, that's a set of observations that are not new to me. But something that really gets to me is how seamless and intentional it is. It really feels like the writer sat down and took their time devising a guy that is believable as that other guy, but only if you read back with certain context.

The conclusion - Comics. Man.

So is this just about how Bernard is really fucking interesting and he's a good character and he's one that gets better on reread and that he can exist independent of Tim and all the haters are wrong. Yeah of course. 💖

But also like, I have thoroughly proven to myself that I was kinda wrong to just reject the published comics medium out of hand. I see now that there's room for the writer's roulette to hit the jackpot and that something I mistook as an outright flaw, the winding and unfocused and often improvised nature of it, can be ridden like a wave if you're skilled enough to do it. Meghan Fitzmarten is a goddamned genius.

I guess I have to read comics now. Fuck

edit for confusion!: he’s not taller than Alfred he’s standing on a rock

ironically Jason Todd also happens to be the Robin who looks the most like Bruce

It’s kind of a constant topic of discussion that the Robins look similar, but what I think is really interesting is the effort the artists put into there designs so that they look similar alone, but totally distinguishable when they’re next to each other. (this doesn’t include steph obviously or damian because he was made to look like Bruce and talia)

Dick, for instance, clearly has the straightest hair as well as lighter eyes than Jason, but darker eyes than Tim (that sounds a bit fickle but trust, you’ll understand when you see the two of them). His nose is also very clearly straighter and narrower than the other two.

Jason, on the other hand easily has the curliest hair out of the three and his eyes are the darkest blue. His nose is also the widest of the three.

Finally Tim who has the waviest (i’m not totally sure how to describe his hair) out of the three. His eyes are also very clearly the lightest and he has a much smaller button nose (this is probably due to his age but it’s still a nice distinction)

I think it’s super interesting how they chose to do this because it allows each Robin to feel like a separate character, but the second they put on the costume they all become the same Robin everyone knows and loves. Idk i just think it’s neat

It’s kind of a constant topic of discussion that the Robins look similar, but what I think is really interesting is the effort the artists put into there designs so that they look similar alone, but totally distinguishable when they’re next to each other. (this doesn’t include steph obviously or damian because he was made to look like Bruce and talia)

Dick, for instance, clearly has the straightest hair as well as lighter eyes than Jason, but darker eyes than Tim (that sounds a bit fickle but trust, you’ll understand when you see the two of them). His nose is also very clearly straighter and narrower than the other two.

Jason, on the other hand easily has the curliest hair out of the three and his eyes are the darkest blue. His nose is also the widest of the three.

Finally Tim who has the waviest (i’m not totally sure how to describe his hair) out of the three. His eyes are also very clearly the lightest and he has a much smaller button nose (this is probably due to his age but it’s still a nice distinction)

I think it’s super interesting how they chose to do this because it allows each Robin to feel like a separate character, but the second they put on the costume they all become the same Robin everyone knows and loves. Idk i just think it’s neat

man i wish that robin having a hood started sooner, because like it’s so cute??? they can be trying to make damian crazy terrifying and i’ll just be like: ‘you’re so scary! yes you are! with your little hood and cape!’ idk dude im already so bad about dicks robin when he was small, but i could be soooooo much worse