Tim Drake: Robin #1 Review

Tim Drake: Boat Guy

Written By: Meghan Fitzmartin

Art By: Riley Rossmo, Lee Loughridge, Tom Napolitano

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: September 27, 2022

Tim Drake: Robin #1 has arrived!  It's finally time to get a new Robin series where the greatest of the Boy Wonders is featured front and center once again because everyone has their favorite Robin and reasons behind it...... it really doesn't matter because no one will ever compare to the great Tim Drake.  So yeah, you can say I'm a fan, but the only problem is...... Well, problems..... we have a weird-ass creative team bringing this book to life.  Let's jump into this Robin series and see if Meghan Fitzmartin can do something with our Boy Wonder that feels like it's the actual character or if she just makes significant changes out of nowhere without having any context behind it, or if she forgets huge pieces of continuity to fit the story being told..... not to mention, let's see if we can figure out this Riley Rossmo art.  Let's jump into this issue and hope for the best.

Tim Drake: Robin #1, even though there are decades of continuity behind this character, to understand this book and what it wants to do, you really just have to read everything that Meghan Fitzmartin has done with the character, including the fact that the setting of this book, the Gotham Marina is based on Tim moving because of something that happened to him at the end of Dark Crisis: Young Justice, which isn't done yet, but the real problem is...... a point is made about moving and starting over when we never had any context of where Tim was before this, so it feels kind of pointless.  Like the idea of Tim finally being happy with his boyfriend Bernard, we never knew what made him sad with Stephanie since the relationship breakup was handled off panel and never dealt with.  So it's weird jumps in logic and storytelling just to fit the narrative of what's going on, and I hope that we get more in-depth ideas in this series because, really, it's just jumping around with concepts that Meghan Fitzmartin has brought up from DC Pride, Batman Urban Legends and even characters from Future State. 

For our first issue, though, we're going to see the state of Bernard and Tim's relationship, see that Darcy Thomas from Future State, who was supposedly a part of We Are Robin that we never saw, is going to be a supporting character and get started in a new murder mystery that is a continuation of the DC Pride story, where disks bring construct animals to live, to play out scenarios from detective stories.  It's all rather odd and it doesn't help that Riley Rossmo's style just adds zaniness to a book that I desperately want people to take seriously because I'm such a fan of this character and want his series to do well.

I'm not a fan of Riley Rossmo's style of art, and because of that, I'm not a fan of the way this book looks...... like at all.  You could probably convince somebody that this book was about Pinocchio and that one day Tim Drake was going to become a real boy by the way that he looks, but art isn't the only problem with the book.  The writing just doesn't feel like Tim Drake..... or it does, and it just feels like Meghan Fitzmartin's Tim Drake, and he's just not the character that I fell in love with all those decades ago.  While characters change and do different things over time, this interpretation of the character just lends itself to people's judgments that Tim Drake is the boring Robin.  If this was the only version of the character that I've read, I'd have to agree.  It's just a weird first issue overall that wants you to know that it takes place after and because of Dark Crisis: Young Justice, but because that book isn't over yet, we have no real context for aspects of this story, and ultimately I was left underwhelmed throughout the whole story, and because of that feeling, I was also left feeling really disappointed because of how much I love this character and want to see him thrive.  Hopefully, things pick up in the next issue.

Bits and Pieces:

Tim Drake: Robin #1 will probably get all the Tim Drake stans out there flocking to this book, me being one of them, I don't know if this is the book to properly get our Boy Wonder back in the hearts and minds of DC fans.  It feels so off in both writing and art.  Of course, things can constantly improve from here, but this first issue felt more like an Elseworld of the Fitzmartin-verse than the continuation of a Robin who's been kicking ass and taking names for over three decades. 

4/10