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A review by oddmara
Robin: Year One by Chuck Dixon
3.0
I enjoyed the new duo of Alfred and Robin, it was a very sweet read to see the balance between his life at school and life at home, and I enjoyed seeing more of Alfred and his inner thoughts. I really like the binary storytelling that Batman comics have, always interchanging between two characters, one on the field and one related to it, and I thought the balance Alfred/Robin was just as good as the Gordon/Batman balance.
Their fight was heartwrenching, Robin's goodbye letter was angst in its purest form, but honestly, I wish we would have seen Batman's reaction a bit more to it. I know this is Robin's story, however, if we had an issue about Batman's time without Robin in it (or even half of one), where we don't see ANYTHING of Robin's life, the tension that would have come out of that would have been so much better than the parallel storytelling between the two of them, which didn't do much besides creating a vague sense of sadness.
I also found it weird how helpless Batman was portrayed in this story. Without mistake, every single mission he went in with Robin, he was downed and Robin had to save him. And while that would have made sense if, let's say, Batman's mistakes were based on him getting distracted out of concern for Robin, all of his mistakes were because of himself. Which is weird considering that even in Year One he got downed less, and he had no fucking clue what he was doing (wasn't even wearing a bulletproof vest) while here everything happens AFTER The Long Halloween and Dark Victory.
I also liked the Dent exploration as an actual villain (and Bruce referring to him as Harvey while Dick referred to him as Two Face did hit me in the gut), I loved his hissy fit over Robin not wanting to play his game (because he learned his lesson and also has trauma tm now), however he felt a lot less daunting and scary than in all of the previous stories. He fully felt more in line with the joker this time, which is a bit upsetting to me since the reason he is such an amazing villain is because he doesn't fall within the spiralling villain tropes and is a lot more cold and calculated, so in terms of Dent's character, this was a huge downgrade.
Their fight was heartwrenching, Robin's goodbye letter was angst in its purest form, but honestly, I wish we would have seen Batman's reaction a bit more to it. I know this is Robin's story, however, if we had an issue about Batman's time without Robin in it (or even half of one), where we don't see ANYTHING of Robin's life, the tension that would have come out of that would have been so much better than the parallel storytelling between the two of them, which didn't do much besides creating a vague sense of sadness.
I also found it weird how helpless Batman was portrayed in this story. Without mistake, every single mission he went in with Robin, he was downed and Robin had to save him. And while that would have made sense if, let's say, Batman's mistakes were based on him getting distracted out of concern for Robin, all of his mistakes were because of himself. Which is weird considering that even in Year One he got downed less, and he had no fucking clue what he was doing (wasn't even wearing a bulletproof vest) while here everything happens AFTER The Long Halloween and Dark Victory.
I also liked the Dent exploration as an actual villain (and Bruce referring to him as Harvey while Dick referred to him as Two Face did hit me in the gut), I loved his hissy fit over Robin not wanting to play his game (because he learned his lesson and also has trauma tm now), however he felt a lot less daunting and scary than in all of the previous stories. He fully felt more in line with the joker this time, which is a bit upsetting to me since the reason he is such an amazing villain is because he doesn't fall within the spiralling villain tropes and is a lot more cold and calculated, so in terms of Dent's character, this was a huge downgrade.