20 Years Ago, A Controversial Character Debut Changed Batman Forever
Bruce Wayne's biological son became one of his greatest allies... eventually.
As much as pop culture loves to depict Batman as an edgy, hard-boiled lone wolf who lives in perpetual isolation, Batman and Robin have been an inseparable pairing pretty much since the Dark Knight debuted. The original Robin, orphaned circus performer Dick Grayson, made his first appearance in 1940’s Detective Comics #38, only 11 issues after Batman was introduced. Robin’s presence has ebbed and flowed over the years, but more often than not, the Boy Wonder is never far from Gotham City.
Since the origin of the title, however, there have been several different Boy Wonders in mainstream DC canon. There’s Dick Grayson, perhaps the most well-known (and the one featured in Batman: The Animated Series and Teen Titans), who was briefly succeeded by Jason Todd (only to be murdered by the Joker and resurrected as the gun-toting edgelord Red Hood), followed by Tim Drake (the boy genius who Sherlock’d the Batman’s secret identity on his own), all three of whom debuted before the year 2000.
It was actually just 20 years ago, in September 2006, that Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert (re)introduced a Robin for the 21st century: arrogant, brutal, and seemingly untameable. Two decades after his first appearance in canon, Damian Wayne has outlived the initial vitriol he inspired to become a remarkably complex and worthy inheritor of the Robin mantle... and he’ll be making his live-action debut sooner than you might think.
He might be the newest, but it's been long enough that we can accept that Damian might also be the best.
The behind-the-scenes history of Damian Wayne is just as convoluted as his comic book origin. In 1987, DC Comics published a then-non-canon graphic novel called Batman: Son of the Demon, written by Mike Barr and drawn by Jerry Bingham. It’s a detective noir mystery that sees Batman forced to team up with his long-lived eco-terrorist archnemesis Ra’s al Ghul, but it’s mostly known for sowing the seeds that would become Damian. In the book, Batman consummates his on-again/off-again relationship with Ra’s daughter Talia, and the two of them conceive a child, but after the discovery causes Batman to become reckless in his single-minded focus on his new family, Talia lies about having a miscarriage and hides the child away from the world to refocus Bruce on his never-ending crusade.
While considered its own separate canon, Son of the Demon became a fixation for comic book writers. Mark Waid and Alex Ross introduced a different version of that baby as an adult named Ibn al Xu’ffasch in the Kingdom Come alternate universe storyline, but it wasn’t until Batman #655, in September 2006, that the character was properly folded into the mainstream timeline.
Just imagine the tension at the al Ghul family reunions.
Damian doesn’t technically appear until the final few pages of the issue, which is mostly dedicated to laying the foundation for Morrison’s sprawling seven-year-long deconstruction and reaffirmation of Batman. It opens with a Batman impostor shooting The Joker point-blank in the face during one of his schemes, opening the story with a literal bang and the first inklings of a question that would run throughout the entire saga: can anyone other than Bruce Wayne be Batman, and if not, what does that say about him? The issue ends with Bruce being coaxed out of the cape and cowl to unenthusiastically attend a charity gala in London, where he’s surveilled by Talia al Ghul (the freshly anointed head of the League of Assassins) and his curious ten-year-old son.
Bruce and Damian don’t officially meet until one issue (and one brawl with mutant ninjas) later, and it’s a tumultuous first encounter. Unlike Son of the Demon, Morrison portrays Damian’s conception as the nonconsensual result of Bruce being drugged (an ugly detail that forever changed Talia’s character, and that later writers have disputed), while Talia’s decision to put him up for adoption was retconned into her raising him as a ruthless disciple of the League of Assassins’ teachings. In an even more extreme way than Jason Todd, Bruce Wayne’s biological son was ironically everything a Robin was never supposed to be: brash, self-important, and a cold-blooded killer.
Like father, like son?
Talia seemingly dumps the boy on Bruce in the hopes that he’ll eventually defeat and replace his father, and the results are as disastrous as you’d expect. Batman #657 depicts Damian’s first night in the Batcave, and within hours he beats up Tim Drake out of jealousy, steals a spare Robin costume, and decapitates a minor villain named The Spook before his father even knows he’s out of the house. It’s only by happenstance and desperation that Bruce officially takes him on a mission as Robin, and even then it’s a long road before Damian replaced Tim Drake as the active-duty Boy Wonder.
In his first few appearances, Damian’s cruel nature seems like a bleak window into his future —the appropriately numbered Batman #666 even offers a glimpse of a possible future in which Damian lords over a nightmarish version of Gotham City as Batman, where it’s implied he sold his soul to Satan himself in exchange for an extended life to continue his father’s crusade. But Bruce’s teachings start to break through the indoctrination he was raised with; not only do they become equal partners as Batman and Robin, but they grow together as father and son. And in 2008, when Bruce Wayne seemingly met his demise in Grant Morrison’s multiversal crossover Final Crisis (he was actually flung hundreds of years into the past) and Gotham City was left in disarray without its protector, Damian helped prove that Batman and Robin were eternal symbols when he officially inherited the title as the sidekick to Dick Grayson’s Batman, a delightful good cop/bad cop reversal that unfortunately only lasted for two years.
The first time in history that criminals would rather run into Batman than Robin.
While Damian was initially perceived as an insufferable brat, and his co-creator Grant Morrison admitted he was supposed to die in his debut story, Damian has outlived the circumstances of his creation and grown to be a character fans love, serving as Robin through some crucial Batfamily events and exhibiting remarkable character growth in the two decades he’s been around (including forming his own Teen Titans, proving himself in a fight against all the former Robins, and even briefly dying before being resurrected).
Damian’s self-important streak and grim attitude have never gone away, but consider his father, and then consider the fact that he’s starred in several DC animated films and is finally set to debut in live-action with the upcoming film Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the debut of Batman in James Gunn’s DCU and a film that’s confirmed to take inspiration from Grant Morrison’s Batman epic. There hasn’t been a Robin in a live-action Batman film in almost 30 years now, but if any of them can prove to general audiences that the idea of the Boy Wonder can be both fun and plausible in a heightened reality of superheroes, it’s the bratty ten-year-old assassin.
