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whats bothered me is how she looks. everyone keeps yapping on and on about how she looks like a cross between the original and batman beyond.

granted its been a while since i looked at the book, but to me the first thing that slapped me across the face was how much she looks like a cross between batman and batgirl in Thrillkiller.

maybe she will be as gunhappy as that too. it would be an interesting way for shiny new batman to interact with his cranky old persona given shape (and a tad exaggerated). a running commentary of sorts on the Bat-Philosophy of Criminal Apprehension, and its alternatives.

i should have phrased that to not sound like i dont like how she looks. rather, its baffled me how nobody has said anything about the similarites ive pointed out.

or im just crazy.

I think there was a comment following that one that explained that he meant it wasn’t being done “Planet DC” style. I’m not really sure there’s that big a difference between introducing them all at once via a big event and introducing them via newshype as the result of a big event though.

My issue (which I’ve mentioned elsewhere) was that it seemed like somewhat premature backpatting (not that most hype isn’t) considering both Batwoman and The Great Ten are still going to be occassional background/guest star characters. It’s great that both companies are trying to diversify their hero rosters but I’m not sure how effective that is when they don’t diversify the actual [i]titles[/i] any.

Winick’s point makes reasonable sense - he wants to reach a stage where you can introduce a gay character without it being seen as something unusual, noteworthy or gimmicky. And that’s fine.

But it’s obviously absurd to make that claim while giving a promotional interview advertising the new Batwoman solely on the grounds that “she’s a lesbian and doesn’t that just show what great, tolerant guys we are.”

That comment sounded kind of weird to me in the article, too.

My hope is that the traditional Batman-Batwoman dynamic will be reversed, with Batman getting obsessed with marrying Batwoman and going to increasingly complex lengths to trick her into marrying him, while she continues to blow him off to focus on the mission.

Fighting crime in high heels? Whatever happened to “Women in comfortable shoes”

My problem with DC’s self-congratulatory press releases is that they are trying to sell it as something empowering to lesbians, but look at the language of the release. “Buxom lipstick lesbian?” They make sure to let the straight guys know that she’s going to be a hot and sexy lesbian. This announcement, coupled with the recent bra-and-panties hot lesbian cuddle scene in the recent 52 issue, makes it obvious that this is simple sexual titillation using the promise of hot girl-on-girl action. Yet they are using the media’s political correctness and diversity obsessions to pretend this is something else. This is about as empowering and respectful as a lesbian segment on the Howard Stern show.

Unless there’s another article I’ve missed, “buxom lipstick lesbian” was the Times’ description of Batgirl from the article, not necessarily DC’s description of the character.

The whole thing certainly seems pretty self-congratualtory. And about 35 years too late.

I don’t like how they’re tying it to Renee Montoya, what next? Holly from Catwoman?

Winick’s point makes reasonable sense - he wants to reach a stage where you can introduce a gay character without it being seen as something unusual, noteworthy or gimmicky. And that’s fine.

But it’s obviously absurd to make that claim while giving a promotional interview advertising the new Batwoman solely on the grounds that “she’s a lesbian and doesn’t that just show what great, tolerant guys we are.”

Fair point, Paul. I shouldn’t have said “not made sense,” but rather, “I disagree.” I don’t think it makes much of a difference whether you roll a character out with a flourish or casually introduce them, so long as the character is a good one.

But yeah, the main thing was “How can you seriously make that statement when it is intended for a New York Times article about the introduction of a gay character?”

Totally unrelated to the gay thing, I just wanted to comment that I actually like the new costume quite a bit.

It keeps just enough of the 1950’s elements with the mask and cape and enough of the new to make for a really nice looking outfit.

Here’s hoping that she turns out to be an interesting and well rounded character and not some kind of “buxom” cliche.

- rick

quite frankly, i’m sick of her, already, and i didn’t even know she existed until i read about her here. kill batwoman. and, while you’re at it, kill batgirl ( all of them ), and huntress, and az-bat thingie, spoiler, anyone who has anything to do with the birds of prey. batman and robin the boy wonder. what was wrong with batman and robin the boy wonder. that worked, just peachy. how many “agents of the sodding bat” do we really need? come to think of it, how many batman-related comics do there have to be? we don’t need fifteen-to-twenty crap bat-titles a month. we just need one really good one. enough really is enough. batwoman was always a rubbish character, and batwoman will always be a rubbish chatacter. and i don’t care how good she’s going to look drawn by adam hughes.

“batman and robin the boy wonder. what was wrong with batman and robin the boy wonder.”

Why keep Robin? He’s always been the most wildly incongruous element of the Batman mythos. You have the dark avenger of the night who dresses up like a demon to strike terror into the hearts of men, paired up with… a kid in bright red and yellow who prances around and cracks jokes? Huntress, Batgirl, Oracle and pretty much everyone else you mentioned works much better with Batman’s motif and modus operandi than Robin does - and most of them, at least, are actually adults. Anyone who would willingly recruit and endanger children to help out in his personal vigilante missions - especially after two of these children have already died - would have to be either immoral or insane. If we were to start cutting dead wood from the Bat-family, Robin would be the first one to go.

i disagree, moose ( n squirrel ). it’s true, the idea of a robin is indeed a little crackers, but, then, let’s face it, the idea of a bloke dressing up as a bat and jumping off rooftops is pretty out there, too. i get what you’re saying about the others working within the batman’s modus operandi, but i just feel that the whole bat-mythos is tying itself up, un-neccessarily, in knots. the comic book industry these days seems obssessed with constantly re-hashing what has gone before. granted, marvel’s a bit more guilty of this than dc ( exactly how many x-titles are there? talk about cocking up a perfectly good idea ), but i’m just getting fed up with the bat-offshoots. how long before they bring in “modern” takes on ace the bat-hound? on bat-mite? on bat-baby? i miss batman and robin the boy wonder. and, no, the frank miller - jim lee thing doesn’t count. i think that by messing with a good thing too much they may just be losing sight of what it was that made it a good thing in the first place. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Robin serves a purpose…

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“it’s true, the idea of a robin is indeed a little crackers, but, then, let’s face it, the idea of a bloke dressing up as a bat and jumping off rooftops is pretty out there, too.”

Sure, but the point is consistency. Of course any superhero is going to be based to some degree on an absurd premise, but any story no matter how unrealistic its premise has to stay true to that premise if it wants its readers to suspend their disbelief. So while no billionaire would actually spend his nights running around on rooftops dressed as a bat, the rules of the Batman mythos establish from the outset that Bruce Wayne does this to scare criminals. If he’s running around with a cheery, brightly-colored mascot, though, it takes me out of the story, because Robin’s presence is breaking the rules. They’re two different flavors of absurd, and they don’t go well together.

To put this another way: Batman and Robin belong to different genres. Batman is a Shadow-esque dark detective whose key appeal is his almost anti-heroesque sense of menace; Robin is a youthful, light-hearted swashbuckling adventurer in the tradition of Robin Hood. Either of these characters could be pretty decent on their own, but together it’s an outrageous clash, mixing about as well as a serious team-up between Sherlock Holmes and Godzilla. Now, you could do a good, entertaining comic where Sherlock Holmes teams up with Godzilla, but only so long as that comic stayed true to the rules of a different genre altogether: comedy. Batman isn’t supposed to be a comedy, as far as I can tell; I’m meant to actually take his partnership with Robin seriously. On that level it’s certainly a failure.

what about the gardner fox - carmine infantino batman and robin? those stories are among some of the finest comic books i’ve ever read.

maybe it’s a generational thing.

But that’s the thing about Robin, he was introduced [I]because[/I] Batman was basically just another generic pulp hero with a slightly better gimick at the time. Robin gave Batman someone to converse with on a regular basis (Alfred not being around til later), and changed the mood of the series to allow for more absurd elements such as good majority of their villan roster. Robin is what distinguished Batman from the likes of The Shadow, The Crimson Avenger, and The Spider and argueably the reason the character stuck around when a whole slew of more pulp-ish heroes fell by the wayside. He’s also what helps to keep Batman from becoming another Punisher or Wolverine type (the latter of whom is known for having rather odd sidekick choices himself though).

Well that and I just like Robin more as a character than Batman on his own.

there you go.

“He’s also what helps to keep Batman from becoming another Punisher or Wolverine type”

Oh, that’s perfectly silly. There have been hundreds of solo Batman stories written over the years, none of which ever portrayed Batman as a Punisher-style psycho (at least until the post-Jason Todd stories, in which Batman was deliberately written as a nut to justify the introduction of Tim Drake). Denny O’Neil famously wrote Robin out of his run back in the seventies specifically so that Batman could get back to his roots as a dark vigilante, and Robin was absent for the rest of the decade without any danger of Bruce Wayne going into a berzerker rage. Other writers since the Jason Todd and Tim Drake eras have been eager to marginalize Robin, and in general they’ve made for stronger, more atmospheric storytelling (see the Moench/Jones run). This is why writers like Matt Wagner keep wanting to handle Batman in his early, Robinless years - because the character is more appealing when he’s reduced to the basic elements that work.

Were there fun, goofy Batman and Robin comics back in the Silver Age? Sure. But again, that stuff plays best as comedy, and today it’s appreciated as such. As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t object to a retro-style Batbook featuring Batman and Robin and the Batladies fighting pink aliens in a day-glo Gotham City, but in a comic where the character’s supposed to be dark and menacing, his brightly-colored prancing teen sidekick doesn’t really cut it.

Just a little comment on lesbianism in comics.

Yeah. You’re going to get “hot girl-on-girl” action if you display lesbianism in superhero comics because superhero comic girls are hot whether it’s a kiss or a love scene. You can show the same things with a heterosexual couple and no one cares, but if you show two women, people perceive that to be exploitation.

I didn’t think the scene in 52 was gratuitously sexual. I think it could have just as easily been… Nightwing or Kyle Rayner in bed with a girl if the plot demanded it. As long as the character is treated with respect, it shouldn’t be an impediment to credibility that they have a sexy scene. Now, if every other week in 52 Renee Montoya was in her undies with a girl, that might be a red flag.

Ghost is a good example. Sexy lesbian leading character who is very buxom. It borders on sexploitation, but it has some strong statements about the objectification and abuse of women in society. Meaningful and true characters and situations can be sexy without losing credibility… in my estimation, at least.

Now, the real challenge will be if DC can establish first rate gay male characters in superhero comics, have them date, kiss, and lay in bed together without having their 90% male heterosexual audience getting freaked out and worried that they’ll become gay if they read it too much.

In short, I think DC is using “lesbian chic” as a safety net, but not as a form of exploitation. But in the end, the stories will prove to be the deciding factor.

“Oh, that’s perfectly silly.”

Well… yeah, it’s just not an internet discussion without hyberbole (I’m kidding around here). But what I meant was “grim loner with little to no long standing support chracters to play off of outside their occassion guest star and team up pals” rather than “psychopathic killer”.

Robin serves the role of being Batman and Bruce’s peer. For a long while he was the only character that was active in both parts of Batman’s life that acted anywhere near an equal. Gordon is largely Batman’s friend, Luscius is Bruce’s friend, Alfred’s the confidant but serves more of a parental role than that of a peer. Not that the concept can’t work without Robin, but what’s often most interesting (yet not very helpfull combating the “Batman is gay” jokes) about the times where Robin is skirted to the sidelines is that his place in Batman’s world is often filled by a well written romantic interest; Talia, Silver St. Cloud, Vesper Fairchild, etc. Since Bats doesn’t have a Lois Lane his mythos often tends to be lacking in the long term but he hasn’t suffored for it due to having the sidekick. I can remember alot of those issues between Jason Todd’s death and Tim Drake actually putting on the costume that would be most distinctly his as being on the dull side, imho. Batman #455-457, and #465-466 felt like huge upswings in direction when I was reading the bulk of issues I had bought. Though that could be character preferences on my part too.

I dunno, I think there’s a pretty big space on the “suspension of disbelief” meter between teen sidekick and purple aliens from venus and Robin doesn’t strike me as being too big a leap given the rest of Batman’s world. I certainly don’t think he’s anymore of a throwback than pulp noir is. Which was and to a large extent still is a genre tied to the forties, yet enough modern creators are fans of it to occassionaly work well in it (usually via short stories and minis) without feeling it’s age. Certainly the dynamic duo concept could benifit from similar modern genre style tinkering.

And sorry about the huge thread drift with this too.

“Robin serves the role of being Batman and Bruce’s peer.”

Robin is hardly Bruce’s peer. From the outset theirs has been a mentor/trainee relationship with very strong parental overtones. Batman is who Robin aspires to be; Robin is a kid Batman’s trying to teach to become like him. Where’s the parity here? Robin isn’t supposed to be on a level with Batman, remember: he was invented as a character for kids to sympathize with in response to the popularity of Captain Marvel.

I have no problem with Batman being a “grim loner”; that’s what he’s supposed to be. Without Robin, Batman still has a rich supporting cast (Alfred, Gordon, Leslie Thompkins, Bullock, Montoya, etc.) and the best rogue’s gallery of any published superhero. None of these characters are going to exactly be his “peers,” but surely that’s the point: Batman’s loneliness is essential to his character; it represents how he’s sacrificed the normal, happy life he could’ve had for the greater good of everyone in his city. This is reflected pretty clearly in the fact that over the last decade and a half, as Batman built up a support network of fellow vigilantes, he became increasingly unlikable - because writers had to have him constantly pushing away all of his friends to preserve the loneliness essential to the character.

The most popular version of Batman out there right now is probably the Timm/Dini animated version, which was notably sparse in its use of Robin; most of the best episodes of that show let Batman run around solo without becoming the one-dimensional Punisher-figure you seem to think he’d turn into without a kid in brightly-colored shorts following him around. All the best Batman movies have dispensed with Robin, with the exception of the one that was supposed to be funny. This is no coincidence; Robin muddies the ton of Batman in rather obvious ways. If you want a sunny, campy Adam West/Silver Age-style Batman, then yes, it’s appropriate to include Robin precisely because the pairing of Batman and Robin is ridiculous. But if you want readers to take the character seriously, Robin doesn’t fit.

Robin seemed to work pretty well most of the time over the last 60 years. Like it or not, he’s part of the mix.

Sure, Batman works as a “grim loner.” Trouble is, “grim loner” has been a somewhat overpopulated stretch of comics real estate since, well, since around the time Wolverine showed up. “Batman the Grim Loner” is about as generic a comic as you’re likely to find.

I think a good writer can make Robin work. The first big mistake that was made with Robin was aging him. He needs to be young enough to be reckless and impulsive and also to trigger Batman’s paternal impulse. The only way to keep this kid from getting himself killed is to keep an eye on him, and the only way to do that is to take him on as an apprentice.

I think Robin was pretty much a peer, not a surrogate son. Marv Wolfman and others rewrote the relationship so that Dick Grayson was full of daddy issues, but if you look at the actual old comics, Robin is given a significant amount of responsibility and respect. He’s a junior partner, or maybe even a younger brother but he isn’t a son. I think the father-son retcon really ruined both characters to a degree. When Robin is done as a respected partner it’s cool, when he’s done as a surrogate son clamoring for approval from his aloof dad, I’d rather not see him at all.

robin is an essential part of the batman mythos, as essential to the popularity and longevity and uniqueness - is that a real word? - of the character as, say, alfred or gordon or the joker. batgirl, az-bat, the huntress, spoiler, et al, are bolt-ons. in just the same way as batman has been handled atrociously in the past ( frank miller, anyone? arkham asylum? the cult? ), then so too has robin had his fair share of bad interpretations. but when batman and robin works, it is the stuff of the very finest comic books, bar none. giving batman a partner - that’s partner, not sidekick - was probably the best thing jerry robinson did for the caped crusader ( ‘cept for the joker, of course ). having a whole army of bat-wannabees running around after him kills the magic, somewhat.

having said that, i’d like to apologise for killing off the original thread. it wasn’t my intention. i’m new to the whole forum thing, and, to be honest, i wasn’t aware that there were so many people out there who cared so passionately about a character who, for the better part of twenty-something odd years, i’ve had to keep pretty much to myself. sad to say, but forty-something comic book readers tend to attract some rather disapproving stares down my local.

thanks. joe.

“robin is an essential part of the batman mythos, as essential to the popularity and longevity and uniqueness… of the character as, say, alfred or gordon or the joker.”

If that’s so, then why have the most successful Batman projects of the last decade and a half all ditched Robin? He was barely in “Batman: The Animated Series.” He was AWOL from the Burton movies and from the recent “Batman Begins.” By any standard, these projects were far more popular and appreciated by a lot more people than any comic published by DC over the last ten years. In fact, kids today are more likely to have seen Robin on the “Teen Titans” cartoon - which keeps him well clear of Batman - than they are to have seen him running around as Batman’s sidekick. Despite the conventional wisdom that Batman and Robin MUST go together, the truth is they’ve often been featured separately - and the projects most fresh in the public eye are decidedly Robin-free.

“If that’s so, then why have the most successful Batman projects of the last decade and a half all ditched Robin? He was barely in “Batman: The Animated Series.” He was AWOL from the Burton movies and from the recent “Batman Begins.” By any standard, these projects were far more popular and appreciated by a lot more people than any comic published by DC over the last ten years.”

But we have no idea how those properties would have performed if Robin was left in them, so there’s no point of comparison! Do we have any proof that those series would have tanked if Robin was left in them? If you look at the eras of Batman’s all time highest circulation, Robin was a part of the book. It’s a well-known fact that Batman really exploded into greater popularity than ever when Kane and Finger first introduced Robin. If Robin didn’t work for selling books, why was his character ripped off so much? (Speedy, Aqualad, Wonder Girl, Superboy, etc.)

” if that’s so, then whey have the most successful batman projects of the last decade and a half all ditched robin? ”

fashion prevails. the fashion today doesn’t call for that sort of thing.

‘Just a little comment on lesbianism in comics.
Yeah. You’re going to get “hot girl-on-girl” action if you display lesbianism in superhero comics because superhero comic girls are hot whether it’s a kiss or a love scene. You can show the same things with a heterosexual couple and no one cares, but if you show two women, people perceive that to be exploitation.
I didn’t think the scene in 52 was gratuitously sexual.’

Sorry, I disagree… women don’t sleep in bras. Really, they should have been in nighties, t-shirts, PJs or the nick. Putting them in bras and panties is to refer to a very specific representation of lesbianism that is all about exploiting sex.

cheers

Exactly Chism, that scene in 52 was so blatant. I’m waiting to see them pillowfight in their undies next.

“Sorry, I disagree… women don’t sleep in bras.”

I’ve seen this comment a few times. And though I haven’t even read the issue in question, I’ve heard enough to disagree strongly, on two points:

1. If they were naked, the scene would be even MORE open to accusations of sexism/objectification.

2. Who says women don’t sleep in bras? Certainly some women don’t. But some do. It’s a personal and physical preference. Perhaps it’s rather unlikely for both women to have been sleeping in their bras (if both of them are depicted that way) but making a sweeping generalization about “what women do” isn’t any more realistic.

my missus sleeps in her bra. and her pants. and pajamas. i tell you, i’m fighting a losing battle here. i don’t know why she doesn’t go the whole hog and wear a trench coat and waders.

is lesbianism in comics something new, then? i always thought the valkyrie ( marvel ) was a lesbian. or maybe that was just me. certainly, there are a number of gay characters, so maybe i just assumed there are lesbian characters, as well.

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