#LET TIM HAVE ALL HIS BIG SISTERS BACK 2K22!

[fantastic-nonsense]

Hi! I absolutely love your DC character and relationship dissections, and I really want to integrate Helena Bertinelli into a fic that I’m currently writing, but I don’t remember a lot of the specifics as to her relationship to Tim? Could you please tell me??

Thank you so much! Yes, I'm happy to talk about Tim and Helena, especially because no one talks about them anymore (which is very sad, because they're adorable and I miss them 😭)

Okay, so there are five comics you need to read if you're interested in Helena and Tim:

Robin III: Cry of the Huntress

"Benedictions" (Showcase '94 #5, Robin (1993) #6, and Showcase '94 #6)

The No Man's Land saga

Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood

Batman: Gotham Knights #38-40 ("Knight Moves")

There's several other scattered individual issues and arcs that showcase some fun interactions, especially in Tim's Robin solo, but these probably give the best contained progression of their relationship.

Put simply, they're really good friends and have a deep trust in each other as heroes. Tim was the first member of the Batfamily to trust Helena and to work with her, and Helena often looked out for him during his early years as Robin. Helena and Bruce had a very contentious relationship (putting it mildly) for a long time, and Tim stuck up for Helena to both Bruce and Alfred on multiple occasions. Meanwhile, Helena clocked Tim as "just some kid" pretty early on and was concerned enough to try and look out for him, but also didn't condescend to him very much.

Right from the beginning, in Cry of the Huntress, they're pretty snarky with each other and Helena engages in some good-natured ribbing at Tim's expense that Tim doesn't take kindly to, but it's also pretty clear that Helena isn't dismissing his skills just because he's a kid and that Tim respects her even though Bruce doesn't like her:

"You're late. We were supposed to meet after midnight. Batman never give you a watch?" "And you wonder why Batman doesn't ever mention you." -Cry of the Huntress #3 (1992)

Helena's a schoolteacher, and that's actually really important context when it comes to understanding her relationship with Tim. She knows how to talk to kids in a way that doesn't make them feel like she's talking down to them, and that's something Tim really needed at that point in his life. He was a kid and relatively new vigilante feeling rather insecure in his skills...but he was also a stubborn, prideful teenage boy who needed more than Bruce and Alfred's dysfunctional attempts to take care of him and his own father's well-meaning but neglectful attempts to parent him. So here's Helena, someone basically unconnected to the mess that is the 90s Batfam, who's more than willing to tag-team a case with Tim even though he's 13 and working for a guy she really doesn't like. Breath of fresh air, much?

Tim and Helena are actually fairly similar when they first meet; they're both rather quick-tempered, quick-witted, and impatient, for example. Even if they won't admit it, they both feel like they have something to prove to those around them. Helena has the benefit of being significantly "older, wiser, and more worldly" than Tim, but Tim has the benefit of being personally trained by Batman and is a bit more naturally analytically minded. Helena has a lot more trauma under her belt and a much larger thirst for violent vengeance than Tim does, but she's also a lot more independent and better able to look past what's immediately in front of her...so they balance each other out well.

It's a very cute and fun dynamic characterized largely by a lot of back-and-forth good-natured teasing:

"I reread the comic. It's about a man who puts on a mask to fight the crime family he was born into. Pretty weird stuff." "You looked in a mirror lately, Huntress?" "Nice." -Showcase '94 #6

"Hey, been keeping busy?" "If I'd known you were coming, I'd have saved a thug. "Thanks, but pass." -JLA/Titans #1 (1999)

Fast forward a couple of years and a few more adventures, including No Man's Land, where a whole bunch of nonsense happens to everyone (including Helena getting shot trying to save a bunch of infants from being murdered by the Joker, leading her to believe she's on her own and none of the Bats trust her), and we see that Tim is the only other 'Bat' besides Dick to explicitly voice that he believed she was innocent when Helena was framed for murder in Cry for Blood:

"I think she's innocent. I think she's being framed.......why would she be so sloppy? If she really did it, why would she make it so easy to blame her? She's smarter than that..." -Cry for Blood #3

And he works to clear her name from the beginning, something Bruce and the rest of the Bats don't start doing until later:

"...spending the week in the library clipping photocopies." "You're the one who wanted to clear her. I'm willing to let it go..." -Cry for Blood #3

Of all the Bats, Tim is the only person in this story (besides Dick, who somewhat loses faith in her after she accidentally shoots Bruce in the chest with a crossbow bolt) who pretty clearly respects not only her intelligence and skills but also her morals to the point where he basically doesn't even entertain the possibility that she killed the man. Tim knows who Helena is, and while he knows she's willing and able to kill he also knows she wouldn't have (or at the very least, she wouldn't have been this sloppy about it if she had).

Later on, he's also rather charmingly protective of Helena when he finds her with Vic Sage, rather like a bratty little brother being immature about his older sister bringing a boyfriend home:

"Boy Wonder. This is a surprise." "Heard you were back in town. Who are you?" "He's okay, Robin." -Cry for Blood #5

So that's sort of the basics of their dynamic: Tim is the smart-ass younger brother figure who loves that Helena treats him like a grown-up (even though she constantly teases him about his age). Helena is equally charmed and annoyed by this snarky well-meaning kid who lowkey stalks her on more than one occasion and seems to know more about her own family history than she does, but she also deeply appreciates the respect and trust he shows her as a hero.

That's about where they stand when Helena's arc in Gotham Knights rolls around. As time went on and they worked together more often, Helena came to think of him as her little brother to the point where when she hallucinates him after being drugged, he calls her his "big sister":

"Sleep later, big sister. Bad guys. Smackdown. You and me. Just like old times." "Sister?" "C'mon, you didn't get hit that hard." "Who...who hit me?" "Thugs. Skells. Lowlifes. Scumballs. Pick a flavor." -Gotham Knights #38

The panels I have in my "Tim Drake is the Batfam's Collective Younger Brother" folder is a lot, by the way. He just attracts older sibling figures...it's part of his charm.

And that's where their relationship stays until a) Helena stopped regularly showing up in Bat books and only really appeared in Birds of Prey and b) Tim started losing loved ones and slowly shutting people out of his life post-One Year Later. After that...we unfortunately don't get much on-panel interaction between the two of them, though they seemed to maintain a pretty good "off-screen" relationship based on the minimal interactions we did get.

So yes, they're very cute and I find it really sad most people either completely ignore Helena all-together or ignore Helena and Tim's relationship even when they do include her, especially because he's basically the reason she ended up semi-regularly working with the Batfam in the first place. Let Tim be the adult Batfam's collective younger brother again 2k22 (just because he's the middle child now doesn't mean he can't still fill the role)!

Postscript: talking about post-Flashpoint!Tim and Helena is basically a lost cause for two reasons: one, Tim was quite literally a different person for the first five years of the reboot until Tynion gave him back his pre-reboot backstory and personality in Detective Comics Rebirth. Two, Helena didn't exist for four years and was largely a completely different person when she finally did show back up in Grayson; she's only recently gotten most of her pre-reboot history restored via the Shadow of the Bat: The Tower storyline in 2021 and hasn't had much interaction with Tim since. They basically haven't had much of a relationship to speak of since 2011, which is pretty sad given their pre-reboot dynamic but also largely explains why modern fandom doesn't really...know they're friends. More things to curse Dan Didio and the DC editorial staff for.