#Tim Drake: Robin

[thebirdsandthebats]

Dick in Gotham handling a hostage situation at a local university. Some villain crashed a party in the student apartments and has the whole building locked down. Dick is in there with Damian, and they finally make it to the floor where the bad guy is and they’re having this big tense stand off before the final fight…

and then one of the college students who this guy had huddled in the corner grabs a chair and just fucking clocks this guy. He hits him over the head so hard that the chair breaks and the guy COLLAPSES. Dick is like . Oh??

And then the student turns around (with a truly unhinged glint in his eye) and Dick recognizes him and realizes OH . Oh this is Tim’s boyfriend. That’s the crazy guy who recruited us to go beat up cultists with him. Yeah we didn’t even need to come he had that handled actually

[shyjusticewarrior]

Love that Tim's endlessly forgiving towards his parents, but when it's Bernard's parents then he's like "aren't you tired of being nice? Don't you wanna go apeshit?"

[cosmicpoutine]

i will take any and every opportunity to put him in a croptop

[chronicdelusionistsart]

Never seen this mentioned but isn't it just really cool that Bernard is a foil to Tim himself by being a funhouse mirror of Early Tim and his motivations. Obviously he figured out Tim's identity by himself which is the gimme but it goes deeper than that

He's a Robin Superfan like Tim was a Batman superfan

(Yes I think a picture of Tim's stalker wall would be better here but then all of Tim's panels would be Stalker Wall pictures) He notices that Tim is off balance the same way that Tim noticed that Batman was off balance

He concludes from this that Tim needs to let people help him, though of course instead of trying to get someone else to do it first he skips straight to helping himself

Obviously they have a much different dynamic on account of being the same age and it being a romantic entanglement instead of a mentoral-to-familial one but isn't it just neat how Tim's arc in Urban Legends and TD:R about struggling over what the Robin identity means to him is supported by every aspect of the work like this. How the guy he likes is in many ways an echo of a younger and more idealistic Tim. How he's internalized the thing he pushed against - the Solo Batman I-Don't-Need-Anyone-when-I'm-having-a-breakdown thing - so hard that he has to have someone do for him what he insisted on doing for Bruce.

This is what it means to have a civilian cast that has meaningful thematic integration with their superhero. I've joked before that they matched freaks but they REALLY match freaks! On purpose! Lois Lane type of character

[littlepikmins]

Tim at the club with his hands on Bernard's waist and shoulder and it's like relax bro ain't nobody taking him from you

[tim-drake-scholar]

Hey idk if anyone else needed this but hey look at Bruce not just giving his approval, not just giving affection, but truly appreciating Tim Drake and everything Tim has every done to help Bruce/Batman. I just think it’s nice

[gffa]

Tim Drake: Robin | Variant covers by Dan Mora

[blog-moved-lol]

help I love them

Also,

QJSHAJAJJANABABAHSHS

(Source - Tim Drake: Robin issues 7-10)

[theofficialuriel]

“tim fans” complaining about the lack of character development and him not growing from Robin as if he wasn’t well on his way to do just that in Tim Drake: Robin 🙄

[duckduckgoose-exe]

Bernard I love you but this outfit is diabolical

[peppermintmagicianlynn]

Tim's Sense of Belonging

"There are only a few places I belong: with Bernard, on the boat, and solving mysteries." - Tim Drake - TD:R Issue 2

I feel like we don’t talk about this line nearly enough. Like, Tim Drake? Admitting he belongs at someone's side? Not even that, making a declarative statement that come hell or high water, being with Bernard is his God-given right?

That feels kinda huge for someone who always seems to be uprooted from one sense of identity to another. Mr. "Batman needs a Robin, but I still wonder if I was really the best for the job". You DID the job, my guy. You did a GREAT JOB, even. That means it WAS your place to be in every moment that you were his Robin. Yet he won't say that with the same confidence he says he DOES belong with Bernard.

That's freaking cute!

[shyjusticewarrior]

Dick's landlord wanted to fuck him. Tim's landlord wanted to be his greatest nemesis. Are any landlords in DC Comics normal about their tenants?

[cosmicpoutine]

you might see more than one version of this, i'm running an experiment. click to see the details better 👁️

[chronicdelusionistsart]

Bernard Dowd and the Art of Recontextualization

I'm what you might call a "fake Batman fan" - that is, I've only watched most of the Batman animated series', all of the live action movies, most of the animated ones, played some of the video games... so, you know, probably thousands of hours of my life in Batman related media. But not the comics! Fake fan!

Frankly, I find the comics medium the way DC and Marvel do it to be really hard to follow. There's the fact that you can't really follow an individual solo character without them getting caught up in massive crossover events that ruin their arc and pacing, there's the soap-opera-iness that encourages cheap and revolving conflicts inherent to the longform monthly release schedule, the writer roulette, and there's also just that going back to try and thread a particular continuity or character is an exercise in frustration. Oh and the retcons. Everyone hates those. They've (basically) never been good. Don't remember this part it will never come up aga

But, you know, despite this - or maybe because of this - comics is a breeding ground for ideas. Because of the quick turnaround and the demand for novel conflicts, comics just churn out idea after idea. Good ideas, bad ideas, doesn't matter. Get it to print. Retcon it later if we write ourselves into a corner. Comics are often soooooo first draft coded. This is why I personally prefer adaptations - they often reimagine ideas and retcon them into new narratives where they can serve a more coherent plot. But what happens when a character is picked up for a second draft ... without actually contradicting the earlier material? While enriching the earlier material, even?

(SPOILERS for Tim Drake: Robin and uh... 20 year old comics under the cut!)

So, uh, quick disclaimer - because I have very little overall knowledge of DC's Comics continuity, there may be more interesting examples of times that what I'm going to point out was done. But I love Bernard and from a writer's POV I'm impressed with the way they did it so we're talking about Bernard lmao

The Beginning (Robin 1993) - Reading comics from the 2000s hurts in a way I can't describe

Okay so I heard Tim Drake is dating a guy now? (Penny Sonic voice) Whoa he's bisexual I didn't know that! I'm sure people on the internet are being very normal about this. Cool let's find out more about his new bf. I like starting from the beginning... so like yeah hold on while I crack open the Robin comic and take down what this guy's deal is.

😬

So basically the TL;DR of Bernard in his original appearances is that he seems to be an attempt to introduce some normal stakes teen drama into Tim's life. He has all the Funny Guy Friend Classics - he's got an inflated sense of his proficiency at pulling girls, he's inexplicably drawn towards the protagonist (who is cooler than him), he wants to date the most popular girl in school, and he wants to get down with older women!

This might just be me but while I was going through this I thought like, he almost reads a little uncanny, like he's been filtered through a Disney Teen Special. In practice he mostly serves to introduce Tim to the Real Plot, Darla Aquista, and be one of his ties to civilian life, which is, like, fine. He's ultimately just a background character and he's so unimportant that he only has one appearance after their school gets shot up(!!!), which is, again, to be more of an accessory to the Darla plot.

After this display of "wow this guy's kind of lowkey insane for offering to his resurrected bestie supervillainess to be her manager actually", he's dropped forever. Comics! We're not gonna unpack that.

The Sequel (Batman: Urban Legends) - We're Gonna Unpack That

Until almost two decades later when he calls Tim up for a date. And while I'm trying to skim over a lot to get to the point here and I don't really know the FULL context, it is notable that Tim is in the middle of an identity crisis / the cusp of adulthood when this happens (I think he just lost a spleen or something. That sucks dude). It's pretty implicit that part of the reason he's going to see Bernard is because he's someone familiar in a time when he's facing a lot of new and scary stuff.

And at first blush, he really does seem like the same dude. The familiar arm over the shoulder, the banter, it's all very casual and similar to the ribbing from high school -

- and I guess nothing has happened to Bernard in the interim haha he's just the funny friend guy right?

I really like the way they did this. I'm just unambiguously going to praise how good this is if you just came off the 2000s stuff. Comics have kind of breakneck pacing by nature but they really manage to condense down and then pull off a neat sleight of hand over the course of like four pages here. They re-establish Bernard as a silly guy and then wham you with the fact that yeah actually we ARE gonna unpack that. Fuck you Tim Drake life is ever changing and nothing stays the same

So the TL;DR on the rest of the Urban Legends storyline is that stuff like, HAPPENED to this guy while our focus was elsewhere. He learned martial arts, presumably so that he wouldn't be so helpless in the next school shooting level event, he got into a pain cult, he's just Not Doing Well. We find out, reading between the lines, that calling Tim on a date was probably one of his last attempts to reach out to someone when the cult stuff was getting really bad.

I've heard people complain that Bernard is uninteresting or not a character or entirely focused on his relationship with Tim, and I think that criticism is really weird considering that his entire re-debut focuses on the point that he's been having his own life and making his own (often wild) decisions - ones that really changed the course of his life - while Tim was gone. And it's also notable that this story is about how the fact that he's his own person and has changed and has made the nerve-wracking decision to take action and call Tim inspires Tim himself to take a leap and fling himself into the uncertain waters of young adulthood.

Me when I have my bi awakening and call to get out of a rut simultaneously because Cute Insane Guy Inspired Me. iconic

So that's how Bernard has changed. But that's not recontextualization, that's just the writers taking a guy and making him do another, cooler thing. Well hold the fuck on because we're not goddamn done.

What did he mean by th-

The Recontextualizerrrrr (Tim Drake: Robin) - Bernard is the funniest person in Gotham City. I'll not be taking constructive criticism on this

Tim Drake: Robin is the followup to the Urban Legends story and Tim is the main character fr. Obviously. but Bernard is also a major character. Later, he even gets to be a POV character. But they don't do that for several issues, instead treating us to his shenanigans from Tim's point of view as he solves a bizarre serial murder case and like, they're cute! And neither of them are normal in the slightest. I love that for them.

Again, TL;DR, there are a lot of interactions where Bernard talks to Tim both in and out of costume, but we don't get to see his POV until they go out to a restaurant and meet Bernard's parents there by accident and Tim has to run off to do Robin stuff. And like... a lot of stuff happens in this one bois. Whammy after whammy

We're suddenly introduced explicitly to a lot that was only implied or just completely unavailable before. Bernard's parents are ragingly homophobic. Probably were never great even before that. He suffers from depression. All that is a lot to. wait. hold on a second

he knows?????

HE KNOWS????

Okay so if you stop at this point and reread the entire run so far you find out that Bernard is in fact the biggest troll in the entire universe. This is the moment that cemented him as my favourite, by the way. Like I had a feeling that he knew and I was just laughing my ass off when my suspicions were confirmed.

But this is really interesting on top of that because Bernard has been revealed to be, at this point, a guy who you should look deeper than the surface to understand. Someone who masks his true self and whose true motivations you can only uncover if you're really looking past the facade. Even with Tim, he sort of offers Tim and Robin half the story each, taking advantage of Robin's "distance" to give out information he wants Tim to think about but that he's reluctant to talk about frankly while at the same time almost daring Tim to open up about his identity.

Absolutely most normal way to tell your bf about your cult trauma. You'll always be famous to me Bernard Dowd

This is a really neat trick by the writers. It makes Bernard a multifaceted character who got to quietly develop while we were mostly focused on Tim, and there's some clever clever foreshadowing they set up in this run to achieve this. If it were just this, I would call it good writing.

But it actually goes one level deeper than that and becomes something really really special. because as we all know, Bernard was not conceived to be this way, he was a one-off guy who was kind of annoying and he was essentially retconned to be, like. Gay? Have depth? Be funny? All of those things?

The Seamless Retcon (Robin 1993 Again) - We took your guy and we gave him gay subtext and it worked astoundingly well

This is not a new observation btw, I've seen a ton of posts to this effect. But oh my god. Some of these panels really hit different with the new Bernard lore. Like holy fuck just read this back to back

There are tons of moments like this. There's SO MUCH that the revelation that Bernard is queer adds to his initially extremely underwhelming tenure in the Robin comics. A reread almost begs the question of what Bernard must have been thinking at any given moment! BRO YOU SAID YOU WANTED TO FUCK HIS STEPMOM. That's completely believable as a next-level closeting move and goes from kind of annoying to turbofunny.

Like yeah of course he's acting like a douche. His father is a status-chasing asshole and he's five racks deep in the closet. Of course he gravitates towards Tim - his gaydar is pinging and he thinks Tim is cute. And it's also pinging that Tim is like. You know

None of this would hit as hard if the writers had not set up Bernard as someone who masks so much. They worked it in that character trait to mean that you could always glean information deeper than the surface from his top level interactions.

Because of this, Bernard is really fucking interesting and he's a good character and he's one that gets better on reread. Like I said, that's a set of observations that are not new to me. But something that really gets to me is how seamless and intentional it is. It really feels like the writer sat down and took their time devising a guy that is believable as that other guy, but only if you read back with certain context.

The conclusion - Comics. Man.

So is this just about how Bernard is really fucking interesting and he's a good character and he's one that gets better on reread and that he can exist independent of Tim and all the haters are wrong. Yeah of course. 💖

But also like, I have thoroughly proven to myself that I was kinda wrong to just reject the published comics medium out of hand. I see now that there's room for the writer's roulette to hit the jackpot and that something I mistook as an outright flaw, the winding and unfocused and often improvised nature of it, can be ridden like a wave if you're skilled enough to do it. Meghan Fitzmarten is a goddamned genius.

I guess I have to read comics now. Fuck

[littlepikmins]

I am obsessed with how whimsical Bernard is like he only agrees to go on a date with Tim if he helps Damian which is so trollish of him (also he doesn't even seem freaked out at all that Damian just appeared out of nowhere and Tim threw a knife at him 😂)

And then there's also him knowing Tim was Robin for who knows how long and playing 4D chess by saying stuff like, "There's MY boy wonder" and telling Robin he's concerned about his boyfriend.

He seems like such a simple guy, but he's actually very mischievous, playful, and clever and knows more than he lets on.

Even when he's telling Tim his theories, he also says "wouldn't that be cool?" which implies he doesn't 100% actually believe his theory (possibly because he already knows Tim is Robin) he just thinks its fun coming up with theory ideas! I love his whimsy!

[rhysska]

Bernard,, my silly guy. Was rereading tim drake: robin