white-weasel

[white-weasel]

Following my Bernardposting about how Comics Can Rule, Actually, I did actually go and read more comics! And I've done some thinking.

Something interesting about the comics fandom that I've learned being a Bernard Dowd fan is the degree to which the fandom buys into the idea of a continuous Main Timeline which is a complete uninterrupted story from start to finish and in which contradictions are unwelcome and sloppy at best and in which intentionally bad faith reinterpretations use retcons like a hammer at worst.

And like, I get that. That's how DC's readership drive works. They get people invested in the Soap Opera, the ongoing story, and that investment is what sells books. DC has a vested interest in pushing this interpretation of their comics. But the more I read comics the more it doesn't seem to work that way in practice!

Like, contrast TV adaptations which tend to have strong internal continuities. People will say "Oh, in My Adventures with Superman, Lois Lane is like this." This is a reasonable thing to say. But when talking about comics, most people will say stuff like "Oh, in Comics, Tim Drake is like this." And that's like, you're compressing 30+ years of events with different writers with different ideas of the guy into one assertion. And even when they don't say that, they often treat Tim's appearances as one story from 198X to now.

This is really weird to me. Because I think seeing comics continuities as a monolith makes them harder to understand and works at cross-purposes with engaging with the material in good faith. I personally want to engage with each writer's tenure as their own thing and take the surrounding runs as "fuzzy canon" or something to adapt material from, because I think that's how you kind of have to write in comics to make any story that has legs.

Like, when I talk about how much I like Tim Drake: Robin, most of the people talking about how they don't like it cite like it's because Tim is OOC because of this or that thing that happened in 2010 or 2004 or 1995 or whatever. And that's like. Great. I think we are talking about four different guys though. I'm talking about TD:R Tim who obviously has a lot of love put into him from his previous appearances but is having a Robin (And Queer) Identity Crisis and working through it in the way that the author interpreted the character. I'm not talking about Red Robin who's going through his Whump Locked In Era. Red Robin Whump Locked In Era is cool and all, but that's another run with a different set of surrounding context and a different author with different goals with the character. I don't think it's meaningfully possible for characterization or continuity to remain stable in the conditions that ask those two writers to make the stories they want with the baggage they have.

The fact that I'm coming at it with a fundamentally different viewpoint than a lot of people probably explains why I'm like. Why I don't really care if they "ruin a character" in a given run or adaptation (hello, Wayne Family Adventures antis!). Why I see Bernard (my beloved)'s characterization inevitably changing in the future and wince but have to let it go because this is how it works. I think it explains why I tend to disagree most with those who are hung up on The Continuity.

I think it would be nice if more people could articulate this fundamental difference in expectations! I think it drives a lot of arguments and misunderstandings that could be avoided.

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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

[white-weasel]

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

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pov: you're cooked

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i miss her and her little wrenches on a string

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i think my favorite thing about the saw franchise is that they don't cgi the actors to look younger no matter what fucking timeline we're in like they put tobin in a backwards baseball cap to show he was younger and said fuck it saw x takes place before saw 2 and if amanda looks older no she doesn't go fuck yourself and i think that's wonderful

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kaname date from ai the somnium files.....

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go watch the passenger (2023)!

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i’m sick and tired of people pretending that burger isn’t delicious just to clown on americans. america deserves the ridicule, but why’s burger catching strays? burger did nothing wrong

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For the last time dude, my leitmotif sounds exactly like it always has. There is no symbolism for creeping corruption in there

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when your creepy crush is trying to get you out of the closet

do you guys think the cult was homophobic? bc bernard joined them to repress his homosexual tendencies

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Someone else HAS to have said this but can we appreciate the cosmic joke on Timothy Drake-Wayne that is his boyfriend having figured out behind his back that he's Robin. Like ohhhhh ohhhhhhh I'm so sorry Mr. Drake-Wayne. It must suck to have someone pay a lot of attention to you and figure out your secret bat-identity. Maybe you and someone else in your family this happened to can make a support group about it

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lame civilian boyfriend that no one likes (he's my favourite)

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sk8ter bois (he said see you later boy)

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Reading Bernard as Queer in his Early Comics

Bernard Dowd is, frankly, VERY easy to read as queer way before he started actually dating Tim Drake, and right back to his literal introduction in which he is quite literally checking Tim out, let's not lie. Followed by a lot of stuff that can be read as flirting.

But to me the most definitive moment that I point to is actually when he implies that he thinks Tim is gay, and it's because of the way he says it.

"We're two modern, enlightened men in the third millennium, Drake. No need to make up imaginary girlfriends." [Robin #123]

Tim has at this point rejected Darla, certified hottest girl in school, explaining that he already had a girlfriend, Stephanie, and he's happy with her. Neither Darla nor Bernard believe him (Darla thinking the reason he lies is because he's afraid of her mob boss dad, interestingly also revealed to be a reason Bernard told her for why guys don't ask her out in general), and with Bernard here thinking she's a cover for Tim being gay.

And while that certainly isn't an odd thing for a straight guy to assume, when you think about straight boys in the early 00's, I'm sure you'd know pretty well that this would come out more directly like "what, are you gay?"

And Bernard in particular does not have a history of beating around the bush about accusations he isn't actually sure are true. Like when he just went "admit you have an abusive father who beats you" about Tim's black eye.

What he actually says accomplishes three things.

One is clearly implies that he thinks Tim is gay without actually saying the word, which is kind of inherent to this time period's queer culture when talking in public spaces.

Second is that he indicates he is a safe person to tell.

And third, and most importantly for this particular essay, he indicates he is part of the same category.

Now I'm sure someone could argue that what he's actually saying is "we're both not the type of people who would CARE if someone's gay", but I think that falls apart in the context of using this sentence to tell Tim he thinks he is.

Because how do you backtrack from that if Tim was like, "yes, you too?"

And I think the answer is that you don't.

My best guess for if Bill Willingham really didn't intend Bernard to be queer is that he only avoided the word "gay" and phrased it this way because in the public medium of comics he didn't want Bernard to come off as rude as actual teenage boys would to avoid complaints. (Or editorial stopped him.)

But whether intended or not, Bernard declares himself queer here.

And so when people are curious as to "Why Bernard?" in the subject of out of all the guys Tim was close with, for one to be chosen to end up dating him, I point to this.

It's this.

This this this this THIS

And so we get blessed with this smug asshole (affectionate):

[Tim Drake: Robin #7]

And I love him

[white-weasel]

you might be in the room that you die in