Born To Kill, the story that launched the Batman and Robin title in DC's New 52 continuity in 2011, is a superb exploration of the relationship between Bruce Wayne and his son Damian, the ten year old badass raised to be a trained killer by the League of Assassins. Damian is a brilliant character, a boy raised by evil but with good in his heart, who ends up in an entirely different emotional place from where he started. Born To Kill details the teething problems that were experienced whenever he was in the midst of his early days as Robin. In previous stories that took place in pre-New 52 continuity, Damian had operated with Dick Grayson as Batman, because Bruce Wayne was thought to be dead at this point. This meant that Damian held an idealised view of his father in his head. Born To Kill deals with the difficulties Damian then has when trying to work with his father, a completely different personality to Dick, with whom Damian had forged such a strong partnership. The story features a new villain named Nobody, who is murdering criminals in Gotham and tries to convert Damian to this dark side, telling the boy that he was always meant to be a killer and not a hero. He is revealed to be Morgan Ducard, the son of Henri Ducard, a man who had trained Bruce Wayne in the past. Morgan resents Bruce for stealing his father's attention away and seeks to gain his revenge by subverting the ideals that Bruce had been trying to instil in Damian. Born To Kill, written by Peter Tomasi and drawn by Patrick Gleason, suffered upon release simply because it was published at the same time as Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo were defining Batman for the modern age with their Court Of Owls opus. We reckon it deserves to be more widely acknowledged in the pantheon of Batman's greatest hits.
