1. Inducting Dick Grayson As Robin
Robin is in many respects a fabulous character -- giving Batman a junior partner and moral conscience to bounce dialogue off of, allowing the caped crusader to lighten up a little, putting Bruce Wayne into the new and sometimes uncomfortable role of father figure -- but at its core, it might argued there's something...
problematic about the idea of Bruce Wayne inviting a young boy to join him on his quest for justice. I'm not talking about Jason Todd here, the Robin who was most famously killed in the line of duty; letting Jason wear the costume was certainly a dubious decision, but it's one that the
source material itself has basically spent 30 some years second guessing. No, I'm going right back to the very first (and in many people's opinion
best) Robin, Dick Grayson, a great character with a fantastic origin story: a young trapeze artist whose parents are killed by protection racket gangsters, Dick Grayson is basically kidnapped by Batman before child services or a psychiatrist can talk to him, and within five panels is being inducted, almost by blood oath, into Batman's holy war on crime -- wait, WHAT?!
The problem with Robin has never really been the character himself: once Robin's
there, it's
fine -- the story can progress, and the reader gets a lot of valuable character interaction/insight from him. But making it plausible that Bruce Wayne would actually be kosher with dressing up a little boy with no crime fighting experience in the brightest costume possible and having him run towards men with machine guns has proven damn near impossible. Hell, even when the writers of the Batman comics introduced the idea that Bruce Wayne adopts Dick Grayson -- to make the father/son connection that much more literal, and also to try to offset the slightly weird "Batman and Robin sitting in a tree" undertones -- it still made little sense: billionaire Bruce Wayne has been a near recluse, has almost completely cut off his personal life to devote himself to becoming the Dark Knight detective, can barely have normal relationships with people, is trying to hide this tremendous secret...and he suddenly decides he wants to be a foster father?? The whole scenario is so weird that when Frank Miller after-birthed his misbegotten Batman opus All-Star Batman & Robin -- where "The Goddamned Batman" is a near psychopath more concerned with causing property damage than actually, y'know, combating injustice -- he pretty much just recreated the above scene (albeit with more police cars getting blown up, courtesy of a grinning, cackling Batman) to prove just how craaaaaaaazy Bruce Wayne is:
Miller got criticized a lot (
and rightly so) for the overall nuttiness of All Star, but on a certain level, all he was doing was honestly illustrating just how insane Batman's whole "kidnap a traumatized boy and draft him into a war on crime" scheme has
always been. Honestly, when you start to think about it, it's a little surprising a "Jason Todd" situation didn't happen a whole hell of a lot sooner.