For nearly as long as Batman has stalked the streets of Gotham City, he’s had Robin with him to watch his back and lift his spirits. When the first Robin grew up and moved on, the title became hereditary, passing from one young ward to another. Batman acts as a parent and mentor to the Robins, with the unspoken expectation that someday Bruce Wayne will retire from the role and one of his disciples will carry on the mantle of the Caped Crusader. The question of which Robin would make the best Batman has been the subject of decades of fan debate, but a recent story revealed that, when the time comes, none of them make a good Batman at all.
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Robin became a hereditary title when Dick Grayson, the original, aged out of the sidekick role and became a solo act named Nightwing. Batman took in a troubled youth named Jason Todd to replace him, but Todd ran up against a particularly edgy Joker and died, only coming back twenty years later as the bitter, violent antihero Red Hood. Tim Drake became Robin by outsmarting Batman, figuring out his and Grayson’s secret identities, and applying for the job to aid a grieving Bruce. Finally, Tim left the role when Bruce’s biological son Damian Wayne appeared and Bruce made him Robin in order to rehabilitate him from his League of Assassins training. But Tim never quite succeeded at establishing an identity of his own.
In Detective Comics #966, a Batman from a dark future revealed that, when the Robins are pressed to step up to become Batman, they all fail in their own ways. The issue was written by James Tynion IV, with art from Eddy Barrows, inks from Eber Ferreira, color by Adriano Lucas, and lettering by Sal Cipriano, and begins when Tim Drake frees himself from a dimension-traveling villain’s prison. He breaks free with a Batman who reveals himself to be Drake from the future. This version of Tim is anxious to warn himself about the dark future ahead.
In future Tim’s timeline, Bruce Wayne is killed by Batwoman when the two come into conflict over Batman’s darkest project, Brother Eye. When he does, Dick Grayson takes up the mantle. Dick is the natural first choice to replace Batman, as he has in the past when Batman seemingly died. But while he may have the skills, Dick simply doesn’t have the intense obsession it takes to fill Bruce’s shoes, and he went back to his family. Jason tried to become Batman next, but nearly died in the attempt when he fought the League of Assassins, leaving him disabled and depressed. Damian takes the third attempt, the one revealed back in 2007’s Batman #666: in an attempt to equal his father, he sells his soul for immortality, becoming the center of a hellish crisis that nearly burns Gotham to the ground.
That leaves the Robin who least wanted to be Batman, and the master detective who never quite found his own path: Tim Drake. But the stress of donning the cowl was too much for him. Drake became a tyrant, killing all of Gotham’s villains and oppressing its other citizens to maintain order. When the future Tim came to the present, he became so consumed with preventing his own failed timeline that he became a villain named Savior who’s willing to kill heroes who go bad in his branch of the future. Suddenly using his own last name as his superhero title doesn’t seem so bad.
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