Batman and Robin #1

"You know, I'd have killed for a flying Batmobile when I was Robin." - Batman

Three things the uninitiated need to know before going into this issue:

1) Batman's dead. (Well, obviously not dead dead. He's coming back eventually. But be cool and play along, huh?)

2) The old Robin is the new Batman.

3) The new Robin is the old Batman's illegitimate son. (Don't ask. I mean, if you really care, knock yourself out. But otherwise, it's not really important.)

It seems a bit odd that Batman and Robin have been in existence for almost 70 years, and this is the first regular series actually titled Batman and Robin. (Well, there's also this, but it's crap, and thus easily ignored.) Over the past several years, though, Batman and Robin have been less like partners and more like old pals from high school who occasionally still hang out, but really aren't into it, and are just doing so out of habit.

So on one hand, this title is long overdue. There's something really iconic and familiar and fun about the Batman and Robin partnership, especially once the 90s stripped it of most of its cornier elements. Hell, Robin even got pants!

On the other hand, though, at the end of the day, this isn't really Batman and Robin. It's the artist formerly known as Robin and Batman's kid, who may well be the most annoying character in comics. To be fair, this is mostly by design. Damian (Robin) clearly isn't supposed to be likable. That doesn't make reading him any more pleasant.

Also, in this issue, the Batmobile flies. The Batmobile shouldn't fly. It just shouldn't. It's as wrong as if Superman suddenly decided to start walking everywhere.

Other than these quibbles, though, this was a pretty solid first issue. Frank Quietly is one of the top artists working in comics today, and at any given moment, Grant Morrison is fully capable of delivering a completely awesome moment that will remind readers of how cool superhero stories can be in the hands of a writer who knows what he's doing. (Conversely, at any given moment, Grant Morrison is also fully capable of delivering a completely confusing moment that will make readers tear their hair out by the roots, and scramble to log onto comic book message boards to see if anyone else understood whatever it was that went right over their heads.)

Perhaps most impressively, Morrison and Quietly have apparently managed to pull off what countless other creative teams have failed miserably at: coming up with a truly great Batman villain.

You can probably count on one hand the number of good Batman villains that have been introduced in the past decade. In fact, I could only come up with one. The majority have been more along these lines. Of course, one issue (let alone, two pages of that one issue) is too soon to judge whether Pyg will be the former or the latter. But man...how does that picture not give you the willies?

So after a couple of years at DC where Morrison's production has been uneven at best, he charges back with a valiant, if not entirely successful, effort. It's probably not the Batman and Robin series readers would have liked to see, but it's not a bad start, either.