Should Batman's Rogues Begin Before or After Robin Debuts?

[Aahz]

Thinking about it Robin: Year One has also allready Two-Face, Mad Hatter and Freeze as villains, so chaning it back would effect more then just Long Halloween and Dark Victory.

But it really kind of diminishes the importance of Robin, if all big villains predate him.

[9th.]

I don't see a need for Robin to be there before ALL of them. Surely he'd have at least a few.

[Robanker]

Maybe one or two of them before, but I think Bruce's first year or two really should just be against "regular" crime. It needs to escalate as a reaction to him and Robin.

[PurpleGlovez]

I just remembered something interesting: Detective Comics #866 has Harvey Dent as district attorney prosecuting a case after Dick's first outing as Robin...

[Frontier]

Thinking about it Robin: Year One has also allready Two-Face, Mad Hatter and Freeze as villains, so chaning it back would effect more then just Long Halloween and Dark Victory.

But it really kind of diminishes the importance of Robin, if all big villains predate him.

I don't think it necessarily diminishes Robin but emphasizes the escalating threat and difficulty of Batman's War on Crime to the point where he needs a partner to tackle it head-on.

[Aahz]

I don't think it necessarily diminishes Robin but emphasizes the escalating threat and difficulty of Batman's War on Crime to the point where he needs a partner to tackle it head-on.

I think it does since it removes him from a lot of the most important stories from that time.

And Long Halloween has iirc basically all the big villains from Dick's time as Robin already in it, by the time the later big name villains appeared he was already an adult.

[Frontier]

I think it does since it removes him from a lot of the most important stories from that time.

And Long Halloween has iirc basically all the big villains from Dick's time as Robin already in it, by the time the later big name villains appeared he was already an adult.

Yeah, but I kind of got the sense that things were escalating to a point in those stories to where Batman needing a partner to take on the Supervillains was a more practical option than it would've seemed otherwise.

What important stories are we thinking of here? Wouldn't it just be the villain debuts?

[PurpleGlovez]

If Robin debuted before the rogues gallery, it would place him behind the scenes of dozens (possibly hundreds) of early Legends of the Dark Knight tales and related mini-series and one-shots, including most significantly The Long Halloween. It's clear that the Bat-office's editorial policy in the 90s and early 2000s was that there was a significant pre-Robin period in Batman's history where these stories occur; however, as noted above, there actually is post-Crisis precedent for Penguin, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, and Two-Face all being post-Robin; but there is also equal evidence that they were not.

Not only that, but there are even more late-debuting villains that DC tried to push implausibly early in the timeline; Batman Confidential's Good Cop Bad Cop makes the Ventriloquist a Year One-era villain, and he is seen in the pre-Dark Victory Two-Face Year One alongside fricking Killer Croc, Maxie Zeus, and Matt Hagen's Clayface; speaking of him, there is actually a Legends of the Dark Knight story that claims Clayface was the first supervillain Batman ever fought, just three weeks into his career.

And I mean, it's not like the original stories with the OG villains like Joker and Catwoman played it off like supervillainy in Gotham was a direct response to the debut of Robin. His presence was largely incidental to that of the villains and sometimes irrelevant. So I don't know.