Tim Drake: Robin Ongoing Series Coming in September

[Vordan]

Good for Tim fans I guess, but I’m going to be so pissed if this means Damian is losing the Robin title because Tim has failed so hard at moving beyond that moniker.

[a moment closer]

I can't even enjoy Riley Rossmo. This will be the third book I was excited to hear about until I found out who the artist was. Bummer!

[Darkspellmaster]

Good for Tim fans I guess, but I’m going to be so pissed if this means Damian is losing the Robin title because Tim has failed so hard at moving beyond that moniker.

Its not that Tim has failed moving beyond, Red Robin was showing he could, he was ready to go onto college, but DC fucked that up.

[dietrich]

To be honest I half-expect Fitzmartin to still write the book like that.

Also I'm just not convinced Fitzmartin is going to be able to genuinely handle developing the relationship properly seeing how she handled Steph in the Pride special and the general execution so far.

I didn't read the Pride Special so I can only speculate blindly. I did read Urban Legends and I felt she did good work with the limited pages she had.


The Pride stories by their very nature I believe were designed to showcase LGBTQ pairings so one expects some heavy pandering going in. I would have been stunned if Fritzmartin used that story to fix or go into detail about Tim and Steph.

In my mind, Steph was always going to be a prop in that story because the goal was to push the new relationship.

Now that Fritzmartin has the pages to play with nothing stops her from elaborating on what happened between with Steph.

She's very tuned into social media and if she's savy then I expect she'll consider the feedback from frustrated fans and give them the closure they have been demanding.

There's a big crossover between Tim Fans and Steph fans. It'd be dumb to burn a significant percentage of your target audience when it's such an easy fix.

[SixSpeedSamurai]

This means Rossmo is finished on Harley Quinn. In fact he is not scheduled for any of the 5 Harley Quinn books scheduled for August, nor even any of the countless covers (5 books with variants).

The HQ Annual solicit says

Tune in for the final installment of Harley Quinn’s Task Force XX Space Extravaganza, plus the start of a new status quo for Harley Quinn!

It's like they decided to burn off the entire final Stephanie Phillips story in August. So maybe showing no real confidence, rather than what looked like a lot of confidence, in this run of the character.

I would hope for a completely new creative team. Replacing Rossmo is start, and I would also like to see someone else have a chance to write in place of Stephanie Phillips.

Wondering what Harley Quinn fans think, but I didn't spot a general Appreciation thread for her.

That said, Rossmo does seem like an unusual choice for a book about Tim Drake. But you could say that about anything Rossmo works on. He's polarizing. His fans like him, but no one seems to be entirely neutral about his style.

There will be a lot of people who will dislike the Tim Drake book entirely because of the art.

it's the characters 30th anniversary month, has nothing to do with "dumping" Phillips story.

[SixSpeedSamurai]

Good for Tim fans I guess, but I’m going to be so pissed if this means Damian is losing the Robin title because Tim has failed so hard at moving beyond that moniker.

Red Robin was a good series, got cut short by New 52.

[Konja7]

The Pride stories by their very nature I believe were designed to showcase LGBTQ pairings so one expects some heavy pandering going in. I would have been stunned if Fritzmartin used that story to fix or go into detail about Tim and Steph.

In my mind, Steph was always going to be a prop in that story because the goal was to push the new relationship.

Now that Fritzmartin has the pages to play with nothing stops her from elaborating on what happened between with Steph.

Curiously, although Stephanie was a prop for the new couple, Bernard was a background character in the story. Literally, Bernard only appears in the last page of that story.

[OBrianTallent]

I can't even enjoy Riley Rossmo. This will be the third book I was excited to hear about until I found out who the artist was. Bummer!

Same. I was so excited to see Tim was getting a new series, even if it were by Fitzmartin. She writes a serviceable Tim, not a prefect Tim, but a serviceable one. I thought the cover was hideous and then discovered who was drawing the book. Damn. I really want to buy this series, but I just can not get into Rossmo's artwork at all. I would hate for this book to fail because of the creative team and have DC feel like Tim is not a viable character.

[Hypo]

Is Damian's book ending, or does this mean we have two Robin ongoings now?

I mean Damian’s book is just called Robin and this is Tim Drake: Robin so I assume two different books.

I’m happy to see Tim get more stories

Also possible that Damian's book gets replaced by the upcoming Batman vs. Robin book by Waid.

Mark Waid pits Batman versus Robin in September

Batman vs. Robin, along with the new Tim Drake: Robin series, appears to have taken the place of the ongoing Robin series starring Damian Wayne, which is not soliciting a new issue in September, which also follows writer Joshua Williamson's exit from that series with August's Robin #17.

[MajorHoy]

Mark Waid pits Batman versus Robin in September

Batman vs. Robin, along with the new Tim Drake: Robin series, appears to have taken the place of the ongoing Robin series starring Damian Wayne, which is not soliciting a new issue in September, which also follows writer Joshua Williamson's exit from that series with August's Robin #17.

Wonder if Damian could return in a new Robin series after Batman vs. Robin is done?

[Frontier]

I didn't read the Pride Special so I can only speculate blindly. I did read Urban Legends and I felt she did good work with the limited pages she had.


The Pride stories by their very nature I believe were designed to showcase LGBTQ pairings so one expects some heavy pandering going in. I would have been stunned if Fritzmartin used that story to fix or go into detail about Tim and Steph.

In my mind, Steph was always going to be a prop in that story because the goal was to push the new relationship.

Now that Fritzmartin has the pages to play with nothing stops her from elaborating on what happened between with Steph.

She's very tuned into social media and if she's savy then I expect she'll consider the feedback from frustrated fans and give them the closure they have been demanding.

There's a big crossover between Tim Fans and Steph fans. It'd be dumb to burn a significant percentage of your target audience when it's such an easy fix.

It's going to be very hard for Fitzmartin to write Tim and Steph after she spent a story basically showing Tim being a terrible ex-boyfriend to her and not even giving him that good of an excuse for breaking them up. Or Steph acting OOC. If there was closure, it wasn't a very satisfying one, at least if you're a fan of them as a couple.

I think the only service I can see Fitzmartin giving to the pair is for those who view them as hard best friends with no risk to the Bernard relationship. In fact let's just make Steph the biggest Bernard shipper of all time .

[NOCTPHOENIX]

It's going to be very hard for Fitzmartin to write Tim and Steph after she spent a story basically showing Tim being a terrible ex-boyfriend to her and not even giving him that good of an excuse for breaking them up. Or Steph acting OOC. If there was closure, it wasn't a very satisfying one, at least if you're a fan of them as a couple.

I think the only service I can see Fitzmartin giving to the pair is for those who view them as hard best friends with no risk to the Bernard relationship. In fact let's just make Steph the biggest Bernard shipper of all time .

The kind of people Fitzmartin listens to on twitter/tumblr are the shipping group who only care about ships. She will probably make them hard besties as this what these groups do to get Steph out of the way and have Tim only date men. WFA already did it.

[regg215]

As someone who once owned every single issue of Tims original run, its hard to say but this is an instant pass for me. The current DC writers are either not talented enough, lack the patience or have no sense of actual storytelling to convey the stories they are telling now in an effective manner.

Is it possible that you could make Tim drake a bi character, sure,
could you have him fall into a relationship with an old friend and drift away from stephanie- sure,
could you have stephanie come to terms with the change in her and tims relationship and even grow to be happy about it- sure.

However this would take time, it would be something that would gradually build over 15-20 issues, having events push Tim to confront things in his life and eventually embrace things he wasnt ready to before. Is this the direction that I would have ever taken with Tim, absolutely not, but it certainly could have been done and done with some effect by the right creative team, instead 30 years of a characters history, his key relationship and sense of identity all changed in the page length of what would probably be an annual. In basically 40 pages Tim breaks up with Stephanie, embraces being bi, tells everyone and is accepted by steph, in essentially one bleeping issue...

The problem is that the current writers cannot effectively turn the character they are writing into the character they want to write, so they illogically change the character and dumb down everyone around them to ensure their story can happen and once it's "Canon" it can never be changed and lets be honest that is all they want out of this. Fitzmartin doesn't seem to actually care about tim as a character, but instead making sure her fanfiction and tumblr fans get to emptily praise something that makes no sense. If they want to go this direction with Tim, then its absolutely DC's right to do so but all this Tim drake storyline has been is bad storytelling that has been able to hide as "representation", they full well published this knowing they could be immune from any criticism because anyone who objects is instantly labeled some sort of ist or phobe, making this change with Tim is fine and I am sure there are some happy about it but overall this was bad storytelling that was rushed because a lot of currenty writers lack the ability to actually tell the story they would need to in order to make the changes they want to happen make sense and that is sad for anyone who actually invested in these characters because it is an insult to the audience and an insult to the people who they allegedly are trying to represent.

[Digifiend]

The problem is they rushed it. We should've seen the break-up on panel.

[SixSpeedSamurai]

Same. I was so excited to see Tim was getting a new series, even if it were by Fitzmartin. She writes a serviceable Tim, not a prefect Tim, but a serviceable one. I thought the cover was hideous and then discovered who was drawing the book. Damn. I really want to buy this series, but I just can not get into Rossmo's artwork at all. I would hate for this book to fail because of the creative team and have DC feel like Tim is not a viable character.

Why couldn't they have gone with Ortega? She's way better than Rossmo and so far they have just given her small stories to do.