Batman #46 Preview / Discussion

[HsssH]

He doesn't have to be a show-stealer to overshadow other characters. Its kinds why Moore killed Holms and Dracula in his LXG before the start of the series. Regardless of how badly written or irrelevant "popular" characters are to the main plot, people tend to pay more attention to them simply due to familiarity. Thats why almost every vampire movie has Dracula or some reference to him, because most of the viewers watching vampire movies, at some point, think "how Dracula works in this setting?".

With Damian, its likely that couple of irrelevant panels with him would attract more attention than 5 pages of Duke doing something important. Its really same argument that people make about Batman guess staring in other books - he is going to take control of the story because people care more about him than some random D-list hero.

[InSavnity]

He doesn't have to be a show-stealer to overshadow other characters. Its kinds why Moore killed Holms and Dracula in his LXG before the start of the series. Regardless of how badly written or irrelevant "popular" characters are to the main plot, people tend to pay more attention to them simply due to familiarity. Thats why almost every vampire movie has Dracula or some reference to him, because most of the viewers watching vampire movies, at some point, think "how Dracula works in this setting?".

With Damian, its likely that couple of irrelevant panels with him would attract more attention than 5 pages of Duke doing something important. Its really same argument that people make about Batman guess staring in other books - he is going to take control of the story because people care more about him than some random D-list hero.

I must admit I never read anything from Moore's LXG production and your comment doesn't encourage me to do it any time soon. If what you write is true, far from having evolved as an author, Alan must instead have lost much of his verve. I've read a lot of opinions and commentaries about his work on Swamp Thing and never once I found any of those where the commenter complained that Batman had "stolen the thunder" or "overshadowed" the titular character during the narrative arc taking place in Gotham just before the space trip.

But back to Damian's situation, I strongly disagree with everything you wrote in the second part of your post. While it's happened rather frequently in the past (and it's still happening now) that an author was feeling a form of reverence for a long-established character that prevented him/her from exploiting their artistic vein to the fullest of its extent, Damian is definitely not an immortal icon of fiction and the only person in control of what ends up on the written page is and always will be the author and no one else. Otherwise how would you describe works of fiction that take some long-established characters and turn them into something compltely different and ten times more shoddy? You know, like that recent Dracula movie where he's turned into some kind of X-Man. Moore didn't dare touch him, but apparently somebody didn't have as many scruples. And Bram Stoker's creation apparently did jack squat while the depths of his character were used to wipe a director and a screenwriter's butts.

[Aioros22]

First of all it's Damian not Damien, secondly Tim Drake remained relevant through out GM's run and of course it's hypocrisy and beyond that it shows criminal ignorance of the history of Robins. All Robins were 10 year olds when they started,if Snyder is uncomfortable with that then he should avoid Robin entirely. There is no way he's selling me a 16 year old normal kid is better than a 11 year old genetically perfected child of Bruce and Talia who can have his organs and limbs replaced in case of injury. Even if we take Snyder's words at face value it still does not prevent him from just writing or even acknowledging Damian as Bruce's son only,he doesn't have to write him as Robin.

It`s mosly semantics, sure, but neither Tim or Jason were 10 year old when they started training as far as I recall, in either continuity. That being said, even if it`s hypocritical for Snyder to not write Damian for that reason alone, he`s got a right to it, since other writers deal with Damian and Snyder still wrote him in the mandatory crossovers in the beginning. And as a reader I just respect that since I get that material anyway.

It doesn`t strike me as that odd a writer prefering to write a teen able to basically be an action hero, when golden age sidekicks and 80`s action flicks were full of it. I can understand being easier to digest even if "Comics".