Sunday 1 March 2009

Sketch Sunday: Robin the Boy Wonder

The Sensational Character Find of 1940! Dick Grayson's Robin put in his first appearance in Detective Comics #38, a little under a year after Batman's crime-fight debut. Created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson, Robin brought an easily identifiable audience surrogate into the Bat-fold, lightening The Batman's grim urban procedurals. Dangling twitching giants from planes was out, team work was in! The Boy Wonder's immediate success sparked a slew of copycat sidekicking, forming a central tenet of the Golden Age of comics in the process. Although no longer Robin, the Grayson character still kicks it anti-crime, now operating under the much less exciting alias of Nightwing.

There's more than a little Burt Ward about this Robin, no bad thing considering not one live action portrayal has even come close to Ward's excitable punning brawler. He's always desperate for a scrap!

2 comments:

Mark Kardwell said...

I knew a guy who told me how he used to spend his summers working in a restaurant owned by Burt Ward. None of his stories exactly convinced me of either one's sanity.

Chris Ready said...

Heh he! Excellent! I've got to get hold of Ward's autobiography, I hear he was a right shagger in his day.