Four of Them

this used to be a batman blog, i swear

translatingtimothy:

EDITED TO ADD: Sorry everyone, but it seems my queue isn’t working (it didn’t post anything this week! Grrr.) It will take a bit more time to get through things as I have to log in and post manually instead of queuing >.< 

Before I get on the heavy stuff about this series (when the Joker’s involved, there’s a lot of it) I wanted to focus on this short scene. Tim’s at school and being approached by two groups of people, one of whom are his regular tabletop RPG group (wow Tim bet you have an alias that none of the other Batfamily members know that you use with your regular group because you probably wind down after a long/difficult job with RPG ^^), and the other by a “cool” guy. Being Robin is really cutting into Tim’s social life and private time: presumably one doesn’t simply get invited to a “killer Christmas party”. He’s also not doing as well as he usually does at school: he’s losing his concentration in class, he feels exhausted and sleepy, and he can’t spend as much time with his school friends as he likes. I’m noting this because while Dick probably started school locally after becoming a Robin, and so did Jason, they were both “new students”; Tim is already enrolled somewhere. While Dick would easily have made “civilian” friends, he at least had close bonds with the other Titans. Jason spent time with the Titans as well - uh, a more fruitful time than Damian’s, anyway; however, Tim had these friends before taking the mantle, so he must feel a bit guilty about keeping something like this from people he wants to be close to, or is used to being close to, even if he understands he has to protect his identity and Bruce’s.

 This isn’t just because of his late nights, but having all this extra work to do in order to find and/or stop criminals. The transition so far hasn’t been smooth, and on top of that, this is the first time he’s out in Gotham alone. In “Debut” he at least had the Big Bad Bat to back him up, so to speak, but in this issue, he looks especially vulnerable.

And then the Joker escapes.

Things aren’t looking good for Tim right now.

From Robin Series II #1