Tim Drake is a brilliant idiot

[SPOILERS below for the most recent issue of Detective Comics. No, I don't think the title of this post is a spoiler, just a self-evident statement that's been true since the Nineties]

Sometimes you love a character because they're a precious little cinnamon roll who has done nothing wrong. Sometimes you love a character because they're a self-destructive idiot and you enjoy watching the trainwreck.

So Tim Drake's back from the dead and being an idiot.

The thing about Tim Drake, a thing that I love about him, is that he's an arrogant little son of a bitch. I adore him but he absolutely is. He has that problem of being so often the smartest person in the room that he relies on it and tends to have a massive blindspot for how other people are going to feel about his decisions, especially when he doesn't explain that he's even made a decision.

Right now his decision is to embrace the future he's glimpsed where he becomes Batman. His plan before that was to set up Batman with a team and then swan off to Ivy Town for university and making the world a better place through computer science. As far as Steph Brown, his girlfriend who is very pleased to see him alive again, that's still the plan. Tim is being Tim about thing and changing the plan whilst assuring himself that she'll see how good the new plan is and come around to it without him actually explaining himself.

Yay for emotional honesty in relationships, am I right?

James Tynion really gets Tim's characters because this is the perfect Tim move: its essentially selfless (he's giving up his dreams to alter his destiny and avoid becoming a fascist dickbag); its logical (because fighting this destiny actually causes him to become a fascist dickbag); and, most importantly, its going to explode in his face. Hell, he even has Kate, a woman who admits to being the crappy partner in most of her relationships, telling him he's being an idiot and he's just not listening.

I look forward to seeing the flaming ruins of his arrogant good intentions in the future. 

A Lonely Place of Living: picking up the breadcrumbs

First of all, this moment is very, very sweet. One of the changes to Cass' character I do like in the Rebirth continuity is that she's a lot closer to the family in emotional terms. Back in the day there was affection, yes, but she always held herself a little distant. Also, someone whose primary language is physical should probably make more use of physical contact than she usually did.

Anyway, as sweet as this (and Tim and Luke being complete comp-sci nerds) is what I'm really interested in talking about is the latest little breadcrumb in the mystery of Conner Kent. Here it is:

So, more confirmation that Tim does not remember Conner. Considering that, contrary to my memory, the New 52 Superboy did use that name for a while this might indicate that he has been removed from history. After all, no one's so much as mentioned him since Rebirth started. Either that or Tim literally cannot connect the concepts of “New 52 Superboy” and “friend” which... is not totally out of the question.

The guy was an epic tool, let's face it.

However, this does suggest that somewhere deep in Tim's subconscious he does remember Conner, that there is an emotion tied to the name. A rather shippy, slashy emotion apparently.

This could conceivably be the same process as we saw with Wally West the elder at the very beginning of Rebirth, another consequence of that “stolen decade” business. We know from the experiences that Barry Allen and the original Titans had that memories can be restored from the old history even if it can be a bit oddly selective (none of the Titans remember Cyborg or Beast Boy being on the team back in the day) or perhaps indicates that this is not quite the pre-Flashpoint history that was changed.

The plot thickens and we're only halfway through this arc. 

Untangling Detective Comics #966

[This post MAJOR SPOILERS for Detective Comics #966 as well as recent events in the Batwoman ongoing which also has implications for the whole meta-narrative of Rebirth as well as my own unsupported speculation, be warned, they begin right after the header picture.]

Oh, sweet Jesus, time travel in a multiverse involving the timeline of a character I have an unnatural in-depth knowledge of. Its Christmas come early!

Context: this week's issue of Detective Comics, the second part of A Lonely Place Of Living, features the current Red Robin version of Tim Drake (as seen since the dawn of the New 52) and a future version of himself who is Batman (as mentioned in the recent flashforward issue of Batwoman) being chased through Mr. Oz's prison by Doomsday (the New 52 version that killed Superman except he didn't because there was only one Superman now not two so that's sort of undefined at this point).

Mixed up in all this was a recent promise by James Tynion IV that this issue would bring us some answers on the question of Conner Kent, the pre-Flashpoint Superboy. The issue sort of delivers on that but also uses these answers to set up more mysteries.

So, where to begin?

Tim!Bats: Who He Is And How He Came To Be

Firstly, the future Batman who is Tim Drake and uses guns including the gun used by Joe Chill to kill the Waynes. This Batman originally appeared in a Teen Titans storyline by Geoff Johns over a decade ago. In that story Tim, along with a bunch of the Titans, have turned all-out fascist. In fact, one of the first glimpses we get into how bad things have gotten for the characters is Tim executing Duela Dent, the Joker's Daughter (she was a nicer, more whimsical character in those days and wasn't wearing anyone's face but her own).

Except maybe he's not quite that version of gun-totting Batman Tim Drake. This future Tim says he remembers “an echo” of the conversation he has with present day Tim, a conversation in different context but where he (future Tim) was equally horrified by the depths to which his future self had fallen.

The conversation he is referring to is quite specifically not the one he's currently having with his past self here. Logically, then its the conversation Tim had in Teen Titans with his own future.

The future Batman here is Tim from the pre-Flashpoint continuity who remembers meeting his future self and, in spite of all the warning, still chose to go down this route of being a Batman who kills because he felt driven to it after Bruce's death. However, he also remembers events from the life Tim is now living (or was going to before his abduction) as he refers to getting maybe a couple of months into his life as a student in Ivy Town before being drawn back into the world of costumed vigilantism. In the flashbacks to his native time we also see a conversation between the future versions of Anarky and Spoiler which ties in to the recent Utopia/Dystopia two-parter, though clearly a version of events where either that relationship didn't fall apart or the two reconciled in later years.

Future Tim claims that certain events are fixed so the obvious conclusion is that if the pre-Flashpoint continuity had continued it would have reached the status quo Johns set out and it would have passed through at least some of the events of Rebirth.

Considering that the whole premise of Rebirth was to restore a whole bunch of pre-Flashpoint continuity this isn't surprising. Presumably then the future we're dealing with here is one unfiddled with by whatever “stole a decade” from the DC universe.

It is also the future as seen in Batwoman, a Rebirth-continuity series.

Two options: either this future is inevitable (as it happens in both pre-Flashpoint and Rebirth continuity) or something is going to happen now future Tim is loose in the present to make this future happen, Terminator-style.

Then there's Conner Kent.

Kon Artistry

The big twist at the end of the issue is that future Tim remembers Conner but present Tim does not. This isn't much of a surprise as even the New 52 version of Conner (who never adopted the name, I don't think) hasn't even been referred to since Rebirth. Neither version was even present in the flashback to The Death Of Superman during the recent tour of Superman continuity that established what was and wasn't canon in the new continuity where the two New 52-era Clarks have been merged into a single history.

This might or might not be meaningful. It might tie into what we're talking about here or if might just have been editorial buying themselves time over a character they had no real use for.

So, is Conner coming back? It all comes down to whether we're dealing with two distinct futures with similar aspects or some unified future no matter which timeline we're looking at. The future we see in this issue has both Conner (not a part of the future we see in Batwoman) and Commissioner Montoya of Free Gotham (both featured in the Batwoman issue).

If the future Batman Tim comes from is exactly the same future we saw in Batwoman, if it is the future of the Rebirth continuity, then it makes sense that Conner's presence within that future means there's some future planned for the character. If, however, the lack of Conner in the Rebirth continuity is just a good mechanical way to establish that time is mutable and this dark future can be prevented (as Batman Tim actually says in the issue) then it makes sense that he'll stay gone.

Or both these theories could be way off because Tynion is a better writer than me or just because this was all a cute nod for fans rather than something deep and meaningful that a sane person would spend the better part of a thousand words trying to noodle out. 

Batfamily Dynamics: Tim and Cass

There were never enough scenes of Tim and Cass having dick measuring contests. That might sound an immature way of describing their dynamic but I stand by it. Here was had the two Bat-characters who had some claim to being better than Batman: the girl who could outfight him and the boy who could out-think him.

And in their later pre-Flashpoint incarnations as Black Bat and Red Robin they bounced off each other amazingly. They didn't get enough chance to do it, Cass' chronic lack of a series saw to that.

Grief, was DC ever had a bigger missed opportunity than Cass as Black Bat? She's still Cass Cain but she's operating as Hong Kong's Batman! Hong Kong! Just imagine the stories a setting like that could have generated.

Ugh, water under the retcon, I suppose.

Anyway, one way Rebirth has done right by me is putting these two in the same title. True, Cass is a very different character (and I do like the new Cass, mind) but I do hope they delve into this dynamic again sometime soon.

And if I'm lacking enough sass in Detective Comics there's always Tim and Steph's relationship to tide me over...

Jumping Ship (Tim Drake, Steph Brown and Harper Row)

First, let me say this so there's no ambiguity: I'm grateful that Steph is back. I like the way she's being brought back: origin polished up a bit, still in keeping with the character we remember and with earnest promises that there are plans for her after Batman Eternal wraps. This is good, I'm glad to see it and very enthused for where its all going next, but...

My God, am I seeing great chemistry between Tim Drake and Harper Row!

It certainly helps that Eternal has taken the New 52 Tim and reverted him to type just a little. Tim is one of those characters to me, we all have them, who is so bound up in how I got into comics that I'm a bit precious about him. Chuck Dixon's Robin wasn't the first series I read but it was the first series I went looking for back issues and collections of, the first time I learned to look for a creator's name. I watched this character grow through Dixon's run, through Young Justice, through Bill Willingham's run (look, we all make mistakes) and then to become a truly spectacular solo act in the Red Robin ongoing.

Then it all got swept away. I'll say this straight: I am not a fan of the new origin Scott Lobdell set down in Teen Titans #0 or the whole attitude of trying to place Tim totally outside the Bat-family. What I like about Eternal's Tim is that he's back in Gotham yet retains the lone wolf vibe he developed coming out of Batman Reborn plus the one aspect of the New 52 version I liked: his focus on looking out for the young people who suffer when the adults fight.

Add to this mix young Harper Row, future Robin-esque Bat-sidekick (according to that Eternal teaser that interrupted Zero Year) who has enforced her help on Tim the way Tim did to Batman back in the day. Okay, that's not such a good description of Tim's new origin but the New 52 is more about cultural memory than a literal chain of events laid down by continuity. That's my theory and it helps to make the New 52 a bit more palatable and comprehensible. She's also as dedicated to her own area of social justice as he is, except her focus is the poor of Gotham rather than the young of the world.

Of course, their mutual arrogance has placed the two of them in conflict almost since the moment they met but Tim has something of a history with stubborn women. Almost exclusively with stubborn women, now I think about it, between Steph, Lynx, Wonder Girl and Tam Fox.

You know, listing it out like that it occurs to me just how celibate Tim's been since Flashpoint. I think the only time he's managed to get any in the last three years was when he got possessed by Trigon and fooled around with Solstice which... ugh, no.

What I'm basically saying is this: we have two alpha-type personalities who are techy, stubborn and arrogant and I really want to see the sparks fly.