Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

By Lauren R. O'Connor

Holy adolescence, Batman! Robin and the Making of American Adolescence offers the first character history and analysis of the most famous superhero sidekick, Robin. Debuting just a few months after Batman himself, Robin has been an integral part of the Dark Knight’s history—and debuting just a few months prior to the word “teenager” first appearing in print, Robin has from the outset both reflected and reinforced particular images of American adolescence. Closely reading several characters who have “played” Robin over the past eighty years, Robin and the Making of American Adolescence reveals the Boy (and sometimes Girl!) Wonder as a complex figure through whom mainstream culture has addressed anxieties about adolescents in relation to sexuality, gender, and race. This book partners up comics studies and adolescent studies as a new Dynamic Duo, following Robin as he swings alongside the ever-changing American teenager and finally shining the Bat-signal on the latter half of “Batman and—.”
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978819818

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Cover Page for Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

Comics Culture

Edited by Corey K. Creekmur

Volumes in the Comics Culture series explore the artistic, historical, social, and cultural significance of newspaper comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels, with individual titles devoted to focused studies of key titles, characters, writers, and artists throughout the history of comics; additional books in the series address major themes or topics in comics studies, including prominent genres, national traditions, and significant historical and theoretical issues. The series recognizes comics of all varieties, from mainstream comic books to graphic nonfiction, produced between the late nineteenth century and the present. The books in the series are intended to contribute significantly to the rapidly expanding field of comics studies but are also designed to appeal to comics fans and casual readers who seek smart critical engagement with the best examples of the form.

Bart Beaty, Twelve-Cent Archie

Noah Berlatsky, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948

Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon

Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics

Lauren R. O’Connor, Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

Qiana Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest

Paul Young, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism

Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

Lauren R. O’Connor

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: O’Connor, Lauren R., author.

Title: Robin and the making of American adolescence / Lauren R. O’Connor.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: Comics culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020049809 | ISBN 9781978819795 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978819801 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978819818 (epub) | ISBN 9781978819825 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978819832 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Robin, the Boy Wonder (Fictitious character) | Adolescence in literature. | Sidekicks in literature. | Superheroes.

Classification: LCC PN6728.R576 O36 2021 | DDC 741.5/973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049809

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Lauren R. O’Connor

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Brian

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

The Secret Origins of Adolescence

Chapter Two

Robin, Nightwing, Batman: The Shifting Sexuality of Dick Grayson

Chapter Three

Girls Wonder: Young Female Robins in the Modern Age of Comics

Chapter Four

Mixed Signals: Adolescence, Race, and Robin

Chapter Five

The Sidekick on Screen: Images of Robin in Television and Film

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

Arguably the most widely known adolescent character in American literature is Robin, sidekick to Batman. Even from a very young age, nearly all Americans can finish the phrase Batman and . . . Many of those who are perhaps too young to know much about classical literary adolescents, like The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield or the titular Huckleberry Finn, or perhaps too old to have been captivated by The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen can likely recall that Robin is a superhero who fights crime in Gotham City alongside Batman, and most of those could probably even describe his costume.¹ Yet despite Robin’s ubiquity, very little criticism or analysis exists on the character.

What is it about Robin that has resisted critical engagement? I wonder if, subconsciously, Robin reminds those invested in defending comics (and the superhero genre more specifically) of everything by which it was once negatively defined. As Angela Ndalianis notes, Despite [comics’] immense popularity, the public perception for a long time was that comics were a kid’s medium—or, more specifically, a young boy’s medium. As such, it was generally perceived . . . as the lowliest of popular culture media.² In the last few decades, however, comics have more or less come to be regarded as potent sources of artistic, literary, and cultural production. But it is possible that Robin remains, in the larger cultural consciousness, an emblem of everything that makes comics less legitimate. Robin is silly, unserious, childish; Robin is rarely positioned to offer informed critiques of neoliberalism, the war on terror, surveillance capitalism, or sexual politics, as many of the most celebrated superhero stories manage to do. In turn, comics scholarship has, for the most part, left the figure out of its character histories and explorations of grim-and-gritty superhero comics that are not just for kids anymore, because Robin is, in fact, just for kids.

This book begins from exactly this premise—that Robin is a youthful character meant for consumption by mostly youthful readers—and then considers what creators have communicated through Robin about youth, adulthood, and the process of getting from one to the other.

Rejoining Comics and Youth

This book is far from the first to reassert the obvious relationship between youth studies and comics studies. The receptivity toward child and adolescent studies in comics has been nearly twenty years in the making. In Charles Hatfield’s Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comic Studies, he effectively argues that comics studies’ prior avoidance of the subject constituted a profound mistake, for the association between comics and childhood is long, complex, and crucial to understanding comics history.³ In the past two decades, many scholars have taken up the call to reunite youth and comics in academia, reflecting their lasting partnership in the popular consciousness.

The two books that most closely resemble this one in their approach to comics and youth studies bookend these decades: Bradford Wright’s Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (2001) and Lara Saguisag’s Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (2019).⁴ Like this project, Wright’s book covers a broad temporal swath in the history of comics and pays particular attention to the superhero genre. Wright asserts that comic books have played a crucial explanatory, therapeutic, and commercial function in young lives.⁵ However, Wright grants no special attention to the portrayal of youth in comics; rather, he takes the existence of teenagers for granted, arguing that comics have been an integral part of adolescent culture. Wright does not go so far as to question the phenomenon of adolescence itself or argue how comics might reflect or reinforce certain ideas about teenagers. Conversely, I am interested in precisely the way Robin has swung alongside incredibly intricate social and political trends that have, collectively, made adolescence throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Unlike Comic Book Nation, Lara Saguisag’s Incorrigibles and Innocents specifically addresses images of youth in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American comics and comic strips. Saguisag is forthright about childhood’s immateriality, pointing to its construction right in her title—as this book does for adolescence. Incorrigibles and Innocents and this book both examine the social construction of supposedly natural life stages, denaturing them and demonstrating their roles in nation building and shoring up the construction of other social identities, like race, gender, and sexuality. Both books likewise use the medium of comics to view and disentangle some of these coconstructions. Saguisag’s work underscores the centrality of childhood to the development of the comics medium and explores how early comic creators used the image of the child, at once strange and intimately familiar, to probe other societal boundaries surrounding race, class, and gender.⁶ Incorrigibles and Innocents is complex and thorough, as detailed in its analyses of Progressive Era comics and conceptions of childhood as the delicate, layered renderings of R. F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley; Saguisag delves deep and takes her subject very seriously. This book, on the other hand, strikes a different tone.

I do not mean to say that I don’t take my work seriously. I very much do. But this project retains a lightness, of which I am aware and unashamed, for two primary reasons. First, this is the first book-length study of Robin, a character with over eighty years of consistent publication history. Rather than focus on a specific time period or DC Comics title or even a single iteration of Robin (for there have been several), I have chosen to take a broad approach and selected Robin’s most obvious and enduring trait—adolescence—as the primary lens through which I read the character. I am barely scratching the surface of all this figure can tell us in an effort to provide an introduction and an invitation.

Second, I have learned by sifting through decades’ worth of Batman, Detective Comics, Robin, and Batman and Robin, among other titles, that Robin simply resists being taken too seriously. The character brings a lightness to Batman comics, and that light carries over into this text as well. Writing about Robin also requires acknowledging that there has been significant reluctance to pay much academic attention to the subject, bordering on willful ignorance. Those outside of comics fandom and scholarship tend to think of Robin as a weird blip in Batman’s history, convinced by the likes of Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, and Zack Snyder that Robin is not central to the Batman mythos. What they do know of Robin is often influenced heavily by perceptions of the 1960s Batman television show and Robin’s gee golly nature therein (aided by a conflation of camp and silliness, when the former is far more nuanced). Those within comics studies have for the most part neglected the figure, despite Robin’s incredible longevity. Robin has been a DC Comics feature or title character since his introduction in 1940 and has appeared, in some iteration or another, in scores of films and television programs.

Though this is the first book-length work on Robin, Kristen L. Geaman has edited a volume of scholarly essays and creator interviews about the first character to play Robin entitled Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing, and Batman. Like this project, Geaman’s own contribution to that volume highlights the first Robin’s adolescence as a defining trait, comparing Dick Grayson to the protagonist of a traditional bildungsroman.⁷ Yet the bildungsroman itself positions adulthood as the goal and ending of the story; it renders adolescence as little more than a pathway to the teleological inevitability of maturity rather than a phenomenon worthy of investigation on its own—and therefore misses the opportunity to investigate this phenomenon through Robin.

Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder also takes only one of the seven major characters who have been Robin as its focus. Whereas Batman has been Bruce Wayne for all but a handful of nonconsecutive years of his long history,⁸ the role of Robin has been filled in notable fashion by four white boys, one of whom is a poor juvenile delinquent; two white girls; and a young Black boy (though this last one’s Robin status is a bit hazy). I contend that even Robin’s consistent replacement and creators’ experimentation with different social identities for the figure are indicative of something essential about adolescence—namely, its liminality and the way we can envision many potentialities for adolescents, whereas the perception of adult identity is more permanent, fixed, calcified.

TABLE 1. A SUMMARY OF ALL ROBINS PAST

* This issue is the more popular and well known of Jason Todd’s two introductions. The first came in 1984, but it was rewritten after the DC Comics event story line Crisis on Infinite Earths.

** Though Tim Drake partially appeared in Batman #436, 439, and 440, he was not named and shown in full until issue #441.

*** Like Tim Drake, Damian Wayne appeared in shadow and silhouette in Batman #655; he was shown in full in Batman #656 and named in issue #657.

Though Geaman’s edited volume is the only work on library shelves about any Robin figure, several books that essentially serve as character histories about other superheroes exist. By far the most library real estate is taken up by histories of and pontifications about Superman and Batman, though two books published in the last several years begin to give Wonder Woman the attention she merits.⁹ Conventional wisdom would suggest books about the Dark Knight would contain lots of information about Robin, one of his most constant companions, but conventional wisdom would be mistaken. Mentions of Robin in many such texts often amount to scapegoating, offering Robin as a sacrifice to the gods of staking out Batman’s relevance or as casual asides that position Robin as little more than filler for a pocket on Batman’s utility belt.

Take, for example, Will Brooker’s seminal Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. In it, he offers a five-sentence, minimalist explanation of who Batman is, including He is often helped by his sidekick, Robin.¹⁰ But something rather odd happens in Brooker’s discussion of his sidekick, Robin: the first subsection of the book ostensibly devoted to Robin becomes focused instead on changes to Batman’s moral code. Brooker details Batman’s shift from early moral ambiguity to a stricter sense of right and wrong, a revision that saw the Dark Knight give up guns and commit to never taking a life. While this shift is no doubt important and did occur simultaneously with Robin’s introduction, it induces a sort of thematic whiplash in readers who assumed the section would be about Batman’s trusty sidekick.

Like Brooker, historian Jill Lepore seems invested in ignoring Robin’s place in comic book history: she begins her 2017 bestseller The Secret History of Wonder Woman with these lines: Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long.¹¹ This is objectively false, as Robin was introduced in 1940, several months prior to Wonder Woman’s introduction in 1941, and has never been out of print since. And just as Lepore’s work reveals that Wonder Woman can teach us much about women’s history in the United States, Robin appears to be a similar avatar in the history of American adolescence.

In other words, portrayals of Robin offer the opportunity to analyze how producers have represented their young readers better than any other character in the history of the genre. Reading Robin reveals what mainstream culture thought and thinks about the American adolescent—and the adolescent is, I argue, merely what the larger culture thinks it is. Modern American adolescence, as the title of this work implies, is not a static state of being or universal biological experience. Instead, it is a social construction: adolescence is made.

Making Adolescence

In my training to become a professional adolescent counselor and several years of work in the field (fun fact: I am still licensed as of this writing), I was taught to rely on models of adolescent development that assume a relatively universal experience, one that is an essential part of growing up and that was only just discovered and articulated in America in the first half of the twentieth century. However, I found these models to be lacking nuance, as though enforcing a sameness on young people of different backgrounds and social identities that did not really seem to exist or only existed when it was mapped onto them by educators and parents. The frameworks I was taught to use also do not account for the fact that as little as a century and a half ago, Americans saw adolescents and experienced their own adolescence very differently than today, leading me to question the very foundation of collective knowledge regarding teens.

As I learned when I began researching the origins of adolescence, the word teenager is fewer than one hundred years old, though I use the terms teenager and adolescent interchangeably in this book. Despite the linguistic reference teenager makes to the years ending in -teen, the term originates as a description of a sociopolitical state of being, not a particular age range. While individuals throughout history have experienced their thirteenth through nineteenth years, there is no record of the word teenager in print until the 1940s (though there is some disagreement as to the specific date of the term’s first appearance). Leerom Medovoi, in his Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (2005), credits historian William Manchester’s work for illuminating an early published record of the term: in a 1945 New York Times Magazine article titled A Teen-Age Bill of Rights.¹² Though the article did not specify an age range, Medovoi traces the way it responds specifically to the prewar construction and refinement of the adolescent.

Medovoi summarizes the construction of the adolescent, noting it was designed as a dependent whose physical maturity belied the need for adult supervision and instruction.¹³ This supervision was achieved primarily through education: schools became a means for the professional middle class to impart its values and ensure its reproduction. In other words, adolescence represented a condition of—and case for—a lengthening state of dependency.¹⁴ It was this sense of extended dependence, this sort of enforced childhood, against which the Teen-Age Bill of Rights protested.

The adolescent and the teenager are thus two sides of the same coin, bought and sold by adults for their value in maintaining hegemonic order and opening new markets. The adolescent represents a pseudoscientific construction, used as a means of reproducing middle-class norms; the teenager is the sociopolitical response to the adolescent, intimately linked to youths’ demands for freedom and individuality. These demands were ultimately neutralized by a marketplace that was more than willing to accommodate rebellion and individuality through the consumption of cars, comics, and rock and roll, thus reinforcing the dominance of the adult and bourgeois values yet again. My usage of adolescent and teenager as relatively interchangeable highlights the ways in which they both function to achieve the same end: casting the younger individual, regardless of actual age, as inherently different and in need of some form of administration and control.

Through this lengthened state of dependence, the idea of adolescence was molded into a powerful mechanism by which white heteropatriarchal dominance perpetuates itself, fueled by fin de siècle and Progressive Era American anxieties about citizenship and power in a rapidly industrializing and globalizing world. As I explore in detail in chapter 1, the transition from childhood to adulthood grew from a threshold to be crossed into a long, winding hallway to be navigated under the close watch of schools, play reformers, coaches, and parents. By extending childhood and its requisite supervision, adolescence allowed powerful individuals and institutions to define what the process of maturation—and its end goal of an idealized form of maturity—looked like. Successfully completing this process thus became contingent on one’s resemblance to those already holding the most power—namely, white, heterosexual, and male. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t exit the crucible of adolescence with these traits were considered waylaid or arrested in their development, unable to achieve full maturity and the rights and privileges it offers.

The socially constructed aspects of the adolescent are hidden beneath a veneer of medical, pseudomedical, and educational literature that defines adolescence through shared traits like irresponsibility, poor judgment, and overemotionality. These traits combine to make the adolescent more dismissible than the adult—as in, we don’t have to take teenagers seriously, with their raging hormones and impulsive decisions. These connotations of adolescence cover over the cultural work adolescence performs in maintaining the hegemonic status quo, but reading Robin allows us to witness creators (intentionally or unintentionally) reinforcing the narrow pathway to idealized maturity through this adolescent figure, one who is ostensibly in line to inherit a heroic role and legacy.

It is for this reason that four of the seven Robins in DC Comics history rise to the fore of this work. I am most interested in those figures who represent detours on the pathway to idealized maturity: Dick Grayson (queer), Carrie Kelley and Stephanie Brown (female), and Duke Thomas (Black). How writers resolve or don’t resolve these characters’ eventual growth into adulthood