Roughly a year after the gun-toting Batman made his first appearance (I'm not kidding about the guns - Batman would have been a good poster child for the National Rifle Association), he adopted Dick Grayson and promptly broke all kinds of child protection laws by training him to fight bad guys. Oddly enough, Dr. Fredric Wertham never picked up on that particular issue....
I haven't read Bob Kane's autobiography, so I don't know what his sixty-years-later take on the events is, but I figure it was largely a sales gimmick. You want the young boy market to buy more of your books? OK, throw a young boy into the stories for them to identify with. It must have worked, because Robin has been around ever since. Not only that, but he paved the way for a truckload of other sidekicks: Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Bucky Barnes, Rick Jones, and so on.
These days, the 'Robin' character is probably best known for a stunt that DC pulled a few years ago, where they threw the fate of the character (not Dick Grayson, by the way, but rather the delinquent who replaced him when Grayson become 'Nightwing') to the whims of the comics audience. Get this: his life depended on the outcome of readership votes cast via telephone. Gives you kind of Bread-and-circus-y feeling, doesn't it?
Needless to say, there was a Robin-shattering ka-boom.
- NP
