0.68%

🦞

[72votes]

The classic Robin costume—what is the truth under the red tunic?

ONE-PIECE green leotard 🩱

TWO-PIECE green undershirt + briefs 👕🩲

ONE-PIECE for wear, TWO-PIECE for display cases

ONE-PIECE for Dick Grayson, TWO-PIECE for Jason Todd

Voting ended onMay 13, 2025

The current theme is "THE PANTS MAKE THE MAN: SHORT PANTS, BIG OPINIONS"—on Robin, pants(lessness), and culture.

[pixie-stick-it-to-the-man]

I love when writers just go off the rails to try and fix minor continuity errors like grant wdym bruce dyed his hair???? Girl what???

[iconuk01]

Bruce didn't dye Jason's hair, but Jason did, in the first go-round of Jason's Robin origin

Jason V1.0 (the circus performer) was a strawberry blond

Whose first impromptu Robin costume (long story) was this

Then several months later, for even more complicated reasons, Jason used a spare original costume in his size to join Batman on a case and mentions...

And he never went back to blond.

Then hsi whole origin got rejigged and he'd never been a redhead.

So Morrison is sort of referencing a no longer quite valid plotpoint, and getting that one wrong too! :)

[pixie-stick-it-to-the-man]

That’s so wild!

[iconuk01]

Honestly, as someone who was there at the time, we really weren't. That's been unfairly amped up by DC and some portions of the fanbase, I feel.

Dick was clearly outgrowing the role of Robin over in the pages of the much better selling than Batman, "New Teen Titans".

So the introduction of Jason Todd was a precursor to Dick giving up the role and then handing it on to Jason with in a way that bursts Bruce's heart with parental pride.

The fact that Jason was a blond carbon copy of Dick's origin was more or less accetped as necessary shorthand to get a kid with the right skills to be Robin up and running in short order.

Yes, there were some raised eyebrows and resigned sighs at the parallels or outright copying, but people were more glad to have Dick being able to be Nightwing and Batman having a Robin again, than anything, I think.

And I think it's important to note that Jason 1.0 lasted over four years worth of stories, including adventures with his old circus, some soap opera with him being adopted by someone else and moments like him being penpals with another junior hero, Kid Devil from the "Blue Beetle" series, and even helping out the Titans.

Street punk Jason 2.0, on the other hand, for all his having an interesting and different take, lasted little more than a year and a half of issues before he was gratuitously killed off.

And Jason 1.0 has been near studiously ignored by DC in terms of reprints, which seems unfair.

[about-faces]

It doesn’t help that Jason 1.0’s stories are pretty much entirely consigned to the runs by Gerry Conway and then Doug Moench, which were almost entirely ongoing stories rather than the sorts of shorter, standalone stuff that could get reprinted later. That’s always been my suspicion, anyway. Those stories are too tied up in their respective story arc contexts.

Thankfully, DC at least put out collections of Conway’s run, although I think those collections are likely way out of print. Not to mention the confusion of splitting the collections up by artists Gene Colan on Batman and Don Newton on Detective, meaning readers would have to jump between two different books every alternating chapter to keep up.

[72votes]

26 October 1988

The Washington Post headline for the death of Robin, Batman's youthful sidekick

Headline by The Washington Post; syndicated feature from Alexandra Peers of The Wall Street Journal

[72votes]

Robin's belt will save him if he's choked, smoked or dunked. It has an air supply mask, fire extinguisher and flotation device. He's also got something up his sleeve—food concentrates. But I shouldn't go on in this frivolous fashion. Batman has spent a tortured year or so since the death of Robin.

— updates to the new and improved Robin costume, as communicated by DC Comics Inc. to the St. Louis Post Dispatch // Tuesday, October 23, 1990

[72votes]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WISHES to all the September 15-16 babies.

[72votes]

Robin's belt will save him if he's choked, smoked or dunked. It has an air supply mask, fire extinguisher and flotation device. He's also got something up his sleeve—food concentrates. But I shouldn't go on in this frivolous fashion. Batman has spent a tortured year or so since the death of Robin.

— updates to the new and improved Robin costume, as communicated by DC Comics Inc. to the St. Louis Post Dispatch // Tuesday, October 23, 1990

[cashrulezbisous]

[heroesriseandfall]

The more time that passes since Dick stopped wearing his original Robin costume and Vic and Roy still call him “short pants,” the funnier it gets.

Here is the last time Vic got to call Dick short pants while he was still in “short pants”:

New Teen Titans Vol. 1 #39 (Feb 1984) — even in this same issue it’s shown as a leotard, not literal shorts, yet the nickname remains!

But Vic doesn’t let the fully-leg-covering Nightwing suits stop him (and neither does Roy):

New Teen Titans Vol. 2 #37 (Nov 1987) — IRL almost 4 years since Dick became Nightwing, in-universe at least over 1 year

Titans Vol. 1 #1 (Mar 1999) — IRL 15 years since Dick became Nightwing, in-universe ~3-4 years later

Titans Vol. 2 #44 (Oct 2002) — IRL over 18 years since Dick became Nightwing, in-universe ~5 years later

Titans East Special #1 (Jan 2008) — IRL almost 24 years later, in-universe over 6 years later

Titans Vol. 2 #7 (Jan 2009) — IRL almost 25 years later, in-universe over 6 years later

This is what you lose when you try to pretend Dick had pants as Robin :(

Titans Vol. 4 #2 (Aug 2023) —these pants are a lie! they should just keep calling him short pants. to be fun and silly, because I like it.

Other characters have called him it before, too, but I couldn’t find any of the rest of them continuing to do it years later. Also if anyone can find more panels calling Nightwing “short pants,” please do share because I find them very amusing.

[heroesriseandfall]

@cleromancy OLLIE?

Found it, you were right it was Winick, found it in his GA run by checking for Dick’s appearances:

Green Arrow (2001) #49

Not gonna lie, it feels way weirder when the adultier adults do it. It’s a Titans nickname to me. Did Ollie start calling him that independently, or did he just hear it from Roy so many times he copied it???

Maybe Winick really likes the nickname because he’s the most prevalent writer here. He wrote this panel, but also Titans East Special and Titans v2 #7. Wolfman wrote the NTT ones, Devin Grayson wrote Titans v1 #1, Tom Peyer wrote Titans v1 #44. So there’s a variety of writers but Winick is the only one rivaling Wolfman…though maybe this’ll change if I find more, as I’m certain this isn’t comprehensive.

[sapphyreblayze]

The Un-Made Batman Cartoon featuring Jason Todd as Robin

So I posted about this on twitter ages ago, but I felt the need to share it here too, since tumblr is a much better platform for archiving things.

There was an un-made Batman cartoon in the 1980s starring Bruce and Jason as Batman and Robin and the writer’s bible for it is available to read online.

It is literally the cutest thing I have ever read, and everyday I curse the gods that it didn’t get made. Here’s just a selection of the cuteness from this thing:

                                                        ~***~

                                                         ~***~

…and there’s way, way more but I don’t want this post getting really long. The whole thing can be read here: 

http://www.criticalblast.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_image_full_node/public/field/image/Batman%20Writers%20Bible.pdf

and I would absolutely recommend you do so. And please, make this a widely known thing in the fandom, so we can all collectively mourn its loss.

[arcade-confetti]

× × ×

BATMAN AND ROBIN 1988 CONCEPT DRAWING 01-03

“Nelvana, at one time Canada’s largest animation house, briefly had the rights (or were gunning for the rights) to develop Batman. The executive team asked anyone interested to pitch some character designs, so I did.

I got positive feedback on it, but the next thing you know, Nelvana no longer had rights to Batman, and were going to produce Beetlejuice instead. (To great success I might add, but still… I was disappointed I wouldn’t get a chance to work on the Dark Knight.)

And the rest is history. Warner Bros. Animation, and the visual style of Bruce Timm, along with Paul Dini’s great scripts, creatively redefined Batman for a generation.”

-Michael Thorner on Flickr, 2012

.

x

“Another relic from my days in ABC Children’s Programming. A pitch cell from Nelvana when they had, for a brief moment, the rights(or at least I think they did) to pitch a Batman animated series.”

-Dan DiDio on Facebook, 2015

“Here’s an even bigger mind-fuck for you: a month or two ago, I was digging through the archives looking for something and stumbled across the treatment for a Batman series that I wrote for Nelvana at that time. Small freaking world….”

-J. Mlchael Straczynski comment on post

.

Batman wiki that led to me discovering these images

As mentioned in the lostmediawiki (with better sources and links)

[72votes]

Drake's dress is decidedly darker than that of the previous Robins, marrying the costume worn by his predecessors with the costume of his mentor—it is dark, and has full-legged pants rather than shorts (which somehow seems to allay accusations of homoeroticism), exchanging camp for austerity.

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew Joseph. "Batman and Robin in the Nude, Or Class and Its Exceptions." Extrapolation Vol. 47, Iss. 2 (2006): pp. 187-206.

[72votes]

[72votes]

Detective Comics #402 (1970)

[pepaldi]

May 6th

It would seem that today is No Pants Day (in swedish below under Donald) and on this day (in 2004) the last episode of friends aired. So with that in mind ....

Happy No Pants Day.

[72votes]

The problem with Robin came up when the movie company wanted to do Robin in the movies. So they said to DC, “We have to redesign Robin.” They couldn’t use Robin the way he was. And DC was stuck with the problem of what to do. So they called me — a very smart thing to do in my humble opinion — and they said, “Can you do some new designs for Robin?” I said, “Are you asking me to redesign Robin?” They said, “Yeah, we are asking you to redesign Robin.” I said fine and I started to work. [...] They wanted me to work on it because the film company was saying they would change it. So I started to submit some designs. The most important thing that I did was realize the character had to remain Robin, but had to be a new Robin, and there were some things that were really wrong. Like his legs were bare, that didn’t make any sense. He wore these little elf boots, that didn’t make any sense. His colors were too bright — yellow and red — and he was going to be out at night, it doesn’t make any sense. [...] The problem was how do you make this Robin valid? Turn the boots into ninja boots, cover the legs, deepen the colors on the costume so they were more in [line] with the Batman, put packet things on the sleeves to carry weapons, redesign the mask, redesign various things.

— Comic book artist Neal Adams, on redesigning a movie-suitable costume for Robin, Batman's sidekick

[72votes]

26 October 1988

The Washington Post headline for the death of Robin, Batman's youthful sidekick

Headline by The Washington Post; syndicated feature from Alexandra Peers of The Wall Street Journal

[wontbeyoungforever-deactivated2]

[enobariasteeth]

okay but reminder they hated this little guy enough to put his life up to a poll