In this review of Batman and Robin: Year One #5, the Dynamic Duo’s investigation into Gotham’s new crime boss leads them into an encounter with the deadly Clayface!
Batman and Robin: Year One #5 main cover by Chris Samnee (DC Comics)
BATMAN & ROBIN: YEAR ONE #5
Written by MARK WAID and CHRIS SAMNEE
Art and Main Cover by CHRIS SAMNEE
Variant Covers: YANICK PAQUETTE, BRUNO REDONDO, JACOB EDGAR
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: February 19, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Batman and Robin: Year One #5 begins as Dick Grayson barely lasted one hour in school before his guardian Bruce Wayne was called to pick him up. Dick refuses to return the next day, but is warned that avoiding school will curtail his nighttime duties as Robin, the Boy Wonder.
Later that night, Batman and Robin meet Commissioner Gordon atop the GCPD Headquarters, where the name following the reported “melting man” is a one Mr. “Hagen”. Batman also informs Gordon that he’s aware Two-Face owns a stolen file from their offices, and that he knows Gordon is keeping something from him. Later that night, Bruce attends a farewell party hosted by a departing Martin Koski. Catching a tattoo inside his wrist, Bruce stays until the party ends and confront “Martin” as the Batman, deducing that the real Martin is dead and his impersonator must be the melting man, Hagen. The two battle down the stairs, all the while Alfred tries to radio that Dick’s flown the coop and taken one of the Batbikes. As Batman barely survives his first encounter with Clayface, Robin holds his own against a trap from Grimaldi’s men, but eventually gets knocked out and captured.
Analysis
Mark Waid and Chris Samnee turn another classic style Batman story as though no time has passed from the 90s. This issue and the miniseries in general have that old school Chuck Dixon feel of balancing multiple plotlines at once, effortlessly weaving a larger story with terrific pacing and artwork. The fight between Batman and Clayface was a great one, with solid mood and a creep factor that increased with the use of mirrors and Clayface melting onto Batman in an effort to suffocate him. All really solid stuff.
But I’m still frustrated by his one-dimensional take on young Robin. We’re five issues into the story, and I don’t know if we’re ever getting any forward momentum in Dick’s character development. Part of that may just be my hang-up in seeing Robin as a character and not a kid, but that’s been a public perception problem for years now, outside of the comics. Plenty of writers have had little trouble fleshing out Dick’s headspace in these early years, making him more than just the annoying sidekick. So far in this series, Robin has rarely been a cool character, mostly embarrassing everyone on the page whenever he screws up or puffs his chest out to Gordon. Once or twice is fine, but it’s been almost six months and nothing has phased him about his new life. There’s been no reaction to the near-death experience he and Batman suffered in the last issue, and we don’t even see what school is like for him, we just cut to him and Bruce leaving.
Between the lack of interiority in Dick’s character and the focus on Batman and the Grimaldi crime plot, I think it’s safe to say that Waid isn’t all that curious about who Dick is at the early age, beyond the fact that he’s a kid. I think he’s meant to be twelve or thirteen, but he’s written like he’s nine or ten. And his temperament, while both appropriately and predictably immature, has gone on too long for Batman to continue to think this is a good idea.
It’s tough, because I’m still enjoying the book, but Dick’s one of my favorite characters (I reviewed his Nightwing title series for over three years straight), and the original Batman and Robin team is my favorite in all of fiction. More than that, I love how they’re written in Waid’s World’s Finest book. Dick’s older but still Robin and he and Bruce are in total lockstep with each other. I know we’re not going to get any of that in these early days, but I feel in order to show where we’re heading down the road, we’d have different glances at Dick’s psychology early in his career. But he reads like any juvenile Pixar boy character, irrespective of who his character actually is and has been established for a very long time.
I’m no longer comparing this with Robin Year One, and with Batman’s tangling with the Matt Hagen Clayface (which tracks, as Hagen was the first mud like Clayface in continuity, Basil Karlo was simply a masked killer), this might as well be an Elseworlds that doesn’t connect to anything that’s come before. And that’s DC for you, it’s fine. Still, I want to see Dick when he’s angry and sad and thinking back on why he’s doing any of this. Perhaps Waid’s playing the long game and everything will catch up to Robin before long. But I would’ve have thought we’d have gone a little deeper into his character by now.
With Robin captured at the end of Batman and Robin: Year One #5 ‘s cliffhanger, we’ve got the opportunity to focus on his headspace in that situation. But with how the book’s been written for a while now, I doubt we won’t simply cut to Batman’s plan to rescue him and spend the whole pencil mileage detailing that until Robin’s back in the cave, with no look into his thought process throughout. I hope Waid proves me wrong.
