Red Robin #12 marks the end of the Chris Yost run on the title, and with it, the culmination of the story he has been telling about Tim Drake since issue 1, the only question is, was the story worth telling?
To me, the answer is sadly no. What started out as a strong series about Tim Drake becoming his own man, slowly but surely turned into a book about a whiny brat not believing that his father figure was dead. It went from being not as much as a hero, as becoming annoying. The issue opens with Ra’s plan to bring down everyone Tim cares about down being foiled, as Red Robin was able to call in friends to stop the league from committing mass murder, a quick fix, but really, there was no other way for the situation to end nicely, so I’ll let that slip.
Next we have a fight between Tim and Ra’s, this is meant to be the culmination of all the work Yost has put into Tim Drake, and what does Tim have to say for himself? “I’m probably going to die.” Awesome.
This issue was a fast read, like most of the issues for this series, not a fast read in the sense that I wanted more, it was more a fast read in that I was in awe at how very little I cared about Red Robin in this comic.
My main issue with the comic, is not the issue itself, which when read alone, is a good solid issue, it is nothing special, but Yost has certainly written worse. My problem has to do with the culmination of the work. With issue 8 I said how annoyed I was at how fast Yost glossed over the issue of Red Robin facing new villains, and in this issue, he does an even sloppier job of dealing with all the plot threads he had been dangling in front of the reader since issue one. Most of which only received one panel of explanation.
My personal favorite was the conclusion as to why Tim felt that Bruce was alive, and why he has felt that way since issue 1. I am not going to spoil it here, but I will say, it felt like Yost had ended the comic a page earlier and his editor came back to him and said he forgot to explain why Tim was such a dick and believed Bruce was alive.
Bing bang boom and we have the culmination of Yost’s run on the book.
The art is serviceable one again from Marcus To, who is slowly proving himself to be a damn fine secondary artist for a second tier book, I wouldn’t want him anywhere near Batman, judging by how he draws Dick here, but Red Robin seems to given him the opportunity to shine. I will say some of the pages felt like they should have been given more room, such as the page where Red Robin is kicked out of a window by Ra’s. This one pager would have looked awesome as a two page full spread, with Ra’s on one page and Red Robin on the other, it would have been awesome. As one page, it felt cluttered.
All in all a good issue of Red Robin, marred by being paced way too quickly for the comic to breathe. Pretty soon I will be doing a retrospective of the Chris Yost era of Red Robin as a whole, which will discuss how explain how badly I hated this pay off to his run. But right now, for an average issue with nothing spectacular art, I am giving this:
Red Robin #12:
Reviewed by Suavestar
